#at first i thought vox would be number 3 but also he said no to wearing a dress so | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bad-and-drawn-that-way · 3 months

Note

HEAR ME OUT- DUMBIFICATION, DEGRADATION AND PRAISE WITH VOX

THOUGHTS??

I also have a headcanon request that I'll do separately in list form! This is actually a scene from a scrapped multi-chapter fic idea I had for a secretary reader. As to why it was scrapped, I didn't know how to finish it so I ✨gave up! ✨

Ngl this is actually only half of the scene, there's scraps of this whole extra kinky round-two thing with some casual exhibitionism, but we'll see how this does first. That being said, enjoy!

At Your Service [Vox x Secretary Reader] NSFW AS FUCK

(NSFW writing under the cut. Minors stay away <3)

It was an early morning like any other. Vox is sitting at his desk, looking over the paperwork he had from yesterday. It’s far too early and his bougie oversized office offered little comfort as you sleepily walked in. Hearing the door open, Vox looked up and smirked as he noticed the coffee in your hand.

"Good morning." he greeted you, motioning to a chair for you to take a seat.

"Morning," you smile a bit tiredly as you enter the room. You were never much of a morning person. Once the initial adrenaline of stepping out of your house had burned out, you needed the extra caffeine boost to keep your energy going.

A yawn slipped past your lips as you sat in the chair across from his desk.

"Wimp," Vox chuckled, poking fun at your inability to start a morning as early as him. It had become a regular topic of banter that started most of your work mornings together.

"Capitalist cocksucker," you wave him off. "Not everyone can be up at the ass crack of dawn in a freshly pressed suit, Sir. A few more sips of this stuff and I'll be good to go." You say as you lift your coffee to your lips.

You hum and lick some foam off your lip as you pull out your laptop. "Any changes to today's agenda I need to know about?" you ask him.

Vox smirked, rolling his eyes as he pulled up one of the hundreds of tabs he had open on his computer. "I can tell you're still a bit tired, but if you're sure... " he paused for a moment, glancing over his schedule."Yes, actually. There has been a small change to the overall plan. We're going to be running a new campaign today, so I'll need you to be ready to assist with that."

"What would you like me to oversee?

"I want you to be over on the promotion side for this new campaign," he said as he looked up from his paperwork. "Make sure that we get maximum visibility on this. The security system may have been a spur-of-the-moment idea, but it could bring in huge fucking numbers if we pull it off. I want as many people as possible to know about it and twice as many sales as views minimum.”

You nod, take notes, and start writing an email draft to get meetings scheduled. "Do you want the visual hypnosis team to work on the campaign or the auditory team?" It was common knowledge that Vox had hypnotic abilities, but it was less common to know how it had been incorporated throughout his entire company. Inductions were slipped into nearly every advertisement, program, and product that the company made.

"Have both of the hypnosis teams work on it," he answered. "We'll have the visual team focus primarily on the advertising for the campaign, and the audial team will work on creating the sounds and audio to slip in. We want this to be a very effective campaign, so the more hypnotic technology we can put into work, the better."

You stop typing, looking up at him incredulously. “Are you sure? The last time we doubled down on inductions we had to do that whole cover story to explain why half of hell turned into braindead zombies for a week.”

“It’ll be fine,” Vox waved off your concerns. “That was years ago and we’re better at this shit now. We can always blame it on Alastor somehow if shit goes wrong.”

You nod along, "If you’re sure. I've personally been incredibly susceptible to the combination, so forgive me if I don’t watch any of your programs for the next month," you say idly without thinking.

You didn’t notice as Vox paused. You didn’t notice the toothy grin that could have prepared you for what was to come either. "How susceptible were you previously to hypnosis?"

You nod along, not listening to his question as you finish sending the email to the hypnosis teams. Your brain catches up with you as you hit send and you freeze like a deer in the headlights. The look on your flushed face was priceless and Vox would have burst out laughing if he wasn’t so invested in hearing your answer. "I, uh.." you look away from him, "I was focused and said too much out loud. You weren't supposed to hear that."

His eyes were still on you, a clear look of curiosity flashing across his expression.

"You're right, I wasn't supposed to hear that,” He grinned. “But you said it and you’re not getting out of this that easily. You said that you are quite susceptible?"

You cringe, knowing you couldn't dodge a direct question from your boss. Even if he was an ass and an absolute man-child. "I..." you bite your lip curling in on yourself and crossing your legs as you take a sudden great interest in your laptop. "Yeah, I may have... experimented a bit."

His eyebrows raised, and he leaned slightly over to get a better look at you.

"Experiments?" he spoke softly. "What type of experiments?"

You sputter, your entire body flushing as you stammer out a panicked reply, "I, ah, um.. don't know if that would be a-appropriate to um.."

He chuckled slightly, now seeming rather amused by your reaction. "I assure you, I've heard much worse than whatever you may be worried about telling me."

"E-even so," you try to reason. "It's embarrassing. It's one thing to do it, it's another to tell your boss about it."

His eyebrows raised further. "You've done hypnotic experiments on yourself, and you're embarrassed to tell me about it?” He chuckles and rests his screen on his hand. “Yeah, no. You’re not getting out of this. What exactly did you do?"

You stare at him, before sighing and opening up a blank document. It was too mortifying to say out loud. He may have the power to squeeze the information out of you for his entertainment, but you’d be damned if you gave him the satisfaction of saying it out loud. You silently type up that you've tried being hypnotized both sober and when high and how you had done free-use edging with a group while high and hypnotized. Without a word you turn the laptop around so he can read it, your face on fire as you look anywhere but at him.

He had been expecting something a bit more tame, but now he was intrigued. It seemed that you had quite the mind on you to explore such risky topics. When he finished reading it, he raised his eyebrows even further, seemingly somewhat impressed.

"Well, I'll be damned," he commented. "That's not what I expected... What made you wanna try such things?"

"I like the feeling of it," you muttered as you turned the laptop around and promptly deleted the damning text.

His eyebrows raised a bit, intrigued. "You like the feeling of being hypnotized? You like letting someone else be in control of you?"

You pressed your lips together, blushing hard as he asked his question.

"Is that a yes then?" he inquired, his grin growing as the pixels under his mouth went dead. "You don't want to give me a straight answer, but the way you're stuttering and blushing makes it pretty clear that you do."

"S-Shut up," you bite back at his call-out as you finally look back at him.

Vox laughs as he just keeps winning the game he’d caught you in. "I think I hit the nail on the head, didn't I?"

"Y-Yes, sir." You say, cringing as you realize that sounded completely different given the topic compared to when you usually called him that during work hours.

He chuckled again, finding your response more than a bit amusing. "Well then, I take it that you have no issues with me being in complete control over you, then?"

You would combust into flames if you could. Your legs clenched together as you took in his question. You looked down at your laptop, stammering as you felt yourself quickly slipping into his grasp. "T-The campaign-"

"Yes, yes, yes," he interrupts you, seeming rather amused by this. "We'll talk about the campaign after that. I'm more interested in how much control you're willing to give up to me right here and now."

"I..." you pause, staring down at your hands clenched on top of your laptop. Were you really about to do this? Fuck it.

You look up at him and nod.

A grin appeared on his face as you nodded, even more amused now that this little bit was going exactly the way he had hoped. The two of you had flirted here and there, but never anything more than the occasional passing comment. If anything, it had just been a part of the playful and teasing game you’d be playing together for the past few months with you as his assistant.

He had no idea if you had ever truly noticed his advances or the way he’d stare at your ass in that pencil skirt you always wore during meeting days. But now he had the chance to unravel every last secret that’d been out of reach. Vox was nothing if not an opportunist.

"Good girl," he said softly. "Are you ready for me to control you now?"

You stand, going to place your phone and laptop on a nearby table. You stop and take a shaky breath, smoothing out your pencil skirt. You turn and walk back to him, this time hesitating instead of simply sitting in the chair across from his desk.

"Yes."

He smiles at your obedience and hesitation, noting the way that you smoothed down your skirt. You had already given up quite a lot of control to him, and it seemed that it was just going to be even easier from this point on.

"Then come here," he said softly, motioning for you to do so.

Your heart was pounding hard in your chest and you felt how hot your cheeks were as you stepped forward and moved to stand before him. His attention had been on every part of you, taking in every inch of you. He didn’t have to sneak in glances like before, he could just take it all in on his own time. He was enjoying the way that he seemed to be able to control you with a seemingly simple command. And to think he’d barely lifted a finger.

His eyes moved downwards as you stood in front of him, and his expression became a bit more serious than mere amusement.

"Let your skirt fall to your ankles," he instructed.

You practically shivered at the command, screaming internally at how embarrassed you felt and yet squirming at how just a short command from him was enough to send sparks through your body.

Your face flushed as you slowly undid the zipper on the side of your hip, taking a sharp breath before letting the fabric fall to the floor. You hugged yourself as you looked to the side, stepping out of your skirt and standing half-exposed in front of him.

He couldn't help but smirk as you did exactly as he commanded. Your legs were now exposed, and he noted how they were quivering slightly.

"Good girl," he smirked. "Now, let's step this up."

"But you’re still wearing too much. Let’s move on to your top next, shall we?" he suggested with a spark of playful amusement.

Oh god, was he really going to make you do this? It would have been one thing if he had been the one undressing you, but the fact he was making you do it for him like this was going to be the double death of you. You shakily undo the buttons of your blouse, trying to keep your heart rate under control as you pull it over your head and let it fall to the floor by your skirt.

You look at Vox, hoping he’d finally have some mercy and touch you himself, but he only lazily drags his gaze over your body with a hum of approval. "And finally?"

You were only left in your bra, underwear, sheer black thigh-high tights, and your heels. You felt incredibly vulnerable in his large office. Anyone could come in through the door and the windows that overlooked the city suddenly felt far more exposing than they ever had before.

You could see the spark of excitement begin to rise in him as you bit your lip and paused. Your hesitation was only making this a bit more exciting for him. He could hardly keep up the playful mask when his claws were threatening to tear into the armrest of his chair.

"Go on... " he said softly and slowly, his voice now beginning to become a bit huskier.

You took another shaky breath as you slowly reached back to unclasp your bra. You shook just knowing he was looking at you. That he was pursuing this. It made you hyper-aware in every way as you tossed the garment to the side and then finally stepped out of your underwear.

His gaze on your body was intense once more, seeming to take in every inch of you. He could not stop himself from being intrigued by your body and by just how vulnerable you were right now.

Your shaking was making it even more enticing to him. "Good girl," he said softly. You move to undo the garter and roll down your tights, when he stops you. Leave those. They’re perfect.” The dead pixels under his mouth might as well have been drool with the way his eyes hungrily took in the sight of the tights pressing into your skin so perfectly.

“Are you ready to move on to the last step?"

You take a deep breath before lowering to your knees in front of him and nodding. You'd never done anything like this with a single person, finding it so much easier in a group. His lone, laser focus on you made you feel every twitch and spark and overwhelmed you in the best of ways.

"Yes, Sir."

He looked down at you once more, this time taking in all of your body as you were now kneeling, your hands resting on his chair.

"Now..." he said quietly as he reached down in a rare moment of tenderness as he lifted your chin. "I want to ask you a very simple question, but you must answer honestly. Do you enjoy this? Do you enjoy giving up your control to me?"

The smallest moan slips past your lips without your permission. Despite your embarrassment, you answer truthfully. “Yes. I love it a lot, actually.."

He smirked at the moan and the truth in your words. You were enjoying this... he could tell. You truly loved giving up your control to him. And he loved taking it.

"Good girl," he said with a soft chuckle at your veracity. "Very, very good girl. You enjoy letting me take c̶o̸m̶p̴l̶e̵t̵e̵ control of you, don't you?"

You take a deep breath, feeling your body relax a bit as you feel a bit of yourself give into him as you finally gather the nerve to look him in the eye. "Yes, Sir."

His expression seemed to shift a bit as you gave in even more. His amusement was more apparent now, as he now had you exactly where he wanted you.

"I love that you enjoy this so much," he said softly. "Does it make it more fun for you to know that you are pleasing me?"

You nod, shifting on your knees. "It does," you say earnestly. "Your approval isn't something easy to earn."

The slight shift you made was enough to cause him to smirk once more. Every time you moved, he would find something new about you that appealed to him.

"I approve of this tremendously," he grinned. "It is obvious that you enjoy giving up your control over me and letting me take control of you. It is clear that you enjoy giving me pleasure."

You let out a hot breath, your eyes darting down to between his legs as he mentioned giving him pleasure. You weren’t subtle about it either. Vox chuckled, amused more now than any other time during the interactions you two have had so far. You whine, your fists clenching where they rested on top of your thighs. Your chest shifted with every movement as you waited for his instruction.

"So eager," he breathed. He reached down and tucked your hair behind your ear as he committed the view to memory. "Go on, then,” he purred. “Show me what you’re willing to do for this.”

"I'm happy to give you a demonstration," you say to him with a smirk. Vox chuckled, happy to see some of your usual sass seep into the moment. He just knew you had a bratty side to you. The duality of how eager you seemed to submit and that bit of knowledge filled him with anticipation for all the different sides of you he wanted to see.

You scoot forward and reach for the zipper of his slacks. You chuckle as his breath hitches when you slowly pull down. He moans softly as your hand only continues following a path down as you palm him slowly over his slacks. There was already a bulge formed there that made you twitch with delight.

Looking up, you see Vox watching you with wide eyes. The smirk on his face only grew larger as you slowly pulled down his slacks and boxers You could feel the heat of his gaze on you, his breath becoming more and more audible with every slow movement.

You hum with pleasure as you focus your attention on his half-hard cock in your hand. It was easier to let go and forget your insecurities when you had him in front of you like this. For as much as you’d fantasized about him, you had never dared to dream you’d find yourself in this situation with him. You lean down and use your hand to slowly pump him before you lock eyes with him and lick a trail across the underside of his cock.

“F̷̮͛u̷̞͗c̵̹̈́k̸̝̎i̷̝͝n̶̗̎g̷̭͒ hell,” Vox swore, his grip on his chair tightening. His breath got increasingly more audible, his throat hoarse from his attempts at restraining any noise he might make. He’d been dreaming of this for far too long. He had you pegged all wrong. He always thought you were innocent. Flirty, but he couldn’t truly imagine you’d have a side like this. You always seemed too pure despite your sass. How happy was he, to be proven wrong.

"Good girl," Vox huskily breathed as his fingers tangled in your hair.

You lower down to press a kiss to the head of his cock. He hissed as you sucked lightly and collected his pre-cum on your tongue. You let your tongue loll out for a moment to show him before you lower yourself and take him in your mouth. Your tongue swirls around the tip of him and your fingers dig into his thighs as you bob your head shallowly. You tease him with subtle motions before you start to take his length down your throat in earnest.

Every movement you made only increased the heat of the situation exponentially and Vox found his cool demeanor quickly fading as he panted above you. “F̷̰͠u̵͕̅c̵̠̓k̸̞͊i̵̢͊n̵͓̅g̷̤̃ ̶̠̋ḫ̵̑e̵̩̾l̶̦͋l̶̩͆,” he gasped as your tongue lapped at the base of his cock. How the fuck were you doing that when he was jammed past your non-existent gag reflex?

You hummed around him, your eyes watering as you choked on him. He could see the mirth in your eyes and he knew you’d be teasing him with a snarky remark if you weren’t too busy drooling on his dick like a goddamn champ.

Vox lets out a stuttering breath. As hot as it was, he wasn’t going to let you just get away with keeping your attitude intact. Out of selfish pleasure, he let you continue your ministrations for a moment longer before his fingers tugged at your hair, bringing your attention back to him.

You let him pull you off of his member, your tongue hanging out as you catch your breath and smile dumbly at him. His expression remained very much one of satisfaction and admiration as he observed you. That dumbly, innocent smile of yours was rather endearing to him, as it went hand in hand with the way you were acting.

"You really are quite the little showstopper, aren’t you?" he said quietly as he took in your porn-quality face. He idly wondered how the hell you ended up working for him and not Valentino. He was not about to complain about the unexpected victory.

You hummed happily, letting yourself go more for him. It was such a stark contrast to how tense you were when you were working. He'd never seen this side of you before and he hadn't even hypnotized you yet.

He had now realized just why you got so tense when he approached you with that offer. You enjoyed this in such a way that it was almost intoxicating, that it was almost addictive. It was a stark contrast to the version of you he knew that strived for greatness and top results at all times. You must have been so wound up from it all that you just whiplashed into the complete opposite frame of mind to release.

If you were already like this in front of him, then what would you be like after he had you completely under his control?

You nod, smirking as some drool fell to your chest from when you had your mouth on him moments ago.” What can I say?” you say teasingly. “Oral fixations keep a girl eager.”

Vox grinned with the look of a hungry predator as his eyes roamed all over you. Every god damned inch.

“You actually want this, don’t you?” He chuckled. “You want me to turn you into a brain-dead d̶͈͊ȍ̴̪l̵̺͊ḽ̸̏.”

"Please," you whisper as you look up at him with pleading eyes.

You could see the hunger within his eyes as you said that single fucking word. It didn’t take lifting a single finger for you to desperately plead for his control. You’d been wanting this just as bad as he had. The whole goddamned time. Vox buried his face in his hands and you looked at him with concern. You couldn’t see the way he grinned or feel how his body trembled slightly. You could only gasp as your vision was filled with black and red spirals when he lowered his hands and looked at you with a wicked grin.

You sit back on your knees, your eyelids growing heavy as your mouth falls open. Your body felt like it was floating and it was enough to make you feel like you were high. The hypnotic effect of his demonic abilities was how he'd reached the powerful position of an overlord. Even if you hadn't been so susceptible, you would have been powerless under his gaze as a normal person.

Any hypnosis you’d experienced before took many sessions of induction. It took a bond, trust, and a lot of mental bandwidth to be so vulnerable. But Vox could just drop you at a whim. And the pull of his tide dragging you under was stronger than anything you’d ever succumbed to before.

