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aceghosts · 10 months

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Oh, The Reckoning Begins Chapter 6

Series Summary: Five years ago, Junior Deputy Blue Murphy disappeared with Joseph Seed at the final standoff, only to be found a year later in Dutch's bunker. Now, five years later from that final standoff, Blue Murphy and Hope County have moved on with their lives. However, new sinister forces threaten Blue's life, and they will have to rely on the man who started this all to survive: Joseph Seed.

Ch. 1| Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Guilt, Emotional Manipulation, Graphic Depictions of Unrealistic nightmares, Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Death, Explicitly talking about Someone's dead sibling, Blue having a Breakdown, and I think that should cover everything. Please let me know if I should tag for anything else.

Words: 4,269 words.

Author's Note: I did not mean for this chapter to take so long, lol. Hopefully, the next one will be quicker.

AO3

A few days after speaking with Joseph, Blue’s cell phone vibrates softly on their desk, dread washing over them. They look down at the caller ID, recognizing the number: Special Agent Hawthorne. Damnit, Blue hoped he might leave them alone. Blue would not talk to Joseph again; they had to, for their own sanity, which felt like it was starting to slip away like leaves being carried off by a strong breeze. Eventually, their cell phone quiets, Special Agent Hawthorne going to voicemail. They wait a few minutes, wondering if he would call again. Mercifully, their phone is silent as Blue lets out a relieved sigh.

Later that night, when Blue is the only one in the station, they finally gather the courage to listen to the voicemail. Special Agent Hawthorne is calm and empathetic in his message, once again tugging on their heartstrings:

“Thank you for helping us, Blue. Joseph was very cooperative with us after you left; your words gave him a lot to think about. I would like to request that you come speak to him again before our next session. We think it would help keep Joseph invested in working with us. I’m happy to drive you or provide reimbursement for gas.” Special Agent Hawthorne pauses, letting out a deep sigh. “Blue, I understand that after everything Joseph Seed did to you, that you would never want to see him again. Think of the people you can help; do it for them. Do it for Philip Santiago. Do it for Arthur Wilson. Do it for Abigail Carter. Do it for your friends. Do it for those who were killed by Eden’s Gate the first time. You have the power to make things right, Blue.”

They hang up the cell phone, tears burning in their eyes. Boomer huffs and Blue looks over to find him watching them expectantly. “I’m not going. I can’t….” They hesitate, shoulders dropping, “I’m not a hero. I can’t do this, not again.” Looking away from Boomer, they hear him huff again, and Blue wonders if everyone expects them to go. “Shit.” They murmur, grief clouding their mind.

The nightmares are relentless.

Blue stumbles through the Bliss, gagging as nausea overwhelms them. The smell is overpowering, acid rising in their throat. Their eyes water, burning as they try to blink away the tears. Someone grabs them by the their jacket collar, yanking Blue back. They stumble backward, their eyes meeting Marshal Burke’s. He sneers at them, disappointment written across his face. “Saved your life, Rookie, and this how you repay us?” He snarls, hauling them towards the water. Bliss rises from the water in a cloud of thick smoke, the water a sparkly putrid green. They howl with fear, scratching at the Marshal uselessly, trying to wriggle out of their jacket. Yet, Marshal Burke succeeds, overpowering Blue as he dunks them under the water. They thrash in a desperate scramble for survival, fear coursing through their body. He yanks them out of the water after what feels like an eternity, only to submerge them barely a few seconds later. Over and over. Blue’s lungs burn as they desperately suck in air, only to choke down more water. “When will you learn, Rookie? When will you learn that you can never escape us?” Out of the corner of their eye, in a haze of sparkly green mist, Faith appears, smiling coldly as the Marshal shoves their head under the water once more.

CRACK! Pain radiates across Blue’s face as someone punches them. Their aviators crack, breaking into pieces as they fly off their face. Stumbling back a few steps, Blue refocuses, Eli Palmer pulling his fist back for another punch, face full of murderous rage. He sucker punches them in the gut, Blue doubling over as they let out a gasp of pain. Their brain panics momentarily, trying to get their lungs to suck in air. Blue feels Eli’s calloused fingers in their hair, harshly pulling them up to face him. An involuntary pained whimper escapes them as tears well in their eyes. Behind Eli, Blue catches sight of a figure, hidden in the shadows of the Wolf’s Den. Jacob Seed is grinning, a sick, predatory grin that sends a shiver straight up their spine. “I took you in, Rook, and what did I get for it? A rabid wolf in my den.” It wasn’t me; It was that damn music box. Yet, Blue finds they can’t say anything. Or maybe, they won’t. After all, they deserve this, right? Eli was their friend, and Blue fucking murdered him. “PATHETIC!” Eli roars, sending Blue crashing toward the ground. Blue hits the ground, dazed, before Eli’s boot connects with their rib, a sharp crack following. They bite down on their bottom lip, tasting the blood a second later as another kick connects.

“Hey Deputy,” Blue scrambles back towards the wall, away from Dutch. They’re stopped by the handcuffs, painfully connecting them to the small bed. His hands reach out as Blue kicks out. He narrowly dodges their kicks, hands wrapping around their throat. His fingers are thick, squeezing painfully down on their neck. They gasp for air, kicking more wildly now as they try to escape Dutch’s grasp. “I hauled your ass out of that burning wreckage, Deputy. I gave you shelter. I gave you a fucking army,” He snarls, flecks of spit hitting their face. Blue looks around, desperate for help, any help. Joseph Seed, leaning against the wall with a serene fucking look on his face, watches on as Blue’s struggles become weaker. “And, what did you do? Bring fucking Joseph Seed right fucking here? Let him strangle me to death?” A black fuzziness creeps in at the edge of their vision, limbs feeling like lead.

Another figure enters their fading vision, smiling cruelly at Blue. “Did you ever really think we could be free from this? We belong here, Wrath. There is no escape,” the other Blue taunts, their cruel grin widening.

Blue shoots up in their bed, soaked in sweat and tears. Boomer comes to them, licking the salty tears from their cheeks. Taking in a shaky breath, Blue mulls over their dreams. Did they deserve this? Were they destined to be there with Joseph at the end of the world? No, that was stupid. Blue belongs here in Hope County, with friends who love them and gorgeous nature.

They belong here, right?

Blue sighs, helping Boomer up into the truck. Once he was safely sitting shotgun, Boomer licks Blue’s face, making a shitty day slightly better. They laugh, scratching him fondly behind his left ear as Boomer grumbles in happiness. Thank whatever god existed for Boomer; He was their lifeline, the one constant comfort in all the shit they had been through in Hope County. Blue closes the door of the truck, looking out towards the setting sky. It was late, the pink nearly extinguished into the navy. Yet, they felt lucky to be alive, especially after last night. It was the small moments, like Boomer licking them joyfully or seeing the beauty of a sunset that kept Blue alive.

The sound of a car pulling into the Ranger Station parking lot jolts Blue from their thoughts. They look over, finding the very last two people they wanted to see. The maroon sedan stops shortly behind their truck, trying to block Blue into their space. Their fists clench, anxiety settling deep into their chest. Blue would not be intimidated by these two. If they had to, they would ram the sedan with their truck. Wouldn’t be the first time Blue rammed a truck through a blockade of cars.

“Ranger Murphy!” Ethel calls, getting out of the passenger side of the sedan. Peter parks the sedan, turning it off before joining his wife. He nods at Blue, a coldness in his eyes. “I wanted to make sure that you didn’t lose our number. You never gave us a call.” She walks towards Blue, focused intently on them.

Boomer lets out a sharp bark, deep growls emanating from him as his ears lay flat against his head. Ethel nervously glances towards Boomer, stepping back towards Peter. He wraps an arm around Ethel, who leans into him for comfort, as he shoots a nasty look towards Boomer. “Your dog isn’t going to bite us, is he?” Peter asks, distaste clear in his voice.

“Not unless you are a Peggie.” Their eyes narrow, glaring at Peter and Ethel.

Ethel laughs nervously. “Peggies, that’s what the Hope County Resistance called members of Eden’s Gate, correct?” Blue doesn’t speak, only nodding in response. “We’re not with Eden’s Gate, Ranger Murphy. We are just doing a story on them. Peter and I are not your enemies; we want to help you, Ranger Murphy. Telling your story can be cathartic.”

“The Ranger Station is closed for the day. If you have any urgent questions, you should call Emergency Services. If it is a nonemergency, you can call the number of the Ranger Station, and a Ranger will return your call,” They reply, using their best customer service voice, crossing their arms over their chest. What would it take for Ethel and Peter to fucking leave?

Ethel smiles a strained smile, her polite mask cracking slightly. “As you know, Ranger Murphy, we’re not interested in talking about the National Parks. We want to talk to you about Eden’s Gate.”

“I think I made it damn clear that I don’t want to talk about Eden’s Gate. If you continue to harass me about this, I will seek legal measures against you.” After Eden’s Gate, Blue only had to seek legal remedy once to get someone off their back as most people were either scared off or realized they weren’t going to get anywhere. The man, clearly going through something, believed that Joseph was some sort of alien with Eden’s Gate as a front for experimentation, and Blue, a witness to this horror show, was covering for him. Blue wishes it had been something that wild rather than common human cruelty. Maybe, they wouldn’t feel so awful about what they had done.

Peter sighs in frustration, shaking his head. “You know, all this avoidance would make one wonder what you have to hide, Ranger Murphy. Makes me wonder if you might not be so innocent.”

Blue’s blood runs cold, eyes widening at his statement. “Is that a threat?” They ask anxiously, nails digging into the cotton fabric of their forest green ranger shirt.

He shakes his head again. “No, Ranger Murphy. The truth will always come out. Ethel and I are going to make sure of that.” Peter pauses, a small smirk on his face. “Ranger Murphy, what was your relationship with Joseph Seed? The files aren’t clear on that.”

