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mooglesorts · 3 years

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man. it's weird, because there's a lot of things about me that are Very Badger Primary, to the point where i would probably pick it with a strong bird model over anything else at this point... except that i hate dehumanization. i saw primaries described recently as 'things you wouldn't be you anymore if you went against,' and more than just about anything else that's it. even when i think people are monsters, i can't see them as not human; i'd be hard put to define exactly what i consider a 'monster,' but it's more about like. good faith than personhood, i suppose?

it's not necessarily a permanent status to be one--people can change--but my deeply held instinct is that once you have done something monstrous you will always be a person who has been a monster by your own choices, and that it's your duty to learn how to accept that while still living your life, and act accordingly from thereon out. you have to reconcile that you are a person with the fact that some doors are closed to you now, and it's up to you to decide what you do from there.

just. like. even when i hate someone and as far as i'm concerned they can go fuck themself, even in the multiple Heavily Badger social environments i've been in over the course of my life--church, progressive circles, the way the structure of the internet kind of just affects you in general--even on occasions where i've gotten swept away and given in to the pressure to dehumanize (or perform it) for a minute, there's always, always been a voice in the back of my head saying this is a person. this is a person. this is a person. this isn't right.

unintentional dehumanization sets off my '...should we really be doing this? we are getting into not good territory here, it's time to pull up and start questioning' alarms. explicit, intentional, purposeful dehumanization sets off the whole ass tornado sirens. if people on my side are doing it it's enough to throw me into a system-destabilizing crisis, because NO NO NO I WANT TO GET OFF THIS RIDE, I WANT NO PART OF THESE PEOPLE'S MORAL SYSTEM, I FEEL UNCLEAN. it's a good way to make sure i will never, ever, ever trust someone again.

things that are Really Really Badger, off the top of my head (after the cut because Long and trauma talk):

[[MORE]]

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-i've always loved playing adoptable games, pet simulators, etc? any game with randomly generated characters that are Yours Now and a Community, in a deeply badgery way. including games where they can die (the satisfying part is making sure they don't). except that, no matter how much fun the gameplay is, if it gets to the point where they start feeling disposable, and the only way to really keep playing is to stop humanizing them, i lose interest. it's super fucking depressing. it feels like part of me dying inside a little. i don't like it at all.

-i've always been drawn to fandoms and roleplaying communities. i was fiercely loyal to, and proud of, my first rp community on dragoncave as a 13-year-old. when my abusive mom found out about it and completely isolated me for half a year, the promise of being able to make it back to them--just sneakier this time--kept me going; when i finally got back and the group had drifted apart in my absence, it.... was absolutely devastating. i never really recovered from it. even then, i spent years trying to get the group back together every now and then, until i finally gave up.

-i am always keenly, painfully aware of the life cycle of a community. every time i hear the sentiment 'you guys are all great and i love this group' my stomach drops, because i know it's only a matter of time before things go sour or the group dissolves. rp groups, skype chats/discord servers, fandoms, you name it, i am always bracing myself or staying away entirely to avoid the inevitable and it hurts. and it hurts to see people taking part in a community i don't dare be part of, which makes lurking in fandoms... really rough. frankly, it takes me a lot of courage every time i express my appreciation for the shc community because i've been burned so many times.

-on that note: i went through some really traumatic stuff at the end of 2020 that completely turned my life upside down, and i was doing bad until i stumbled across the shc community. the moment i started engaging, it was a huge boost to my mental health, and my ability to cope with circumstances under which i was about to break down spectacularly. and it has been ever since! contributing to The Group Project and seeing other folks being friendly with each other gives me the happy feelings.

-i used to go out of my way to build and run spaces, mainly fandom and rp spaces, and took a lot of pride in engineering them so that they Functioned Well. unfortunately it wore me the hell down over the years for Burnt Badger Reasons, and now i'm too jaded, bitter, and exhausted to give a shit about being a mod/community leader anymore because of it lmao

-among those burnt badger things i relate HARD to the Red Ledger narrative. hoo boy.

-i wish i could find it again, but there was an mlp comic i saw once which went into luna's observations of what each element of harmony Means. with the element of friendship, she says that twilight has a massive amount of love to give; right now it's all focused on celestia, but when she learns to expand it outward she'll have grown into her full potential as a person, and she'll change the world. that struck a chord with how i used to feel, hard, and it's really stuck with me ever since. (hello, unhealthy snake model)

-emphasis on 'used to feel,' lmao

-got super invested in a really toxic '''mental health''' community at a low point in my life; exploded HARD trying to help everyone i could; got into vicious, protracted fights with the shitty mods for years about the harmful way they ran their community until i finally managed to go 'fuck this it's not getting better' and leave.

-had to numb myself emotionally to the people around me for a long time once i really started learning about mental health and trauma stuff, because now i was seeing signs of their pain and baggage everywhere i looked, and i couldn't handle not being able to help.

-the imagery with which i think about my bird primary is overwhelmingly negative. whether it's my actual primary or a model, i uh. i feel like a healthy relationship to one's primary doesn't involve associating it with gore.

-i saw a conversation recently about how birds think of morality in terms of 'if you can, you should,' and how that's scary for badgers because their definition of 'can' involves destroying yourself for the sake of that 'should,' and... yeah, that's a mood. that's a BIG mood. thinking about bird primary stuff is hard--and i had to pick up my lion model to deal with it--because it's so easy for me to spiral into a self-shredding spiral of other people are counting on you to do the right thing, how dare you pull back for your own health and sanity. how dare you turn your back for even a minute. how dare you rest. the work is never done.

which is... a very exploded badger approach to exploded bird morality. whoops.

-fix-it and time travel fiction in which Everything Went Right This Time and It's Going to Be Okay are one of my very favorite self-indulgent fantasies. i will enjoy putting characters through the wringer in all kinds of creatively horrific ways which may or may not end on a downer note, certainly, i love that shit, but i will also 90% of the time have a backup version of the arc or dynamic that's softer and lighter and Actually Healthy This Time. it's the dichotomy there that really gets me tbh, a story where Everything Ends Happily by default will mmmaybe pull me in? but stories where there's the constant shadow of this could end horribly, it's supposed to end horribly, and we got a happy fucking ending anyway are just... that shit will make me cry, man.

it's also why i kind of really hate stable time loop stories where it initially looks like this is going to be The Good Timeline this time around, but OOPSIE everything went to shit anyway! we're right back where we started, just like it was meant to be all along! it's a tired cliche by this point and an unsatisfying one for me, and it makes me roll my eyes every time.

-this is relevant to the bird vs. badger because like... my gut instinct is to prioritize people over systems. when shit hits the fan, when someone's fallen into the machinery and is about to get hurt, i don't feel right about it if i just let it happen. i'll break the machinery if i have to to keep it away from them; i won't feel great about that, and it might cause problems, but fuck it, we'll figure it out later. throwing people into the gears of a system when i'm convinced it's the only option makes me feel Awful.

-related to the above, another trope that really speaks to me in fiction is when a character defies the rules of reality through sheer force of will. no, this is not happening, i don't give a shit what the limits are supposed to be. i refuse to let this be the way things are. (there's that lion model.)

-i've just kind of... always wanted to be an Everyone Badger. it makes me sad how much of that i've lost over the years as i've gotten more cynical, but it's what i wish i could be.

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doubtless i'll think of more the moment i hit send, and there are just as many things about me that are Super Bird Primary, but like... mamma mia that's some spicy badger. the main thing stopping me is the Can't and Refuse to Dehumanize bit. i also... hm. i think i can function okay without a community? they just help a lot, and it sucks when i'm confronted with one i don't have a (stable) place in. any thoughts? is it possible for a bird system's foundation to run so deep that eventually it overrides the bird?

#shc #sortinghatchats #sorting hat chats #badger primary #bird primary #burned badger primary #exploded badger primary #exploded bird primary #burned houses #exploded houses #abuse cw #gore implied cw #moogle hat talks

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potrix-the-queerschlaeger · 4 years

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not a goodbye, a thank you

For @daphne--blue, who gave me this heartbreaking prompt I just couldn't resist: "Geralt facing the one monster he can’t fight. The passage of time, and losing Jaskier to it."

As mentioned in the tags, there is no actual character death in this fic. There is talk about future death, however, after one character suffers a near death experience. The fic ends on a bittersweet, happy-ish note.

Let the feels happen, folks. Embrace them!

You can also go and check this story out on AO3.

- - -

▪ This is not a goodbye, my darling, this is a thank you. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. ▪

The cool breeze carries the scent of early spring with it, fresh and cleansing and full of life, and Geralt closes his eyes as it ruffles his hair and caresses his cheeks. His head is tipped back against the wall of the stables, hands lying loose and relaxed in his lap as he breathes, slowly, in and out in a steady rhythm.

Not many places grant him the safety to act and be this careless, this free, and he’s determined to bask in the pleasure of it for as long as he can. They’ll leave Kaer Morhen soon, all of them returning to their tasks and duties for the year; Yennefer will take Ciri with her to Aretuza for the season, Eskel and Lambert will set out to travel the Path again, as will Geralt after escorting Jaskier across the Continent to the Academy.