You were blissfully unaware as Vox’s expression shifted into feral joy. Your submission. This control. It was all his for the taking. You were giving him everything he’d ever craved and he could already tell that once he properly tasted this power, he’d never want to let go. He’d become an addict, for sure.

Your mind and body felt like they were floating. All you could see was Vox as your empty and needy self waited for his command. Your body felt almost weightless now, every sense and thought centered solely on him. His commands were all that you cared about now, his desires were now like law to you, and your body, empty as it was, only had one desire.

"I want you to do as I ask without question, do you understand?" he asked, his voice shaking with delight and raw hunger.

"Yes," you sigh, your every breath feeling heavy as you’re pulled deeper under his spell.

He had already gotten you to admit you were a submissive slut and he already got you to strip for him. All before he had even used his power on you. Now? Now, he could make you do or tell him anything he wanted. You were his.

"Good girl," he grinned. "I want you to stand up and walk over to that door over there," he said, pointing to one of the nearby doors to the room. "Do you understand?"

"Yes, Sir," you say calmly. Whereas before your embarrassment left you feeling exposed, you now felt relaxed and light. Your embarrassment and insecurities didn’t exist under Vox’s control. There was only the need to satisfy him and be blessed with ecstasy in return.

You walked over to the door in nothing but your sheer thigh-high tights and heels. You place both of your hands on the door and stand with your hips out, waiting for Vox.

Vox glitched hard and admired the way that you followed these commands so easily. This was his. He found himself growing more addicted and possessive by the second. His mind was already buzzing with all the ways he could mold you to his every need and desire. He’d never felt so in control of another person like this and it satiated a dark craving in him.

"Now, I want you to take off those tights and throw them over to me."

You bend over in front of him, fully exposed, yet carefree as you peel off your tights and hand them to him with a relaxed look on your face. Vox sparked again as he got a full view of your need for him. Once your tights were off, you handed them over to him calmly. All you could think about was pleasing him and satisfying him. Your anxiety and self-conscious tendencies were washed away.

Vox ordered you to put your hands behind your back. He grinned and tied your wrists together with one of the stockings. He snatched your underwear from the forgotten bundle of clothing by his desk and made you open your mouth for him. He stuffed them in and used the other stocking to tie around your mouth.

Now that you were completely bound, your mind was completely free to focus on the feelings and sensations you were experiencing. He dropped the hypnotic spell on you and you gasped into your gag as your mind cleared and he pushed you forward so your face and tits were flush against the door. You shuddered hard and let out a broken moan as his palm rubbed against your leaking cunt.

Vox grinned and leaned down to speak by your ear as he slid his fingers in. “You have n̷͙̈o̷̹̎ idea how much I can’t wait to fucking d̷̲͆e̶̗͘s̴̳̈t̸͚̆r̷͎͒o̸͙͊ỹ̸̝ ̸̞̉y̷̰̓ǒ̵̦u̵̬͂.”

Your gasps and moans were muffled by the fabric in your mouth and you pushed against him as he roughly played with you. His hand slammed your head against the door and held you in place as his fingers curled and scissored inside of your sloppy heat. Tears pricked your eyes as your heart and mind raced. You were completely vulnerable to him, but now your embarrassment was rearing his head at the worst (b̴̼̊è̶͔s̶͜͝t̶̹̽) possible moment.

The chance that there could be anyone on the other side of the door had you thrashing desperately against Vox’s ministrations. Vox delighted in your internal struggle and couldn’t help himself as his claws dug into the back of your hair so he could pull you back hard. “I’m going to make sure e̶͖͌v̷̞͐e̶͈̽r̶̡̂y̸̨͊o̵̤̚n̴̦̈́e̴̥͌ ̵͜͠k̵̜̔n̷̝̈́ǒ̷̮w̷͎̅s̸͓̈́ who̸̩͂ ̶͔̀y̸͎̐ő̸̳u̸̗͊ ̶̞̏f̶͎̔u̷̠̅ć̵͈k̶͙̚i̴̜̿n̸̘͐g̷̨̿ ̸͔̌ belong to,” he growled as he lifted one of your legs and slipped himself inside of you.

Your eyes rolled back and you screamed into your gag as he slipped in and out of you with ease. He’d been so hard from the build-up of it all and you were literally dripping for him by this point. Vox growled and lost control as he picked up the pace of his actions, moving you around to different areas of the office and fucking you in as many positions as possible. He wanted you exposed. He wanted you defenseless. He wanted you marked in the blood and bruises of his ownership. He wanted to ḋ̴̥ó̶̰m̵̯̕i̷̗͗n̴͈̽a̵̱̒t̶̤̎ȇ̸͚ you. And he would.

Neither of you could keep track of the amount of times you’d come. Your mixed desire was dripping from your cunt as he’d buried himself deep inside of you every time one of you peaked. This was all he wanted. That was all you wanted. No more thinking, no more emotions, just the sheer fucking pleasure.

Your eyes rolled back into your head as you cried from how good he made you feel. He knew how to unravel you into nothing more than a babbling mess with every clever touch and command. It was becoming too much and yet you felt like you wanted more of it. You were overwhelmed as you felt yourself quickly approaching an orgasm.

“That’s it,” Vox growled as he fucked you against his desk. He chuckled darkly as he smacked your ass. “Fucking do it, c̴͖͆o̵͕͋m̷̟̉ẽ̵̞.”

You threw your head back and screamed as your entire body convulsed around him. You couldn't do anything but take his relentless thrusts as he pounded you into the desk. Vox growled, nearly on the verge of cumming himself when he suddenly rips himself off of you. You let out a muffled sob as you clench around nothing.

Your entire world is suddenly filled with bright blue electricity as you feel everything shift suddenly. You almost fall, but are caught by Vox’s hands. You squint as your eyes adjust to the sudden change of lighting and Vox undoes the gag around your mouth as you realize you’re now in his surveillance room.

Your eyes go wide and you gasp and you see yourself on the monitors with Vox crouched over you. Every screen was showing a live feed of you from several different angles, showing how vulnerable you were in this situation. The footage of you was quite an entertaining sight for Vox as his wires came out of nowhere and threw you onto his chair.

"V-Vox,” you gasp as you look up at him with wide eyes. The overlord’s grin stretches wide as he grabs onto your shaking legs.

It was the first time you'd actually used his name.

At work, you were professional. In his office, you were playful. However now that he had you in his lair, he would mark a new side of you… Here, you were your true self, fully and utterly submissive. Here was his favorite.

You couldn't help but moan shamelessly as he lifted you with his cables and sat in the chair beneath you. You threw your head back with a scream as he dropped you onto his cock and turned the chair so you had an eyeful of each and every monitor with your shameful display recorded.

You moan as you bounce yourself on him, meeting every one of his feral thrusts. Your mind was completely gone. Every grunt and growl that slipped from his lips only fueled your need. The marks on your hips and back from where his sharp nails clawed in burned just as deliciously as the stretch of him inside you.

Pain and pleasure all in one were now filling your mind. His grunts and growls were becoming louder, as were yours. You couldn't control it. This situation was pushing you further and further toward the edge.

You leaned into him, gasping as he made you lose your mind.

"P-please." You begged.

"Beg for it," he said growled, "Beg f̸̼̑ó̶̙r̴̠̀ ̵̫́m̴̡̾è̸̼."

You moan low as you desperately plead with him. "Please Vox, plus fucking break me! Please please please, Sir, please I'll be good. I'll do anything, please, Sir, fucking please!"

"You'll do anything for me," he said, with a grin on his face as he saw you getting more desperate with your plea. The red recording symbol on all of the screens wasn’t enough to make you see the incoming danger. You were too overwhelmed with the pleasure quaking through your body as Vox pumped into your sloppy cunt.

Your entire body shook hard as his movements suddenly stopped. A long whine of frustration and the roll of your hips made Vox grin. You were so desperate for him in the moment, you didn't notice the gravity of the position you were in.

"Fucking please don’t stop, I'll do anything Vox, please," you begged as you desperately rutted against him.

"I'm going to give you exactly what you want," he grinned as he whispered in your ear. "If you do everything I say from now on, then I'll give you everything you want. Sound like a deal?"

You sob, nodding rapidly against him. "Fuck, please, yes! It's a deal, so please!"

Vox suddenly thrusts up into you hard, making you scream as the room flashes with electricity. The deal was made and the pact was sealed.

"Good girl," he said quietly and calmly, as he pet your hair.

His grin was downright sinister as he pulled your head back.

"You're mine now."

Your eyes went wide as you realized the gravity of what you had just done in the heat of the moment. "Wait, I-" you gasp as you're cut off as Vox starts to mercilessly pound into your heat.

"I heard what you said," he grins as his claws dig into your hips and draw blood. "I heard it a̸̩̎l̴͚͗l̷̖̓.. And I'm going to hold you to e̵̻̐v̶͎͌é̵͉r̶͕͊y̷̳̍ word of that agreement."

If you thought Vox was rough before, it was nothing compared to how he used you now. He tossed you around like a toy and you sobbed as he broke you.

Your eyes were crossed as you screamed and took everything he had to give you. "Vox, Vox, Sir, fucking please!" You babbled, practically worshipping how he destroyed you now that he owned your soul. It was too good to care about the consequences. It was too much. All you could think of was how badly you needed him.

Your screams and moans were now all he could hear as you completely lost it. He was using everything that he could to break you and he seemed to enjoy every second of it. He was doing you dirty, but it was also exactly what you desired. All you wanted now was his approval, as he completely controlled and dominated you in body and spirit.

#vox x reader #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel vox #this shit is DEPRAVED #that being said the second half i had drafted was even more feral than this #this was the WARMUP

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gla55t33th · 2 months

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anymore angel vox? :3 how does he interact with other characters! /nf!

i am currently in Sketch Hell as i would describe it so ill be reblogging later when i can Draw but. Ramble under the cut

Firstoff i made the design because of a handful of fics which i read and stupidly forgot to save . Namely the one where he died for alastor, angelic interference, and the one where they made a fuckup on the books. (Ill get back when i find their names) . I just wanted to make the design for the sake of it and try to make his looks fit heaven and also my interpretation of vox, so hes intended to look almost like a character youd see on an old tv show but a bit more suave. I also wanted a space age head because i mean thats The Period of innovation and while there were certainly similar designs while he was alive its more symbolic of progress than actual progress. Then my brain started doing its thing and when i start thinking about anything for more than five seconds i get a bunch of pins and red string and become a full blown theorist who needs to connect everything to worldbuilding or ill die

so. I started a fic and if you find it you find it :]

ANYWAY! CLAPS MY HANDS

my angel vox.

Point the first! this isnt a vox goes straight to heaven, its canon divergence. Vox dies, goes to hell, and at the peak of his messy hell career he dies again and goes to heaven. Vox is not redeemed.

2. Vox is powerless. Heaven equalises people. It has rules, a lot of rules, and these are sown straight into their reality which cant be broken. He does however have free will and a silver tongue.

3. I think vox and sera would get along surprisingly well when it came to it. Sera is a 'tough love' sort of character, and does believe shes doing good in spite of it all, and is willing to do lesser evils. Vox cares about nothing but numbers and outcomes. This means that if they share a goal a lot of their approaches would also be shared, and i think theyd be fond of that.

4. Vox despises heaven. Just the fundamental concept of it. He does enjoy a struggle and he does enjoy pain, thats the point of being alive to him. Or well. dead. Its an uphill battle but its his uphill battle to fight. Also he just needs something to keep him occupied at all given times or he might just snap #adhd

4a. He also hates the residents, mostly because of very well earned trust issues how its not fun to talk to any of them. They just say whatever theyre thinking, no song and dance, no fine print, and vox loves fine print and searching for hidden meanings.

5. Emily is nice and almost tolerable but he would absolutely throw her off a bridge if it benefited him without second thought. He hates how much of a bleeding heart she is, but that seems to be a trait of everyone up there

6. Vox's relationship with himself is a complex mess. It always has been and heaven made it worse. Not only did it revert his body to how it was when he first fell but Angel Edition, hes barely mechanical anymore- and while being a good part machine was all part of hells punishment at the start for various psyche reasons (as well as how inconvenient it was) he had grown to worship and love his inorganic nature, and how much better it was than his faulty body . I have headcanons about that but that falls under spoiler territory for Said Fic. But heaven handing him back his flesh and blood is a massive massive violation of his boundaries and the moment he stops and actually starts thinking about what the hell has happened hes gonna break

7. The vees think vox is dead dead. Angel!vox would... have a strained relationship if he were to meet like that. On one hand, hes vox! Their vox! But like this he can't be his usual overlord self and while he trusts them enough to view them as friends, he wouldn't be able to face them as partners like this; business or otherwise. Hes horribly powerless and they need him on his A game.

8. Alastor (angel!vox punches the ground and eats drywall)

#hazbin hotel vox #hazbin hotel #Vox #Does this make sense? WHO KNOWS! SLEEP DEPRIVED RAMBLINGS OF AN AUTIST

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utilitycaster · 11 months

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i saw a comment on reddit about what previous villains may return as result of magic prisons dispelling, like Trent or Vecna. And it got me thinking I prefer C2's separation from C1. While bringing 3 campaigns together is fun. With the Mighty Nein, Keyleth, J'mon, Vax and everyone involved it feels like Bell's Hells are a tiny cog in the wheel, not the heroes? Which is realistic. But (bar Imogen and Orym) it doesn't feel like their story anymore? They keep asking 'why us' and I don't know either

So I'm going to just state that I dislike and don't use Reddit as a platform anyway and have specific reasons to mistrust the CR Reddit's rules and moderation. I take any comment made on the Reddit with an entire shaker of salt and would advise people to just not look at it, because I don't think worthwhile discussion is encouraged there.

On the one hand, "why us" is at some point a question most D&D groups ask (and that does include Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein). This is such a massive undertaking that any one group or individual cannot just fix it, and significant and powerful NPCs are a normal part of the game even for past campaigns; J'mon couldn't fix all of Vox Machina's problems so there's no reason to believe they can fix Bells Hells' problems either. Bells Hells are a small cog right now, but missing a small cog will still entirely stop the gears from turning properly.

It's fair to say that because of the setup of this campaign, that sense of "why us" is heightened: most campaigns would probably either build up to the events of episode 51 as the final boss battle, or alternately introduce it very early, before the party can do much about it at all, as something they will build up to solving. Having it as the party hit mid-levels and when they were extremely involved in the lead-up, sometimes at the cost of character development/party meshing is admittedly tricky, and I've said before, the lead-in suffered at times. But that doesn't mean it's not their story. I have had my frustrations, and to be clear if we spend a protracted amount of time in Zephrah I will not be a fan of that specific decision, but since the solstice it has finally, to me, felt like they've been properly in the driver's seat.

I'd also add that my takeaway for quite some time from this campaign has been the theme that imperfect but thoughtful action nearly always is far superior to unrealized perfect ideology. "Why us" isn't really a question they need to answer. Who cares why. It is them, so it's time to shoulder that responsibility. Honestly it's when someone like Ludinus says "yes, it should be me" that we get problems. Had he perhaps looked at all of the things he claims are problems, after serving in positions of power within two separate major governments, and made an effort to actually fix them in real time rather than developing a centuries-long master plan involving draining the life out of various fey creatures, and blowing up the moon we might not be having these problems.

I do still prefer the Mighty Nein as a campaign for a number of reasons, and I still believe that a lot of what I found rough in the earlier campaign would have been improved by, if not the same limitations of the Nein, at least a similarly well-informed character creation process. But that's not something that can really be addressed now, and the appearance of, say, J'mon Sa'Ord is a nonissue entirely unrelated to that.

This is not the first question I've gotten in this vein recently so I'm going to repeat a bit more clearly: I respect people finding that this campaign isn't for them, and as all the above outlines I have had my own issues. However, this is something you should be talking about on your own blog and not my inbox. I probably will answer some, especially if I see a hook to talk about my thoughts, but I'm not going to be terribly validating to you if that's what you're looking for, and I'm not really a good person to vent to if that's all you want.

#answered #Anonymous #critical role spoilers

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sgt-farron · 2 years

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I am just having a lot of thoughts and feelings of getting confirmation that Laudna died at 20. That is so young. Like, we could all inferred before hand that he had been living in un-death for 30-ish years based on the Whitestone/Vox Machina connections before but to have those numbers side by side is something else. She has been existing in this changed way for 1.5x as long as she was ever alive and 'normal', her whole life span from infancy to death and then some lived out again as an outcast being perceived as an evil, undead, witch/hag everywhere she went with nothing but the (evil) voice in her head to keep her company. And she was undeniable changed by the experience both physically mentally, her relationship with death skewed and being in isolation her awareness of social norms and boundaries in conversation are clearly not normative.

She talks about her life before as if it was a long time ago because it was and interestingly while she says she remembers everything, she very much gives off the vibe that genuinely it was 'another life' to her and is really separate from who she who she has become and is now with Imogen and who she is to become with the group.

That's why I find her statement about being in love so interesting. She started almost wistfully, "You know, I don't think I've ever been in love either." abruptly adds on, correcting herself "I mean, that's not true I deeply love Imogen." and then spends a bit of time really seeming to think about something as if whatever it was just occurred to her, and then agrees with Ashton off distractedly that love was a broad term.

Some people have taken that as she was confirming that what she was say was that she did not love Imogen romantically as everyone around the table had assumed that it was a question of traditional romantic love to which she commented she didn't think she had been in love before. That may be the case, but I think it is likely a lot more nuanced than that given the life she has had.

In the stereotypical "traditional" sense, falling in love congers up the idea of meeting someone, pinning, courting, dating (labels), and maybe being together and wanting to start a family. In my mind, with the wistful way she said it, Laudna seemed to be thinking of a far off time when she was alive and that would have been an option for her. Again, we found out she died at 20, daughter to simple farmers though with some innate magical ability, by her admission didn't appear to have time to experience that before she was murdered and turned into... whatever she perceives herself to be, which is a conversation in and of itself. Despite being a walking, talking, thinking, feeling being she didn't confidently think of herself as alive and uses the phrase "was human", implying that she didn't necessarily see herself as a person either. Combine her physical appearance, no soul (being a hallowed one) and nearly 3 decades of be treated as an abomination, its no wonder.