No way. Blue was not going to have this conversation with Ethel or Peter. “I’m sorry, but if you want information on Eden’s Gate, please speak with Sheriff Whitehorse. I will not speak with you.” Blue turns their back to the couple, uncrossing their arms. Their steps are shaky, adrenaline and anxiety coursing through their body. Their left hand reaches out, steadying them against the cold metal of the truck. All they have to do is make it to the driver’s seat. Just make it to the driver’s seat…

“If you don’t have a relationship with Joseph Seed, why did you visit him in prison this weekend?” Ethel’s tone is smug. Their breath catches in their throat as they stop. A moment passes before Blue sucks in a deep breath, their heart pounding loudly in their ears. How the fuck did Ethel and Peter know about that visit with Joseph? Anyone Blue had told knew to keep it a secret. Hell, the whole County knew what hell Joseph had put Blue through, especially with stealing a year of their life in that bunker. A whole year they’ll never get back. A whole year less with loved ones. “It wasn’t hard to figure out,” Ethel explains matter of fact, “Besides, I doubt you know anyone in that penitentiary but Joseph Seed. It makes sense that you would be there to visit him.”

Blue whirls around, wrath burning within them. “Have you been stalking me?”

Ethel and Peter exchange uneasy glances with each other. “Stalking is a harsh word,” Peter answers, “We were watching your home, trying to decide when we might talk to you again. And well…,” He shrugs, a ghost of a smile on his lips, “Ethel and I just happened to find a bigger scoop, but you haven’t denied it. What is your relationship like with Joseph Seed? Strange that a ‘victim’ of his would go to visit him.”

They swallow, trying to get their wrath under control. Blue wouldn’t let Peter or Ethel get the best of them. Trying to play the question off, Blue rolls their eyes. “Listen, I don’t know what weird narrative you’ve cooked up in your heads, but I did not visit Joseph Seed. I don’t want anything to do with him or Eden’s Gate for the rest of my life. So, fuck off.” They could no longer be nice or polite about any of this. Underneath their shirt, the WRATH scar starts to burn, a stark reminder of the anger simmering within them. Without thinking, Blue reaches up to scratch their WRATH scar.

Ethel tilts her head, stepping forward as she shrugs Peter’s arm off her shoulder. “Are we making you angry, Ranger Murphy? After all, that’s where the WRATH tattoo lays right? I saw an examination photo of it; looks rather nasty.”

Shame courses through them as Blue looks away. The examination photos were supposed to be private, but photos of the WRATH and PRIDE scar had leaked on the internet. And now the cat was out of the bag. No matter how many take-down notices anyone sent, they just seemed to pop up again and again. Eventually, Blue gave up, resigned to having some of their worst physical scars out there on the internet. Looking back, Blue glares at Peter and Ethel. “Yeah, I’m angry. You keep bringing up Eden’s Gate, which contains some of the worst memories of my life, and then you can’t understand why I wouldn’t want to talk about it,” They let out a hysterical laugh, before they raise their voice, “By the way, a tattoo is something you want! What John Seed gave me was a fucking scar! It wasn’t a fucking tattoo!”

“I’m sorry, Ranger Murphy. I’ll refer to it correctly next time,” She steps closer, “You still haven’t answered our questions on your relationship with Joseph Seed.”

“Are you romantically involved with him?” Peter asks, following Ethel.

Blue snorts, shaking their head. The fucking nerve of these two! “Fuck no.” They turn away from the pair again, determined to get in their truck and drive away.

“Ranger Murphy, wait-.”

BARK!

Boomer barks loudly, ramping up his behavior as he slams against the window. His barks are interspersed with deep and throaty growls, malice in his normally warm brown eyes. His teeth glint in the window, ready to rip apart anyone who would threaten his owner. Blue knew he had lost one owner, and that Boomer wouldn’t let that happen again. Ethel screams, scrambling backward only to fall on her ass. As Boomer barks, Ethel crawls away, Peter helping her up seconds later. Coming to the passenger side window, Blue lays their hand on the glass. Boomer stops, a low whine coming from him as he licks the window. His tail wags ferociously, practically a blur.

Glaring at Blue, Peter snidely comments, “You should control that dog of yours.”

“Good boy!” Blue praises Boomer, winking at him. He barks joyously, only to start growling menacingly again at Peter and Ethel. “As I said, Boomer only acts this way if you’re a Peggie.”

“My sister…,” Ethel starts, a soft sob escaping her as Peter rubs her back, “My sister was a part of Eden’s Gate. She is the reason we’re doing this.”

“Oh.” Guilt washes over them as Blue awkwardly looks away. No matter how many times it happened, Blue was never good at dealing with the family members of those who had lost a Peggie. So many wanted to know what happened to their parents, partners, children, and others. Blue didn’t have a good answer for them then, and they sure as hell didn’t have a good answer now. “Is she….um?”

Ethel nods, Peter taking her hand as he interlaces his fingers with hers. “She died. She almost survived it, but then she had to help Joseph in your final fight with him. And that’s the one she didn’t make it back from.”

Blue frowns, the memory hitting them.

“I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN SAVE YOU!” Joseph screams as Blue hauls Grace up to her feet. The Bliss is thick around them in a sparkly greenish-white mist, stuck in their throat as Blue lets out a nasty cough. Their stomach twists, a wave of nausea rolling over them.

“You okay, Dep?” Grace asks, letting out a cough of her own as soon as she is steady on her feet.

Blue nods. “I’m fine. We need to stop him!”

Grace readies her gun, giving them a decisive nod. “On it.”

The two split as Blue heads after Nick, determined to free him from Joseph’s control. A Peggie steps into their way, assault rifle pointed at Blue. They stop in their tracks, raising their shotgun. Blue remembers the way her pale blonde hair glinted in the misty sunlight, her piercing green eyes. The moment doesn’t last long as Sharky body checks the Peggie, slamming her out of the way. “I got ya, shorty!”

“Thanks,” Blue yells, moving into action once again. They’re not going to let Joseph win.

“Oh.” Oh shit, that was-.

“Do you remember her now?” Ethel asks, her eyes glassy with tears.

“I do,” Blue admits quietly. “Ethel, I’m so sor-.”

“Save it. I don’t want your sympathy,” She snarls before another sob escapes her, Peter squeezing her hand, “I just want my sister back, but that’s impossible. Now, I just want to understand why.”

If Blue could, they would give Ethel her sister back. They would give so many people their families back. But they can’t, and now they have to live with all that blood on their hands. And they’ll never know why Joseph chose them for all of this, why they were the one chosen to be the devil. Except for their time in the Bunker, Blue never believed in the Voice. Clenching their left hand into a fist, their fingernails dig into their palm painfully, drawing blood. “I don’t know why he chose me, why he had to make me the harbinger of the apocalypse. If I knew why, I would have done everything in my power to not be that person!” They uncurl their fist, wiping tears in their eyes. Fuck, how desperately they would wish to not be that person.

“Would you have walked away?” Ethel asks.

“What?”

“Would you have walked away?” She asks, enunciating every word as she narrows her eyes coldly. “I know Joseph Seed gave you a choice to walk away. So, if you had the chance again, would you have walked away?”

Blue knows what the answer should be: Yes. They should say ‘Yes, I would have walked away that night’. But…they can’t say yes; they can’t say the words everyone wants to hear. Even with the knowledge of what happens, Blue wouldn’t be able to walk away, doomed to repeat the cycle of violence over and over again. Walking away would be leaving the people of Hope County to die, to be tortured at the hands of Eden’s Gate. And they couldn’t do that. Blue wasn’t one to ignore what they saw as a clear injustice, and Hope County was an injustice if Blue ever saw one. Maybe if Blue were a better person, even a good one, they might have been able to solve it peacefully, talk Joseph out of this madness. But they would never leave Hope County to suffer.

Taking a deep breath, Blue looks Ethel directly in the eyes, squaring their shoulders. “No, I wouldn’t have walked away. Not even if I knew what was going to happen.”

Ethel’s eyes widen, tears running down her cheeks as she stares at Blue in abject horror. “You’re a monster,” She snarls desperately, “You and Joseph Seed. You two deserve each other.”

“We should leave.” Peter pulls Ethel away as she leans into him, sobbing into his chest. He doesn’t spare Blue a glance as they stand there shocked, only able to watch as Peter leads Ethel to the sedan. “She isn’t wrong, Ranger Murphy. You’re just as much a monster as he is. You could have stopped this; you always could have.”

They watch Peter and Ethel get into the car, driving away a few moments later. Once Ethel and Peter are gone, Blue slumps to their knees, throwing out their hands to catch themself. Parking lot gravel digs into their hands as body-wracking sobs consume them. The Williams were right. Blue could have stopped this; they always had the choice. And they never did. Instead, they fought, leaving nothing but death and destruction in their wake, just like monsters always do.

“FUCK!” They scream, raw and angry, slamming their hands against the ground. Inside the truck, Boomer lets out a high-pitched whine, terrified for his human. Their sobs only continue as grief and rage consume them, leaving Blue unable to move.

Eventually, (they don’t know how much later, but all the pink is gone from the sky), Blue gets up to their feet, feeling hollow and tired. Their vision isn’t blurry from the tears, sobs no longer shaking their body so hard that they couldn’t stand. Shakily, they make their way to the driver’s seat, leaning against the truck for support.

Climbing into the driver’s seat, Blue barely closes the door before Boomer starts licking them. His tail wags, happy to see them again. “Thanks Boomer. I’m okay.” Their voice is hoarse from all the crying. Boomer pulls away, but he still looks concerned as he patiently waited in shotgun.

Pulling their seatbelt on, a thought crosses their mind. They might not be able to make up for the loss of Ethel’s sister, but they had to do something to make things right, and there was only one clear path in front of them. Grabbing their cell phone, Blue dials a number.

His phone only ring’s once before picking up. “Blue?” Special Agent Hawthorne sounds surprised, yet hopeful on the other end.

Cutting straight to the chase, Blue tiredly says, “I’ll speak with Joseph again.”

“What changed your mind?” He pauses for a second, before adding hastily, “Not that I’m refusing your help. If anything, I’m relieved that you changed your mind.”