In the late summer, Ciri will find Geralt wherever he might have ended up, and together they’ll travel to Oxenfurt to join Jaskier for the end of term festivities. The three of them will make the journey back to Kaer Morhen together come fall, where Vesemir and his brothers will be waiting for them, and Yennefer will turn up whenever she’s grown bored with life in whatever court she’d decided to grace with her presence and services.

And Geralt will feel whole again, he will be home once more, and the thought alone makes him smile softly to himself.

Somewhere further in the courtyard, Lambert yells out a colourful curse while Ciri cackles maniacally. Eskel is taunting the former through his laughter, and Vesemir’s voice joins in with barked commands and corrections once the clang of steel against steel continues. Somewhere above them, on one of the balconies overlooking the yard, Geralt can hear the scratch of quill against parchment as Yennefer works on her correspondence, interrupted every now and again by the tapping of nails against an inkpot.

He realises what’s wrong an instant before everyone else grows suddenly, eerily still; Jaskier is quiet.

Geralt’s eyes snap open and immediately find Jaskier in the same spot he’s been in for most of the afternoon, sitting perched atop a few old crates with his lute in hand and a tune on his lips. Only now the lute has been set aside so Jaskier can press his hands to his chest, a frown pulling at his brows as his face twists and turns ashen.

He begins to gasp as Geralt springs to his feet, coughing harshly before that turns into breathless wheezing. His hands are shaking when they reach for Geralt, their grip weak and feeble where they curl into Geralt’s tunic, and his heart stutters.

Jaskier’s eyes are wide and shining, and his heart stutters, stutters, stutters, and then it doesn’t anymore because it stays silent.

Silent. Silent. Silent—

“Geralt, move!” Yennefer hisses sharply as she shoves between them. “Move and help!”

It’s overwhelming, as everything comes rushing back in; the sound of raised voices, the smell of worry and fear, the feel of his brothers flanking him closely, the taste of his own panic in the back of Geralt’s throat.

“Yenn,” is all Geralt manages to choke out, but Yennefer knows him well enough to simply, brusquely instruct, “Lift him, carefully. Follow me.”

His mind is blank apart from a frantic, terrified repetition of Jaskier’s name as they step through a portal into their rooms. He gently arranges Jaskier on the bed and begins to undress him as ordered while Yennefer vanishes for a long, torturous moment. She returns with her bag of herbs and salves, and Geralt has to bite the inside of his cheek bloody to keep himself from snarling at her when she tells him to give her space to work.

Jaskier is quiet. Silent. Still.

“Is he going to be—” Geralt’s voice breaks off halfway through the question when bile rises up his throat. He swallows convulsively against the sting of it, vision swimming. “Yenn, will he—”

The hand Yennefer’s got splayed across Jaskier’s chest turns purple with magic, glowing brightly, and Jaskier’s whole body jerks before going limp again. Yennefer waits, watches, holds her free hand over his mouth and nose. Her expression grows pinched, her hand glowing bright for another moment, Jaskier convulsing more violently than before.

Geralt can hear himself growling, low and hurt, though he can’t seem to stop. But then Jaskier sucks in a painful sounding breath, twitching under Yennefer’s hands as she smooths them down his torso, murmuring quiet spells that Geralt doesn’t hear over the sound of the renewed beat of Jaskier’s heart.

Slow. Weak. Too slow, too weak, but there once more.

Yennefer sits back with a shuddering sigh, eyes squeezed shut and mouth pressed into a thin line. Somehow, despite his legs feeling weak like he’d just run for hours, Geralt makes it over to the bed to perch down next to her, laying a hand on her back.

“He’s stable, for now,” she says quietly as she tips her head to rest against Geralt’s shoulder. Geralt moves to wrap an arm around her, holding her close. Yennefer leans into it and pats Geralt’s thigh. “He’ll be in the clear, I believe, if he makes it through the night, although I do highly recommend a visit with a human healer. Good thing your little lark is as stubborn as they come.”

He is, proudly so, and were the circumstances different, Geralt would see the humour in the situation. He can't find it in himself to do so, now. “What happened, Yenn?”

Yennefer gives a delicate shrug. “It's near impossible to tell. Whatever it was, it put a strain on his heart which proved to be too much.”

Geralt's own heart clenches at that. “I didn't—”

“Oh, please, Geralt, get over yourself,” Yennefer cuts in sharply. She moves back a little, and Geralt pretends he doesn't notice her wipe discreetly at her eyes. “Trained healers and physicians find it impossible to predict and prevent these things, how could you have?”

It's illogical, Geralt knows, but he wants to argue anyway. It's him who knows Jaskier, inside and out, better than any other living soul. It's him who cares for Jaskier, who loves Jaskier, who is supposed to protect Jaskier when Jaskier can't protect himself.

It's him who has failed, spectacularly so.

Some of what he's thinking must show on his face, despite his best efforts, because Yennefer's features soften again. “Geralt,” she says, too gentle for Geralt's comfort, “he's human. He's growing older—”

“Don't,” Geralt snaps, harsh enough to make Yennefer's face close off entirely. Geralt swallows hard, looking back at Jaskier and away from Yennefer’s eyes. “I know he—I know, Yenn, fuck. I know. Just. Don't.”

They're quiet for a while, after that. Yennefer pulls several pouches of herbs and vials of liquids out of her bag, setting them out on the desk in the corner. Geralt takes one of Jaskier's hands, pressing his lips to his pulse, head bent over their clasped hands while he listens to Jaskier's shallow breathing.

Unsurprisingly, it’s Yennefer who speaks first again. “Spring water and aether,” she demands, still bent over her equipment. “Honey, if there’s still some left, for the taste.”

“If you think I’m leaving him right now,” Geralt grunts out, not bothering to finish the sentence.

“He’ll be asleep for hours, yet, the healing spell I’ve put him under will make sure of that. You, on the other hand,” Yennefer turns to raise an eyebrow at him, “can go and make yourself useful.” Geralt opens his mouth to protest again, but Yennefer talks over him, “And go see how your daughter is handling all of this.”

That’s enough to make Geralt shut his mouth, sudden guilt churning in his gut. Reluctantly, after kissing his palm, Geralt releases Jaskier’s hand, laying it back down gently. He ghosts his lips over Jaskier’s forehead before getting up, moving towards the door without glancing back at Yennefer.

Before he lets the door fall closed behind him, though, he murmurs a quiet, “Thank you.”

He gets as far as the end of the corridor, where Vesemir is leaning against the wall. He straightens up as Geralt approaches, watching him without saying a word when Geralt stops in front of him, unsure of what to say. Eventually, he settles on, “He’s alive.”

Vesemir nods, once, and then he reaches out to cup Geralt’s face. Geralt melts into the touch, can’t not, and Vesemir breathes out, “Oh, my boy,” and tugs him closer, lets Geralt bury his face in his neck, and cling to his back as he shakes apart.

Geralt shakes, and shakes, and can’t seem to stop, eyes dry but burning terribly as Vesemir holds him, strong and tight and the only thing keeping Geralt from crumbling into tiny, shattered pieces of himself. He can’t tell how long they stay like that, but when Geralt feels like he can move again without losing himself, his throat feels parched and his head aches.

In a shocking display of tenderness, Vesemir tucks a strand of loose hair behind Geralt’s ear before he steps back, clapping him on the chest. “The others are on the sparring grounds,” he says, and the smallest of smiles tugs at one corner of his mouth. “The little menace was beating the ever-living shit out of your brothers before I left.”

Taking the dismissal for what it is, Geralt detours through the kitchen to gulp down some ale, splash some water on his face, and grab the ingredients requested by Yennefer before he makes his way outside. He hears grunting and swearing long before he sees them, Ciri sitting on Eskel’s chest with a dagger to his throat while Lambert is crouched close by, ready to pounce.

Their heads swivel around in almost eery synchronicity when they hear Geralt’s boots crunch along the gravel path, and then Ciri is on him in an instant, flinging herself at him hard enough to force a startled, “Oof,” out of him.

“Tell me he’s okay,” Ciri whispers against his cheek, her voice small like Geralt almost never hears it.

A brief glance over her shoulder reveals both Lambert and Eskel watching him intently, their faces creased in apparent concern. Geralt turns his face into Ciri’s hair before answering. “For now.”

Ciri makes a hurt noise, Eskel breathes in sharply, and Lambert mutters, “Fucking hell.”

“I want to see him,” Ciri says, pulling back just far enough to glare at Geralt with wet, shimmering eyes, as if he’d ever refused her a single thing in his life. “Right now, I need to see him. Please.”

“Oh, now we have manners, do we?” Lambert snorts, and it’s enough to effectively break the worst of the tension.

Vesemir has commandeered the comfy armchair by the hearth when they get back, a book in his lap that Geralt would bet he hasn’t read a single word of. Lambert plops down on the carpet by his feet, legs pulled against his chest and chin resting on his knees, while Eskel takes the potion ingredients from Geralt, and goes to help Yennefer with the brewing.

Ciri has no qualms about curling up next to Jaskier on the bed. She cautiously puts a hand on his ribs, making sure she can feel him breathe, presses her forehead against his shoulder, and closes her eyes, sniffling quietly every now and again.

Geralt settles on Jaskier’s other side and takes his hand again.

No one but Jaskier sleeps that night.

It’s shortly after dawn when Jaskier’s fingers twitch against Geralt’s palm.