BUT then she met Imogen. Things changed. Imogen, who from the moment she met Laudna heard her thoughts as "musical and not painful like everyone else" and who thinks of meeting Laudna as the first time she had felt peace in a long time. We don't know how their first meeting went exactly, but they ended up each trusting each other enough to start traveling together and to do so for two years so far. Based on the hermit comments, most of the time it was just the two of them, building a home with one another.

Even before she admitted aloud that she "deeply loved" Imogen, it was clear by her comments to others, her conversations with Imogen, and her anger over seeing her hurt, that she cared very deeply for her. While this appears to be a meaningful, strong bond they have with one another, in the bigger picture of her life and experiences, it is also very new and short lived (so far). It makes sense that she wouldn't have thought of it as being "in love" (traditional) but also be able to say without hesitation that it is a deep love, not having considered it until (possibly) they were said side by side in that conversation, because it wasn't an option (in her mind) and maybe that is what she was contemplating.

Of course, they could just have a queerpaltonic relationship and Laudna's seeming to reflect on her answer may not lead to any shift in how she sees their relationship, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Not that they need labels. Whatever bond they have seems to have evolved outside of needing any of that.

Laudna is such a fascinating character and I am so intrigued by every bit of story we get about her and now knowing for a fact now that Delilah Briarwood is her patron of all things and all the potential that has.

#I had thoughts and feelings #long post under a cut so you are not bombarded #laudna #imogen temult #critical role spoilers #campaign 3 spoilers #cr3 spoilers #campaign 3 episode 6 spoilers #Just a stream of conciousness ramble #laudna x imogen #imodna

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popopodogrev · 3 years

Text

Tharizdun and Exandria’s leap in progress

“Watching. Potential. Learn. Grow. Provoke. Consume. Reward. Patience”.

Uk'otoa "The Open Road" (2x05)

It was talked at length how the theme of hunger is prevalent in this campaign. And this hunger has many faces – from the literal hunger of Kylre the Nergaliid to the metaphorical hunger for wealth of Vokodo to the hunger for freedom of Uk'otoa. And many people theorize that it is the influence of Tharizdun, the Chained Oblivion that prompts the rise of insatiable hunger in many beings.

But I want to talk about another type of hunger which showed up time and time again.

The hunger for knowledge.

More importantly, I want to talk about how the rise of hunger in the world is associated with negative phenomena like corruption and madness– but at the same time, the coming of Tharizdun could also prompt (and already prompts) the biggest leap in technological and magical advancement in Exandria’s history – because it is Tharizdun that makes hungry minds search for answers.

One of the most prominent examples of it is the story of Fjord. Uk'otoa (the being whose “hunger” is speculated to be influenced by Tharizdun) in his dreams tells him not to simply obey or follow his commands – no, he tells him to use his natural curiosity and ambition to become more powerful – and to do so by learning. Note how in the beginning of campaign Fjord’s goal is to get to the Soltryce Academy to learn about his new powers – and when that doesn’t work out, he is still eager to learn what Uk’otoa offers him (in the "Stalker in the Swamp" (2x21) his patron saying “Learn” prompts Fjord to dive into the pool). Only with the help of Caduceus and the Wild Mother he is able to cope with his hunger.

Then let��s look at Fjord’s First Mate - Beauregard. She is the group’s Number 1 note-taker, researcher, theorizer, truth-revealer. Her whole story is tied to the Cobalt Soul monks whose goal is to seek knowledge...

But is it really?

The Cobalt Soul worships The Knowing Mistress, Ioun who was forever wounded by Tharizdun – and it seems to me that, with possibility of Tharizdun’s release Ioun make the Soul lean more towards their second goal – to root out corruption, of which the Chained Oblivion is both the main representation and the main source (note how Beau gets not some high researching position in the Order like an “archivist” – but the position of the Expositor).

But of course, we cannot talk about hunger for knowledge without talking about Caleb. From episode 1 he was curious, he had appetite for knowledge – but as we saw later, many times he was borderline hungry for it (and because of it, he was able to develop unique relationships with both Fjord and Beau who also very inquisitive in nature and face the same temptation as him – note how it was Caleb and Beau who read the eye-granting book of DeRogna). For many episodes his goal was to unravel the secrets of time itself – and now, when we all thought that he was finally able to keep that hunger in line, the secrets of Aeor – and Cognouza ward – proved to be his hardest test yet.

The same Cognouza ward which is speculated to be corrupted by the Chained Oblivion.

But theme of searching for answers, of desire to know runs like a thread through all of the Mighty Nein’s story. Clerics frequently use Speak with Dead, Commune and Scry – to try to learn new information, to gain advantage, to understand what is really going on (note how it was Jester who used the divination circle in Eiselcross).

And this is what really makes the Mighty Nein’s story different from Vox Machina’s – they must unravel the secrets of world, dive deep into the lost knowledge, theorize, search and learn to even try to defeat their enemies (and note how it was Molly who never wanted to know anything about his past – and where it got us).

But as I said above, not only Mighty Nein are prone to this hunger for knowledge. The whole world of Exandria and its denizens become more agitated. Take, for example, Yussa – Yussa, the great wizard, the owner of the Open Quay who lived for hundreds of years – but it is now that he cannot keep his morbid curiosity at bay and puts himself in danger time and time again (and note that he got stuck second time in Cognouza). We all joked that he is High Int Low Wis character – and while he certainly is, it does sound a bit strange that his desire for knowledge would overcome him like this.

Unless he too succumbs to the influence of Tharizdun like all those who seek knowledge.

But nothing can compare in terms of thirst for knowledge to what Essek did. When he decided to become a traitor to the Dynasty, when he decided to give Beacons to the Empire so he can research them he was influenced by a number of social and psychological factors – but at the very heart of it, Essek Thelyss, the Shadowhand, was hungry to learn – to learn the nature of the Beacons and the Luxon, the nature and possibilities of the dunamancy itself. After 120 years of life his natural curiosity, his desire to learn was too accelerated by Tharizdun – and to quench his hunger for knowledge and power, Essek starts a war.

And it goes without mention that dunamancy is like the perfect metaphor for that. Both Essek and Caleb are eager to find true limits of this school of magic and therefore spend a lot of time exploring the ruins of Aeor (and note the many signs of connection between Luxon, dunamancy and Tharizdun – the wording of 9th level spells “Ravenous Void” and “Time Ravage” yet again refers to the theme of hunger. Caleb and Essek wanting to master dunamancy quite literally means mastering the hunger of the Universe).

So, considering all the examples mentioned above (and so many things that I didn’t touch upon), we may say that the hunger of Tharizdun sips through every level of one’s live on Exandria, both on personal and societal scale. Twenty years ago, there were no guns in Exandria save for Percy’s inventions - now we have Hupperdook which is the Empire’s first industrial town and the main research center for the “new and volatile technology” of gunpowder and guns. Twenty years ago, the dunamancy was a mysterious to Kryn and unknown to Empire - now we have research centers in Rexxentrum and people like Essek digging for answers. Twenty years ago, Exandrians knew almost nothing about Aeor and the Age of Arcanum – now we witness the emergence of pre-Calamity robotic society of aeormatons which can spread the lost technology around the world.

So, it won’t be a stretch to say that, if the coming of Tharizdun is not addressed in this campaign, in the next twenty years Exandria will become the most technologically and magically advanced it has ever been in its history. In this context the Moon Theory and Spelljammer setting (hints of which can be found throughout the games) would make so much sense for Campaign 3 – as they are the perfect blend of high technology and magic to which Exandria is rapidly approaching.

#critical role #cr meta #cr spoilers #mighty nein #dungeons & dragons #i hope you can see how hard i was procrastinating writing my bachelor's theris

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justalittlebluetiefling · 4 years

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Time for another Mighty Nein Name (Episode 60) Update!

I just finished episode 60 in my rewatch last night. Before I inundate you with spreadsheet info, here’s a quick reminder/disclaimer: I have been counting the times that they say each other’s name in conversation. This means that I’m not counting it when Marisha tells Matt she’s going to go stand behind Caduceus, but I am counting things like Fjord saying, “Hey, Jester.” or Nott telling someone else that Caleb is really good at magic.

Also, this may not be perfect. Sometimes there’s cross-talk. Sometimes they mumble. Sometimes I’m staring off into space and I have to back up the episode and hope I didn’t miss something. I’ve definitely caught them saying names a few times when it’s not noted in the transcripts or closed captions because of these things. I’ll make an official post with real graphs and things when I get caught up to their current episode count, but these little updates are fun for now.

I also decided not to count NPCs or guest PCs, because honestly? This was complicated enough as it is. Guest PCs may be something I do in the future or something I use transcripts for once this is all said and done, because there will be less words to comb through.

Anyway, have some facts!

The Mighty Nein have said each other’s names 2839 times as of episode 60!

The number of times a PC says another PC’s name

The number of times a PC’s name has been said by another PC

So far, they have referred to Nott as Veth 14 times and I have folded those into her name count. Also, this does not include the 3 times Jester has called Fjord Oskar or the 3 times Fjord called Jester Fiona for reasons unknown even to me I’ll change that in the future.

Now we’ll have a breakdown of how many times each PC’s name has been said by the others. These are in order of who has said their name the most to who has said their name the least.

Fjord

Fun fact: Jester is the first person to say someone else’s name over 200 times! Also I didn’t expect those colors to come through but that’s nice.)

Beau

Another fun fact: Beau/Marisha seems to initiate RP more than the other way around. I think that’s why her numbers are so low.

Caleb

Yet another fun fact: It’s really a race between Nott and Fjord to see who breaks 200 next. They’re currently tied at 170 for their ‘favorite’ name.

Nott

Jester

Yasha

Caduceus

Mollymauk

The final fun fact (they stop being fun after this): they continue to mention Molly every once in a while, so his count keeps going up little by little.

The name each PC says the most

Molly is not included in this, since his has not updated. He will be included again in the final update.

Final Thoughts

As always, this has been super interesting. We could try to read into this in a meta sense, but without doing this for Vox Machina as well, it’s hard to tell if this is just their RP styles or an actual character choice. But let’s say we were going for a little bit of meta based solely off that final chart. It could totally indicate the person in the group that character feels the strongest connection to.

Fjord and Jester have been together since before the beginning, as have Caleb and Nott. These two duos continue to rely on each other for a lot of their moments of vulnerability.

Beau and Jester are roommates and, at this point, Beau might (already?) have a crush on Jester. Going a little further into this, her next most popular name is Caleb, followed by Fjord and these three are arguably the ones she's had the most meaningful moments with as of episode 60. She’s made sure that Jester knows that she cares about her as a person. She’s also done that with Caleb (the shouting scene in the woods, etc.) and with Fjord (telling him he’s still her captain, etc.).

Yasha isn’t around often, but Jester is always the first person to reach out and make sure she’s feeling welcome. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that (although she’s falling for Beau) she feels the strongest connection to Jester out of everyone. Jester’s easy to feel connected to, after all.

And Caduceus hasn’t been around very long either. Even if he’s probably around more than Yasha quantity-wise, his time with the Nein was very disconnected at first. He was really struggling. But Fjord has already started lowkey looking to Cad for guidance and they’re well on their way to becoming the Wildmother Brothers (or Teahaw if that’s your jam!). While Jester definitely reached out to Caduceus the most out of the group to try and ensure his comfort (at first), Fjord is the one who needs his help the most at this point. That seems to be most of what Caduceus focuses on; who needs his help. He also just doesn’t say names a lot in general. Also, this is a wild guess since I didn’t count this, because that would have been too much to track, but I’m pretty sure that most of the times he says someone else’s name is when he’s not having a conversation with them.

#critical role #the mighty nein #fjord #beauregard lionett #caleb widogast #nott the brave #veth brenatto #jester lavorre #caduceus clay #mollymauk tealeaf #yasha nydoorin #mighty nein name game #and i would be remiss in not thanking ofsinnersandsaints for helping me come up with this project idea in the first place #here's to the next 50 episodes (because i'm assuming that's how long it will take me to catch up with the main campaign)#there's a tiny bit of meta/spec in there at the bottom

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eurosong · 4 years

Text

Undo my ESC 2020 (SF1)

Good evening, folks! “Undo my ESC”, my look at how I would have changed this year’s contest, is back! Even though the EBU, well, indeed sadly and very literally did undo the ESC this year, there is still room for changing about my personal ideal Eurovision 2020. Let’s have a look at the first semi-final! 🇦🇺 Australia: I continue to be mightily impressed with the quality of Australia Decides, an NF putting forward a number of credible options to represent Oz. I felt the juries helped dodge a bullet this year, because the televote winning song was a rather cliché and dated choice, out of step with the relatively vibrant and contemporary feel of the field. The actual winner was pretty decent albeit with dubious live vocals and an even odder stage concept. It could be improved by working on those two factors, though even better would be to send instead the dramatic Rabbit Hole, truly a title for our season, or even better, the searingly emotional Raw stuff which knocked me off my feet upon first listen and still packs that punch 🇦🇿 Azerbaijan: Once again, Azerbaijan went down the “buy in a song from elsewhere and attempt to put on a thin gloss of local instrumentation onto a generic pop song in lieu of some actual authenticity. I can’t say I even hate the song this time, though I do dislike how they reportedly nabbed it off non-oil-rich San Marino in a bidding war. I would have brought back Dihaj or... anyone who could produce something halfway Azeri? Also, something that doesn’t make me do a full-body cringe as much as the country ranked the worst in the ESC-sphere for LGBT rights sending a song about “gay or straight or in between.”

🇧🇾 Belarus: Belarus made the right choice - I can really rarely say those words. For only the second time ever, we got a song in Belarusian, and whilst it isn’t up there with the gorgeous Historyja majho žyccia for me, Da widna is still a pleasant listen that soars above many of the hyped pre-contest fan favourites and was a nice surprise from a bad NF. The only thing that I would change? That the unhinged comic brilliance of Pavloni be in the final. Watch from about halfway through to the end for an absolute mood whiplash odyssey.

🇧🇪 Belgium: A lot of people had plenty of hope when they heard that the veteran Hooverphonic were set to represent Belgium in 2020, and I was amongst them. My reäction to what they ended up bringing though was tepid. It’s got the quality rich instrumentation that I expected from this band, pleasant vox, but as a song, it goes nowhere for me, in part because of how repetitive it is and lacking in a hook I find it. I would have picked a more immediate song for Eurovision, because this felt like another DNQ for Belgium, following the same mistakes as 2018 and 2019. They will be back in 2021, and I will be interested to see if they take a slightly different tack.

🇭🇷 Croatia: Following up on Belarus, Croatia was another example of a selection in which I had no hope providing something excellent to recompense for usually reliable countries going off the rails. I finally have from Croatia something to fit in with the likes of Adio from Montenegro and Nije ljubav stvar from Serbia as an epic Balkan ballad. Few people were expecting Divlji vjetre would win; I was over the moon that it did and would change nothing. I hope Croatia re-send the gentleman Damir next year with an equally strong song.

🇨🇾 Cyprus: After giving us a literal replay of Fuego last year, this year they’ve gone a slightly different route, but no less generic (even coming with one of the several duplicately named titles of this year), no less uninspiring, no less completely detached from Cypriot music. I’m longing for Cyprus to send something like Eimai anthropos kai ego again.

🇮🇪 Ireland: So RTÉ came into Eurovision all guns blazing this year, promising “an almighty bop” that will be “remembered in 10 years’ time like Euphoria.” I had feared that their frame of reference for their song would be 10 years’ stale, but instead they cast their net even further back to the mid-2000s. It properly sent me into hysterics when I heard this being compared to EVERY major female singer of that period, depending on whom you asked, before this came into general release. You know what, though? I hold my hands up and admit that I adore the anthemic Story of my life. It’s just so drenched in colour that I feel uplifted every time I listen to it, which is often! Lesley has such a likeable, authentic charisma that adds to the song too. I am so gutted we’ll never see the staging because I feel this would have been a memorable party moment. This is just 3 minutes of happy nostalgia and I live for it.

🇮🇱 Israel: You know, usually, I am not a fan of single-artist national finals, because if you are not a fan of the artist, your choice is very limited indeed. However - I don’t know how one can nót be a fan of Eden to some degree. Her music is not up my street, but she sells it to me through sheer force of personality, positivity and presence. She had four songs and she put her heart and soul into them all. The winner was the vibrant Feker libi, which I would only change by altering the chorus a bit, as its odd 90s dance vibe doesn’t sit so well with the rest of the song. As for Eden, she cried when she reälised she couldn’t go to ESC 2020 and again when she found out she’d been picked for 2021. I wish all artists had this amount of passion.

🇱🇹 Lithuania: There was a sea change in Lithuania this year. I don’t know what happened, but they went from punchline to packing a punch. Their national final had been one that pretty much no one watched, dragging on for several weeks and almost always to choose a mediocre, anticlimactic choice after all that effort. This year, it was one of the most entertaining and diverse NFs of the bunch. My early favourite to win was the powerhouse Monika Marija’s return with If I leave, very much up my street with its country stylings. However, by the time the final came, I had been won over also by the eventual winner, the offbeat and infectious On fire, whose victory I would not alter because it serves as a more dramatic turn of the page for Lithuania’s Eurovision presence. It was such a relief to see this prevailing, with a huge lead in the televote, over the awful, imported Unbreakable or the respectable but pedestrian Make me human. I hope the broadcasters will respect the support this has in Lithuania and allow the Roop to come back in 2021. 🇲🇰 Macedonia: Just no. No. No. Scrap everything about this, bring back Kaliopi and let her get her revenge for the juries screwing her out of qualification with the beautiful “Dona.” 🇲🇹 Malta: Malta have done the unthinkable and sent two songs in a row that I really like for the first time since 1997-8. As Ian would have put it, I was expecting a mere “vocal exercise” from Malta to show off the impressive range of Destiny. Instead, they came out with something so soulful that I have no choice but to enjoy. I hope they go a similar route in 21.