They won’t tell Special Agent Hawthorne about Ethel’s sister; it isn’t their story to tell. Instead, Blue opts for a simple half-truth. “It’s like you said in your voicemail. I can make things right; I want to make things right.”

“I…I understand. Would you like me to pick you up? Or will your friends, Sharky and Hurk, take you to the prison again?”

No one needs to know that they’re visiting Joseph a second time. Blue’s friends will worry, and Blue has scared them enough. “I think it would be best if I came alone this time.”

“Send me your address, and I can pick you up at 10:30 AM on Saturday. Thank you for doing this, Blue. You don’t know how much this means to us.”

“Yeah,” Blue says, having a distinct feeling about what this might mean, I’ll send you a text with my address. See you on Saturday.”

“Have a good night, Blue. Look out for yourself.”

“You too.” Hanging up, a shadow of darkness weighs over them in the dark truck, bearing down heavily on their shoulders.

Peter glances over at Ethel, worried for his wife. She shouldn’t have had to do this, and Peter wishes he could have taken the burden off her. Ethel sits in the passenger seat silently, passively watching Hope County scenery. Breaking the silence, Peter says, “You didn’t have to tell Ranger Murphy about your sister.”

“I did,” She turns to look at him, eyes red and puffy, “It was a gamble, but in the end, I think it will pay off. He was right, Ranger Murphy and Joseph Seed are really alike.”

He grips the steering wheel tightly, indignant anger on Ethel’s behalf coursing through him. “He shouldn’t have assigned you to this. He should have-.”

Ethel’s cell phone rings, cutting Peter off. She quickly pulls the phone from her purse, a brief flicker of panic crossing her face as she scans the caller ID. “It’s him.”

Peter stays silent as Ethel answers the phone. He hears the harsh tone of the caller, unable to make out the conversation. Every minute or so, Ethel says “Yes”, or “Of course”, occasionally wincing as the volume ramps up. By the end of the call, Ethel is visibly stressed, running a hand through her blonde hair. “He’s moving the timetable up.”

“What does that mean?”

Ethel sighs. “We’re going to talk to Joseph. He managed to get us a visit, one that won’t be reported to the FBI. As for Ranger Murphy….”

“He thinks it’s time for them to play their role?”

She nods. “I just hope he knows what he is doing.”

“Me too.”

Tag list: @detectivelokis, @sstewyhosseini, @marivenah, @vampireninjabunnies-blog (If you want to be added or removed, just let me know!)

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dispatchdcu · 25 days

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Aliens: What If?... #2 Preview

Aliens: What If?... #2 Preview #alienwhatif #whatif #alien #bishop #Cruz #xenomorph #MARVEL #marvelcomics #comics #comicbooks #news #mcu #art #info #NCBD #comicbooknews #previews #reviews #Amazon #Aliens #Ripley

Aliens: What If?… #2 Preview: WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? Thirty-five years after the disaster on Hadleys Hope, company man Carter Burke is eeking out a cursed existence on a backwater asteroid. With his once-promising career in the toilet, Burke’s only remaining purpose in life is to care for his daughter, Brie. She hates him, probably for being a horrible person. And when she finds out what…

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seikointelli · 2 months

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I bought a new bin large enough to fit Carter Daniels in 🥰- 🐨

Also, just here out of sheer boredom so this one goes for the visionaries and sidekicks (Tod, George and Billy included):

What scared you the most as a child? I'll go first. I was terrified of bees.

Carter: Oh no I'm so upset about the "bin" you grabbed! It's called a trash can you idiot.

Alex: Lightning. I didn't mind thunder but lightning made me shit my pants.

George: The idea of a God or Gods. Or anything that just makes me think too hard.

Tod: A porcelain doll my grandparents had sitting on a shelf in the living room. I hope it broke.

Billy: Literally everything.

Clear: Losing loved ones, especially after my mom died.

Kimberly: My parents' closet. I'm still a little scared of dark closets now to be honest.

Burke: I know it may seem silly, but I was deathly afraid of lizards.

Wendy: Death, which is kinda ironic now.

Kevin: Cars. Don't ask. Please.

Nick: Clowns. I'm sorry but they're so fucking ugly.

Lori: My mom's disappointment and Slappy from Goosebumps.

Sam: Snakes. Just snakes.

Molly: Ghosts, Oujia Boards, and paranormal stuff like that.

#final destination #final destination 2 #final destination 3 #the final destination #final destination 5

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scienceninjaturtle · 11 days

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ALIENS: WHAT IF…? #5 (OF 5)

Paul Reiser, Leon Reiser, Adam F. Goldberg, Hans Rodionoff & Brian Volk-Weiss (W)

Guiu Vilanova (A) • Cover by Phil Noto • Variant Cover by Andrei Bressan

WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED?

As if Burke wasn’t already the worst boss in this galaxy, he just kicked off the office party from hell. Xenomorphs are loose in the mines, in the vents…hell, someone better check under the copier. It’s all to save his beloved wife and redeem himself in the eyes of his estranged daughter, but Burke’s in WAY over his head. Did he escape Hadley’s Hope all those years ago just to meet the same fate now? We make no promises, True Believer – except the promise of entertainment!

32 PGS./Parental Advisory…$3.99

#marvel comics #aliens #xenomorph

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keycomicbooks · 18 days

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Aliens: What If...? #1 (2024) Peach Momoko Variant / Hans Rodionoff, Paul Reiser & Leon Reiser Writers / Guiu Vilanova Artist / 1st Appearance of Shin Yutani

#AliensWhat If...? #1 (2024) #PeachMomoko Variant / #HansRodionoff, #PaulReiser & #LeonReiser Writers / #GuiuVilanova Artist / 1st Appearance of #ShinYutani "Untitled" WHAT IF… CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? SAVE ON SHIPPING COST - NOW AVAILABLE FOR LOCAL PICK UP IN DELTONA, FLORIDA https://rarecomicbooks.fashionablewebs.com/Aliens%20What%20If.html#1 #RareComicBooks #KeyComicBooks #MarvelComics #MCU #MarvelUniverse #KeyIssue #Aliens

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graphicpolicy · 2 months

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Preview: What If… Aliens #1

What If… Aliens #1 preview. What if... Carter Burke had lived? #comics #comicbooks

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#adam f. goldberg #brian volk-weiss #comic books #Comics #guiu villanova #hans rodionoff #leon reiser #marvel #paul reiser #phil noto

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theloniousbach · 1 year

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COUCH TOURING WITH CAFFE LENA TV

BRUCE MOLSKY/MAEVE GILCHRIST, 23 MARCH 2023

BEPPE GAMBETTA, 24 MARCH 2023

This venerable Saratoga Springs, NY, folk club has a fairly robust apparatus for streaming concerts and I have enjoyed Vieux Farka Toure and the Old Blind Dogs from them with minimal incident. BRUCE MOLSKY, starting yet another interesting project with harper MAEVE GILCHRIST, and BEPPE GAMBETTA are, like the Dogs, old Focal Point favorites. That they were on successive nights was unusual, but sure, let’s do it.

There were some temporary glitches the first night (and I had some on a different device from usually reliable Small’s Live Tuesday night), sadly, the BEPPE GAMBETTA show froze repeatedly requiring reboots and the stream seemed to skip like warped vinyl. I closed it off halfway through the second set. Both shows will be available for another week, so I may give them as shows a second chance, but I will hesitate before reupping with Caffe Lena TV.

That disappointment comes because my expectations for these artists is so high. We got to see BRUCE MOLSKY at the Hiawatha Music Festival while on vacation last summer in concerts, dances, and workshops and he still makes it to the Focal Point. He is such a solid fiddler, full of technique and taste. Like Kevin Burke among others, he makes it seem effortless and it sneaks up on you that he actually just did something amazing. He is proudly an old time fiddler and yet he plays with Balkan, Irish, Finnish, Cajun,and Swedish musicians, bringing his tradition in conversation with the others and seamlessly playing the other musics too. So now he’s working with MAEVE GILCHRIST who is from Scotland but has Irish relatives (not, I think, a typical Scotch Irish story). This was hardly Scottish tune>old time medleys, though they did begin with a deliberate Irish air that settled into an old time tune. There were songs, contemporary but with tradition (Kate Rusby, a telling of an Australian shipwreck, Nic Jones, LInda—not Richard—Thompson) and Finnish, Shetlands (Fully and Newly Rigged Ship!!) and Metis tunes to go with the old time and Celtic elements.

They are heading out for some gigs and then a festival, but this seems to have been the tour opener. There was a bit of a settling in early as the fiddle found a way around the harp, but they worked that out. The banjo worked out more immediately, interestingly enough. Gilchrist has a fine voice and sense of tunes and songs, but it’s a weird instrument. Still she gave it some drive and it is after all somewhere between a guitar and a piano. I will always be interested in what Molsky does, so I’m glad we got to see this effort.

BEPPE GAMBETTA is a guitar geek’s dream—amazing flatpicking, certainly inspired by Doc Watson, but incredibly wide ranging. We gave up after he played a Verdi aria that he played at Doc’s visitation. He also did a couple of tunes from his collaboration with David Grisman celebrating Italian mandolin music (requires a Maybelle Carter approach to translate the duets to one guitar) and songs in Italian. One told an Italian outlaw tale not unlike Randall Collins which he also did. He mentioned Watson several times and we came back from one pause in the middle of a Blue Railroad Train>Brown’s Ferry Blues>Nashville Blues. But that, the Norman Blake tune, and an outro fiddle tune refracted through his part time residence in New Jersey, Fuhgedda About Me Not were the main bits of bluegrass/old time-y music. But even those were refracted through his harmonic complexities. His guitar instrumentals, though flat picked, struck me more related to the John Fahey/Leo Kotke fingerstyle tradition. As such they are even more amazing.

The above comments are, alas, not based on a full, uninterrupted version of the concert. Over time, the irritation will dissipate and I’ll think I have a sense of Beppe Gambetta 2023. But, for now, I’m aggravated and disinclined to return to Caffe Lena even as I want to keep checking in on the wonderful world of music The Focal Point opened up to us Kleindorfs and not just defaulting to jazz.