“Geralt,” he hums quietly, blinking sluggishly for a moment. His eyes widen as he looks around at the people gathered in the room. And then he grins jauntily, tongue-in-cheek. “Well, now. To what do I owe this honour?”

“Jaskier,” Ciri hiccups, lower lip trembling, and Jaskier says, “Oh, my darling little lion cub,” as he wraps his arms around her, and tenderly kisses the crown of her head.

Eskel comes over to squeeze Jaskier’s ankle through the furs. “Fucking hell, Jaskier,” he grunts, but the relief is palpable on both his face and in his voice.

“Don’t fucking do that again, buttercup,” Lambert adds gruffly, then yelps when Vesemir none too gently cuffs the back of his head.

He herds Lambert and Eskel out of the room with a roll of his eyes, but not before promising Jaskier the last of the pickled cherries—his favourite, and a rare commodity by the end of the winter—to go with his morning meal.

“And once you've eaten,” Yennefer says as she sets a vial of swirling, pale blue liquid down on the small table by the bed, “this, and another after supper. Twice a day, for a week at least. Geralt forgot the honey, so, please, do feel free to nag at him when it tastes like unwashed feet.”

“Your bedside manner is atrocious,” Jaskier informs her, nose wrinkled, even as he frees one of his arms to beckon her closer. “The absolute worst, let me tell you.”

Yennefer sniffs at him haughtily, flicking her hair, but she does hug him tightly for a long moment, and kisses his cheek when Jaskier whispers, “Thank you, my dear.”

Ciri gets up when Yennefer tilts her head at her, though she's very obviously unhappy about it. Jaskier, of course, notices as well, reaching out to squeeze Ciri’s hand. “Go eat, little darling, and fetch me my food as well, would you?”

Once he and Geralt are alone, Jaskier slumps, and breathes out a tired, shaky sigh. Geralt helps him lie down more comfortably, arranging the pillows behind his head, and tucking the furs more snugly around him.

He looks up again when Jaskier grips his arm, a small smile playing on his lips. “You're fussing.”

“We're out of honey,” Geralt blurts nonsensically, then immediately winces at his bumbling. He opens his mouth to say something, anything else, then closes it again helplessly. When he tries again, all that comes out is a hoarse, broken, “Jaskier.”

Jaskier's eyes crinkle, turning almost impossibly fond, and he tugs at the arm he's still holding, urging Geralt to lie down with him, head on Jaskier's shoulder. One of Jaskier's hands finds Geralt's to twine their fingers together, and the other moves to Geralt's head to stroke through his hair.

“The thought of losing you,” Geralt murmurs, eyes shut firmly, “scares me more than I ever thought possible.”

“My love,” Jaskier's voice is brimming with just that, damn near overflowing with the emotion of it, “of course it does. As it does me, when I dare to think of a world without the wonder that is you in it.”

Geralt tightens the arm he has around Jaskier, swallowing hard around the sudden, painful lump in his throat.

Jaskier brushes a kiss over his temple, then lets his lips linger there. “Death will take all of us, human or not,” he says, and shushes Geralt when Geralt makes a choked sound of protest, gently tugging at a strand of Geralt's hair. “Not today, and damn well not any time soon, if I can help it. But it will, eventually.”

“Jaskier—”

“And should it come for me before it finds you, you will go on. You will hurt, and you will rage, and you won't believe that the pain could ever pass enough to let you breathe again, but it will. And you will go on living, Geralt, because you'll know it's what's right. You'll know it's what I wished for you; to heal, to live, to love—”

“No,” Geralt almost snarls, because it is unthinkable. His mind balks at it, his stomach churns; not after Jaskier, not without Jaskier. “Not that. I couldn't—”

“Don't be ridiculous, dearheart,” Jaskier chides. He nudges Geralt's chin until Geralt looks up at him, into his soft eyes and open, adoring face. “You'll continue to love your daughter, your brothers, Vesemir, Yennefer. You'll keep loving me, like you've kept loving everyone else you've had to let go. And you'll find new people to love in the most beautiful, wonderful of ways, people who'll care for you, and cherish you, and love you back with all that they have.”

Geralt can't recall the last time he cried. He knows he must have, as a child, and most likely during the worst of the trials as well, but he doesn't remember.

He won't forget this time, he knows.

Jaskier leans in to kiss the wetness away from his cheeks, and opens up like a flower in the sun when Geralt turns his head to bring their mouths together. He lets Geralt push him back, lets Geralt cover him, lets Geralt cry, and keeps kissing him.

Kissing, and kissing, and kissing until their lips are red and swollen, until Geralt has nothing else to give.

Until there's nothing left for Geralt to feel but exhaustion.

And love.

Always love, when he's with Jaskier.

Geralt lays his head down on Jaskier's chest.

He drifts off to the new yet familiar beat of Jaskier's heart.

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redscullyrevival · 6 years

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I finally saw The Last Jedi and I liked it - what I wasn’t entirely anticipating is that I also really enjoyed it! I will now commence bullet point blabbering about the film below the cut and it shall not be spoiler free.

I now understand all the raging nerd-hate this movie has been getting - this film aimed to straight up burn this motherfucker down, huh?

Loved it.

Personally I was very… underwhelmed with The Force Awakens. It was a fun romp and I loved the new characters and the nostalgic twinge of the familiar but oh boy the entire thing felt far too beholden to the pedestal of A STAR WARS FILM! in slow steady blinking lights.

The Force Awakens has that octane Abrams pacing but it is also just so damn stiff. So ridged. And obviously deeply afraid to wander off the path.

I understand that the first re-introduction to such a beloved franchise playing it (excruciatingly) safe made sense; but I was still upset with the final product, with the final choice to deliberately aim to be nothing more than what I’ve seen and felt before.

The Last Jedi on the other hand turns out to be a long, cozy, chat about how A STAR WARS FILM! should be struck down so something new can grow.

Hallelujah!

The visceral attack this film must feel like to a particular kind of Star Wars fan is no doubt very intense and in all honestly I do have some pity for folks who found this new film to be dismissing the legacy they feel connected to in deeply personal ways.

*clappy hands*

But oh, I loved it so much!

Every twist and turn, every aspect of this film pushes the anticipated rhythm of A STAR WARS FILM! away; all the momentum the film gains is for the final purpose of rejecting everything easy and expected, for pushing past, well, the past.

Hot damn, the nerds are kind of justified for once.

The Last Jedi came for them! It went so hard! The more someone had dug themselves into the belief that STAR WARS was a solid thing they knew and understood on a fundamental core level then the deeper the cut would go as the film raged on.

The anger, the hate from certain fandom circles makes total sense.

Because this film done changed the Star Wars.

And it was about fuckin’ time.

So prepared was I to sit through The Empire Strikes Back: The Remix that the intense gut fans-hate-it reaction the film got opening friggin’ day got me all kinds of delighted, how I saw it such a reaction signaled that this new film would be something actually new.

And the fresh air of The Last Jedi comes from some pretty drastic subversion of A STAR WARS FILM! It is down right beautiful.

Ultimately, if the choice to change Star Wars was just to grim dark and edge it up then it’d be pretty terrible I agree, but The Last Jedi managed to alter and course correct massive change without breaking the frame of the how and the why and to whom these STAR WARS stories are told.

I mean, in my opinion anyway.

I felt the film put a lot of care and love into explaining to the audience what was right and natural about change, explaining that strength could be found in letting go of our nostalgia and expectations and opening up to new experiences in old sandboxes. I felt The Last Jedi was an oddly gentle film that knew it was going to frighten some while igniting others and did it’s best to show it’s good will towards signaling hope and legend and legacy into a shared experience.

*shrug shrug shrug* YA FEELIN’ ME?!

I know I already have a spoiler warning above the cut but now I am going to really get up in this film and push my eyeball up against it’s eyeball and hey if you wanna see all particulars feel free, but this is now specific spoiler territory, thanks and happy holidays:

I was so enthralled with Finn and Rose’s quest and I was ecstatic when it didn’t work out.

The two went on a space goose chase for a daring rescue mission and got into ruffian escapades and thought on the fly and were brave and funny and were livin’ that STAR WARS life - and they failed spectacularly.

Their mission, their rip’roarin’ escapade, was in fact a brash and ill thought out plan that almost got absolutely everyone killed.

Precious, lovely, daring, and confident Poe Dameron was a horrible leader.

His belief in a desperate gamble; his total confidence that he was in the right and the stuffy Vice Admiral didn’t know when to take a risk; the audience knowing his qualities as sure fire STAR WARS leadership was all for nothing and people died for it.

I said HOT DAMN!

This film made General Organa and Vice Admiral Holdo, two older women who don’t run around with blasters in hand but who have no less twinkle in their eyes the true leaders of the resistance. The true bearers of the spark of rebellion. It was their matured tried and true mentorship that ended up saving them all - not the cocky charisma of a younger good looking man.

Also Leia is confirmed Force Sensitive™ bringing to an end decades long old guard fans bickering and moaning over if she has pretend magical powers or not and why if she did that’d be “not right”.

(Seeing Carrie Fisher bathed in moonlight was emotional)

And then, oh man, Rey’s parents? Wonderful, soulful, bright and strong Rey? Because she is in a STAR WARS film and can use the force everyone including people who’ve never seen The Force Awakens assumed her parents were a part of the legacy, a part of the grand scheme.