🇳🇴 Norway: So, finally Norway saw some sense and reverted to making the most of having a talented composer, Kjetil Mørland, who is so enthusiastic about Eurovision that he has come back since his success with A monster like me a few times. He should have won with En livredd mann; I wouldn’t have been unhappy at all had he won with Who we are, and indeed, Attention was another song that I had to consider as being amongst the best of its (bizarrely organised) selection. The one thing I’d change? The lyrics. It sounds like an infatuated 12 year old with low self-esteem singing, not a grown woman.

🇷🇴 Romania: It’s not up there with Goodbye or On a Sunday, but Romania have returned with a third song I really enjoy. Alcohol you was head and shoulders above the others in the single-artist selection, and I am still sent by the way she sabotaged the bop that was predicted to win the final so that she could send this more meditative, confessional effort. What would I change? The unnecessary revamp that abruptly shifts the direction of the song in the last third.🇷🇺 Russia: When this first came out, I thought “well done, Russia. Kept us waiting on you until way past the deadline, and all for this bizarre Aquaësque troll entry.” Despite myself, “Uno” has grown on me to some degree. Maybe it’s because of the death stare of the female backing singer who’s giving me some strong Rosa from Brooklyn 99 vibes, and I live for that. Maybe it’s because it’s serving a flourescent lime green in a year when there is so much beige that even an ugly odd colour seems pleasing. I wouldn’t change this, and I hope they get sent again next year because it’s delightful seeing Russia unpaired from Kirkorov.

🇸🇮 Slovenia: Again, I am going to find myself in a small minority, but Slovenia was, like Belarus and Croatia, an unappetising selection that nonetheless yielded a gem for me. They really said screw you to underlying trends and went for a song that moves at a glacial pace fitting of the title, Voda. This was constantly in last place on the Eurovision scoreboard app, which just speaks to the limited taste tolerance of many of its users. There is so much here to enjoy: Slovenia sticking with its language yet again; the ethereal vibes; the deep, rich voice of the singer; the melancholic and poëtic lyrics; and the fact that it was perhaps the only good “revamp” of the season, going in the opposite direction of Albania and inserting an orchestra to make it that much richer in sound. Wonderful stuff and hope she returns in 2021.

🇸🇪 Sweden: So, for the first time since 2014, Sweden has sent a female artist - 3 in fact - and with them, left the cookie cutter niche they’d occupied since then behind. They sent my favourite of their songs since 2013, Move, a joyous gospel-infused effort where the love and positivity of the Mamas gave me tingles to watch. And yet, it wasn’t my ideal choice. My personal winner would have been my favourite entry from Sweden since... possibly as far back as I morgon är en annan dag in 1992. I’m talking ‘bout Dotter of course. The artist whose beautiful Melodifestivalen début with Cry got bizarrely ignored had a superb redemptive arc this year, becoming the huge favourite with Bulletproof. I watched her performance of this over 200 times so far and still watch often. I find the song so poignant, the performance and her presence so bewitching. It’s a rarity for songwriters who also perform their songs to get this far in MF these days, and Dotter lost out by the narrowest of margins, but would have been a great encouragement to others like her had she won. It was widely said that Sweden had the potential for a record-equalling seventh win if they had sent Bulletproof. As much as I cherish Ireland’s record, had it been Dotter to equal it, I wouldn’t have been mad at all. 🇺🇦 Ukraine: Widbir got over their Maruw drama in great style, once again being one of the coolest and most alternative national finals out there. Well done, Ukraine! There were a number of propositions that I would have been happy to see represent the country. My initial favourite was Vegan, one of my most streamed songs of the season and one which always puts a smile on my face with Jerry’s facial expressions and puns like “‘cause I’m vegan, I can’t even call you honey.” And honestly, I would have loved to have seen it in Rotterdam. I also loved, amongst others, Tam kudy ja jdu and Picz, which were both the victims of being in a semi-final with all the good songs whilst the second semi-final was nowhere near as competitive. Having said all that, I am not sure that I would change the eventual winner, Solowej, because it’s its own brand of delightfully authentic. I would undo their unnecessary revamp and keep it as the live version linked to above, though. And the automatic qualifiers: 🇩🇪 Germany: As you would expect from one of the musical monoliths of Europe, Germany once had some of the best and most diverse national finals of the continent, but something went wrong - they kept inviting wild cards, whose scrappiness endeared them to the public even when their songs were mediocre, and so we saw complete no-marks getting the Teutonic nod despite star-studded competition. Nonetheless, “Unser Lied für” was always worth tuning in for, an annual dose of getting mesmer-eyes’d by Barbara Schöneberger too. This year, they threw it all away for one of the most repetitive songs of the year, with a young, confused looking Slovenian being the god knows how many’th contestant to channel his inner Justin Timberlake with another knockoff that sounds as German as fajitas. I would have kept the national final - or, if they’re really going to start doing internal selections, go daring with Lily among clouds, whose Surprise was one of the crown jewels of the previous NF season. 🇮🇹 Italy: Sanremo, which actually predates Eurovision, is so much more than an NF, but its own cultural institution, and the quality is such that a song can be your fifth or sixth in Sanremo but still rank really highly in your ESC rankings. Performing with, and composing for, the orchestra, seems to give its entries a timeless quality that few others compare with. My initial favourites were Tosca’s Ho amato tutto, which from its first strains to the final, saudadic “eh” that serves as an unofficial coda, breaks my heart still sublimely; Viceversa, a heartwarming effort by the unbelievably charming Gabbani and Tikibombom, a slice of Sicilian excellence with trenchant lyrics. My most streamed has been Sincero, remembered more for the hugely memetic moment of one of its representatives changing the lyrics and the other walking out disgusted, but which I adore for its synthy vibes and its brilliant lyrics. The eventual winner was Fai rumore, which I also love too much to propose that it be changed. The lines about “an unnatural silence between us” are all the more poignant now. Lowkey think this could have won Italy its long-awaited third victory. 🇳🇱 Netherlands: Now, this is what I call a host nation song. The way I see it, if you’re hosting, you have a direct ticket to the final that you may not enjoy again for a long time, so why not go for a risk? And a risk NL indeed took. Grow is a very atypical song. It builds in a way we do not expect it to. It is mostly minimalist, focusing most of our attention to Jeangu’s voice, making this an intimate, almost confessional track. The crescendo is cathartic. After Albania destroyed itself with an unnecessary revamp, this became my #1 and I would change nothing about it. It really sucks that a song so personal to its writer and performer won’t be allowed on the stage in 2021 - that’s what I would change. A ridiculous decision on the EBU’s part.

#eurovision #opinion #esc 2020 #eurovision song contest #eurovision 2020

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last Thursday in an interview with The New York Times, Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa said, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

The uproar over King’s comments came swiftly, and there have even been calls for his resignation. On Monday, King was booted by GOP leadership from his House committee assignments, and on Tuesday, the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning white nationalism and white supremacy (even though it didn’t rebuke him specifically.)

All of this raises a question (two questions, actually):

King has a long of history of making racist comments and aligning himself with white supremacist causes, so why are congressional Republicans taking action only now?

And are Republicans opening themselves up to criticism for not similarly condemning President Trump’s racist comments?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): My answer to No. 1 is that typically this kind of action (stripping committee assignments) is related to some kind of scandal (money laundering, sexual harassment) and not just offensive views.

More generally, American politics has not really figured out what we do with racism. (My residence on understatement island is becoming more permanent.)

sarahf: So the fact that King lost his committee tenure because his views were offensive is pretty unusual?

julia_azari: Yes. I don’t have an exhaustive list, but, I mean, Jesse Helms was in Congress less than 20 years ago, and he was known for “racially charged” comments and ran one of the most notorious race-based ads of all time — but I don’t think he faced any formal consequences.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I’m a bit baffled by the timing. There are a few different theories floating around — like King being electorally weaker now than he’s ever been (he even got a primary challenger), or Republicans being in the minority for the first time in a while — but I’m not totally convinced of any of them.

Probably the most convincing point I’ve seen came from Jane Coaston at Vox, who pointed out that King used to be seen as a kingmaker in Iowa politics (especially in presidential primaries) and a way for other Republicans to validate themselves as tough on immigration.

But that may not true anymore. There’s (probably) not going to be a competitive GOP presidential primary in 2020, and Trump has now arguably become the GOP kingmaker on immigration.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): The actual words King used, “white nationalist, “white supremacist” were unusually politically problematic. Trump avoids that kind of language, even as he implies all of the same things. Also, the media started pressing Republicans on this, and that put them in a tough spot.

nrakich: Perry, King made a just-as-bad comment (in my view, anyway) in 2013, when he said that undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children have “got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” But nobody did anything then.

Although it does seem that King was getting himself into hot water more frequently in the 2018 election cycle. And Republicans probably thought doing anything about it before the election was not politically palatable.

julia_azari: There’s a needle being threaded here: People (thinking VERY broadly about the electorate) don’t like overt racism and ugliness, but they also don’t respond well to serious challenges to the racial status quo.

sarahf: So do we think this continues to spiral and that GOP leaders in Congress ask King to resign?

A number of Republicans have begun to call for his resignation, including Sen. Mitt Romney and Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

nrakich: King’s local newspaper also called on him to resign.

julia_azari: They endorsed his opponent, though.

perry: Elected Republicans can call for him to resign all they want, but unless people and entities like Fox News, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Trump turn on King, then I don’t think this dynamic changes.

The next step here is for King to really lean hard into the idea that he is being prosecuted by the “political correctness” police, the media and the progressive left — playing the victim card against the forces of multiculturalism is powerful on the right. I would argue that it helped get Trump elected. I’m not sure King is done, unless he resigns.

sarahf: I have to say I’m a little surprised that “political correctness” hasn’t become a big part of the national conversation yet.

nrakich: Perry, last week, I was also skeptical that King’s political career was in any danger. But now that he’s been stripped of his assignment on the Agriculture Committee, which is a big deal in his district, don’t you think that makes it a lot more likely that his primary opponent (state Sen. Randy Feenstra) could actually win?

perry: I don’t know much about his primary opponent, but in general, I would not want to run as a Republican candidate aligned with the people trying to take down King for being too willing to defend “Western civilization.”

nrakich: That’s very much not the tack Feenstra is taking. He’s a hardcore conservative himself, but he argues King’s controversies have made him ineffective. In an impressive bit of needle-threading, Feenstra says people should vote for him because he’s the one who will advance Trump’s agenda most effectively.

julia_azari: One question, which I don’t know how to answer, is whether some critical number of voters who don’t like political correctness also don’t like white supremacy (lots of people hold conflicting views). It may be that the last couple of years — Charlottesville in 2017, Pittsburgh in October 2018 — have tipped the balance of them toward thinking that the latter (white supremacism) is more dangerous than the former (political correctness).

Given King’s 2018 performance — he won re-election by only a few percentage points — it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a lot of people in his district to make a difference.

perry: Like if King paints his GOP primary opponent as a pawn of the media or elites trying to take him down, that would be smart politics.

One obvious shift: Before the 2018 election, the GOP had to worry about every seat. There was a chance Republicans would wind up with a one-seat majority or even a five-seat majority. If that were the case, I don’t think they would be attacking King in this way.

nrakich: Yeah, good point.

perry: Now that they are in the minority, it’s easier to purge the most controversial members.

sarahf: So you really think some of the timing of this is related to the fact that the comments were made after the election?

perry: Totally.

Nothing to lose now — they might have needed King’s seat before. Now, I think he is likely to lose in the general election in 2020. So Republicans have some incentive to dump him and try to field a better candidate for the general.

julia_azari: Yes, I agree with this assessment.

nrakich: See, I think that reasoning is flawed.

The 2018 midterm election was a historically great year for Democrats … and King still won by 3 points. King probably isn’t in electoral danger in 2020 unless it’s at least as good of a year for Democrats.

That said, I think congressional Republicans might agree with your assessment and that’s why they’re nudging him out.

julia_azari: So did King run ahead or behind people in comparable districts?

I’m guessing behind.

nrakich: Yes, Julia, you’re right. Last month, I did an analysis of 2018’s strongest and weakest incumbents, comparing how each incumbent “should” have performed based on their district’s partisan lean, elasticity and the national popular vote vs. how they actually performed.

King was one of the weaker incumbents; he did 10 points worse than we would have predicted.

Steve King was a weak incumbent

The 10 Senate and House incumbents who underperformed by the most in the 2018 elections*

Incumbent Party State or District Expected Margin† Actual Margin Net Incumbency Advantage Elizabeth Warren D MA D+39 D+24 -15 Chris Collins R NY-27 R+13 R+0 -13 Sheldon Whitehouse D RI D+36 D+23 -12 Mia Love R UT-4 R+12 D+0 -12 David Cicilline D RI-1 D+45 D+34 -11 Bob Menendez D NJ D+22 D+11 -11 Jim Costa D CA-16 D+25 D+15 -10 Duncan Hunter R CA-50 R+14 R+3 -10 Steve King R IA-4 R+13 R+3 -10 Rob Woodall R GA-7 R+10 R+0 -10

*Excluding open-seat elections, elections that did not feature both a Republican and Democratic candidate, jungle primaries, elections with multiple incumbents and elections where the incumbent was an independent.

†Based on the state or district’s partisan lean, its elasticity and the national popular vote.

Source: ABC News

So I suppose you could argue that these recent comments could make him an even worse incumbent, and that would cause him to lose the next time out.

But again … you’d have to assume another D+9 (or similar) national environment in 2020.

And if that happens, Republicans are getting wiped out anyway; King’s seat won’t matter.

sarahf: But is what’s happening with King a blip, as he’s consistently been one of the party’s more controversial members? Or is this more of a watershed moment where the GOP says, “we’re not willing to tolerate views of white supremacism in the party”?

julia_azari: It could be an early watershed moment, Sarah.

perry: I don’t think this is a watershed moment. But Republicans have now created a baseline: We will purge you if you openly say that you support white nationalism and white supremacy.

But it’s unlikely that Trump would ever cross that exact line. He and ex-senior White House adviser Steve Bannon have always said they are for nationalism, not white nationalism. Arguably, actions that align with a white nationalist agenda aren’t as problematic, at least politically, as words in support of white nationalism.

Most people who are wary of America getting less white and less Christian can figure out how to not declare their intentions so openly. For example,saying Mexico is sending rapists to the U.S. is pretty racist, but it’s still different than saying, “I support white supremacy” or “I don’t see a problem with white supremacy.”

sarahf: But I do wonder if the litmus test for what is and isn’t an acceptable comment will change?

julia_azari: These things are very slow to change, and one of the things that I think is challenging for Republicans today vs. Democrats 60 years ago or whatever is that racism has taken on more subtle forms in the current era — predatory lending, problems with the criminal justice system — that are much less obviously egregious than lynching and de jure segregation. (Even though the contemporary issues are very serious, and I’d point out that Democrats also contributed to these problems in past decades; no one gets a pass on this stuff).

perry: So I don’t think the GOP’s litmus tests can change much right now because Trump has been racist in many ways. He hasn’t used the N-word or explicitly identified as a white supremacist, but any broader definition of racist behavior will include Trump.

To put this another way: The gap between Trump and King is fairly narrow.

julia_azari: I sort of disagree with Perry about the possibility for this being a moment, though, as I said, I think it will be slow. Here’s David Broder writing about Jesse Helms’s retirement in 2001.

He makes a point that Helms had every right as an elected senator to hold and fight for his views, before condemning those views and arguing against “sanitizing” Helms’ legacy. For elected Republicans to actually draw a boundary around a set of views is very unusual in the American context. Not only was racism the norm, but we have tended to see legitimacy in the process of being elected, not in the substance of the views.

nrakich: Yeah, I think it’s really splitting hairs to argue that there’s a meaningful difference between Trump’s (and other Republicans‘) thinly veiled racism and King’s more explicit racism. And King’s crossing of some invisible line is clearly not the real reason the GOP has condemned him. The real reason is that King is one of 435 and Trump is president.

If that rumored tape of Trump saying the N-word comes out, are Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney going to call on him to resign?

I doubt it.

perry: I think Romney would call for Trump to resign if he was on tape calling a black person the N-word.

Liz Cheney, no.

I think Nathaniel is basically right: Trump is being excused because he is president.

But my sense is that a lot of Americans think racist means only using the N-word or something very, very explicit, and Trump hasn’t crossed that line yet.

julia_azari: Which is sort of related to what I was saying before: We don’t really have a political tradition of holding people accountable for substance as long as they hold power through a legitimate procedure.

sarahf: What I find so interesting in the backlash against King is that he didn’t make a racially explicit comment that targeted one group of people. Instead, he signaled that he thought an inherent racist ideology was OK, and that was enough to spark outrage.

perry: So there is a new book coming out by Duke professor Ashley Jardina called “White Identity Politics.”

She argues that we tend to think of white identity politics as being largely prejudices against groups like blacks and Latinos. What Trump has tapped into, she argues, is not only that racial resentment but also a kind of pro-white-people politics.

So it’s not totally about being against minorities; it’s also a kind of white pride.

I think King hints at these ideas at times.

When he defends “Western civilization,” I think people are hearing that he might think ideas from Africa or Asia are bad. And, sure, a lot of what King has said seems to look down upon people who are not white. But part of what he is saying is that “white people are good and have great ideas.”

julia_azari: Combined with this idea is the belief among white people that they face racial discrimination (it has become a somewhat widespread view). This seems like a key element of the white identity appeal, that there’s an element of grievance, in addition to a pride in one’s identity or background or whatever.

perry: So I do wonder if people talking about racial issues are at times talking past one another. King is saying that he is pro-white, but that is interpreted as being 100 percent about being anti-black or anti-Latino.