#concert review #couch tour #Caffe Lena TV

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zillapiner · 2 years

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Jean smarts children

#JEAN SMARTS CHILDREN PROFESSIONAL#

#JEAN SMARTS CHILDREN SERIES#

#JEAN SMARTS CHILDREN TV#

Smart was later cast in a leading role as Charlene Frazier Stillfield on the CBS sitcom Designing Women, in which she starred from 1986 to 1991. After beginning her career in regional theater in the Pacific Northwest, she appeared on Broadway in 1981 as Marlene Dietrich in the biographical play Piaf. “Our favorite thing in the world,” she says, “is to make each other laugh, and make other people laugh.Jean Elizabeth Smart (born September 13, 1951) is an American actress. And her Hacks co-star Einbinder always gets her going. And as the three of them are finding their new normal as a family, Smart is finding new ways to laugh.

#JEAN SMARTS CHILDREN TV#

I mean, I’m gonna have my children, obviously, but they have their own lives.” Her older son, Connor, is interested in film and TV sound editing, her younger just got accepted to a great high school. “I just assumed we would grow old together, and now I feel like I’m just going to grow old alone. Losing her husband “was so shocking on so many levels,” she says. “A million years ago, I had two separate psychics tell me I was gonna live to be 98, so I’ve decided I’m going to live to 98. “What are you, nuts?” She says old age was foretold to her, sort of.

#JEAN SMARTS CHILDREN PROFESSIONAL#

So now that she’s hitting her professional prime, what else is good about being 70? “Ha ha! Nothing!” She cackles. “I felt like the universe was rewarding me for being true to myself.”

#JEAN SMARTS CHILDREN SERIES#

About 24 hours later, she was asked to audition for the juicy role of a crime matriarch in the second season of Fargo, the gritty FX TV series inspired by Joel and Ethan Coen’s hit 1996 movie. So after much deliberation, she decided to pull out. The deal put her on hold for over a year and a half, and production still hadn't begun. “I wasn’t getting offered things or auditions.” She took on a role she wasn't crazy about for a comedy pilot. “Then I went through a little dry spell,” she says. The two were married for 34 years, until Gilliland passed away suddenly last March.įollowing five successful seasons on Designing Women, Smart made the most of the next two decades, winning Emmys for a recurring guest role on Frasier and as a regular on Samantha Who? and nabbing Emmy nominations for her role on 24. So the producers said, ‘Will you come back whenever there’s a critic here? You got the audience going!’” She and Gilliland wed in 1987, at her co-star Dixie Carter’s rose garden in Hollywood. It was not a great play, but I’m a good laugher. “He would riff on something to the point where I was gasping for air, you know? He had that kind of mind.” She asked him for help with a crossword puzzle he invited her to see a play he was doing, “and I went to see it three times. Smart met her husband, actor Richard Gilliland, when he played Potts’ character’s boyfriend on the show. She recalls how she and her co-stars ( Dixie Carter, Delta Burke and Annie Potts) “would get weird questions from reporters, like, ‘Oh boy, what’s it like with four women on a set together?’ I finally said to one guy, ‘Would you ask the guys on Barney Miller that question?’” “There really wasn’t a show like that,” Smart says of the series about strong Southern belles running their own interior design firm. She thrived in the spotlight, performing in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, regional theater and on Broadway, then was off to Hollywood, where she secured guest spots and short-lived series roles-until she broke out playing sweet-but-scattered Charlene Frazier from 1986 to 1991 on the hit sitcom Designing Women. But drawn to the stage during her senior year of high school, she decided to major in drama at the University of Washington. Smart initially saw herself pursuing a service career, perhaps in nursing, social work or veterinary medicine. Her mother, Kathleen, was a homemaker and a seamstress who would make beautiful clothes for her kids her father, Douglas, worked as a high school history teacher and took on extra jobs selling encyclopedias door-to-door, painting houses and teaching night school. Her parents, who served in World War II, were both funny and taught her a strong work ethic.

#Jean smarts children

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oscopelabs · 3 years

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It’s Arrested Development: How ‘High Fidelity’ Has Endured Beyond Its Cultural Sell-By Date by Vikram Murthi

It’s easy to forget now that at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic had taken hold of our consciousness, for a brief moment, High Fidelity was back. Not only did Nick Hornby’s debut novel and Stephen Frears’ film adaptation celebrate major milestones this year — 25th and 20th anniversaries, respectively — but a TV adaptation premiered on Hulu in February. In light of all of these arbitrary signposts, multiple thinkpieces and remembrances litigated Hornby’s original text on familiar, predictable grounds. Is the novel/film’s protagonist Rob actually an asshole? (Sure.) Does Hornby uphold his character’s callous attitudes towards women? (Not really.) Hasn’t the story’s gatekeeping, anti-poptimist approach to artistic taste culturally run its course? (Probably.) Why do we need to revisit this story about this person right now? (Fair question!)

Despite reasonable objections on grounds of relevancy, enough good will for the core narrative—record store owner seeks out a series of exes to determine a pattern of behavior following a devastating breakup—apparently exists to help produce a gender-flipped streaming show featuring updated musical references and starring a decidedly not-middle-aged Zoë Kravitz. I only made it through six of ten episodes in its first (and only) season, but I was surprised by how closely the show hewed to High Fidelity’s film adaptation, to the point of re-staging numerous scenes down to character blocking and swiping large swaths of dialogue wholesale. (Similarly, the film adaptation hewed quite close to the novel, with most of the dialogue ripped straight from Hornby.) Admittedly, the series features a more diverse cast than the film, centering different experiences and broadly acknowledging some criticisms of the source material regarding its ostensibly exclusionary worldview. Nevertheless, it seemed like a self-defeating move for the show to line itself so definitively with a text that many consider hopelessly problematic, especially considering the potential to repurpose its premise as a springboard for more contemporary ideas.

High Fidelity’s endurance as both a piece of IP and a flashpoint for media discourse is mildly baffling for obvious reasons. For one thing, its cultural milieu is actually dated. Even correcting for vinyl’s recent financial resurgence, the idea of snooty record store clerks passing judgment on customer preferences has more or less gone the way of the dodo. With the Internet came the democratization of access, ensuring that the cultivation of personal taste is no longer laborious or expensive, or could even be considered particularly impressive (if it ever could have been). Secondly, as one might imagine, some of Hornby’s insights into heterosexual relationships and the differences between men and women, even presented through the flawed, self-deprecating interiority of High Fidelity’s main character, are indeed reductive. Frears’ film actually strips away the vast majority of Hornby’s weaker commentary, but the novel does include such cringeworthy bits like, “What’s the deal with foreplay?” that are best left alone.

Accounting for all of that, though, it’s remarkable how many misreadings of Hornby’s text have been accepted as conventional wisdom. It’s taken as a given by many that the novel and film earnestly preach the notion that what you like is more important than what you are like when, in fact, the narrative arc is constructed around reaching the opposite conclusion. (The last lines of the novel and film are, literally, “…I start to compile in my head a compilation tape for her, something that's full of stuff she's heard of, and full of stuff she'd play. Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it's done.”) That’s relatively minor compared to the constant refrain that Rob’s narcissism goes uncriticized, even though the story’s thematic and emotional potency derives from what the audience perceives that Rob cannot. To put it bluntly, High Fidelity’s central irony revolves around a man who listens to music for a living being unable to hear the women in his life.

While Hornby’s prose immerses the reader in Rob’s interior monologue, providing ample room for the character to spout internal justifications of his behavior, the novel hardly obscures or conceals this conclusion. Moreover, the film makes it unavoidably explicit in numerous scenes. Rob (John Cusack) triumphantly pantomimes Rocky Balboa’s boxing routine soundtracked to Queen’s “We Are The Champions” after his ex-girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) confirms she hasn’t yet slept with her new boyfriend Ray (Tim Robbins), but doesn’t hear the part where she says she prefers to sleep next to him. When Laura informs Rob that she did eventually sleep with Ray, Rob completely falls apart. In an earlier, more pointed scene, Rob goes out with his ex-girlfriend from high school (Joelle Carter) to ask why she chose to have sex with an obnoxious classmate instead of him. She venomously informs him that he actually broke up with her because she was too prudish, an abrupt, cruel bit of business we actually witness at the film’s beginning. It was in her moment of heartbroken vulnerability that she agreed to quickly sleep with someone else (“It wasn’t rape because I technically said, ‘Okay,’ but it wasn’t far off,” she sneers), which ultimately put her off sex until after college. Rob doesn’t hear this explanation or the damning portrait of his teenaged self. Instead, he’s delighted to learn that he wasn’t actually dumped.

These are evidently low character moments, one’s that are comedic in their depiction of blinkeredness but whose emotional takeaways are crystal clear, and one’s that have been written about before. My personal pick from the film, though, comes late when Rob attends Laura’s father’s funeral. He sits in the back and, in typical fashion, turns to the camera to deliver a list of songs to play at his funeral, concluding with his professed wish that “some beautiful, tearful woman would insist on ‘You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ by Gladys Knight.” It’s a really galling, egotistical moment that still makes me wince despite having seen the movie umpteen times. Yet, it’s immediately followed by the casket being lowered to the ground as Laura’s sobs ring out in the church. In a movie defined by John Cusack’s vocal timbre, it’s one of the few times when he completely shuts up. From two-thirds down the center aisle, Frears’ camera pushes into Cusack’s face until tears in his eyes are visible, but what you really see is an appropriately guilt-ridden, ashamed expression.

However, none of this evidence carries any weight if your objection to High Fidelity is that Rob suffers no material consequences for his behavior. While Rob is frequently called out for his actions, he is never actively punished. He doesn’t, say, receive a restraining order for continually calling Laura after they’ve broken up or end up alone mending a permanent broken heart because of his past relationships. By the end, Rob and Laura get back together and Rob even starts an independent record label on the side. It’s a stretch to characterize Hornby’s High Fidelity as a redemption tale, but it is a sideways rehabilitation narrative with a happy ending that arises at least partly out of mutual exhaustion.