NOPE.

In fact, to really drive it home just so fans can’t possibly be confused, Kylo Ren tells her “You’re nobody. You don’t belong in this story.”

He said that with his mouth words!

But there she is all the same, good old Rey. And she’ll remain. Without being so and so from extended universe’s kid or a character only in some comic book or Luke’s secret child or whatever.

Rey is just a character made to be there and to use the force because, hey, it’s a STAR WARS MOVIE! We needed someone to be the Luke this time around so why not Rey?

PS we shattered Luke’s lightsaber and made Rey indebted to jack squat of this franchise. She searched for her purpose and her parents and only found the strength of herself and her own choices. Peace out!

That tickled me senseless, having the cultural institution of STAR WARS being full on assaulted for two and a half hours.

That tickled my pickle.

The Last Jedi is hyper self aware media, but it was still fun. It was still a good time but it laid down hard and fast with changing the lifeblood of STAR WARS that even I, who is nowhere near as big a fan as someone you could probably hit with a stone’s throw, admit to feeling some uncomfortable chafing at times while watching.

STAR WARS is a legit cultural institution by the way, I didn’t just say that for the fun of it - that’s absolutely 100% true.

Star Wars as a media, as a franchise, has an ebb and flow of patterns, style, symbols, and motifs that dictate a tonal cohesiveness which designates something as recognizable as STAR WARS.

What I’m doing when I all caps “Star Wars” is I’m trying to defer attention to the known concepts and ideas of Star Wars media as a whole cultural institution and experience rather than just invoking a cluster of films, only I’m trying to do all that just through the written word.

Star Wars is a film and STAR WARS is all that which defines the franchise as well as our shared cultural understanding of said franchise, ya fell me? That’s how I approach talking about this kinda stuff online anyways. I feel most will understand what I’m doing with the capitalization and all that but hey, now ya know ‘fo sure.

Anyway

Shit y’all! Luke Skywalker is a funky sore spot huh? Loved that too.

Lets get to that Kylo Ren:

Kylo Ren’s entire set up is that he ain’t Vader and fuck, ain’t that the truth. But in a good way. Duh Kylo Ren is not Vader, he is a different character. And, now, he isn’t even remotely similar to Vader as a STAR WARS character.

Everything about Kylo Ren is opposed to Darth Vader; while he gain’s definition with this new film Kylo Ren didn’t even remotely start out as a mysterious villain like Vader originally did.

We all knew, in that STAR WARS fashion, that Kylo Ren had to be tied to the legacy. We all knew that he had to be tied to the lifeblood of the franchise. And Ben Solo absolutely is.

We knew this before Han ever revealed it through dialogue and that’s why it wasn’t a big reveal in The Force Awakens. Of course Ben Solo turned to the dark side and is Kylo Ren. Of course. Of course he has some weird Vader obsession, the character needed to emulate Vader so as to take up his mantel in the narrative and in the franchise. We needed a baddie in a helmet, stat!

But oh, look what has happened though, oh man:

Luke Skywalker in a moment of fear almost murdered his own nephew -because he is in STAR WARS.

We all know if there are Jedi then there is a light and a dark side of the force; we all know that if you are a master of and a teacher in the ways of the force you open yourself and your students up to a choice; and we all know that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

Kylo Ren being a direct response to Luke friggin’ Skywalker is as far from Vader as you can get but fits just so right within the cleansing fire that is The Last Jedi.

The hero of the first saga ignited the villain of the next.

That ain’t very STAR WARS and something tells me that is the biggest kick to the crotch for a lot of folks.

I, of course, dug the hell outta that choice.

Kylo Ren is actually interesting now. Mischief managed.

The very not subtle social commentary the film was dishing out was a pretty pie to boot. Bit on the nose but hey, ain’t that STAR WARS at least? Didn’t even have to dig this time around, gems sitting right on the surface.

… Damn, I’m tired. I still have plenty to talk about though. Hmm, well, lets close this out on a different note (and that’s a pun):

The music of STAR WARS is bonkers recognizable. Like, I keep saying Star Wars is a cultural institution that uses motifs and symbols as devices for defining itself, right? Yeah, the use of music in this film is a pitch perfect example of that.

The Last Jedi seamlessly flows from theme to theme, with specific well known scores highlighting emotional call backs and in-story referenced characters - the use of music is the most traditionalist aspect of this new film (they even shook up the editing this time around - shock and awe).

Smart though, if they fucked with how STAR WARS did music then even an impassive twerp like me would be pretty upset.

For my money, the musical score is still the best thing about a good old Star War.

#star wars #spoilers #ignore me

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stetervault · 7 years

Note

Any recommendations for a multiple chapter Good Peter fic?

There’s a Good Peter tag you could search up, and here are some of my faves:

know who i am by Aminias (SeeingRed)

What about the first time Stiles runs up to Peter, and Peter tries to take him back to his mom, and he’s like you can’t, my mama’s in the hospital, and daddy thinks I don’t know, but she’s gonna die “

At least Five times Peter and Stiles find each other + One time its mutual er something like that

Love.

With Mars Bars, Snickers and Skittles by FeelingsDusk

Peter wakes up one year and almost ten months after he managed to drag himself out of the burning Hale house to find the remaining members of his family tired, worn down, stressed and downright miserable.

The situation is unacceptable and he won’t stand for it.

Baby Stilinski-Hale by Triangulum

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Peter says. Stiles just shrugs. “Are you going to tell me why, or do I have to guess?” Stiles would love to glare at him and snark back like they always do, but her nerves are just too frayed and she doesn’t have it in her. Peter seems to sense this and frowns, his face morphing into one of concern. “Stiles..?”

He takes a few steps closer, slowly as if he’s trying not to startle her and that makes her want to let out a hysterical laugh, but she keeps it in. He sets his hand on her shoulder, the other going to the side of her neck. He frowns at the way her pulse is racing, as if he needs to physically confirm what his ears are already telling him. She lets him touch her, knowing without even needing to think about it that he won’t hurt her. She does let out a bitter little laugh at that. Well, physically he won’t.

“What is it?” he asks and the genuine concern in his voice almost breaks her. He leans down and stares into her eyes, their faces so close, and she sees his nostrils flare. “You smell…different.”

Well, that’s her cue.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispers.

The one where Peter gets Stiles pregnant and is a big old softie about it.

Love is Thick by Green

Peter finds out his best friend is sick, and she has a surprise for him.

When It All Falls Apart by Peter Hale (RyloKen)

Stiles doesn’t know what to do.

He’s on the verge of losing everything in the divorce, on the verge of breaking down. He hates himself, hates what he is, what he’s not. He has no husband, no alpha, no mate. He’s about to lose his mind, and he has no hope.

His mother used to tell him; when you’ve hit rock bottom, the only way out is up. But what’s the point in trying to climb out of Hell, when the Devil’s waiting for you with an army of lawyers?

And with his heat just around the corner, Stiles doesn’t think he has anything left to give. He needs a miracle.

He just didn’t figure his miracle would wear Alexander Amosu and fight his battles with a smirk that could kick-start the apocalypse.

Ace In Your Face by SushiOwl

saintrenee asked: Steter, ace!stiles doing everything in his power to avoid Peter who had started courting him after the two of them being friends. Maybe involve something along the lines of “did you just jump out a window to avoid me?!”

Red String verse by gryvon

Peter had given up hope of ever finding his soulmate until the red string on his finger leads him to a four-year-old. He’s going to Hell. Or jail. Or both.

Living On A Wire by oriolevent

What the hell is Stiles supposed to do now that his band’s been broken up and Scott’s gone solo? Get tangled up with the Hales, of course.

Jabba the Mutt by sugarpanties

Stiles comes across a puppy. The pack doesn’t approve. Peter does, so when Stiles storms away, the werewolf isn’t left behind.

Strange Duet by BelleAmante, thiliart (thilia)

The past three years have been a series of shocking, or not so shocking, successes for 2018 Tony award winner and two time Grammy nominee, Stiles Stilinski. You don’t typically find classically trained opera singers singing alternative folk rock to crowds at Coachella. Nor do you find indie singer/songwriters winning best actor awards at the Tony’s for their Broadway debuts. Stilinski has made it his lifetime habit to defy and exceed all expectations.

-or-

A Steter fic loosely based on Phantom of the Opera

Just Let Me Be Your Ticket Home by pibroch (littleblackdog)

Look, it really wasn’t her fault that she missed him. Less than five months of frequent and enthusiastic sex had not given her nearly enough time to get sick of him yet.

Holidays with Steter by DiscontentedWinter

Peter and Stiles spend Halloween together.

They listen to their hearts. Those cheap, disgusting candy hearts.

Hey, whatever works.

Altruism by ladyoneill

Stiles is kidnapped by hunters out to punish human sympathizers. By the time the Pack finds him, he’s been forced into prostitution. Peter’s the only one who can get him back.

Tight Jeans, Leather Boots Make a Stiles Go Wee-Woo by Elpie (Horribibble)

Feeling lonely and alienated at a college across the country, Stiles decides to explore his ever-developing sexuality at the closest gay bar.

He just wasn’t expecting quite so many bikers. Or such good food. Or Peter Hale.