So if conservatives aren’t allowed to say that “Western” or “white” culture is good and that Mexican immigrants and Muslims diminish that culture, that would affect more Republicans than just King. You can hear these kinds of views on Fox News, from Trump and from other influential conservatives. If Republicans start purging those views, the impact will go beyond King.

julia_azari: Making coded racial appeals has been a successful strategy for Republicans and, at times, some Democrats (Democrats have moved left on racial issues, even in the last decade). But maybe we’re getting to the point where it won’t be.

perry: I agree with what Julia said, but I also thought it was true in 2002. Trent Lott resigned under pressure from his Republican leadership post in the Senate over something way, way less controversial than many things Trump has said. (Lott praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, which was centered on pro-segregation views.)

julia_azari: Yeah, I think these things move really slow.

perry: We may not see a steady decline in the acceptance of racist behavior, but something more complicated, with racist comments being more tolerated at some times than others.

nrakich: I think about that Trent Lott controversy all the time!!

If anything, we’ve moved into a place where coded racial appeals are more socially acceptable, not less — at least in the medium term (i.e., since 2002), not the long term (since 1960) or short term (since 2016).

But I do think that openness is causing us to grapple with coded racism as a society. It’s the latest battle in the culture war.

And the liberal side may very well win in the end. But it took emboldened people on the far right to spark the fight in the first place.

julia_azari: If it is a politically costly move for Republicans to cut King loose, then maybe we are seeing actual change. If not, maybe we are seeing the Lott thing all over again. That was pretty cheap as far as political costs go.

perry: I assume this kind of question is always context-dependent. It is easier to replace a congressional leader or a rank-and-file member of Congress than the president. For instance, it’s easier for Democrats to say in 2018 that Bill Clinton should have resigned for inappropriate behavior with an intern than it would have been to say that in 1998, when Clinton was still in office.

sarahf: So maybe we don’t see pressure on Republicans to speak out against Trump until much later.

julia_azari: But maybe it opens space for a 2020 primary challenger?

nrakich: There are also confounding factors, like Trump’s problems in other areas — i.e., the Russia investigation. If special counsel Robert Mueller’s report implicates him in collusion or obstruction of justice and ends up destroying his legacy, it will be easier for future historians and laypeople alike to pile on him for the other stuff.

I would be curious to see how the legacy of a highly effective, scandal-free racist president would go.

Maybe something like Woodrow Wilson‘s, eh, Julia?

julia_azari: He remains a hero in some liberal circles.

I wrote a piece about a year ago about presidential legacy and one of the things I am most sure about is that the mainstream legacy writers — who historically have been mostly white — are very forgiving of racism.

The line most-often employed is something like, “That’s just what people thought at the time.”

Is it easy for me to imagine people saying that about Americans in 2016 or whatever? No. But that’s probably more about my limited imagination than anything else.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Thursday, September 30, 2021

Today’s kids will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, study says (Washington Post) Adriana Bottino-Poage is 6 years old, with cherub cheeks and curls that bounce when she laughs. She likes soccer, art and visiting the library. She dreams of being a scientist and she wants to become the kind of grown-up who can help the world. But if the planet continues to warm on its current trajectory, the average 6-year-old will live through roughly three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, the study finds. They will see twice as many wildfires, 1.7 times as many tropical cyclones, 3.4 times more river floods, 2.5 times more crop failures and 2.3 times as many droughts as someone born in 1960. These findings, published this week in the journal Science, are the result of a massive effort to quantify what lead author Wim Thiery calls the “intergenerational inequality” of climate change. The changes are especially dramatic in developing nations; infants in sub-Saharan Africa are projected to live through 50 to 54 times as many heat waves as someone born in the preindustrial era.

YouTube is banning prominent anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content (Washington Post) YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that’s contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country. As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous. The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox. Mercola, an alternative medicine entrepreneur, and Kennedy, a lawyer and the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy who has been a face of the anti-vaccine movement for years, have both said in the past that they are not automatically against all vaccines, but believe information about the risks of vaccines is being suppressed. In an email, Mercola said he was being censored. Kennedy also said he was being censored. “There is no instance in history when censorship and secrecy has advanced either democracy or public health,” he said in an email.

Vaccine Mandates Kick In (1440) Tens of thousands of healthcare workers in New York risk being fired if they remain unvaccinated against COVID-19, as a state mandate went into effect Monday. Roughly 16% of the state’s healthcare workers, or about 83,000, aren’t fully vaccinated, and an estimated 8% haven’t received their first shot. An executive order from Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed Monday allows medically trained National Guard members to fill staff shortages if necessary. Workers fired for being unvaccinated will not be eligible for unemployment. Separately, a New York City vaccine mandate for educators in the nation’s largest school district becomes effective after school Friday—the teachers’ union says about 3% of its staff remain unvaccinated. In North Carolina, more than 175 healthcare workers at Novant Health have been dismissed after not complying with the company’s vaccine mandate. The various mandates have sparked ongoing protests, both in New York and elsewhere.

Ahead of winter hibernation, Alaska celebrates Fat Bear Week (Reuters) In Alaska, leaves are falling, daylight is dwindling and salmon-devouring brown bears are racing the clock to pack on the pounds they need to survive their winter hibernation. Unbeknownst to the enormous bruins, some of them are also competing in Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bear Week, Alaska’s annual celebration of gluttony and nature’s abundance. For seven days starting on Wednesday, wildlife fans will submit online votes in a playoff-style competition among 12 of the park’s fattest brown bears photographed at the salmon-rich Brooks River. Katmai’s bears are among the biggest in the world, thanks to the abundant runs of salmon that swim into the river system from southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Katmai’s bears, which number about 2,200, can grow to well over 1,000 pounds (453 kg) from summer feasting. They can also lose a third of their body weight during hibernation. Fat Bear Week becomes more popular each year, with online voting growing to nearly 650,000 votes cast in 2020 from 55,000 votes cast in 2018, said Naomi Boak, a Katmai media ranger. The popularity is easy to understand, Boak said. Fat bears bring joy to people, she said. “They get to do something and be healthy that we don’t get to do, and that is be fat,” she said.

America’s car crash epidemic (Vox) Driving is the most dangerous thing most Americans do every day. Virtually every American knows someone who’s been injured in a car crash, and each year cars kill about as many people as guns and severely injure millions. It’s a public health crisis in any year, and somehow, the pandemic has only made it more acute. Even as Americans have been driving less in the past year or so, car crash deaths (including both occupants of vehicles and pedestrians) have surged. Cars killed 42,060 people in 2020, up from 39,107 in 2019, according to a preliminary estimate from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating preventable deaths. According to several traffic experts I spoke with, the explanation for the 2020 fatality spike is relatively straightforward: With fewer cars on the road during quarantine, traffic congestion was all but eliminated, which emboldened people to drive at lethal speeds. Compared to 2019, many more drivers involved in fatal crashes also didn’t wear seat belts or drove drunk.

Havana syndrome (WSJ) The CIA evacuated an intelligence officer serving in Serbia in recent weeks who suffered serious injuries consistent with the neurological attacks known as Havana Syndrome, according to current and former U.S. officials. The incident in the Balkans, which hasn’t been previously reported, is the latest in what the officials describe as a steady expansion of attacks on American spies and diplomats posted overseas by unknown assailants using what government officials and scientists suspect is some sort of directed-energy source. Still more suspected attacks have occurred overseas and in the U.S., the current and former officials said, along with recently reported ones in India and Vietnam.

Greece boosts its military, with French help (Guardian) Less than two weeks after France lost its submarine deal to the so-called Aukus Defense Pact between Australia, the U.S., and the U.K., a new buyer has stepped up. Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and French president Emmanuel Macron just signed a multi-billion euro military agreement that calls for France to deliver three state-of-the-art Belharra frigates to Greece by 2025. The option of a fourth warship is also included. Macron described his pact as part of a deeper “strategic partnership” between France and Greece to defend shared interests in the Mediterranean. Despite being among the continent’s smaller countries, Greek military spending far exceeds that of fellow states. Last year’s heightened tensions between Greece and Turkey over rival claims to offshore gas reserves in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean led to Mitsotakis’ center-right government announcing a major weapons program aimed at modernizing Greece’s armed forces with the acquisition of fighter planes, frigates, helicopters and missile systems.

Business as usual for Afghan opium trade as Taliban ban goes up in smoke (Telegraph) The sacks full of thick, brown opium paste give off a distinctive smell as turbaned traders and farmers haggle over prices. The opium being freely bought and sold in the drug bazaars of southern Afghanistan will soon make its way as heroin into the country’s neighbours and then into the world beyond. It is a trade which, a month ago, the Taliban said they would stamp out in a repeat of a ban imposed under their 1990s regime. Opium growers in Helmand told The Telegraph they were again preparing to plant fields full of poppies, with the Islamist group having so far stalled on implementing a ban—one of a number of promises that appeared designed to please the West and have since been broken. It has raised fears that Britain could see a further influx of heroin as the Taliban choose to profit from taxing the trade instead of stamping it out. Afghanistan is by far the world’s largest opium supplier and is estimated to produce four-fifths of global supply. The drug accounts for 11 per cent of the Afghan economy, the United Nations estimated in 2018.

Young Iranians Increasingly Want Out (NYT) Amir, an engineering master’s student standing outside Tehran University, had thought about going into digital marketing, but worried that Iran’s government would restrict Instagram, as it had other apps. He had considered founding a start-up, but foresaw American sanctions and raging inflation blocking his way. Every time he tried to plan, it seemed useless, said Amir, who at first would not give his real name. He was afraid of his country, he said, and he wanted to leave after graduation. “I’m a person who’s 24 years old, and I can’t imagine my life when I’m 45,” he said. “I can’t imagine a good future for myself or for my country. Every day, I’m thinking about leaving. And every day, I’m thinking about, if I leave my country, what will happen to my family?” This is life now for many educated urbanites in Tehran, the capital, who once pushed for loosening social restrictions and opening Iran to the world, and who saw the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States as a reason for hope. Since 2018, many prices have more than doubled, living standards have skidded and poverty has spread, especially among rural Iranians. All but the wealthiest have been brought low. Divorce is up, fertility rates are down and many from Iran’s younger generation are postponing weddings and searching for ways to leave the country in the face of economic and political stagnation.

Bangkok on alert as 70,000 homes flood in Thailand (AFP) Thai authorities have rushed to protect parts of Bangkok from flood waters that have already inundated 70,000 homes and killed six people in the country’s northern and central provinces. Tropical Storm Dianmu has caused flooding in 30 provinces, with the kingdom’s central region the worst hit, the Thai Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department said. The level of the Chao Phraya River—which snakes through Bangkok after winding almost 250 miles (400km) from the north—is steadily rising as authorities release water from dams further upstream. Soldiers on Tuesday set up barriers and sandbags to protect archaeological ruins and landmarks as well as neighbourhoods in the old royal capital Ayutthaya, about 40 miles north of Bangkok. There are hopes Bangkok can avoid a repeat of the catastrophic 2011 monsoon season, when it experienced its worst flooding in decades—a fifth of the city was under water and more than 500 people died.

Kishida To Become Japan’s Next Prime Minister (Foreign Policy) Japan’s ruling Liberal Democrat Party has backed Fumio Kishida as its new leader, effectively making him prime minister-in-waiting for the world’s third largest economy. Kishida, a former foreign minister, won out in a highly contested election, beating Taro Kono in a runoff vote on Wednesday afternoon in Tokyo after the two had virtually tied in the first round of voting. His inauguration as prime minister is now assured, as the LDP holds a comfortable majority in Japan’s House of Representatives. Although today’s vote represents the end of Kono’s leadership bid for now, the short shelf life of Japan’s prime ministers (Kishida will be the tenth in the past 20 years) means it’s unlikely he’ll fade into the background.

Ethiopia crisis ‘stain on our conscience’ (AP) The crisis in Ethiopia is a “stain on our conscience,” the United Nations humanitarian chief said, as children and others starve to death in the Tigray region under what the U.N. has called a de facto government blockade of food, medical supplies and fuel. In an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday, Martin Griffiths issued one of the most sharply worded criticisms yet of the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade after nearly a year of war. He described a landscape of deprivation inside Tigray, where the malnutrition rate is now over 22%—“roughly the same as we saw in Somalia in 2011 at the start of the Somali famine,” which killed more than a quarter-million people. Meanwhile just 10% of needed humanitarian supplies have been reaching Tigray in recent weeks, Griffiths said. ��So people have been eating roots and flowers and plants instead of a normal steady meal,” he said. But the problem is not hunger alone. The U.N. humanitarian chief, who recently visited Tigray, cited the lack of medical supplies and noted that vulnerable children and pregnant or lactating mothers are often the first to die of disease.

Modern art or theft? (Foreign Policy) A Danish art museum has been left significantly out of pocket (or helped finance a brand new work of art, depending on one’s perspective) after $84,000 in cash the museum had given an artist to recreate two of his works became the inspiration for a new piece: two blank canvases titled “Take The Money and Run.” Artist Jens Haaning had been commissioned by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg to reproduce “An Average Danish Annual Income” and “An Average Austrian Annual Income,” two pieces which represented the total amounts using framed U.S. dollars. Museum authorities believe Haaning’s interpretation went beyond the usual artistic license and have given him until January to return the money.

#headlines #news

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calvin2killen · 3 years

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Mothering as a Brief Timeline of Overarching Disappointment

My relationship with my daughter will always be complicated

Being a mother was something I always wanted, despite (or because of?) my own childhood. Let’s just say my own mother was less than nurturing and had a violent, nasty streak that meant my psyche was hammered out on an anvil of fear, forged in survival. I knew I could do better, and I did. I wasn’t perfect, mind you, but damn near good enough.

My daughter is striking. Olive skin, blue eyes, tall. Taller than I. Her lineage is indigenous Australian, but it’s a heritage that’s hard to pinpoint just by looking at her. She could be Greek, Italian, Spanish. While I celebrated her bloodline, she is ashamed and does not want to know her history. Australia is racist country and Aboriginal people are, unfortunately, not highly regarded. When she met her boyfriend, now fiancée, she gave me strict instructions to “not tell him what I am”.

I often wonder whether that feeling of deep shame, an internalised reflection of how Australian society views her Aboriginality and hence her, has somehow been projected onto her relationship with me. Except the shame has been twisted into a diluted form of contempt. Contempt of me, and what I represent. According to my daughter’s world view, I am not the kind of mother she should have. She wanted a mother that was not me. Someone who wasn’t adventurous, free-spirited, unmarried.

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I met my daughter’s father at a karaoke bar one Friday night after work. I was almost my daughter’s age now. He was dark and handsome, but not so tall. Fit and lean. I discovered, later, that he was a sportsman, and a good one. I also discovered, when I was pregnant, that he gambled, drank and was involved with at least two other women. One of them called me to tell me what kind of man I was involved with. I suspect it was to win him back, to persuade me to give him up. I didn’t tell her he had fathered my child. I was sick to my stomach and it wasn’t because of morning sickness.

Once I made the decision, my pregnancy was one of peace, although I was concerned he’d reappear, and he did. But only one time, when my daughter was a few weeks old. I stood strong in the doorway, protective of the tiny baby that needed me to shield her from any kind of danger, and refused to let him into my apartment, her life. He left, suitably cowed, and did not return. A few years later, I changed my surname, and that of my daughter’s. We moved house a number of times. Facebook tells me that some thirty years later, he is still dark and handsome, fit and lean. He changes women every few years.

I built a life for my daughter and I, or so I believed. I went back to university to study teaching so I could work a job with child friendly hours. I bought an apartment so she would always have a home. I rarely dated because I was careful about the men I associated with, not for me, but for her. I was tough but fair with my discipline, mindful that I wanted to raise an independent woman who knew that she always had a choice, but that choices always had consequences.

Her twenty-first birthday was not supposed to be celebrated with a party. I had given her a passport and plane tickets to Thailand, and that was instead of and better than. But she wanted to be made a fuss of, so a party was also had, mostly at her expense, with me making a contribution. That party was the first time my daughter swore at me, embarrassed that I would even contemplate partying on with her friends once the venue had closed and things were winding up at the end of the evening. You’re not fucking going with us, she said. Just go fucking home. What could I do?

The weeks following her birthday celebration were awful, but this was not an isolated incident. I was shocked by her words and actions at that time and in that place, but here had been a slow build-up over her teenage years. Like an erupting volcano, she vomited the lava of contempt, the ash of loathing all over me once she was twenty-one. It was as if once she came of age, she gave herself permission to erupt, to damage, to maim.

I went to Vietnam when my daughter was twenty-three. She was working, in a stable relationship, and an adult by all accounts. Responsible. She had many friends, a vibrant social life. I went because at fifty-three, I had an urgent need to challenge myself, so I quit my job for a gap year. A midlife crisis, according to my daughter. That year turned into four of the best of times, worst of times years. My relationship with my daughter was still strained, but it had been even before her she ordered me to just go fucking home. The geographical distance between us was a relief.

When my mother died, I received a small inheritance. I was surprised, because I didn’t know I was in her will. I hadn’t talked to her for years. I called my inheritance compensation, and I’m grateful for it. It has given me the gift of freedom to choose. My daughter, always good with money, decided that it was time to stretch out her hand. I gave her a small amount to help with the house she was building. Then she came back for more. For her wedding reception. I said no. She didn’t speak to me for months. I was hurt but grateful for the eerie peace. A relationship with my lover had ended abruptly, and I needed to heal.

She called me, which was unusual. I would go months without hearing from her, especially after I had said no to her very kind offer of me giving her more money. Her boyfriend was by her side as she wept. She was pregnant with twins, it was ectopic and the pregnancy needed to be terminated. I asked if she wanted me to come back to Australia. I could get on the next plane. No, was the reply. Her boyfriend and his parents would make look after her and there was nothing I could do, really, so I should just stay there. I called every day, twice per day for a week, making sure she was ok. She was. We slipped back into our comfortable routine of sporadic contact, punctuated by news of her engagement and my return to Australia.