Those two elements—Rob’s asshole recovery and the exhausted happy ending—rarely seem to factor into High Fidelity discourse. Granted, there’s credence to the idea that, socially and culturally, people have less patience for the personality types depicted in High Fidelity, and thus are less inclined to extend them forgiveness, let alone anything resembling retribution. I suppose that’s a valid reaction, one against which I have no interest in arguing, but it’s somewhat ironic that High Fidelity has endured for reasons that have nothing to do with its conclusions regarding inflexible personal principles and the folly of escapism. Both the book and film are specifically about someone who slowly comes to terms with accepting reality rather than live in a world mediated by pop cultural fantasies whose unrealistic expectations have only caused personal suffering. It’s not unfair to characterize this as a fairly obvious epiphany, but considering we currently live in a world dominated by virtual echo chambers with an entertainment culture committed to validating arrested adolescence, it retroactively counts as “mature” and holds more weight than it otherwise should.

Near the end of High Fidelity, the book, after Rob and Laura have gotten back together in the aftermath of Laura’s father’s death, Hornby includes a chapter featuring five conversations between the couple unpacking the state of their relationship. During the third conversation, Rob and Laura fight about how she doesn’t care about music as strongly as he does, catalyzed by Rob’s objection to Laura liking both Solomon Burke and Art Garfunkel, which, in his mind, is a contradiction in terms. Laura finally admits that not only does she not really care about the difference between them, but that most people outside of his immediate circle of two don’t care about the difference, and that this mentality is indicative of a larger problem. It’s part of what keeps him stuck in his head and reluctant to commit to anything. “I’m just trying to wake you up,” she says. “I'm just trying to show you that you've lived half your life, but for all you've got to show for it you might as well be nineteen, and I'm not talking about money or property or furniture.”

I fell for High Fidelity (first the movie, then the book) as a younger man for the reasons I assume most sensitive-cum-oblivious, culturally preoccupied straight guys do: it accurately pinpoints a pattern of music consumption and organizationally anal-retentive behavior with which I’m intimately familiar. I spent the vast majority of my early years listening to and cataloguing albums, and when I arrived at college, I quickly fell in with a small group of like-minded music obsessives. We had very serious, very prolonged discussions filled with impossibly strong opinions about our favorite artists and records. Few new releases came and went without them being scrutinized by us, the unappreciated scholars of all that is righteous. List-making wasn’t in vogue, but there wasn’t a song that passed us by that we didn’t judge or size up. I was exposed to more music during this relatively short period of time than I likely will ever absorb again. Some of these times were the most engaging and fun of my life, and I still enjoy discussing and sharing music with close friends, but I’m not such a true believer to fully feel comfortable with this behavior. It’s not entirely healthy on its own and definitely alienating to others, and there comes a point when you hear yourself the way a stranger might, or maybe even catch a glimpse of someone’s eyes when you’re midst rant about some stupid album, and realize, “That’s all there is of me. There isn’t anything else.”

This is what Rob proclaims to Laura in the conversation when she tells him she was more interested in music during their courtship than she is now. It’s a patently self-pitying statement on his part that doesn’t go unchallenged by her in the moment or bear fruit in the rest of the novel. Yet, it’s this type of uncomfortably relatable sentiment that goes under-discussed. If High Fidelity will continue to have a life well after its cultural moment has passed, then it’s worth addressing what it offers on its own terms. Near the end of the book, Laura introduces Rob to another couple with whom he gets along quite well. When the evening comes to an end, she tells him to take a look at their record collection, and it’s predictably filled with artists he doesn’t care for, e.g. Billy Joel, Simply Red, Meat Loaf. “'Everybody's faith needs testing from time to time,” Laura tells him later when they’re alone. Amidst Rob’s self-loathing and sullen pettiness, Hornby argues that one should contribute in some way rather than only consume and that, at some point, it’s time to put away childish ideas in order to get the most out of life. It’s an entirely untrendy argument, one that goes against the nostalgic spirit of superhero films and reboot culture, but it doesn’t lack merit. Accepting that some values aren’t conducive to a full life, especially when it’s shared with someone else, doesn’t have to mean abandoning interests or becoming an entirely different person. It just means that letting go isn’t an admission of defeat.

It’s why I’ve always found the proposal scene in the film to be quite moving, albeit maybe not specifically romantic. It plays out similarly in both the book and the film, but the film has the added benefit of Cusack and Hjejle’s performances to amplify the vulnerability and shared understanding. Laura meets Rob for a drink in the afternoon where he sheepishly asks if she would like to get married. Laura bursts out laughing and says that he isn’t the safest bet considering he was making mixtapes for some reporter a few days prior. When asked what brought this on, Rob notes that he’s sick of thinking about love and settling down and marriage and wants to think about something else. (“I changed my mind. That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. I do. I will,” she sarcastically replies.) He goes on to say that he’s tired of fantasizing about other women because the fantasies have nothing to do with them and everything to do with himself and that it doesn’t exist never mind delivering on its promise. “I’m tired of it,” he says, “and I’m tired of everything else for that matter, but I don’t ever seem to get tired of you.”

This sort of anti-Jerry Maguire line would be callous if Laura didn’t basically say the same thing to him when they got back together. (“I’m too tired not to be with you.”) It’s possible to read this as an act of mutual settling, but I always thought Hornby’s point was personal growth and accepting one’s situation were intertwined. The key moment in High Fidelity, the film, comes when Laura finds Rob’s list of top five dream jobs. (In the book, Laura makes Rob compile the list.) At the bottom of the list, after such standard choices like music journalist and record producer, lies architect, a job that Rob isn’t entirely sure about anyway. (“I did put it at number five!” he insists.) Laura asks Rob the obvious question: wouldn’t you rather own your own record store than hypothetically be an architect, a job you’re not particularly enthused with anyway?

It’s Laura who convinces Rob that living the fifth-best version of your life can actually be pretty satisfying and doesn’t have to be treated like a cruel fate worse than death. Similarly, Rob and Laura both make the active decision to try to work things out instead of starting over with someone else. Laura’s apathy may have reunited them, and Rob’s apathy might have kept him from running, but it’s their shared history that keeps them together. More than the music and the romance, High Fidelity follows the necessary decisions and compromises one has to maneuver in order to grow instead of regress. “I've been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself,” Rob says near the end of Hornby’s novel. High Fidelity’s emotional potency lies in taking that sentiment seriously.

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tabloidtoc · 3 years

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Life & Style, April 26

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Khloe Kardashian is a total fake

Page 1: Lady Gaga in a wedding dress on the set of House of Gucci in Rome

Page 2: Contents

Page 4: The Top 10 SAG Awards Looks -- Mindy Kaling, Jamie Chung, Amy Adams, Sarah Levy, Kerry Washington

Page 5: Kaley Cuoco, Nicole Kidman, Natalie Morales, Viola Davis, Lily Collins

Page 6: Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen celebrated their 12-year anniversary, posting heartfelt tributes to each other on social media, but their relationship hasn't always been so rock solid -- Tom admitted that Gisele has made a lot of sacrifices for their marriage and she hated living in Boston because she had no friends there and felt so alone because Tom was never around; things got so bad they sought counseling, which was the wake-up call that Tom needed -- he promised to make changes and he agreed to quit the Patriots and sign with a team in a location that was more desirable to Gisele and Tom stuck to his word and he came the new quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and since moving to Florida, Tom and Gisele have never been happier and they have date nights every week and always make sure to communicate -- it wasn't easy, but they're both really proud of how far they've come

Page 7: After multiple delays, David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc have finally filmed the highly anticipated Friends reunion special and they all got really emotional when they saw the set and being there brought back so many fond memories -- it's the first time in 17 years that fans will get to see the entire cast together since the show went off the air in 2004 -- afterwards, everyone went to Jen's house for dinner -- each of the stars was paid $2.5 million to appear in the special

* Throwback -- Dolly Parton in 1965

* Biggest Spenders of the Week -- Bobby Flay, Aaron Rodgers, Vanessa Hudgens, Angelina Jolie

Page 8: Drew Barrymore revealed that, after three divorces and a string of failed romances, she's sworn off marriage altogether -- Drew doesn't need a man to feel complete and she's happiest hanging out with family and friends -- if the right guy comes along later down the line, great, but for now, she's content with being single

* Becoming one of the most sought-after stars in Hollywood has gone straight to Ana de Armas' head -- the cast and crew are often left waiting for the actress to emerge from her trailer on the set of the new action thriller The Gray Man -- Ana's got a lot going on and she's juggling several different projects, as well as photo shoots and phone calls with her team and people don't stay mad at her for too long, but they have nicknamed her Ana de Diva, but she isn't upset by the scathing moniker because she's a big name now, and with that comes a lot of responsibility and the way she sees it, there are worse things than being called a diva

Page 10: The Week in Photos -- Orlando Bloom got a surprise visit from the Easter Bunny

Page 11: Jennifer Lopez in jeans at a photoshoot for InStyle, Priyanka Chopra dancing around her backyard in a bright yellow dress

Page 12: Animal Tales -- Gilles Marini posed for a pic with his African grey parrot Anya, singer Madison Beer leaned in for a kiss from a caramel-colored stallion, Kate Beckinsale's feline Clive seemed less than thrilled when Kate strapped him to her chest in a carrier

Page 13: Kaia Gerber and her precious pooch Milo snuggled up in bed, Malin Akerman and a goat

Page 16: Stars Behaving Badly -- Lisa Vanderpump let her parched dog drink from her water glass at a restaurant in West Hollywood, Maisie Williams went topless under a translucent jacket while shooting a new TV series about the Sex Pistols in London, HGTV Design Star host Allison Holker used a megaphone to give out instructions to Property Brother Jonathan Scott on the show's finale, Calvin Klein wasn't worried about stains when he shoved a pile of spaghetti into his mouth at West Hollywood's Mauro Cafe

Page 18: Say What?! Helena Bonham Carter who turns 55 in May, Chelsea Handler who admits she consumes mushrooms almost every day, Olivia Munn who is the proud pet parent of rescue dogs Frankie and Chance, Melissa McCarthy on doing her own stunts in Thunder Force, Brian Tyree Henry on Godzilla vs. Kong co-star Millie Bobby Brown