And here are some without the tag but I thought fit the category anyway:

On idiocy and stupidity by FeelingsDusk

As a rule, Stiles doesn’t go home unless he’s forced to and he spends all his time either studying or experimenting with anything and everything that catches his attention. He doesn’t care about making friends but he does have some people he’s in good terms with. He doesn’t want more, attempts to force the issue with him will be met with a sneaky and swift retaliation, as many can attest.

He may be an idiot like professor Callaway always tells him, but he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t need anyone.

And then ickle itsy bitsy Cora Hale enters Salem, gets sorted into the special tier and, wide eyed after one of his experiments blows up spectacularly, she points at him before telling professor Callaway, who was with her, I can choose anyone right? I want him to be my mentor.

Naughty Hookers (Swathed in Wool) by pprfaith

Stiles is happy with his store, his hobbies, his friends. Peter’s just trying to figure out how to raise his nieces and nephew without fucking them up too badly.

Paths cross.

Proposing To Strangers by moonstalker24

At the end of a strained relationship, crime novelist Stiles chooses to hide from the world inside a bar with far too many motorcycles outside it for comfort. Here he’ll meet the man of his dreams, eat food and propose marriage, all within the first five minutes.

Peter doesn’t know who this kid is, but he’s cute and looks like he could use a break. So he feeds him. He’s not expecting a marriage proposal, but with what comes after, he doesn’t really mind.

The Unexpected Marriage of Peter Hale by moonstalker24

This is the story of how Peter gets married without technically dating anyone.

“You can bring your boyfriend with you,” Talia says.Peter stops giving Henry more bits of dried fruit to stare at his sister “Boyfriend?”“Of course!” Talia gestures at Stiles who looks around behind him with wide eyes. “I’m sure the whole family would be interested in meeting your young man.”

Stiles Stilinski’s Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Werewolf by moonstalker24

(As Observed By Scott McCall, Best Friend Extraordinaire)

Scott doesn’t like the werewolf that followed Stiles home from a folklore seminar. Neither does anybody else. Somehow, it’s Scott’s job to tell Stiles that.

Sanctuary by DiscontentedWinter

The Hale Wolf Sanctuary isn’t just for wolves.

It turns out it’s for Stilinskis as well.

Surprising, unplanned and wonderful by RebaK1tten

Stiles is an omega happy with his gender and looking to court the right alpha and be courted back. Three guesses who the right alpha is.

Monopoly by Triangulum

It’s Monopoly time,“ Scott says without looking up from Mass Effect.

"Monopoly time?” Derek asks.

“Safeway and all their sister stores like Albertsons are doing their Monopoly game,” Stiles says. He grabs his backpack and rifles through it before pulling out his Safeway Monopoly board with little Monopoly pieces stuck to it.

Isaac snorts from next to Scott.

“You’re not going to win anything,” he says.

“Oh ye of little faith,” Stiles says. “I already won a $50 gift card.”

“What, seriously?” Isaac asks.

“Stiles wins something every year,” Scott says, groaning as his character dies. “Last year he won a $5,000 college scholarship.”

“Fingers crossed for the vacation,” Stiles says.

Peter woos Stiles with Monopoly pieces.

Life’s a Ball of Yarn by Triangulum

“He’s so cute!” Erica coos, reaching out to scratch the fluffy calico kitten in front of her.

The only problem is that kitten is Stiles and he doesn’t want Erica’s fingers anywhere near him. He hisses and when her hand keeps on coming, he sinks his teeth into it. Erica howls and shakes her hand, making Stiles fly off and skid across the loft floor.

“I think he might not want to be touched,” Peter drawls.

“He let you hold him,” Erica grumbles.

“I didn’t lunge at an animal the size of a potato with my nails out,” Peter points out, and YEAH.

Another fic where Stiles gets turned into a kitten.

Hale Escorts by Triangulum

Peter usually doesn’t take clients, but Lydia doesn’t usually send people his way, either. But she’s asked this of him, to help her friend who’s never been able to come with a partner, never had a sexual experience that has ended in anything but discomfort, pain, and/or disappointment. And of course, the girl in the photo is exactly his type. He wants to devour her, make her scream and writhe and shake, show her how pleasurable sex can really be.

The one where Peter Hale is a professional, high-end escort and owner of Hale Escorts, and all of Stiles’ past lovers have been seriously awful.

Stiles Stilinski: Wolf Whisperer (and Provider of Pop-Tarts) by ChuckleVoodoos

Stiles realizes that Peter might, in fact, be in need of a friend. And what better candidate than Stiles himself (accompanied, of course, by delicious pastry treats)?

All In A Spin by ShippersList

Stiles can’t really talk anymore but, with Peter, he realizes he doesn’t have to. Even if their spoken communication consists of one swear word and stuttered syllables, they understand each other. And that’s what counts.

If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out by mia6363

Commander Stilinski looked like he fell out of a propaganda video, his armor still smoking as he pulled off his helmet and handed it off to First Officer Argent. He had a few bruises down his neck but his smile was bright.

“Glad to see you safe and sound, Mr. Hale. I’d hate for Derek to lose a member of his family.”

“I told you,” Derek snapped at his superior, “he’s not worth this, Commander.”

Life Is What You Bake It by ladypigswagon

“You’re not broken Mr. Stilinski, nor are you a freak,” Deaton says, reaching into a drawer and searching for something, “You are simply asexual.”

“Asexual?” The word tastes heavy in Stiles mouth but it doesn’t feel wrong.

“Asexuality is not uncommon in society,” Deaton continues, finding what he was looking for. Unsurprisingly it’s a pamphlet. “There are lots of omegas, betas and alphas are asexual or a form of asexuality. There are many chat forums and websites that cater specifically to asexuality. Obviously you will not be required to go to play-mating classes anymore and if you so wish you can remain off the suppressants.”

Stiles clutches the pamphlet in his hands. Asexual. Not broken, just asexual. It’s a word that Stiles can definitely get used to.

Alpha Peter and the Ragtags by Triangulum

Derek has been one of Stiles’ best friends for years, almost as long as Scott. They’ve been friends through Stiles’ mom’s death, and through Derek’s ex trying to burn the Hales’ house down. So Stiles only feels slightly badly for ogling Derek’s hot uncle. He’s covered in tattoos and easily the most attractive man Stiles has ever seen.

“Hello, Stiles,” Peter says, his voice like silk.

“Peter?” Stiles stammers. “You’re back.”

“Astute as ever,” Peter says.

“Oh, fuck off,” Stiles says. Peter just laughs.

The one where Peter is a tattoo artist and an alpha without a pack, and Stiles is college student and best friends with Derek. When Peter moves back from New York, there’s immediately something between them.

Whiskey is My Kind of Lullaby

Peter is a simple saloon owner on one of the outer planets between the Aaru Belt and the Olympus Galaxy. He’s done with trouble. Done with adventure. So fucking done with rustlers. That is, until a cute young outlaw named Stiles wanders into his bar. Peter has this problem where he can’t seem to resist charming narcissists (perhaps because they remind him of himself). And when said narcissists turn his life upside-down, the worst part is he’s not even that upset about it.

#ask #teen wolf #steter #stiles stilinski #peter hale #fanfic rec #fic find #good peter #archercrow

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dudence-blog · 7 years

Text

Dear Dudence for 17 October 2017

For a little spice in your life go with a Bloody Maria. Just swap out the vodka for tequila. And it's only day drinking if you stopped. Can't stop! Won't Stop! With that useful advice on to answering questions people asked of someone else! Shoot an email to [email protected] or reach me on Facebook!

I feel like I’m going to be the downer in this group of questions… I don’t know how to deal with #MeToo as a rape survivor. I’m feeling triggered and angry. Social media is a big part of my job, so I can’t just turn it off all day, but I’m not sure what to do. I keep finding myself going to the bathroom and sobbing. My boss posted on our Facebook page about how “proud” he was of all the women who’ve been sharing their stories and I almost lost it. I haven’t talked to many people about what happened to me, including several members of my family, and I don’t want to “come out” as a survivor through a hashtag. At the same time, I really want to respond. I want to tell people that survivors don’t owe them their stories. I don’t want people to come away from this display of mutual pain and think that by posting a hashtag, they’ve done enough.

Dear Dealing with #MeToo as a Survivor, it hasn’t been reduced to a hashtag so it can trend on social media, it can also be used as a cudgel against people who don’t genuflect enough or in the correct manner. You don’t have to out yourself as someone who has been raped to complain about the lazy nature of hashtag activism or question the sincerity of folks pretending to be surprised that sexual assault is a crime women disproportionately impacting women. Getting furious about other people’s benign messages of support is probably not healthy, but it is what it is. That you have suffered a traumatic experience and feel it is better for yourself to not make is public doesn’t mean it’s the same for others. Your boss has expressed some solidarity with victims so it might be worth mentioning to him that, while this campaign is trending, it is difficult for you to work this part of your job.

I live in one of the areas of the country that was significantly affected by the recent natural disasters that hit over the past month or so. (Hurricane, flood, fire etc.) Although I used to really enjoy this column, I now find myself reading the questions and feeling extremely angry, as I don't think that the issue of whether or not someone may or may not have said something mean to a coworker qualifies as a real problem when I personally have no power, have to stand in line for hours to buy food, and had to send our son to my parents house to live so he could attend school since our home was severely damaged. I just want to tell people to get over themselves and be happy and grateful that the only problems they are facing are those. They have food, water, and a warm and dry place to sleep. Everything else is really meaningless.