She asked me to give her away at her wedding. This came after three months of silence, broken by this conciliatory offer that must have been difficult for her. She thought only in terms of how things looked, what people would say, and she had always said that her fiancée’s father would give her away. Why, I had asked, when he didn’t birth you or raise you? He’s only come in at the tail end, I’d said. She is now supervising my attire for the day, suggesting suitable styles, texting me pictures of navy or green wrap dresses, long and flowing in soft material. Fortunately, we agree.

I have been back in Australia for three months, homeless while I wait for my tenants to vacate my apartment. I’m staying at my sister’s house in the country. I have no transport. There are no cafes. I have seen my daughter once during that time, and only because my sister and I went to the city, and we arranged to meet for dinner. Two hours all up. My daughter said she couldn’t possibly see me when I return because she’s so, so busy with her house. And the wedding. And work. And Christmas.

What it is clear to me now is that my daughter views me as peripheral to her life. When she was younger, I performed a utilitarian function of shelter, money, food, transport. Now, I am an annoyance, an annotation, an alien being to be tolerated, barely. She is twenty-eight, so this is unlikely to change. I often wonder why this particular dance became the way we operated as a family. I can’t put my finger on when or how. All I know is that this is not how I imagined motherhood at all. It’s this withered tree-like thing, so loaded with disappointment that the bough is bent, almost broken. I can’t seem to get it right, no matter how I try.

WRITTEN BY

killen calvin

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secretradiobrooklyn · 4 years

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SECRET RADIO | 10.3.20 & 10.10.20 Combo

Secret Radio | 10.3 & 10.10 | Hear it here.

Liner notes by Evan except *, artwork by Paige

1. The Modern Lovers - “Roadrunner”

Can there be, can there ever be, a better hittin’ the road song than this? Not to me, not to us. “I’m in love with modern moonlight… I’m in love with the radio on” This song brings everything that makes rock so fundamentally exciting: the straightforward beat, electric guitars, electric keys, that sense of complete freedom with your gang in the backseat singing the chorus.

2. Swell Maps - “Full Moon In My Pocket”

It pains me to admit that I cannot remember the name of the pasteup guy at the Rocket who used to tell me about the bands he loved, and that he thought I’d dig. I was so, SO into Pavement at the time, head over heels, and he did a great job of acquainting me with some of their precedents, handing off tape comps with songs from Young Marble Giants, Au Pairs, Swell Maps, and so much more. One of the tapes had this song, in two versions actually: this one, and an a cappella version, which sounds very poncey except it was the same take as this, bouncing with reverb and attitude. On our long drive from the woods to the city, a full moon hung in front of us like a carrot on a stick, and I started singing this song before I even realized it. Whatever the name of that super-awesome pasteup guy (Tom? I feel like it was Tom), I just want to tell him: I’m sorry, I’ve always been bad at remembering names, but I’ve never forgotten those tapes. Thank you.

3. Assa Cica - “Yokpo Wa Non Kpo Hami”

When we were first getting into Beninese rock, it was Antoine Dougbé who pulled us down the rabbit hole. I figured we couldn’t be alone — his songs are the standouts on “Legends of Benin.” But there’s practically nothing to be found. I eventually found myself at Discogs, marveling at the sheer number of names that T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo went by and sifting through music looking for signs of Dougbé. I eventually found this album, and not just the voice but the whole style of the band convinced me that Assa-Cica was somehow another name Dougbé went by. After some discussion, Paige and I bought our first Beninese record. In the weeks that it took to arrive, we learned a lot more about Dougbé, including the fact that he’s not actually the singer on those songs! But also I don’t think Assa-Cica is the singer on this song either! We did turn out to love every song on this record, but this one is my personal favorite, just a barnburner with disco roots. Every time I listen to it I try to imagine the cultural and personal forces that brought it into being, and it only gets more absorbing.

4. Eko Roosevelt - “Me To A De Try My Own”

T.P. Orchestre research also brought me to an album they did with Betti-Betti (or Beti-Beti), a Cameroonian singer whose tracks eventually led to Eko Roosevelt. I don’t get down with all of the music of his that I’ve heard, but this one just brings a smile to my face every time. I love the patois he sings in, where recognizable words rise suddenly out of the bubbling disco bass and the good-natured horn sections. I would never have guessed that hunting for African voodoo funk would eventually reveal a path to appreciating disco… but I’m glad that it has. I mean, I spent whole years of my life thinking that horns had no place in rock music, so what the hell do I know?

5. Jacqueline Taïeb - “Le coeur au bout des doigts”

6. T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo - “Non Gbeto Do Mahu Tche”

This 7” is from that rich early period of T.P. Orchestre (this one is I think from ’72) where the arrangements are hand-drum heavy but the organ and guitar are funk. The vocal is — I don’t know what it is, it’s a genre I hadn’t heard until I heard this band in this period.

7. Los Wembler’s de Iquitos - “Llanto en la Selva”

8. Iggy Pop “The Passenger”*

I’ve always thought this was one of Iggy Pop’s finest outside of his work with Stooges. I think I also always liked it because I am most often the passenger. I really really don’t like driving. I really avoid it. I have a driver’s license but boy do I not like to use it. There aren’t really a lot of songs about riding in the passenger seat that are positive or cool that I can think of besides this one and Art Brut’s “I Love Public Transportation”.

This album also makes me think of Shena’s old place on Damen Ave. in Wicker Park Chicago. This record and of course Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”.

Hope you had a great birthday Shena!

9. Jacques Dutronc - “Les Gens Sont Flous”

The things that gets me about the song are: that single bass note that plunges every time in the verse, the shaker in the chorus, and that freakin triangle hit that happens on the coolest possible beat throughout the entire song. I fully intend to lift that idea into another song if I can find the right spot for it.

10. Jimi Hendrix - “Third Stone From The Sun”

This goes down as one of the greatest rock recordings in history. Every time I swoon at the guitar phrases, the bass line, the drums, the weird low chaos of his slowed down vocals. Truly a masterpiece, capped off by the final minute of beautiful noise that sounds like planets in motion.

11. Björk Gu∂mundsdóttir and tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar - Gling-Gló - “Bella Simamaer”

12. Ayalew Mesfin - “Gedawo (The Hero)”

The first 20 seconds of this song are crucial, because it establishes the 4/4 rhythm that’s coursing under the 3/4 handclap. That is such a killer rhythmic feel I can hardly stand it. I only wish they’d pull out the handclap in the middle, just for a handful of measures, and then bring em in again. Meanwhile, Mesfin’s vocal approach is so intense!

Entr’Acte - “Phantom of the Opera Entr’Acte”*

We figured we needed an Entr’Acte to denote the change in vibe from trying to stay alert and amped on the turnpike to being back home in Brooklyn. Half of this broadcast was made in the front seat of the van on our drive back to NY after our recent visit to the Midwest where we stayed in the woods the majority of the time with a couple of runs to St. Louis to pick up Banh Mi So and tofu Laap.

Evan and I have this thing we call “Disney Reptile Brain” but before that I should explain, Evan and I have this other thing we call “different high schools.” We have an age difference that we mostly don’t notice but every now and then there will be some cultural touchstone and one of us is like “What!? You don’t remember that!?” and we’re like “Ahh, different high schools!” So something like, the year 1994, Evan might remember it as when Kurt Cobain died, and I’ll remember it as the year “The Lion King” came out.

So, Evan missed all the of the major releases by Disney from that time – Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, etc. – and thus he can see how ridiculously bad these remakes are in a way that I can’t. He says that you have to “Disney Reptile brain” to fully see the movie, that you have to have the animated version playing in your mind’s eye at the same time you're watching these “live action” remakes or they don’t make any sense. And it’s true, for me and lots of other people I know born between 1984 and 1990 we experience this when watching these films, like you already know it so well and know what’s going to happen it’s more like some sort of ritual, incantation, or reenactment of a feeling.

So, that’s Disney Reptile Brain. And if you’re like, wait, but this is Phantom of the Opera and that’s not Disney. You’re right, but it turns out Reptile Brain is a thing that can happen with musicals and ALW stuff is perfect for it. (Evita! Evita!) I am helpless when I hear this music which I got into around the same time that I was devouring Disney VHS, even though I hear it now and it’s SO. SILLY. But when I hear this melody, I’m like right there, on the boat with Christine and the Phantom. I’m like a cat picked up by the scruff and I’m just completely engrossed and I can’t unlearn that feeling. If you’ve seen Phantom at all recently, it is straight up hilarious kid stuff, like how it starts with an auction of lot #666, and the phantom is like this super moody broody guy who writes passive aggressive notes to everyone. I now can hear it as so funny and so square, but what you’re hearing on this track is my reptile brain in full effect.

Next time this music comes around, we’ll get into how Christine is Professor X and Magnito is the Phantom...

14. Sunny Blacks Band - “Holonon Die”

Ha! I said plenty about this song on air. Suffice it to say I’ve been getting obsessed with Meloclém and his performances. It’s really hard to find out anything about him, so this early track makes me really happy. I think this is sung in Fon.

15. Yo La Tengo - “False Alarm”

Alongside “Third Stone from the Sun,” another of my all-time favorite recordings ever. Yo La Tengo was a key protein in learning about rock music, starting with the album “Painful” and hitting a peak not just on this album but specifically this song. Alongside a vivid memory of Sean N., I helplessly air-keyboard to it, air-drum to it, dance my face off. By that final phrase I’m all worn out.

16. Meas Samon & So Savoeun - Hits Collection

We don’t really know anything about this song, including its title. It’s from a cassette called “Hits Collection.” We know Meas Samon from other sources, but I have no idea what they’re talking about and what is happening in this song, though I will say the tape warping on the entire fabric of the track is absolutely delicious.

17. Syna So Pro - “Fengyang Song”

I feel so proud of Syna So Pro and St. Louis introducing this track. The first time we saw her perform this song was live at El Leñador, and it was a knockout. She (they?) used a looping pedal situation to build this huge harmonic structure in real time. I believe she may be studying Chinese, but I know she’s studying Chinese music. There’s this and one other amazing Chinese song in addition to her many songs in English on her album “Vox.”

Nino Rota

18. Fela Kuti - “Open & Close”

I would listen to this whole song just for the Tony Allen solo in the early middle — but I also love how the song is so long that even a solo as particular as that one gets swallowed back up into the totality of the track (though he has many amazing passages throughout). The emotional equilibrium of the horns is cautiously optimistic. And I find myself thinking about the passage that goes “Let me tell you a story: open and close,” and how “open and close” is a narrative in action right there in three words. What was open has closed. It’s clearly a big change, a serious shift. Once open, now closed. Why? What changes as a result? Did anyone get hurt in the closing?

19. France Gall - “Celui Que J’aime”*

In the theme of “songs that got away” (see “Muxima”) this is one that I was thrilled to find again! I heard it on Jeff Hess’s show on KDHX many years ago. It set me on a France Gall odyssey. I bought albums and collections, and none of them had this song. I think her tone is probably my favorite female vocal tone, and she’s also one of my favorite singers in her delivery. This one is very different than some of the other stuff I associate with her but I think it’s still my favorite of hers.

20. Ely - “As Turbinas Estao Ligadas”

Now Again Records put out a collection called “Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas” and it’s got as much tone as the title boasts. Credit due to “vinyl archaeologist” Joel Stones for tracking down songs like these and putting them within reach. This is one among several favorites and a true hit.

21. Tulia - “Pali się (Fire of Love)”

Speaking of true hits: welcome to the world of EuroVision, where music is a medium for international competition. This song is Poland’s entry for 2019. We spent an amazing week with our friends Phil and Archie driving between Cambridgeshire and London singing along with all of the finalists of that year’s competition. It’s a fascinating idea, this vote-based international struggle turning into a final victor that somehow expresses the zeitgeist of ALL OF THOSE COUNTRIES TOGETHER — because it’s not just Europe, it’s Israel and Australia. Also amazing is that this isn’t just some scheme cooked up in the reality TV era: this has been going on for decades. In fact, France Gall was the EuroVision winner in 1965 — for Luxembourg!

22. Luigi Tenco - “Ciao Amore Ciao”

Likewise, this song was in international competition. It was sung by Egyptian-born French superstar Dalida. We saw an eponymous movie about her at the St. Louis International Film Festival in 2017 and she was a completely engrossing character. I’m not totally sold on this song as she sings it — but I love Luigi Tenco’s version. And man what a looker! He died young by his own hand, and she died too young by her own hand, and that is about as French as it gets.

23. Marijata - “I Walk Alone”

“This Is Marijata” is the sound of Ghana in 1976. I was talking about Marijata with Josh Weinstein recently, and he reminded me of this song and how much I dig it. It’s got that slow burn organ in the background, the slightly clumsy percussion in the foreground, those freighted vocals — but when it gets to the chorus, as the organ hook gives way to the horn hook, that’s when it truly hits its stride. And by the time we disappear into the fadeout, it has become fully epic.

24. Lijadu Sisters - “Life’s Gone Down Low”

To my ears it really feels like this song could have been released this year, rather than in 1976. What the hell was going on in West Africa that year? I feel like we could put together a great mix of songs just from that single year from Nigeria, Ghana, Benin and Ivory Coast. The Lijadu Sisters (Taiwo and Kehinde, actual identical twins) put out their first album in 1969; by their third album, “Danger,” the source of this song, they were huge stars in Nigeria and played with Ginger Baker, Art Blakey, and so on. They eventually moved to Harlem and lived together their whole lives, until Kehinde passed a little less than a year ago.

25. Os Kiezos - “Muxima”*

As mentioned, I heard this song in a video work by Alfredo Jaar at the Art Institute of Chicago. You can read about the piece here. I learned that “Muxima” is an Angolan folk song and in the video of the same title there are, I believe, 5 different versions of the song. One particular one – the one that pulled me into the room where the video was playing on loop – was a gorgeous vocal arrangement. I even tried shazaming it. No dice. So I wrote it down and started looking for the song, the particular arrangement. I bought a collection of Angolan music because I saw the song on it. That’s the one you heard on this broadcast and it is a recording that I now really love. I periodically keep looking for other versions of the song, hoping I’ll come across that missing version though. I thought I got close this week when I found Duo Ouro Negro’s version. (Worth checking out!) That one from the video though, still haunts me! It’s been 9 years now, I wonder if I would recognize it but I think I would. I guess the next thing I can try is a shot in the dark email to Alfredo Jaar. This is and one other song share the top spot of “songs that got away” the other one is some beautiful song that was coming from a small radio from a group of old Puerto Rican guys who were playing cards on the sidewalk on South 3rd street in Williamsburg. We were touring through and staying with our friend in that neighborhood and as we were moving the van I heard this beautiful song coming off the sidewalk. Those guys had great taste.

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vinayv224 · 4 years

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The controversy over the new immigration novel American Dirt, explained

On January 21, Oprah Winfrey announced that Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt would be her next book club pick. Winfrey is pictured here with Cummins, Gayle King, Anthony Mason, and Tony Dokoupil. | CBS via Getty Images

A non-Mexican author wrote a book about Mexican migrants. Critics are calling it trauma porn.

The new novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, officially released on Tuesday, was anointed the biggest book of the season well before it ever came out.

It sold to Flatiron Books at auction for a reported seven-figure advance. Flatiron announced a first print run of 500,000 copies. (For most authors, a print run of 20,000 is pretty good.) It received glowing blurbs from luminaries like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Sandra Cisneros. Early trade reviews were rapturous. The New York Times had it reviewed twice — once in the daily paper, once in the weekly Book Review — and also interviewed the author and published an excerpt from the novel.

But over the past few days, the narrative around American Dirt has changed. One of those New York Times reviews was a pan, the other was mixed at best. Another critic revealed that she’d written a review panning the book, too, and the magazine that commissioned her review killed it.

All of these negative reviews centered on one major problem: American Dirt is a book about Mexican migrants, and author Jeanine Cummins identified as white “in every practical way,” as recently as 2016. (She has since begun to discuss a Puerto Rican grandmother.) Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings.

So on Tuesday morning, when Oprah announced that American Dirt would be the next book discussed in her book club, the news was treated not as the crown jewel in the coronation of the novel of the season, but as a slightly awkward development for Oprah.

Oprah, lounging in a silk robe, sipping her morning coffee, copies of Groff's and Seghal's reviews of AMERICAN DIRT on the coffee table. She picks up her phone and thinks: I'll show these literary girls what chaos is

— joshua gutterman tranen (@jdgtranen) January 21, 2020

The story of American Dirt has now become a story about cultural appropriation, and about why publishing as an industry chose this particular tale of Mexican migration to champion. And it revolves around a question that has become fundamental to the way we talk about storytelling today: Who is allowed to tell whose stories?

“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”

American Dirt is a social issues thriller. It tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, fleeing their home in Acapulco, Mexico, for the US after the rest of their family is murdered by a drug cartel. Lydia is a bookstore owner who never thought of herself as having anything in common with the migrants she sees on the news, but after she comes up with the plan of disguising herself by posing as a migrant, she realizes that it won’t really be a disguise: It’s who she is now.

In her author’s note, Cummins explains that she wrote American Dirt in an attempt to remind readers — presumably white readers — that Mexican migrants are human beings. “At worst, we perceive them [migrants] as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep,” she writes. “We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.”

Cummins also says in the note that she recognizes that this story may not be hers to tell, while stressing that her husband is an immigrant and that he used to be undocumented. She does not include in the note the fact that her husband immigrated to the US from Ireland, an elision that some observers have taken to be strategic, as though Cummins wishes to give the impression that her husband is Latino and is in just as much danger of being held in a cage at the border as the people she is writing about.

“I worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” Cummins says. (It is worth noting at this juncture that plenty of people who are slightly browner than Cummins have in fact written about Mexican migration.) “But then, I thought, If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?” Cummins continues. And so she spent years working on this book, traveling on both sides of the border and interviewing the people she met there.