Page 20: Pete Davidson has officially moved out of his mother's home and into a $1.2 million luxury high-rise condo on Staten Island, and it's all thanks to his new girl girlfriend, Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor -- the Saturday Night Live star showed off his two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom bachelor pad during a Zoom call -- Phoebe is a down-to-earth girl, but she doesn't want to date a man who lives in his mom's basement and she thinks Pete's mom, Amy, is awesome and says it's a great thing that they're super close, but being in a long-distance relationship is difficult enough so Pete and Phoebe need some alone time when they're together, which was almost impossible with his mother hanging out upstairs -- Pete knew it was time; he just needed that gentle nudge

Page 21: Matt James and Rachael Kirkconnell were spotted in NYC together, sparking speculation that the former Bachelor couple have rekindled their relationship -- the pair parted ways while the show was still airing after photos of the graphic designer at a plantation-themed college party in 2018 surfaced on social media -- Rachael made a mistake but she owned up to it and was willing to learn from it and it didn't change her feelings for Matt or vice versa and Matt was in love with Rachael too and he couldn't just turn those feelings off so no one would be surprised if they decided to reconcile

* Michael B. Jordan's girlfriend Lori Harvey was left reeling over photos of the actor sharing a smooch with Chante Adams on the set of their new movie A Journal for Jordan -- of course, they were just shooting a scene for the film, but Lori was still annoyed and she asked Michael about it, and he brushed it off and explained it was part of the job but Lori still has her suspicions and she's been thinking about dropping by the set just so she can keep a very close eye on them

Page 22: Cover Story -- Khloe Kardashian living a lie -- devastated by an unretouched photo leak, Khloe faces claims she's a body positivity hypocrite as she demands the viral image be taken down

Page 26: Alex Rodriguez to Ben Affleck: Back off my fiancee -- Ben gushes about ex Jennifer Lopez in a new article and A-Rod isn't happy about it (not quite Bennifer yet :)

Page 28: Prince Harry overwhelmed with work -- Harry struggles to adjust after trading his cushy royal role for a variety of normal gigs -- though his job for BetterUp is primarily remote, added stress comes in the form of Harry's Spotify and Netflix deals, plus growing charity work -- Harry finds all of his new, non-royal titles fresh and exciting, but while he's a great person, some in his inner circle say Harry's kind of dumb and worry whether he can handle the pressure

Page 30: Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli life after prison -- reunited following months spent behind bars, Lori and Mossimo try to pick up the pieces -- prison definitely took a toll on Mossimo and he doesn't expect sympathy, but he's still struggling to adjust to what he went through; it really broke him down and forced him to reevaluate his life

Page 32: Who Lives Here? Lil Nas X

Page 34: Entertainment

Page 35: Star Review -- Jonathan Van Ness

* As Seen On-Screen -- Meghan Markle wore a dark green coat while walking through Archie's Chick-Inn during her CBS interview which was J. Crew's Perfect Lightweight Jacket

Page 36: Go Green at Home -- reduce your carbon footprint even more with these eco-chic essentials, because our planet can use all the help it can get

Page 37: Beauty Crush -- get Jurnee Smollett's look from her makeup artist Emily Cheng for the SAG Awards

Page 38: Spring Beauty Must-Haves -- these product picks aim to reign as new-season favorites -- Camila Mendes

Page 40: Diva or Down-to-Earth? Rihanna bagged her own haul at Bristol Farms in Beverly Hills -- down-to-earth, Shay Mitchell worked from home with help from her most trusted assistant daughter Atlas -- down-to-earth, during a photo shoot in Malibu Brooke Burke got a makeup refresh from a personal primper -- diva

Page 42: Social Stars Posts of the Week -- Sofia Vergara sneaking Heidi Klum a chip on the set of America's Got Talent, Neil Patrick Harris finished the first season of The Irregulars while quarantining in Toronto, Jared Leto pretended to pluck the moon straight out of the sky during a masked outing in Italy, Beyonce treated her daughter Blue Ivy to a meal at Nobu in Malibu

Page 44: Horoscope -- Taurus Gigi Hadid turned 26 on April 23

* They're Not Together, But They Should Be -- Capricorn Charles Melton and Virgo Zendaya

Page 48: What I'm Into -- Kameron Westcott of The Real Housewives of Dallas

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luthienne · 5 years

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do u have any quotes about toxicity in love + enjoying emotional pain

I think sometimes we conflate enjoying emotional pain w enjoying the beautiful aspects of a relationship, and forgiving the pain, normalizing the pain, accepting it as a natural, and inevitable part of intimate contact with another person. At some point in this kind of cycle, love can become synonymous w pain.

I think we learn to compromise or even sacrifice our own wellbeing for people we care about, friends (or family) as much as partners, until it becomes normal; we make ourselves the safe spaces for the people we love, only dreaming of the kind of reciprocity that would result in them prioritizing and protecting us as much we would them—and we focus on all the moments we felt loved and protected, and make them bigger in our minds, and repeat the cycle, and hope that one day—despite all the evidence to the contrary—they will choose us. In the meantime, regardless of our distortions, reality goes on, and we stay, and we stay, and we stay, and we assign deep meaning to every good moment, and we lose the ability to trust our instincts and our hearts.

I think the human ability to love deeply and unconditionally is complicated and unfathomable. I think we can normalize the pain so much that we begin to crave it, not consciously, but in that way that means: they do love me, they love me more than I ever dreamed myself possible of being loved—and we have good memories, too, beautiful memories and moments. No one will ever love me the way this person can, and does, ever again, so how could I ever leave—

Kenneth Burke, “A Letter From the Center”

“His touch both consoles and devastates me; I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.”

Angela Carter, The Erl-King

“I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you. (…) That’s my whole life you’ve bent in your hands. What could I have grown up to be? What kind of a human woman, what kind of simple, happy thing?”

Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow? Anything, anything, anything.”

Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“She had decided to stay. She had decided to go. In her sleep she had decided a thousand times. Her dreams were split in half.”

Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Love? I wanted to go with him, to be on the strong side, for him to spare me, like one who seeks shelter in the arm of the enemy to stay far from his arrows. It was different than love, I was finding out: I wanted him as a thirsty person desires water, without feelings, without even wanting to be happy.”

Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories

“It is all past; for this terrible madness of love has paralyzed my wings, the eyes of my spirit have lost their sight, my heart is dried up, my soul is drained to bloodless poltroonery. Oh, save me from myself—”

Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

“She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, I was abducted, but it sounds wrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, I was not abducted. Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted to escape my body. Even, sometimes, I willed this.”

Louise Glück, A Myth of Innocence

“What did she think / when all her strength / was twisted for his bearing; / did it break, / even within her sheltered heart, a song, / some whispered note, distant and faint…”

H.D., Collected Poems

“You have done this a hundred times. Will always do it. Always. I’m so tired of your lack of everything thoughtful, wise about you. You act like a child, a child that just asks and asks and never thinks and sucks one to death, and I’m sitting here crying because it’s so hopeless to ever expect you to be otherwise.”

Anaïs Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller

“…to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.”

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

“And say his name. Wound and salve in the falling steam. Whatever my body wrings is for him, pitiless in its love.”

Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians

“…somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning.”

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

“I never asked you to explain that act of violence / what dazed me was our ignorance of our will to hurt each other”

Adrienne Rich, Collected Early Poems

“Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads on willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common values and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Magnificent, somehow. To give in. Wreck yourself so completely. The beauty of it.”

Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians

“The ways of sating hunger made us sick.”

Wisława Szymborska, View With a Grain of Sand

“I don’t know how to speak anymore. I can’t speak anymore. I have taken apart what they never gave me, which was all I had.”

Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness

“My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have. My body says, will this pounding ever stop?”

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

“…and I grieved the loss of my only belonging.”

Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness

“You were sick, so sick, with your wound of thwarted longing; you wanted the power to change the illusions you live in.”

Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“Why should anyone go through so much in order to be treated right?”

Alice Notley, Culture of One

“Did it really seem bad to you / There by the dark green sea, / That, submitting to terrible fate, / You didn’t argue, you agreed?”

Anna Akhmatova, Complete Poems

“My soul may be straight and good, but my heart, my hopelessly bent blood, all that keeps hurting me inside, it can’t hold upright.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke

“I didn’t want this, not / this (but listen, quietly, to want is what bodies do / and now we are ghosts only).”

Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems

“Maybe you still can’t understand why I stayed so long. I wonder what you’ll name my sin: Complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? How can you tell the difference? Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence? I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could.”

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy.”

Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

“How to lie was something learned. It meant love at the time anyway. Mine will be a long life feeling always a little ruined, deep in a well, knowing the worst thing I am capable of not telling.”

Allison Seay, To See The Queen

“She looked like one who had made her choice and done the worst she could do with it.”

Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

“I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.”

Anaïs Nin, from a journal entry featured in Henry and June

“When has my grief ever gotten in the way of your pleasure?”

Louise Glück, “End of Winter”

“You do this, you do. You take the things you love / and tear them apart / or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.”

Richard Siken, Crush

“And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Another moment and I will tell you: it’s not joy but torture you give me. I’m drawn to you as to a crime—”

Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems

“And I was helpless, tormented, and intoxicated / By the sweetness of your cruelty.”

Anna Akhmatova, Complete Poems

“You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together / to make a creature that will do what I say / or love me back.”

Richard Siken, Crush

“…she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish…”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: that we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people.”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Comprehension came later, if the defiant, determined refusal to recognize a thing can be called ‘comprehending’ it.”