Dear Who Really has a Problem, step away. When dealing with a tragedy or a disaster some people crave any return to normalcy or an opportunity to spend some time not thinking about how tough their situation currently is. Clearly that is not what you're getting from this. It doesn't mean that won't return, but it's not a thing for you right now. And while "how do I keep kids from attending my party?" is far more First World Problem than "I have no clean drinking water", it is an important question to the person asking. Life can be hard enough without needing to turn it into a tragedy competition to determine just who has it worse. Due to unfortunate circumstances, I’ve recently attended a number of wakes. Am I obligated to kneel before the casket and say a brief prayer? I’d been taught that this was the “polite” thing to do, but it feels disingenuous now that I no longer subscribe to any religion. I’m sure the grievers don’t notice or care either way, but should I continue to fake pray?

Dear Wake Etiquette, you're not obligated to pray. If part of the wake involves filing by the casket to pay your respects it is polite to go with the crowd, pause at the casket, and have a moment. Whether you spend that moment praying for the eternal salvation of the deceased, hoping the surviving family can find strength or comfort in this difficult time, or to wonder if you can make it home in time to catch the latest Game of Thrones before it gets spoiled online is up to you. I supposed you could go up to the casket and loudly proclaim that, as an enlightened atheist, you refuse to partake in this silly superstition. I'm sure that would go over well too.

My girlfriend recently bought a vibrator for us to use together. We're both women if that matters. However, it's been a couple months since and we haven't used it together once. We have had sex several times, but once we were in bed and I suggested we use it and she said it had dead batteries. My question is, should it upset me or worry me that she is clearly using it on her own time?

Dear Should I be Concerned, define “recently”. If she burned through a set of fresh batteries in two months y’all need to get some better batteries. Unless you’ve got one of those fancy-pants ones which have an internal battery, and if that’s the case make sure you check that it’s been plugged in before y’all get to your banging. That being said let’s go ahead and slow your roll high speed; just because she’s (Googles "female equivalent to jacking off", loses 10 hours to Urban Dictionary and all faith in humanity) jilling off without you doesn’t mean she’s going to be cheating on you. Heck, just because she didn’t want to use a certain vibrator with you doesn’t mean she’s going to be cheating on you; maybe the idea sounded better when she had it and she realized it wasn’t something she wanted to do? That she wants to occasionally self-bang doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to have sex with you too. Talk with her about what you want and how you’d like her to give it to you.

I am a 45 year old woman struggling with several issues. I have returned to dating as a middle aged woman. The men I meet are manipulative and tend to dump me after a few weeks. I also drink more than I should (3 to 5 glasses of wine, nightly). As if that is not bad enough, I spend a couple hours a day on dating and kink websites. I feel lost. I started seeing a therapist five months ago. This was after being "ghosted" by a man who was married. I was very hurt at the time. It felt good to vent to the therapist. However, now, after months of weekly appointments, I feel like therapy is worthless.

Dear Too Nice Therapist, you’re being dumped after a few weeks by men you via dating and kink websites? I’m shocked. If you’ve spent half a year seeing a therapist weekly and you’re feeling like it isn’t helping you (it’s certainly not worthless; the therapist has been well-compensated) then please, go and find another one. But I do have to ask, have you addressed your feelings of not making progress with your therapist? Because a therapist isn't going to be able to make you choose better men; they might help you understand why you keep picking up men who get what they want and move on, but it's still choices you're making.

My ex husband and I split up over 5 years ago. My daughter was just turning 4 and had a difficult time, but I did everything I could to make the transition easy. We never did anything "officially", and although her father was horrible to me, he was an excellent dad and I supported them seeing each other every chance they could. In the beginning he would only take her for a few hours some days and overnights occasionally in an effort to limit any social life I could develop. As years passed, he finally met someone and stopped using her as a means to control me. Once he started dating this person, we developed a clear schedule of when she would stay over at his house.

Dear Daughter Dislikes Stepmom, wait, you mean you had a court bless off on a divorce where the child custody agreement is “We’ll wing it”? Seriously? Nevermind, I’m getting wrapped around the axle on a tertiary issue. Let’s go ahead and ignore what your mother wants in this; she’s not helping. In the absence of a child custody agreement specifying who gets your child when (again, seriously?) I’m thinking this is something your daughter, your ex, and you need to hash out. Your daughter is 9, she deserves some say in how her life goes; it doesn’t mean what she wants goes, but she gets a say. It might be that she needs a temporary respite from staying with your ex and Trish. Your daughter is getting older and just because she’s well-adjusted doesn’t mean she can be feeling some emotions about being with the woman her father prefers over her mom. Trish might not like the reminder of a previous relationship. It probably is frustrating to your ex that the child he loves views nights spent with him as a reason for tears. An advantage of revisiting your custody agreement and including your daughter is it gives her some control over her life, which helps with her buying into the agreement, which helps her adjust to and accept the change.

I am a college aged woman who recently got out of an almost year long polyamorous relationship with another woman and a man (they were pre-involved for years). It was a spectacularly awful breakup. At the moment, the male partner and I are dating but the other woman is out due to attempted physical assault and anger issues (yes, she's been to therapy but stopped). Frankly, there are oodles and oodles of more backstory I could provide but the long and short is I just found out from my male partner that her mysterious internet job is in fact camming. She became a camgirl shortly before she and I met, withheld that information from me purposefully, and is now very popular and ridiculously financially successful.

Dear Unintended Revelations, does she now drive a brand new Nissan Altima? A polyamorous relationship between a trio of college-aged people exploded in a spectacular way? NO WAY! Totally did not see that coming. You were with her for less than a year, had no idea what she did, and she didn’t didn’t make an effort to see you for 25% of the time you were together? Yeah, I think it’s fair to say she was putting more effort into being a camgirl than she was into your relationship. To answer your question about where you go now I’d say you need to move on. You are going to get none of the validation you think you’re owed by confronting your ex for her perceived slights. Although. since you found out about her occupation through your boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend, I'll bet confronting her about her infidelity and demanding an explanation or apology will go swimmingly.

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celticnoise · 7 years

Link

I missed Lisbon by nearly eleven years.

My parents weren’t even in their teens when the greatest club side this island has ever produced went to Portugal as ambassadors and came back as icons. It was a victory that belonged more to my grandparents than my folks, and had they still been here I know they would have loved these days.

I know that because Lisbon looms large in our family and it always has.

I will hazard a guess and say that it’s not the only family where that’s the case.

I come from a die-hard “Celtic household”, where everyone gets it.

When my niece was born my sister was adamant that she wouldn’t be getting involved in “the family business” but what do you know? She wasn’t even three before she had her first Hoops top. This is how it works. This is how it’s meant to be. You pass this stuff on. Forever.

Lisbon enhances everything we know about our club. I grew up hearing about it. My folks shared many a memory of it over the years. My father ended up in casualty that night after a neighbour decided to christen the close where they stayed with a bottle of champagne, which swung wildly and smacked him on the head instead. My mother remembers going to Celtic Park with her sisters to watch the big cup coming home.

When Celtic played Benfica in 2006, my father travelled over there to stand on the turf where the most famous game in our history was played. That had to be an emotional moment. He’s not a big writer, but he did a piece about that experience for Issue 5 of CQN Magazine. The game was not memorable for any good reason – we lost 3-0 – but he and many others fans already had their highlight to savour, by visiting Lisbon and the place the magic happened.

Everyone has their story about Lisbon, even those of us who weren’t there. They don’t even have to be true stories. For me, one of the first fictional pieces I ever wrote in my life – when I was about twelve – was one of those “make a wish” pieces they give you to do in English class. I wrote one about a kid (me) who wakes up in Lisbon on the day of the match. I got to imagine the whole experience from the perspective of someone who was there.

Why not? What better wish could you make?

Years later I revisited Lisbon in a story called Killing Mr Hitler, where a Rangers fan saves a guy in a brawl; said guy turns out to be a “celestial tourist” – basically, an archangel, on his holidays, down to catch the Scottish Cup Final – and he gets a wish.

After a lengthy discourse on parallel universes and changing history (none of which he listens to) – “In some realities, killing Mr Hitler wasn’t such a good idea, you know …” – he goes back to Lisbon and greases the wall the Celtic players famously climbed over the night before the game, and a couple of them fall and break various bones, and we don’t win the game … but his changing history doesn’t work out quite the way he intended. When he nips back through the time-tunnel (don’t ask) he finds that the shock of the experience motivated big Stein and the team to even greater accomplishments and in the world he’s in we’re actually six times Champions of Europe instead.

It’s one of the few events that shaped the course of my life that I do wish I could back and experience for myself.

I know what it meant to me, and how it made me the person I am. It’s weird being able to connect your entire being to an event you weren’t even alive for, which happened eleven years before you were in the world. It doesn’t seem possible, somehow, for a distant event which, after all, was related to what a football team did, to have profoundly shaped the world for you, but there’s just no doubt at all that it did.

The world we live in, as Celtic fans, was shaped by those guys and what they did over there. Our entire lives have been affected by it in some way. My old man’s life-long love of our club might never have been so pronounced but for Lisbon, so his version of the romantic opening where he offered my mother his Celtic scarf at a taxi rank on a rainy night after he’d come back from a game, might never have happened and then I wouldn’t be here at all.