American Dirt is explicitly addressed to non-Mexican readers by a non-Mexican author, and it is framed as a story that will remind those readers that Mexican migrants are human beings. And for some readers, including some Latinx readers, Cummins was successful in her aims. In her blurb for the book, the legendary Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros declared herself a fan, writing, “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas. It’s the great world novel! This is the international story of our times. Masterful.”

But for other readers, American Dirt is a failure. And it fails specifically in achieving its ostensible goal: to appreciate its characters’ humanity.

“It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween”

The first true pan of American Dirt came out in December, on the academic blog Tropics of Cancer. In it, the Chicana writer Myriam Gurba takes Cummins to task for “(1) appropriating genius works by people of color; (2) slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and (3) repackaging them for mass racially ‘colorblind’ consumption.”

Gurba describes American Dirt as “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf,” arguing, “American Dirt fails to convey any Mexican sensibility. It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween.” Most especially, she critiques the way Cummins positions the US as a safe haven for migrants, a utopia waiting for them outside of the bloody crime zone of Mexico. “Mexicanas get raped in the USA too,” she writes. “You know better, you know how dangerous the United States of America is, and you still chose to frame this place as a sanctuary. It’s not.”

Moreover, Gurba notes that American Dirt has received the kind of institutional support and attention that books about Mexico from Chicano authors rarely do. “While we’re forced to contend with impostor syndrome,” she writes, “dilettantes who grab material, style, and even voice are lauded and rewarded.”

Gurba originally wrote her review for Ms. magazine, but it never appeared there. “I had reviewed for them before,” Gurba told Vox over email. But this time, “when they received my review, they rejected it, telling me I’m not famous enough to be so mean. They offered to pay me a kill fee but I told them to keep the money and use it to hire women of color with strong dissenting voices.”

Gurba says she’s had a mostly positive response to her review, “except for the death threats.” She maintains that American Dirt is a very bad book.

“American Dirt is a metaphor for all that’s wrong in Big Lit,” she says: “big money pushing big turds into the hands of readers eager to gobble up pity porn.”

“I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book”

Gurba’s review established the counter narrative on American Dirt, but that new narrative didn’t become the dominant read until last Friday. That’s when the New York Times published a new negative review by Parul Sehgal, one of the paper’s staff book critics.

“Allow me to take this one for the team,” Sehgal wrote. “The motives of the book may be unimpeachable, but novels must be judged on execution, not intention. This peculiar book flounders and fails.”

Sehgal, who is of Indian descent, says that she believes in the author’s right to write about “the other,” which she argues fiction “necessarily, even rather beautifully” requires. But American Dirt, she says, fails because of the ways in which it seems to fetishize its characters’ otherness: “The book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider,” she writes.

And, putting aside questions of identity and Cummins’s stated objective, Sehgal finds that American Dirt fails to make the argument that its characters are human beings. “What thin creations these characters are — and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations,” she says. “The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous.”

Two days after Sehgal’s review came out in the daily New York Times, the paper published another review from the novelist Lauren Groff in its weekly Book Review section. Groff, who is white, was less critical of American Dirt than Sehgal was, but her review was far from an unmitigated rave: It wrestles with a number of questions over whether Cummins had the right to write this book.

But you would not know as much from the Book Review’s Twitter account, which posted a link to Groff’s published review with a quote that appears nowhere within it. “‘American Dirt’ is one of the most wrenching books I have read in the past few years, with the ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novels,” said the now-deleted tweet.

“Please take this down and post my actual review,” Groff responded.

According to Book Review editor Pamela Paul, the tweet used language from an early draft of Groff’s review and was an unintentional error. But for some observers, that tweet, combined with the deluge of coverage the New York Times was offering Cummins, made it appear that the paper had an agenda: Was it actively trying to make American Dirt a success?

The Times’ intentions aside, in her review, Groff treats American Dirt as a mostly successful commercial thriller with a polemic political agenda, as opposed to Sehgal, who treated it as a failed literary novel. (Arguably, Groff is being truer to the aims of American Dirt’s genre than Sehgal was, but given that American Dirt is a book whose front cover contains a blurb calling it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times,” it’s hard to say that Sehgal’s expectations for literary prose were unmerited.) Groff praises the novel’s “very forceful and efficient drive” and its “propulsive” pacing, but she also finds herself “deeply ambivalent” about it.

“I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book” as a white person, she writes, and became even more sure as she learned that Cummins herself was white. Groff spends much of her review wrestling with her responsibility as a white critic of a novel addressed to white people by a white author about the stories of people of color, and ends without arriving at a satisfying answer. “Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism,” she concludes; “at the same time, weeks after finishing it, the novel remains alive in me.”

On Twitter, Groff has called her review “deeply inadequate,” and said she only took the job in the first place because she didn’t think the Times would ask anyone else who was willing to wrestle with the responsibility of criticism in the course of reviewing it. “Fucking nightmare,” she tweeted.

Fucking nightmare.

— Lauren Groff (@legroff) January 19, 2020

In the wake of these reviews, the American Dirt controversy has coalesced around two major questions. The first is an aesthetic question: Does this book fetishize and glory in the trauma of its characters in ways that objectify them, and is that objectification what always follows when people write about marginalized groups to which they do not belong?

The second is a structural question: Why did the publishing industry choose this particular book — about brown characters, written by a white woman for a white audience — to throw its institutional force behind?

“Writing requires you to enter into the lives of other people”

The aesthetic question is more complicated than it might initially appear to be. People sometimes flatten critiques like the one American Dirt is facing into a pat declaration that no one is allowed to write about groups of which they are not themselves a member, which opponents can then declare to be nothing but rank censorship and an existential threat to fiction itself: “If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience,” Lionel Shriver declared in the New York Times in 2016, “there is no fiction, but only memoir.”

But in fact the most prominent voices in this debate have tended to say that it is entirely possible to write about a particular group without belonging to it. You just have to do it well — and part of doing it well involves treating your characters as human beings, and not luxuriating in and fetishizing their trauma.

In another New York Times essay in 2016, Kaitlyn Greenidge described reading a scene written by an Asian American man that described the lynching of a black man. She strongly felt that this Asian American author had the right to write such a scene, she says, “because he wrote it well. Because he was a good writer, a thoughtful writer, and that scene had a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”

Brandon Taylor made a similar point at LitHub earlier in 2016, arguing that successful writers have to be able to write with empathy. “Writing requires you to enter into the lives of other people, to imagine circumstances as varied, as mundane, as painful, as beautiful, and as alive as your own,” Taylor said. “It means graciously and generously allowing for the existence of other minds as bright as quiet as loud as sullen as vivacious as your own might be, or more so. It means seeing the humanity of your characters. If you’re having a difficult time accessing the lives of people who are unlike you, then your work is not yet done.”

Critics of American Dirt are making the case that Cummins has failed to do the work of empathy. They are arguing that she has the right to write from the point of view of Mexican characters, but that they have the right to critique her in turn, and that what their critiques reveal is that she does not see the humanity of her characters. They are arguing that instead, American Dirt has done the opposite of what Greenidge applauded that lynching scene for accomplishing. That the book has failed to suggest “a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”

It’s in the spirit of that reading — of American Dirt as a failure in empathy, as trauma porn — that Gurba noted on Twitter Wednesday morning that an early book party that Flatiron Books created for Cummins featured barbed wire centerpieces.

pic.twitter.com/6W8suWpCUD

— Myriam Chingona Gurba de Serrano (@lesbrains) January 22, 2020

Those centerpieces are all about the aesthetic splendor of migrant trauma, about the idea of reveling in the thrill of the danger that actual human beings have to deal with every day, without ever worrying that you personally might be threatened. They’re a fairly good illustration of what the phrase “trauma porn” means.

“I only know one writer of color who got a six-figure advance and that was in the ’90s”

The institutional questions about American Dirt are more quantitative. They progress like this: There are plenty of authors of color writing smart, good stories about their experiences. And yet American Dirt, a novel written by a white woman for a white audience, is the book about people of color that landed the seven-figure advance and a publicity budget that could result in four articles in the New York Times. Why has publishing chosen to allocate its resources in this way?

Flatiron Books has defended its choice. “Whose stories get told and who can tell them are important questions,” says Amy Einhorn, Cummins’s acquiring editor and Flatiron’s founder, in a statement emailed to Vox. “We understand and respect that people are discussing this and that it can spark passionate conversations. In today’s turbulent times, it’s hopeful and important that books still have power. We are thrilled that some of the biggest names in Latinx literature are championing American Dirt.”

It is worth pointing out here that Einhorn, a well-respected industry vet, was also the acquiring editor of the 2009 novel The Help, a novel by a white woman about black women in the 1950s. The Help was a bestseller and a major success, but it was also the subject of a critique similar to the one American Dirt is experiencing now, with readers arguing that The Help gloried in fetishizing the pain of its subjects.

Meanwhile, authors of color say that they rarely see publishers investing the kind of money and support in their own books on the level that The Help and American Dirt received.

“I got sexually assaulted by a serial killer in 1996. I wrote a book about that. Most of the subjects in that book are Mexicans and Chicanx. I got paid $3,000 for my story,” Gurba says. “So yes, the publicity surrounding American Dirt is unfamiliar to say the least.”

“I’ve always had five-figure advances (my fourth book comes out this spring) and many of my friends have gotten four figures — and they are mostly writers of color,” said the novelist Porochista Khakpour in an email to Vox. “I only know one writer of color who got a six-figure advance and that was in the ’90s.”

Khakpour adds that the level of hyperbolic attention American Dirt has received, especially from the New York Times, is deeply unusual for publishing. “I only got a Sunday [New York Times Book Review] review for my first novel and that felt like a miracle,” she says. “Again, most writers of color I know are published by indies or academic presses and it’s hard for them to get the attention of the Times. I write for the NYTBR and I can honestly say I’ve never seen this much attention given to a book — I find it embarrassing.”

Both Khakpour and Gurba argue that American Dirt was appealing to publishers because white people tend to be most comfortable reading about people of color as objects of suffering.

“Certain narratives that flirt with poverty porn make liberal white people feel good about their opinions,” Khakpour says. “They feel like they learn something, like by reading these accounts they are somehow participating in helping the world they usually feel so helpless about.”

Gurba says many white people expect to see her enact such narratives herself and become angry when she doesn’t. “Recently, a white woman got angry at me when she found out that I’m Mexican,” Gurba says. “She insisted that I didn’t look or act Mexican and that I had confused her. But she confused herself. She had a stereotype of what Mexicans are. I defied it. That made her uncomfortable. Now, apply that scenario to the literary equation [American Dirt has] presented.”

The narratives Gurba and Khakpour suggest both assume that the decision makers on American Dirt were white. And there is very good reason for that assumption: Publishing is an extremely white industry.

According to trade magazine Publishers Weekly, white people made up 84 percent of publishing’s workforce in 2019. Publishing is staffed almost entirely by white people — and in large part, that fact can be explained by publishing’s punishingly low entry-level salaries.

A job as an editorial assistant pays around $30,000, and it means living in New York City, where conservative estimates generally say you need an annual salary of about $40,000 before taxes to get by. But landing a position as an editorial assistant is generally a promotion: to get one, you usually have to spend a season or two working as an intern first, for low or no pay.

Such salaries mean that the kind of people who work in publishing tend to be the kind of people who can afford to work in publishing: those who are carrying little student debt and who can rely on their parents to supplement their salaries as necessary. And mostly, those people tend to be white.

As a result, publishing is predominantly staffed with well-meaning white people who, when looking for a book about the stories of people of color, can find themselves drawn toward one addressed specifically toward white people — and who will lack the expertise to question that book’s treatment of its characters. Which means that as long as publishing continues to be overwhelmingly, monolithically white, it will continue to find itself mired in controversies like the one surrounding American Dirt.

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failedimitator · 5 years

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Some months back, my friend S asked about my birth chart. When I said I didn’t know, she suggested that I ask my mother what time I was born. I didn’t do that because I have thoughts about Astrology, and most of those thoughts hover around the fact that Astrology in junk. Although these days, it seems like everyone and their mother is into this junk.

One of the reasons why astrology is becoming very popular these days is because of the uncertainty inherent in living in this 21st century. The comfort that religion gave to our parents’ and grandparents’ generation is what our generation is looking to astrology for.

Some years ago, I came across a book called Algorithms to Live By. I still haven’t actually read the book (although it’s been in my queue for about as long as its been since I found out about it) but I found the ideas in the book (from reading articles about it online and watching videos of the authors) quite comforting. They provide a model to navigate the mess that is adult life.

Over the past few days, seemingly at random, I came across three algorithms (or mathematical equations) being used in the domain of love and relationships.

The first, when I speaking with my friend D. She mentioned that her ex-boyfriend had mentioned that he came to the decision to date her using the secretary problem. The secretary problem is an optimal stopping problem that’s concerned with finding the optimal time required to take a certain action in order to obtain the maximum expected reward. It gets its name from the hypothetical situation of an administrator needing to hire the best secretary from an n number of applicants.

There’s a lot of complicated maths involved, but the short answer is for the administrator to interview the first 37% of applicant and outright reject all of them, then hire the next applicant that’s better than everyone that came before. Using this method gives the administrator a 37% chance of choosing the best possible secretary.

Applying this to dating is not as straightforward, if only because you wouldn’t have an n number of willing applicants on queue (unless you’re the bachelor/bachelorette). But there are ways to improvise and approximate.

Let’s assume you’re 20 years old and want to get married/settle down by the time you’re 30. Now let’s also assume that you can have an average of two short term relationships in a year. That gives you an n number of 20; twenty possible partners before you’re 30. 20 by 0.37 gives you 7.4. Round that down to 7. So for the first 3 and a half years -- from 20 to 23 and six months -- you outright reject everyone you date, and then after that settle down with the next person who is better than all of your previous partners.

The second, I came across from a recent article on Vox, is the elo rating system, which is a self-correcting rating system used mostly in chess (but it works for pretty much any player vs player game) to rank players according to their skill level. In the system, everyone gets assigned a number which either increases or decreases depending on how they play. Like the secretary problem that came before it, elo is a probabilistic algorithm that predicts who will win between two players given the difference in their numbers.

When two players with the same elo number play, each has a 50% chance of winning against the other. A player with 100 points higher than another is expected to win 64% of the time. The way the rating self-corrects is that whenever a player who should win loses, they also lose some of their points, and the person who wins when they should’ve lost will gain those points. The lower your probability of winning is when you win, the higher points you’ll get. It’s a zero-sum system.

So apparently, this is the same system Tinder uses for its sorting algorithm, replacing wins and loses with left and right swipes. More right swipes on your profile translate to more wins translate to increasingly higher elo numbers. Or, in Tinder’s case, higher desirability scores. Swiping right on someone with a lower desirability score brings down your score and raises the score of the of the less desirable party.

The third and I final one I came across this morning on the Valentine’s Day episode of This American Life. I’m talking about the drake equation.

The drake equation is a formula used to estimate the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilisations in the galaxy. It goes:

N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L.

where N is the number of intelligent civilisations, R is the rate at which stars are formed in the galaxy, fp is the fraction of those stars with a planet, ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life, fl is the fraction of those planets that actually develop life at some point, fi is the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (because life and intelligent life are not one and the same), fc is the fraction of those intelligent civilisations that have developed technology that is detectable from space, and L is the length of time that that technology remains detectable for.

Now instead of intelligent civilisations in the galaxy, turn that into potential partners in the city you live in.

N = T x fg x fa x fr x fs x fa x f...

where T is the total number of people in your city, fg is the fraction of those people that are of the gender you’re attracted to, fa is the fraction of those that are within your acceptable age range, fs is the fraction of those that are single or otherwise available, fa is the fraction of those that you’d be attracted to. And on and on and on. You can continue multiplying by various fractions like height, education level, dietary preferences, religion, and even whether or not they’d be the kind of person who would run a Drake equation about their love prospects.

The problem with the secretary problem is that, for one, it doesn’t account for the agency of the person on the other side of the equation. Whether or not they’d like you back. Or worse, whether they’re also running their algorithm, and you fall within the 37% range and thus are going to outright reject you anyway.

What the Tinder algorithms doesn’t account for is all the other desirability factors that make up a person past their looks. All the complex internal systems that make one person attracted to another past their actual physical attractiveness. Although, there’s research that shows that this system performs better than OkCupid and other online dating sites that purport to have better matching algorithms.

It makes the process of matching and talking and meeting move along much faster, and is, in that way, a lot like a meet-cute in the post office or at a bar. It’s not making promises it can’t keep.

The problem with running the Drake equation is that I don’t know why you’d want to do that. In the sense that, the equation will show that you always always have fewer dating prospects than you think you do. But who knows, maybe some people find comfort in that.

The bigger point with all these algorithms though, is that they fill the same holes that astrology does. I do not mean that running your life by algorithms is exactly the same as running your life by, say, horoscopes; I only mean that the reason people who gravitate towards these algorithms do are the same reasons people who gravitate towards astrology do: to find some meaning and structure in this mad mad world.

#Day 140 #11022019 #dating #maths #probability #astrology #algorithms #drake equation #elo rating #optimal stopping #Secretary problem #love #valentines

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torentialtribute · 5 years

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MARTIN SAMUEL: Confounding and thrilling… why a Test on the final day has no equal

So what's your favorite sport? In this position you lose the number of times you are asked that question. And most people who broach the subject probably feel the answer. You are going to say soccer. And I love soccer.

Always different, always the same, as John Peel said about The Fall. But I also like rugby and hockey and baseball and a good fight. I love everything well done. I was even dragged by the weightlifting at the Olympic Games.

Still nothing matches Test cricket – or let me reformulate it. None of this is Test cricket on the last day, perhaps the last session, when the best part of your week is invested in the competition. Nothing is Headingley 2019 or Adelaide 2010 or Edgbaston 2005. Or even Karachi in 2000.