Marina Tsvetaeva, Letters Summer 1926

“Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

#ask #anon #compilation #quote compilation #the great wound #the dark's his bone #on memory #like a house on fire no one else can see

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dispatchdcu · 2 months

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Alien: What If?... #1 Preview

Alien: What If?... #1 Preview #alienwhatif #whatif #alien #bishop #Cruz #xenomorph #MARVEL #marvelcomics #comics #comicbooks #news #mcu #art #info #NCBD #comicbooknews #previews #reviews #Amazon #Aliens #Ripley

Alien: What If?… #1 Preview: WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? For years, fans of James Cameron’s legendary Aliens questioned whether Carter Burke, a company man more hateable than the Xenos themselves, had actually survived the traumatic events on the terraforming colony Hadley’s Hope. Now the actor behind the beloved villain, Paul Reiser, joins his son Leon and the star-studded team of writers…

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#Alien #Alien: What If?...#Alien: What If?... 1 #Alien: What If?... 1 Preview #comic books #comics #Marvel #marvel comic books #marvel comic previews #Marvel Comics #Marvel Previews #Preview #Previews

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dillydedalus · 3 years

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april reading

oh yeah this is a thing. anyway in april i read about uhhh.... first contact (twice), murderers on skis & victorian church politics

the yield, tara june winch a novel about indigenous australian identity and history (now and throughout the 20th century) in three narrative strands. imo the narrative strand that consists of a grandfather writing a dictionary of his language (wiradjuri) in order to prove a claim to some land is by far the strongest, but overall i liked this quite a lot. 3/5

land of big numbers, te-ping chen a solid short story collection focused on modern china and young(ish) chinese people, both in china and the diaspora. i particularly liked the stories that had some slighty surreal or speculative elements, such as one about fruit that strongly evoke emotions when eaten and a group of people stuck in a train station for months as the train is delayed, which imo use their speculative aspects in effective (if not super subtle) ways to talk about society. 3/5

the pear field, nana ekvtimishvili (tr. from georgian by elizabeth heighway) international booker prize longlist! a short, fairly depressing read about a 18-year-old girl at a post-soviet school for developmentally disabled childred (but also orphans, abandoned children & other random kids) who is trying to get a younger boy adopted by an american couple. there seem to be a lot of novels set at post-soviet orphanages etc & imo this is a well-executed example of the microgenre, with the pear field full of pears that are never picked bc they don’t taste right as a strong central image. 3/5

the warden, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #1) ah yes, a 6-part victorian series about church politics in an english town, exactly the kind of thing i’m interested in. not sure why i committed to at least the first two entries of the series but here we are. despite this lack of interest (and disagreement with most of the politics on display here) i found this quite charming; trollope has a gift for an amusing turn of phrase & making fun of his characters in benevolent ways. 3/5

the lesson, cadwell turnbull first contact scifi novel set on the virgin islands, where an alien ship arrives one day. the aliens seem benevolent & share helpful technology, but also react with extreme violence to any aggression. they claim to be on earth to study.... something, but it’s never entirely clear what. the book makes some interesting choices (like immediately skipping over the actual first contact to a few years in the future, when the aliens are already established on the islands) but i thought much of it was kinda disjointed and confusing. 2/5

the heart is a lonely hunter, carson mccullers look, i get it, it’s all about the isolation & alienation (& dare i say loneliness) of 4 miserable characters projecting their issues on the central character singer, who is kind and patient and also deaf and mute, thus making him the perfect receptacle for their issues without really having to connect with him as a person and how that isolation hinders them socially, artistically, emotionally, politically, but like... i didn’t really like it. i didn’t hate it but i just felt very meh about it all. 2.5/5

acht tage im mai: die letzte woche des dritten reiches, volker ulrich fascinating history book about the last week(ish) of the third reich, starting with the day of hitler’s suicide and ending with the total surrender (but with plenty of flashbacks and forwards), and looking at military&political leadership (german and allied) as well as prisoners of war, forced laborers, concentration camp prisoners, and everyone else. very interesting look at what kästner described as the “gap between the not-anymore and the not-yet.” 3.5/5

firekeeper’s daughter, angeline boulley) i’ve been mostly off the YA train for the last few years, but this was a really good example of contemporary YA with a focus on ~social issues. ANYWAY. this is YA crime novel about daunis, a mixed-race unenrolled ojibwe girl close to finishing high school who is struggling with family problems, university plans, and feeling caught between her white and her native familiy when her best friend is shot in front of her and she decides to become a CI for an fbi investigation into meth production in the community. i really appreciated how hard this went both with the broader social issues (racism, addiction) and daunis’ personal struggles. there are a few bits that felt a bit didactic & on the nose (and the romance... oh well), but overall the themes of community, family, and the value of living indigenous culture are really well done & i teared up several times. 4/5

the magic toyshop, angela carter i love carter’s short stories but struggle with (while still liking) her novels so far. this one, a tale of melanie, suddenly orphaned after trying on her mother’s wedding dress in the garden, coming of age and awakening to womanhood or whatever. carter’s really into that. it’s well-written, sensual as carter always is, and the family melanie and her siblings are sent to, her tyrannical puppet-maker uncle, his mute wife and the wife’s two brothers, both fascinating and offputting (& dirty) make for an interesting cast of characters, but overall i just wish i was reading the bloody chamber again. 3/5

barchester towers, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #2) (audio) lol tbh i still don’t know why i am committing to this series about, again, church politics in 19th century rural england, but it’s just so chill & warm & funny (we love gently or not so gently - but always politely - mocking our characters) that i’m enjoying it as a nice little trip where people do some #crazyschemes to gain church positions or fight over whether there should be songs in church or whatever it is people in the 19th century fought about. it’s very relaxing. there also is a lot of love quadrangleyness going on and that’s also fun. trollope has weird ideas about women but like whatever, i for one wish mrs proudie much joy of her position as defacto bishop of barchester, she really girlbossed her way to the top. 3.5/5

semiosis, sue burke (semiosis #1) i love spinning the wheel on the “first contact with X weird alien species” & i guess this time we landed on plants! plant intelligence is interesting and the idea of plant warfare is really cool. i do like the structure, with different generations of human settlers on the planet pax providing a long-term view but this allows the author to skip over a lot of the development of the relationship between the settlers and the plant and locating the plot elsewhere, which i think is ultimately a mistake. i might continue w/ the series tho, depending on library availability. 2.5/5

one by one, ruth ware a bunch of start-up people go on a corporate retreat to a ski chalet in the alps, avalanche warning goes up, one of them disappears, presumably on a black piste, the rest get snowed in & completely cut off when the avalanche hits and then they get picked off *title drop* (altho really not that many of them). nice fluff when i had a miserable cold (not covid) but fails when it tries to go for deeper themes... like an attempt to address classism and entitlement sure... was made. also like what kind of luxury skiing chalet does not have emergency communication devices in case internet/phone lines are down... i’d have sued just for that. 2/5

fake accounts, lauren oyler the microgenre of ‘alienated intellectual(ish) probably anglophone person has some sort of crisis, goes to berlin about it’ is my ultimate literary weakness - i almost never really like them, they mostly irritate me & yet i can never resist their siren call. this one is p strong on the irritation, altho at least the narrator does not ascribe much meaning to her decision to go to berlin after she a) discovers her boyf is an online conspiracy theorist (probably not sincerely) and b) gets a call that said boyf has died, it’s really just something to do to avoid doing anything else. but other than that it’s so BerlinExpat by the numbers, like she lives in kreuzkölln! put her somewhere else at least! there is one scene that elevates the BerlinExpat-ness of it all (narrator asks expatfriend for advice on visa applications, expatfriend assures her that it’s really easy for americans to get visa, adds “especially now” while literally, as the narrator remarks, gesturing at the falafel she’s eating) other than that, the novel is.... fine. it’s smart, but not really as smart as it thinks it is, which is a problem bc it thinks it’s just sooo incisive. whatever. 2/5

the tenant of wildfell hall, anne bronte this is reductive but: jane eyre: i could fix him // wuthering heights: i could make him worse // wildfell hall: lmao i’m gonna leave his ass anyway i enjoyed the part that is actually narrated by the titular tenant of wildfell hall, helen (which thankfully, i think, is most of it) because the perspective of a woman who runs away from her abusive alcoholic of a husband is genuinely interesting and engaging, while gilbert, the frame story narrator who falls in love with helen, is.... the worst. i mean he’s not the worst bc the abusive husband arthur is there and hard to beat in terms of worseness, but he’s pretty fucking bad. imagine if helen had found out that gilbert attacked her secret brother over a misunderstanding, severely injured him & LEFT HIM TO DIE & then (when dude survived & the misunderstanding got cleared up) apologised like well i guess i didn’t treat you quite right! she’d have to run away from her second husband as well! poor girl. 3/5

#the books i read #long post #lol i keep forgetting to finish & post these #anyway gilbert fucking sucks! like his name is gilbert you can do better helen

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saintlaurentproblems · 4 years

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Create storylines for a GG reunion ?

I think I did this already, but I’ll do it again since I don’t see it on my blog. I have new ideas since I’m rewatching it.

16 episode reunion - +1 hour each

Trigger warning: Cancer & infertility issues

Chuck is diagnosed with a terminal cancer. Doesn’t tell anyone, including Blair. Chuck and Blair have been trying to have a second child for years, but are struggling with infertility issues. Chuck dies, leaving behind letters to Blair and their son. Blair hallucinates conversations with Chuck so it’s not like we never see him again throughout the series. Blair created an empire similar to Honest Beauty (Jessica Alba’s company). Her empire is growing rapidly, which causes a lot of stress in her life. Her son starts acting out in school after losing his dad. Chuck’s death brings everyone back to NYC.

Dan has been on a worldwide book tour and recently sold the rights to one of his novels to Netflix. He has taken off and has become a bigger celebrity than Serena. Serena became a fallen IT girl and lost her sparkle. She becomes resentful of Dan for it. Dan and Serena argue a lot. Serena surprises Dan at one of his events and finds him having an affair with Olivia Burke. (Hilary Duff comes back). Serena and Dan separate. Serena decides to stay in NYC to find herself again and to help Blair after Chuck’s passing. News breaks that Dan had an affair with actress, Olivia Burke, causing Gossip Girl to become active again. But this time it’s not Dan. Dan comes back to NYC to try to win Serena back. Serena wants to settle down and start a family, but Dan wants to focus on his career. They decide to get a divorce.