And it’s that, and little moments like it, which I’m sure we can all trace back through the threads of time, which tell you what the experience meant and what it was about.

All the way through my childhood and upbringing every conversation at a social function would be steered towards Celtic and Lisbon would come up over and over again.

Sometimes, as with my gran on my mum’s side it would be used as a stick to mercilessly beat the heathens amongst the company who followed another Glasgow side. “You’ll never beat the Lisbon Lions,” she would taunt them, without mercy, until they scuttled off and conceded the point. At other times it would be invoked as something future Celtic players would have to aspire to even if there was no hope of them ever meeting the standard.

This is a generational thing. My generation will tell our grandkids about this and what it means. I hope they have the same sense of pride in it, and in the club, that we do. Certainly that triumph in Lisbon warmed our hearts during a lot of dark years, it’s the one thing that our rivals could never live up to, could never quite reach, and watching them try and fail (usually spectacularly) was a tonic at a time when they were outspending us by a factor of 4-1.

It was the ceiling they never got near to touching, and that somehow made the bad times easier.

It also enhances the way our club feels right now, in this history making campaign. It would have been special anyway, but the timing of it makes it almost mythic, makes it almost like something pre-ordained. The symmetry of it is poetic.

Today a group of guys who, like me, were probably not even born when the Lions secured that victory are putting cut-outs of Billy McNeil all over the city and sharing the pictures on social media; this is fantastic, and a great way to keep the flame burning.

People forget that this was seen by many, at the time, as a Glasgow triumph as much as one revolving around our very own club. Needless to say, it’s no longer viewed in that light, but that’s a minor matter. What everyone will need to accept is that this changed the city, and the way both its major clubs saw the world around them.

Lisbon 67 hangs over Ibrox as much as Celtic Park.

But more than anything, this is about us, all of us, those in the Celtic Family, whether we experienced that day as it happened or whether we’ve lived it since through various media and medium. It’s one of those days I’ve often tried to re-imagine through the prism of social media; how would the internet have responded in the days and weeks before kick-off?

How would we have handled the night itself?

I’m going to try and explore that with an article later on.

The audience which watched the game on TV is a fraction compared to that which would be able to enjoy it now, in various ways, from instant text updates to illegal streams.

It is an inter-generational experience, encompassing those who were there, who watched it unfold on the telly, those not born yet and those who weren’t even born in the 80’s far less the 60’s and to whom this still has the ability to inspire awe.

Tonight at the Hydro generations will come together to pay tribute to those men, in a series of events that will keep the fires burning for the next generation. For days to come this will be the focus of many across the world. Families. Friends. And some of it will be about passing the torch on to those who came after us.

That’s a noble ideal, and one I am glad I can play some small part in.

What these guys did 50 years ago today, it can’t be oversold. How many lives did it shape? How many did it change? Trying to imagine our world without it. It’s like trying to imagine it without the invention of television. It is impossible.

In a way, so was what they did over there, those eleven local boys who got to take the field against one of the best club sides of that, or any, era. People from neighbourhoods likes ours. From lives like ours. Who walked the same streets as some of us did. They were from us. They were just like us. So perhaps what we see when we look at them is a little bit of ourselves. Perhaps they taught us what we could achieve if we did more, believed more, worked harder, got better in our own little ways. They showed us what was possible.

And the debt we owe them, for all of it, is enormous.

They will live forever, as long as the next generation gets it like we do.

Those men shaped their lives too, and it is important that they understand it.

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/30-movies-worth-watching-in-seattle-this-weekend-nov-15-18-2018/

30 Movies Worth Watching in Seattle This Weekend: Nov 15-18, 2018

Widows is a damn fun thriller from an artsy director.

You’ve got many options for movie thrills this weekend, from Steve McQueen’s spectacularly cast Widows to the creepy/comedic classic Beetlejuice. For artsier fare, don’t miss Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary on small-town America, Monrovia, Indiana. Follow the links below to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers for all of our critics’ picks, and, if you’re looking for even more options, check out our film events calendar and complete movie times listings.

Stay in the know! Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app (available for iOS and Android), or delivered to your inbox.

Beautiful Boy I’ve never been a parent or a junkie (yet!), but I found a lot that resonated in Beautiful Boy, a low-key film based on a pair of interconnected memoirs from father and son David and Nicolas Sheff. David (Steve Carell) chews himself up over son Nic’s (Timothée Chalamet) spiral into meth and heroin addiction, asking what he could have done to prevent it and wondering how he can fix it. Nic, meanwhile, copes with not only his body’s betrayal but with the disappointment he feels, both self-directed and from his patient, confused father. From Beautiful Boy’s perspective, Nic is really only guilty of having a curious mind, while David, a good father in every recognizable way, might have simply waited too long to show his beloved son some tough love. The performances make the whole thing sing. Carell and Chalamet both do expectedly good work, and they’re matched by Amy Ryan as Nic’s mother and Maura Tierney as his stepmother. Beautiful Boy is driven by the real-life horror of watching a loved one succumb to drugs, but it’s a family drama devoid of most of the genre’s manipulative qualities, substituting them with honesty, empathy, and fully drawn human beings. NED LANNAMANN Meridian 16 (Regal) & Oak Tree

Beetlejuice Newly dead Adam and Barbara Maitland aren’t down with the Deets family, who moved into the couple’s home after their unfortunate passing and don’t seem at all phased by the Maitlands’ attempts at scaring them out of it. Enter rotten, pervy Betelgeuse (“Beetlejuice”), who sells himself as a bio-exorcist capable of getting rid of their living pests, though he turns out to be a dangerous nuisance who’s more trouble than he’s worth. Tim Burton’s first film (and my first Tim Burton film, too) is on-point with vibrantly weird visuals, quick-witted comedy, and strong before-they-were-big-stars performances from (goddamn he looks young) Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis (extra dimply, woman-next-door funny), a teenage gothed-out Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton at his comedic one-liner-throwing best—like, has he ever been this good? It’s bizarre yet delightful and still tons of fun three decades later. Even the dated special effects retain their charm. LEILANI POLK Central Cinema Friday–Sunday

Bohemian Rhapsody I heart Queen. The song this film is named for was on the soundtrack of my youth. But early reactions to the film biopic (that’s more about Freddie Mercury than the British rock band he led) have been mixed to bad. The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan tweeted that Bohemian Rhapsody “is a glorified Wikipedia entry but Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury (and wears his wonderful costumes) with incredible gusto.” Our own Chase Burns was not a fan at all. (“The 15-minute long shit I took during the middle of the movie was more nuanced than the straight-washed hagiography peddled in that movie theater.”) In sum, enter at your own risk. LEILANI POLK Various locations

Boy Erased This film features the most prolific twinks of our time: Troye Sivan, Lucas Hedges, and Nicole Kidman. These three gays will dazzle the screen in this year’s most star-studded gay flick—oh wait, Troye Sivan is the only gay among them. Lucas Hedges has said he’s “not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual,” and Nicole Kidman, despite being the world’s most famous twink, is surprisingly a 51-year-old Australian woman. While think pieces on Hedges’s sexuality will probably dominate the conversation around Boy Erased, it looks like a cute holiday movie about gay conversion therapy. Go see it! CHASE BURNS SIFF Cinema Uptown & Meridian 16

Can You Ever Forgive Me? In Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Melissa McCarthy stars as real-life best-selling biographer Lee Israel. But this isn’t a life of literary glitz and glamour that you’re imagining after such a juicy introductory sentence! After falling on hard biographer times, Israel turned to a life of writerly crimes, forging letters from long-dead authors to make just enough cash to pay her rent, take her cat to the vet, and aggressively drink. This all sounds sad, I know, but there’s warmth underneath, thanks to Israel’s friendship with the charming, equally self-destructive Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant). McCarthy, who’s made a career of portraying loud women, is a different kind of jerk here—a real person who lashes out not for laughs, but because life is hard and she knows she’s making bad choices. ELINOR JONES SIFF Cinema Egyptian & AMC Seattle 10

Cinema Italian Style The Cinema Italian Style is a weeklong SIFF mini-festival featuring the best in contemporary Italian cinema. This final day, watch Euphoria, about two very different brothers who come together in difficult circumstances. SIFF Cinema Uptown Thursday only

Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch If you’ve ever wondered how the jammy vocals of Benedict Cumberbatch would sound coming from a neon-green Seussian monstrosity, you have your chance in this visit to Whoville. This time, the Grinch has a doggy sidekick named Max. Angela Lansbury voices the Mayor and Rashida Jones does Donna Lou Who. Various locations

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Twee hunter Newt Scamander returns for more J.K. Rowling-inspired exploits. Of the previous Fantastic Beasts film, critic Bobby Roberts wrote: “It is eager to please and amaze, but undersells its spectacle until that spectacle becomes perfunctory. It milks sentiment drier than the Arizona desert Newt’s trying to get to. It’s a goofy blast of kid-lit in love with Looney Tunes-inspired adventure—except when it’s a sour metaphor for child abuse and intolerance that owes one hell of a debt to Stephen King’s famous prom queen.” The new one has Johnny Depp as the titular dark wizard. Various locations