England duo Nasser Hussain (right) and Graham Thorpe (left) celebrate their victory over Pakistan

Let me tell you about Karachi, because it explains a lot. I was the lead sports writer of the Daily Express, not long-termed, and flew away hoping to get an interview with the English captain, Nasser Hussain. He wouldn't do it. He was a miserable beggar then, much nicer now.

The series was also right after two draws, so it was all on the last. Pakistan kneaded a first inning of 405 in total and on the second day, England came in and Mike Atherton started to hit. And bat And bat He was not close, with Hussain, who played a little slower than milking.

Michael Henderson, a brilliant cricket correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, among others, knew Atherton well enough for a rather surprising intervention. He drafted a letter that he poked under Atherton & # 39; s door in the hotel of England.

It was announced that Saturday was Henderson's day off and planned to visit Karachi & # 39; s market that morning looking for carpets.

However, he would sit in the press box after lunch and if Atherton was still beating and batting the way he made his night, he would stand and loudly boo him from the front of the stand all afternoon.

There were not many in the National Stadium that week. Any expression of dissatisfaction would certainly be heard.

The response to this ultimatum was a call from bluff. Not only did Atherton not change pace, Hussain became slower. Atherton & # 39; s 50 lasted three hours and two minutes, Hussain & # 39; s four hours and 17 minutes.

Close by, England had made 198 more runs. No one even wanted to go boo. This would complete the boring draws.

One family correspondent had to fly home prematurely for family reasons and no substitute was sent in his place. The guy from a Sunday newspaper packed himself to return home for Christmas at the office. At the end of a stunning day four, I had no idea what to write.

The cricket correspondent would record the match as it was. My task was to find a theme, a problem, a point of discussion. There were none. There was an available flight mid-morning on the last day.

I took a quick vox doll from colleagues & # 39; s. Is there a chance of a result? Is there a chance of a change? For a man, the best observers of the game advised me to save myself. Nothing would happen in Karachi on day 5.

I stayed because you never know. And at lunch, when the game got closer, there was a lot of fun at my expense. I could have broken out. I could have been on my way. Instead, I was watching here – wait a minute, what am I watching?

For those last hours, the most amazing thing happened. The game has shifted from this swamp of everyday life. There was a small chance that England would win. Ashley Giles and Darren Gough skimmed Pakistan, and England were set at 176 at a speed of four per lake, given the time remaining.

Pakistan then went on a go-slow match throttling. Saqlain Mushtaq took eight minutes to throw one, Waqar Younis took four minutes to settle the field. The hero of the hour was referee Ranjan Madugalle, who used the tea break to emphatically inform Pakistani captain Moin Khan that these overs would be completed, whatever.

Towards the end, Pakistani field players complained that they turned down the winning points in almost darkness when Graham Thorpe. It was the kind of light that you only played as a child in the backyard. Five more minutes and they should interrupt the game.

And against this bleak pressure, England won their first series in Pakistan for 39 years. Of course Atherton & # 39; s 125 in nine hours and 39 minutes earned him the man of the match. It was completely compelling, completely exciting. It was one of the biggest things I saw on a sports field.

However, in the near darkness England changed the game and won in the most compelling fashion

Why? Because so much was invested in it at the time. Just as much was invested in Headingley in 2019 or 1981, or when a test competition reached an insane conclusion.

There are so many moments when a game is ebbing and flowing in one of three directions, so many nuances, passages of complete boredom, followed by sparks of a wonderful life.

You would think a certain session contains the key to the whole game, only to discover a red herring. For example, who would have thought that Friday morning and England & # 39; s 67 all-in this week would not be the most important phase of the game?

Who would have thought that Jofra Archer & # 39; s six for 45 would not be the highlight of England's performance?

For five days, Test cricket has many more options for confusing, wrong footing and surprising. It is a sports team that exerts great pressure on individuals.

Football analysts talk about players hiding & # 39; hiding & # 39 ;. There is nowhere to hide in cricket. Nowhere to hide, even to the greatest test batsman in the world, Steve Smith, nowhere to hide when he threw the ball at Ben Stokes.

Cricket rewards the strictest technology, but also the most casual flair. It has elements of grace and beauty, but also shocking, visceral danger. It rejoices in softness and deception, but also in energy and brute force. And those who play it also love it.

Even in a numb defeat on Sunday, there was a feeling that the Australian players knew they were 50 percent of one of the biggest matches the sport had witnessed. That bowling from England for 67 was an achievement, and one that increased Stokes' performance, and therefore the story.

Players who also invest in the test arena. The white ball game, the Cricket World Cup, can be great, but it can never match the required concentration as the long form unfolds.

Perhaps, with football, familiarity disregards. There is so much of it, and at elite level, so much that it is good that we are almost full.

Ben Stokes again the star of the show in another stunning win for England this summer

Tottenham defeated Ajax in the final minute of a Champions League semi-final and it was the biggest comeback since – well, the night before when Liverpool faced withdrew a deficit of 3-0 against Barcelona, with 4-0.

Then there are deadlines from a personal perspective. Most of the best memories – the 2003 Rugby World Cup final, Andy Murray & # 39; s first Wimbledon victory, Stokes at Headingley, the squares without squares that protrude Canada eight hundredths of a second in Athens – have time by their side .

Football has Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and Leicester and the Nou Camp in 1999, but it is also loaded with late kick-offs and hectic rewrites. Too busy to report it to view it is no joke.

I was present for the Miracle of Medina in the Ryder Cup, which took place after midnight British time. One day it would be nice to find out what the hell happened there.

Cricket test is different. It can be inhaled, luxuriously consumed during the best part of a week.

So when after all this time it comes down to one session, or one over, or one wicket or like on Sunday – one man, makes the difficult progress on that point all the more exciting.

So, as an answer to the question, my favorite sport is Test cricket. Some people find it boring. And sometimes it is. But that is also a bit of the point.

Poch refuses to face facts

Mauricio Pochettino is an intelligent man. So it always seems bizarre that he is neat when he is examined for team selection in the aftermath of the defeat.

& # 39; If the score was 3-0, you wouldn't ask me, & # 39; he said Sunday, he asked why Christian Eriksen did not start. And yes, when a manager wins 3-0, every call is justified.

But the score was not 3-0.

It was 1-0 for Newcastle and Tottenham had no creativity. So, does Pochettino no longer judge Eriksen? Does he want to sell Eriksen? Is he trying to make the player unhappy so that he makes a bid for the European transfer window deadline?

And what advantage would that be for Pochettino, given that he cannot recruit a replacement with the money? It makes no sense – although it does not fail to equate results and talks.

Christian Eriksen shows his frustration during Tottenham & # 39 ; s shock 1-0 defeat by Newcastle

Game passes through Wilshere with

It is no pleasure to report that West Ham will not play for the second consecutive season. competition match won until Jack Wilshere was absent from the starting line-

Both times, the club won its first appearance without Wilshere scoring three goals. Manuel Pellegrini has faith, but Premier League football is steadily passing Wilshere.

It seems that he needs months more than weeks to make a match and no club can afford to wait that long.

] Aluko story has yet to be fully told

Eni Aluko says that many of his English teammates have never apologized for not supporting his claim of racism against Mark Sampson and his treatment by the football association.

She has written an autobiography and says it was low to see her former colleagues race to celebrate a goal with Sampson when the accusations were at their peak.

There is never a convincing explanation for that given public support. Why were the players still behind their manager? And why, even now, don't they support Aluko?

Perhaps more than one book on this subject is needed to make both sides of that story come true.

Eni Aluko & # 39; s autobiography includes his claim to racism against former coach Mark Sampson

Maxine Blythin, the transgender cricket player with ambitions to represent the women of England, also plays at club level for a local men's team.

For Chesham second XI she has an average of 15. For her ladies team, St. Lawrence and Highland Court, her average is 129.

On the weekend, Blythin did not make 145 against Ansty, who all 155 were out. Her figures in the 2nd XI cricket for men suggest a clear average talent. Transported to the Women & # 39; s Southern League Premiership, however, she becomes a star and a county player for Kent.

Blythin identifies a woman, which is her right. However, only those in complete denial would refuse to grant these serious problems around the future of women's sport.

Right to Separate Serena and Ramos

It is very understandable that Referee Carlos Ramos and Serena Williams were held apart this year during the US Open.

It was Ramos who provoked Williams there spectacular loss of control there last season when he dared to treat her like any other player. "You will never, never be to another court of mine, as long as you live," Williams raged.

And not Ramos. Some think the United States Tennis Association has been swept away, but a Williams game with Ramos in charge would have become a circus. To be honest about her, the referee and the opponent, it was best to lie.

As long as it is remembered who was responsible for this unfortunate state of affairs.

was not a Ramos.

Serena Williams (right) argued infamous with referee at Carlos Open

Are EFL after an expert in failure?

The favorite for the football league's chief executive is Jez Moxey, now CEO of Burton Albion, but best remembered for his time in a similar role with wolves.

As such, he helped bring the club to League One with a £ 25m payroll bill because it was not expected that players' contracts would have to be cut in the event of relegation.

It was also Moxey who spoke about establishing Wolves in the Premier League as a priority, in the same season that they fell out.

Yet at least he appointed the man who started to change the club, Kenny Jackett – even though he was Wolves' fifth manager in 16 months at that time. These are difficult times for the Football League and understanding why some clubs turn into absolute disaster areas would come in handy.

Maybe this is what makes Moxey the front runner, it is a subject that he is certainly well versed in.

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#MARTIN SAMUEL: Confounding and thrilling… why a Test on the final day has no equal"

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eurosong · 7 years

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My grand final review

Hey there, folks! It’s exhilaratingly close to the big moment, the beginning of this year’s grand final! Here's my rundown of the Eurovision grand final songs, in running order. I call this a "lights and shadows" list, as, for the sake of nuance, I've added something positive and some criticism for every song on the list. For those who missed it, this is the semi-skimmed version of this full-bodied critique of all the songs. Let's go!

Israel + If the hosts' robotic intro has put people to sleep, this will wake them up. - The lyrics make less sense than your average Edward Lear poëm. Rank: 24

Poland + Kasia has a good voice and sings with passion and conviction. - The song is an absolute dirge with no real sense of direction, and those rhymes are ridic. Rank: 17

Belarus: + Instant cute happiness, this is just so squeeeee - They could have fit another verse in to make the song less repetitive. Rank: 3

Austria: + He put a lót of work into promoting himself and his song, which is admirable. His covers of former ESC songs made him seem like a fan of the contest, which puts you in good steed with fellow fans. I think he got in the final by sheer force of personality. - Saccharine, plim-plom song. Those "hey naaaww" repetitions annoy the hell out of me! And I always mistrust someone so perma-cheerful. It comes across as forced, not quite right and makes me feel he's got human heads in his fridge at home. Rank: 21

Armenia: + Majestic. This song soars like the eagle of Artsvik's name. This kind of song is precisely why I love Armenia, a perfect mélange of traditional and modern that sounds like nothing else in the contest. Artsvik herself has got a special, almost regal poise. Feels like this song dropped out of outer space, love it. - She could have made it even better by including more dancers to closer emulate the surreal video. Rank: 4

Netherlands: + Their live vocals are impeccable. And as for the song topic, losing a beloved relative after seeing them battle a disease something, unfortunately, to which so many of us can relate, so it does pull on my heartstrings. - If they were a less popular country amongst eurofans, would folk consider the girls to be using their mother's sickness for sympathy rather than sympathising with them? My internal jury is out on that one. As for the music, it is derivative and dated - their voices deserve something a few decades closer to "contemporary." Rank: 8

Moldova + They perform this song with verve and do their best to bring the party. - This band's continued success goes to show how far getting adopted as a meme by confused American non-viewers of Eurovision can get you in the competition. Rank: 15

Hungary + Perhaps the contest's best example of how one can use dance to make the story of a song understood beyond linguistic boundaries. One of the most original songs in the contest, performed with passion, emotion and defiance, and certainly some of the strongest lyrics. - Many folk have an automatic dislike to rap at the contest and may get the wrong idea of his bars, seeing them as angry rather than as the deep and moving lyrics that they are. Rank: 2

Italy + Francesco embodies easy-going charm, and his satirical lyrics are amongst the contest's best. - The Eurovision version of the song has much less impact than the San Remo one; it slipped down by rankings because most of those biting and ironic lyrics were removed, leaving only half a verse where there had been two. Rank: 7

Denmark + What Anja does very well indeed is connecting with the audience. It's a song about intimacy, so the number of long close ups communicate that well - it feels as though she's singing right in front of us. - Musically generic, and the aforementioned intimacy is undermined by vox that are beyond the border of shouty. Rank: 13

Portugal + Magnificently moving, ethereal song that has the timeless quality of an instant classic. Sang beautifully in a way that shows nuance trumps power. I never thought a song from this decade's ESC could challenge to be my favourite ever Eurovision song, but this does. - Whilst his interpretation of the song through movement is a key part of its appeal to me, it distracts some folks. My own biggest problem is that I'd rather see Salvador (and Luísa) up on the stage for hours rather than three minutes. Rank: 1

Azerbaijan + Best Azeri entry ever. Something genuinely stylish, mysterious and modern. - The staging seems a bit "GCSE Drama" and gimmicky. Rank: 9

Croatia + It's impressive to be able to sing a duet with yourself in two completely different vocal styles. It's bloody hilarious, too. - This is the ultimate example of the saying: just because you cán, doesn't mean you shóúld. This is more cheese than a tower made of Camembert and his fake smiles are creepy. Rank: 14

Australia + As a piece of music, I quite like the style. With another singer, I might well enjoy this a fair bit. - He sings as though his nose has never been blown, and his forlorn looks to the camera that seem like that of a puppy dog who fears he's going to end up served in a dish of bosintang seem fake and are very disconcerting. Rank: 18

Greece + Only lasts three minutes. Demy must be a generous soul, given the way she allows the backing vocalists to sing more audibly than she. - It takes me about 20 minutes to walk from my home to my workplace or vice versa. In that time, I reckon I could write 4-5 songs of higher quality than this. Utterly generic and disposable pop with lyrics which are just a stream of thought-terminating clichés. Rank: 26

Spain + The song has brought me hours of amusement, because my kids have made a game of making mocking references to it whenever they can. Before a pronunciation face-to-face challenge, one lad psyched another out by saying "are you ready to do it... for your lover?" - Wasted money voting on other songs only for a jury of the "winner's" friends to overrule the public vote. So that they could force this masterpiece in which "do it for your lover" or "just do it" is said, on average, every four seconds. Grim. Rank: 25

Norway + I listened to the acoustic version of this and they sing it well, and it sounds much better acoustic. They seem like nice lads. - Cold, soulless, robotic, and with silly rhyming dictionary lyrics. Rank: 18

UK + The BBC has finally upped its game and tried to create an impressive show. Well done. - Shame the song itself is part sleeping pill, part excruciatingly annoying. "This maaadnnesss..." Rank: 23

Cyprus + For us linguaphiles and/or Armenophiles, there was a great moment in a video where Hovig and Artsvik spoke at the same time, he in Western Armenian, she in Eastern Armenian. That was cool. - Pales in comparison to Rag and Bone Man's "Human" from which the music was ripped off without mercy. Also, physicists across Europe are weeping as Hoving considers gravity to be something that lifts you up ánd halts your fall. Rank: 22

Romania + The second dose of "adorable couple" tonight. This shouldn't work, this unholy blend of rap and yodel, but for me, it so does. Mostly on how happy they are and how that transfers to me in the audience. They're just full on adorable. And you know, as much as it's great that Eurovision has a great many serious acts, I love that something so wild and just plain carefree can get so far too. There's a really good message of living for the moment in this, too. - Ilinca's vocals are powerhouse; Alex' are more underwhelming and that might see them penalised by the juries. Rank: 6

Germany + When she was in the final of that ridiculous national final, duelling against herself, it seems obvious Levina wanted the other, marginally less terribad Wildfire, and felt lumbered by the public's pick of Perfect Life. Despite that, she's done a great job of wholeheartedly promoting the song and has travelled far and wide. I respect the work ethic. She had by far and away the best vocals of the national final, too (shame she got this song which doesn't play to her strengths.) - Usually, I cannot look past the ripped-off Titanium intro. When I can, the lyrics blow my mind in the worst possible. Almost a sinner, nearly a saint, people... Rank: 16

Ukraine + I love a good rock song. This is not so great, but is like a mirage in a desert - giving sóme hope of refreshment, even if it ultimately doesn't deliver. - Runs out of steam after the first minute and becomes a bit of a sludge after a few repeated listens. Rank: 12

Belgium + Absolutely spellbinding studio version. 50-60 years ahead of last year's throwback from Belgium. Minimalist and moving. I hold out hope in a really good final performance. - Poor Blanche has looked as though someone was molesting her dead pet dog in front of her during the semi final. More traumatised than vulnerable. Rank: 5

Sweden + The music, whilst nothing special, is quite catchy. Especially the instrumental parts with the synth-based flourishes. - I find it hard to look past the ugly and forceful "rapey rhyme" style lyrics, or the cringeworthy stage show aptly and succintly referred to by a friend of mine as "fuckboys on treadmills." Rank: 20

Bulgaria + Polished and contemporary song, sung with confidence. - As anything other than background music, it leaves me cold. I really find the performer to be highly offputting, too. Rank: 11

France + Not as good or half as charming as Amir and his song, but not a bad effort. Very French, which from me can only be a compliment. - Feels quite inconsequential after they removed the most meaningful lines and replaced them with a cliché English chorus. Rank: 10

My pre-final top 10, thus: 1 - 🇵🇹 - Portugal 2 - 🇭🇺️ - Hungary 3 - 🇧🇾️ - Belarus 4 - 🇦🇲️ - Armenia 5 - 🇧🇪 - Belgium 6 - 🇷🇴️ - Romania 7 - 🇮🇹️ - Italy 8 - 🇳🇱️ - Netherlands 9 - 🇦🇿 ️- Azerbaijan X - 🇨🇵 - France

#eurovision #esc 2017 #eurovision 2017 #eurovision song contest #review

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