Nate decided to sell the Spectator and become a politician. He is well-liked but he is advised to settle down and get married. His grandfather sets him up with a woman behind Nate’s back. He quickly gets engaged to someone from a similar background. Nate finds out the truth two days before his wedding. He runs away then resurfaces for the first time at Chuck’s funeral. He faces the outrage from his friends and family. Nate decides to get back into politics, but ends up getting into a few scandals, which infuriates his grandfather. Nate gets a new rep as a bad boy and player.

Serena is reintroduced to NY society. She starts climbing her way back up to IT girl status. She gets a lot of press due to the affair. She does a collaboration with Blair’s company. Serena runs into Carter Baizen at an event. It catches her off guard and she refuses to get into anything serious since she just went through a terrible divorce. Serena starts casually dating someone else (bring in a new celeb to guest star. Ryan Reynolds? Jk he would never.) this new relationship helps build her reputation and celebrity status. Serena keeps running into Carter. Their relationship slowly builds. They end up sleeping together. Serena avoids him because she ended up doing exactly what Dan did to her to her new romantic interest. She finds out she’s pregnant. Gossip girl releases the news. Everyone is guessing who the father is: Dan or new love interest? No one knows about her and Carter.

Blair becomes resentful of Serena because she got pregnant without even trying. Blair and Serena get into a very heated argument. Serena moves out of Blair’s penthouse and buys her own apartment. Gossip girl releases the news that the baby is actually Carter’s. Dan is furious. Her new romantic interest dumps her. Carter and Dan get into a physical fight (Joe vs The Winter Soldier). Serena ends up admitting that she’s in love with Carter.

Georgina Sparks becomes a Youtuber/Influencer that spills tea about all of their drama. This starts a war between her and Gossip Girl. They both release scandals to outdo the other. Gossip Girls ends up getting Georgina “canceled.”

Nate and Blair bond over mourning the loss of chuck and their messy lives. They end updeveloping feelings for each other again, but they try to push aside their feelings for the sake of Chuck. Nate and Blair end up getting married and getting pregnant with twin girls, Charlotte (after Chuck) and Ella (after Eleanor).

FYI: the new gossip girl is Nelly Yuki

#answered #gossip girl

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mhalachai · 4 years

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A decade that was - looking back at 10 years

I have just enough introspection left in me to pull this off - let's look at what fanfic disasters I've put out over the last ten years, shall we?

2010 & 2011

I was between fandoms at the time, but I had a Criminal Minds kick for a while.

Immutability: Once part of the team, always part of the team. That's what Spencer told himself as he walked up the stairs.

Branching Out (Criminal Minds/Stargate): Jennifer Jareau's first day as liaison for the Department of Defense really wasn't what she expected.

In Darkness (Criminal Minds/Harry Potter): To the world around him, Aaron Hotchner is a (somewhat) normal FBI agent, with a somewhat normal son and a moderately normal life. He's never told his team who he was... before. When he was known as Aaron Black.

These Small Bones (Doctor Who/Harry Potter): It starts with a girl. With him, it usually does.

2012

I dabble in time travel with this next one, and I still really like how the paradoxes of time hold up.

Marking Time (Doctor Who/White Collar): These are the things Peter Burke knows about Neal Caffrey's beginnings. None of these things are true.

Next up, a little four-part Criminal Minds series, featuring Spencer Reid (genderswapped)

Fragility Optional: Given all that's happened, you'd think no one would expect Spencer Reid to put on high heels and slink out undercover.

But this was also the year that Avengers came out, and my love for Natasha Romanoff sent me down an amazing rabbit hole for the next couple of years, an Avengers/Stargate crossover series in which Natasha Romanoff was John Sheppard’s mother. And that was the least complicated part of it.

A Widow's Tale series (a 10-part series)

The main pieces of this series are Widow Maker, Baba Yaga's Children, and Old Soldiers, the other bits and bobs lead up to it.

I also dabbled in a bit of Teen Wolf this year, starting Child of the Wolf (Avengers/Teen Wolf) and getting the first five chapters out the door in November-December before I got stymied - I would come back to this 7 years later, see below.

Child of the Wolf (MCU/Teen Wolf): Caught between hunters and werewolves, Stiles almost doesn’t have time to wonder much about the hot new redheaded Deputy Sheriff or the bow-wielding sarcastic gym teacher. Almost.

2013

Before Agent Carter came out, I wrote a Peggy Carter biopic, going off the riff of, what if Peggy had touched the Tesseract and stopped aging? It's two-thirds done.

Rhapsody in Blue: For decades, Peggy Carter has had only two constants in her life: Howard Stark, and the Winter Soldier.

2014

Agents of Shield came out and as I tend towards dark-haired girls with mysterious powers, I latched onto Skye for five minutes. Here's a quick installment...

Hell's Gate: In the wake of revelations of Skye’s past, Phil Coulson wasn’t expecting to find out what happened to Skye’s parents, and certainly not from a former Russian agent turned SHIELD operative showing up unannounced on his plane.

And oh! I finished Inevitable! My Anita Blake/Harry Potter epic, started in 2005 and in limbo for a number of years, I finally got it wrapped! Although, epic; I am fast closing in on its wordcount with Hour of the Wolf.

Inevitable (Anita Blake/Harry Potter): A late-night run-in with werewolves in the woods outside St. Louis dumps Harry Potter into a whole new world of trouble. Now Anita Blake has to deal with a new charge as well as Death-Eaters come to town.

Also in 2014 I started my baby, Hands of Clay, my Stucky kid!fic in which I attempt to give Bucky and Steve a happy ending, and Natasha and Clint happy childhoods.

Hands of Clay: James Barnes leads a busy life as a single working father in New York. But when his childhood best friend Steve Rogers falls back into his life, James will have to re-learn what love, friendship and family are really all about.

Also randomly I wrote a small Night Court fusion with the Avengers that I still love and am including it in the list.

Then Thor: The Dark World came out and after I punched a wall at yet another MCU mother getting fridged (Frigga, fridged, get it?) I started a resurrection fix-it featuring Loki’s children on earth, that was going to be great only I lost momentum, but the structure of this were good.

Hel's Bones: Magic pulled Frigga back from the realm of the dead, but not even Loki's children can shield her from the consequences of long-ago actions coming back to haunt her.

2015-2016

the rest of 2014-2016 were consumed with Hands of Clay. But then! Tumblr caught my eye with a figure skating anime, and after the longest time, I checked it out. Which led to

2017-2018

when my Yuri on Ice! phase began.

First up, we have the Blood in the Water series:

Water's Edge: For years, Yuuri had heard people say Viktor’s skating was otherworldly. He never thought they were being literal.

Undertow: Viktor Nikiforov has spent his entire life pretending to be normal. It's never enough.

There Be Dragons: Seven-year-old Otabek knew two things - he wasn't really related to a dragon, and he was never going to fall in love. Things like that belonged only in fairy tales.

A Late Frost: The one thing that Yuuri didn't expect about the World Figure Skating Championships in Boston was that beating two world records and winning a gold medal was going to be the easy part. (WIP)

I also wrote a bunch of YOI one-shots:

Midnight Salchow: Yuuri is convinced he has hidden his shameful past as a writer of Viktor Nikiforov RPF. Yuuri is mistaken.

Eight Days A Week: okay but a nanny!AU where Viktor has somehow acquired a bushel of children and needs a nanny to help care for his screaming brood - enter Yuuri, freshly retired from what he thinks was a failed figure skating career, and in desperate need of money to help pay off his student loans.

Sex Maniac: Katsuki Yuuri, Grand Prix silver medalist and a sorry example of a human being, was seventy percent sure that sleeping with Viktor Nikiforov had turned him into a sex maniac.

The Trials of Anteros: Of course Yuuri knew about Viktor’s hockey-playing twin brother; everyone in the figure skating world did. But given that Viktor had never mentioned the man, Yuuri never expected to get home one day after practice to find Vladimir Nikiforov cluttering up their apartment.

An Uncertain Arabesque: Yuuri never went to the banquet. Viktor never looked into the eyes of a beautiful, sloshed Japanese figure skater, never had the spark brought back into his life with the idea of coaching, and of love. Viktor never saw the gash in the ice, not in the last minute of his free program at Russian Nationals, and couldn’t prevent his blade from catching in the depression, sending him to the ice with a broken knee and a ruined skating career. Viktor never saw any of it coming.

Silver and Glass: February 14, the Four Continents started in two days, and Yuuri was freaking out. Valentine's Day was the least of his worries... or so he thought.

and lastly, the fantasy swordmaster AU that consumed my summer vacation in 2018:

And each man stands with his face in the light: After the carnage on the fields of the Elven Wars, Viktor Ivanovich, general of the northern armies, was done with fighting. When Prince Regent Yuri asked him to track down the mysterious man who slew the Elven King, Viktor complies, hardly knowing how that one action will change his life forever...

Also in 2018, something kickstarted me down the road of wondering what it would be like if Clint Barton (Hawkeye) was raised by Susan Pevensie (formerly queen of Narnia), as one does.

Turn, Archer, and Heed the Wild Hunt (MCU/Chronicles of Narnia): In the summer of 1983, Clint Barton goes to live with his new foster mom in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. Now he just needs to figure out how negotiate this new life... and also what's up with all the strange things happening in the night.

2019

And as I mentioned in yesterday’s, post, 2019 was the year of salt, in which I got cheesed off at Avengers: Endgame and resurrected Child of the Wolf, and then started my current obsession with time travel and other paradoxes:

Hour of the Wolf (MCU/Teen Wolf): Allison Stark has spent her entire life trying to live up to her father's sacrifice. But when the universe itself starts to dissolve, desperation and magic come together to push Allison back in time to try to right the wrongs.

2020

Who knows where we go? I hope it's going to be great :D

Thanks to everyone who's been hanging out with me in this pocket of fandom!

#my writing #year in review #decade in review #i have been doing this for way too long #what's that saying?#try and fail #then try again and fail better?#that's this decade for me #thank goodness for AO3

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