First Man The space stuff is great. When La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s biopic about Neil Armstrong focuses on NASA’s insanely ambitious and dangerous plan to put a man on the moon, it thrums with thrill and threat—from the astonishing scope of space to the claustrophobic confines of the command module, the best parts of First Man are worth experiencing on the biggest screen possible. Ryan Gosling offers an excellent turn as Armstrong, but even Gosling can’t liven up the story’s more pedestrian elements, which largely involve Armstrong’s relationship with his wife (Claire Foy) and his stoic mourning of his daughter. First Man bears the familiar curse of the biopic—it somehow feels both overlong and unsatisfying—and never quite escapes the shadow of The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s remarkable 1983 film that told a similar story with more grace and smarts. Still: the space stuff is great. ERIK HENRIKSEN Meridian 16 & AMC Pacific Place

Free Solo This highly praised, dizzying documentary reveals the heart-stopping journey of Alex Honnold as he conquered Yosemite’s El Capitan wall without ropes or safety gear. You don’t need to be a climber to be thrilled at this glimpse into human accomplishment. Various locations

Hep Cats Cats in movies have symbolized everything from elegance to curiosity to evil, but sometimes they are simply their wonderful selves. Hep Cats delivers a handful of these ailurophilic flicks, like Harry and Tonto, a charming road movie about a man and his cat forced to leave their Upper West Side apartment. It stars Art Carney, who won an Oscar for the role. JOULE ZELMAN Northwest Film Forum Saturday only

HUMP! Film Festival The 14th Annual HUMP! Film Festival, the world’s biggest and best porn short film festival, premiers in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco this November! After the opening festival concludes its run, HUMP! will hit the road in 2019 and screen in more than 50 cities across the U.S. and Canada. HUMP! invites filmmakers, animators, songwriters, porn-star wannabes, kinksters, vanilla folks, YOU, and other creative types to make short porn films—five minutes max—for HUMP! The HUMP! Film Festival screens in theaters and nothing is ever released online. HUMP! films can be hardcore, softcore, live action, animated, kinky, vanilla, straight, gay, lez, bi, trans, genderqueer—anything goes at HUMP! (Well, almost anything: No poop, no animals, no minors, no MAGA hats.) DAN SAVAGE On the Boards

Meow Wolf The adorably named Santa Fe artist collective Meow Wolf caught the fancy of George R.R. Martin, who helped them take over a disused bowling alley for an epic art exhibition. But success comes with its own struggles. Enter their world and find delirious, DIY inspiration. Northwest Film Forum Thursday only

Mid90s Mid90s tells the story of 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) who, after he’s rejected and bullied by his older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges), finds new role models in a crew of skaters led by the wise and magnanimous Ray (Na-kel Smith). Stevie’s willingness to repeatedly fall on hard concrete as he tries to maneuver a skateboard that looks half his height endears him to his newfound friends. The resultant feelings—and the film’s title—places Mid90s squarely in Hill’s nostalgic memory, where he both dramatizes and idealizes the kids’ adventures. SUZETTE SMITH Various locations

Monrovia, Illinois The amazingly prolific documentarian Frederick Wiseman (Ex Libris, In Jackson Heights, National Gallery, and 40 more films!) explores a tiny American hamlet steeped in old farming traditions and periodic ceremonies, like church services, Town Council meetings, Freemason rituals, weddings, and funerals. Northwest Film Forum Friday–Sunday

Mystery Train Exactly one year ago, I was walking down a street in Memphis, Tennessee, when I had what is known as a Proustian experience (or what literary critics call an “involuntary memory”). But in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, the involuntary memory sends the narrator, Marcel, to a town he visited as a boy (Combray). My memory, which was triggered by crossing a street, sent me to a film, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, which is set in Memphis and concerns young Japanese lovers who are obsessed with American popular culture. The couple walks around Memphis a lot. And while I walked around Memphis, I found myself walking, not through my Memphis, but theirs. This movie does not have much of a plot. CHARLES MUDEDE Grand Illusion Thursday only

Narcissister Organ Player The feminist body-shocker Narcissister, who carries out her performance art mostly naked and masked, muses on her Moroccan, Jewish, and African American roots and her intense relationship with her mother in this absurdist, experimental documentary. Northwest Film Forum

Night Heat They proliferated in anxious postwar America and still occasionally return to brood and smolder onscreen: films noirs, born of the chiaroscuro influence of immigrant German directors and the pressure of unique American fears. Once again, the museum will screen nine hard-boiled, moody crime classics like this week’s Night of the Hunter, one of the most unusual and thrilling films ever to come out of Hollywood. The veteran actor Charles Laughton took inspiration from the stylistic extremity of German Expressionism to film this hallucinatory tale of a psychotic preacher pursuing two young children who know he’s murdered their mother. Clear your Thursday night schedule for this one. Seattle Art Museum Thursday only

Night on Earth Five cabbies and five passengers around the globe share funny, weird, and intimate moments in Jim Jarmusch’s quirky classic—a little inconsequential, but charming and beautifully acted. Thanks to Roberto Benigni’s performance, you’ll never look at a pumpkin quite the same way again. Grand Illusion Thursday only

The Old Man and the Gun Based on a true story, the latest from David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) reteams the filmmaker with Robert Redford, who plays Forrest Tucker, the charming, handsome leader of a trio of geriatric bank robbers. Forrest’s partners in crime are Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (a fantastic Tom Waits). Like one of Forrest’s disarmingly polite robberies, The Old Man and the Gun starts out pleasant and sweet before revealing hints of darkness—each of these characters is deeper than they first appear, and one’s never quite sure what any of them are going to do next. Lowery is happy to tag along, capturing lives that are polished by time and dented by experience but remain bright and sharp with wit and passion. Watching Redford have this much fun is, as always, a goddamn delight. ERIK HENRIKSEN Admiral Theater

Overlord While carrying out a vital pre-D-Day mission, a ragtag bunch of American Dogfaces stumble across a small French village that’s just packed to the rafters with secret Gestapo experiments. (Note: In what may be a controversial move in this day and age, the Nazis are unequivocally depicted as the Bad Guys.) Genre mashups are often content to rest on their high-concept laurels, but this J.J. Abrams production is very willing to do the grunt work, solidly establishing its war movie bonafides—an early paratrooper sequence is genuinely alarming—before transitioning into full-tilt body horror. (This is an extremely moist movie.) If this sounds even remotely like your sort of thing, Overlord’s combination of heavy artillery and horrid creatures should prove to be pretty irresistible. When it comes to B-Movies, nasty, brutish, and short all count as positive traits. ANDREW WRIGHT Various locations

Ponyo You can pretty much guarantee that anything with Hayao Miyazaki’s name attached to it will be superbly wrought, fantastically animated, and delivered with a fine dose of poignant storytelling. He has left a fine legacy of films in his (no longer retired, for now) wake, including Ponyo, which has its 10-year anniversary this year and is being celebrated in a series of screening events across the country. This anime fantasy is loosely based on The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen’s version, not Disney’s), about an austere, potentially malevolent warlock/sea king whose young amphibious daughter runs (swims) away from her home. Sosuke, the little boy who scoops her from the waves, believes she’s a goldfish, names her Ponyo, and introduces her to a small slice of his world before her father finds her and brings her back to their underwater kingdom. But Ponyo’s taste of food and friendship fuels her next escape, setting off a chain of events that will change her (and Sosuke) forever. This film gets me choked up every time. LEILANI POLK SIFF Cinema Egyptian Saturday only

Prospect Is this the first major work of Northwest science fiction? Indeed, it imagines a moon that is like the evergreen forests that surround Seattle. The whole planet is green—gothic green. And the light on this strange moon is sharply slanted like Northwest light. The superb film is about prospectors (a father and daughter) looking for a root-made gem that will make them rich. The daughter, however, is keen to get off the planet because the line to it is about to be shut down. But her father is money-mad. If he does not make it here, he will never make it anywhere in the galaxy. Translucent insects float through the air. There are other money-mad prospectors in the endless forest. You do not leave this planet without paying a big price. Money is the root of all evil. CHARLES MUDEDE Meridian 16

Sadie The latest from local filmmaker Megan Griffiths (Lucky Them, Eden) has a perfect Northwest feel. Sadie is 13 and lives with her mother in a dilapidated trailer park. Sadie worships her absent father while being impossible with her harried mother. She is smart and precocious, trying to come to an understanding of how the world works, but the adults around her have their own problems. The film shows the way adults communicate with kids, never talking to them directly, trying to fool the kid and themselves. This leaves young people with half-ass ideas, and they run with them without really understanding the situation, with mixed results. The film has a great cast: The wonderful Melanie Lynskey plays the mom, with Sophia Mitri Schloss as Sadie. GILLIAN ANDERSON SIFF Cinema Uptown Sunday only

Seattle Turkish Film Festival The Turkish American Cultural Association of Washington will present the sixth annual edition of their community-driven, volunteer-led festival featuring a rich panorama of new Turkish films. For the final weekend, check out Something Useful, an intense drama about two women, one of whom has a grim mission, who meet on the train; The Legend of the Ugly King, about the Kurdish actor/director Yilmaz Güney; and Taksim Hold’em, about a man determined to play his weekly poker game despite the massive anti-government protests taking place outside. SIFF Film Center Friday–Saturday

SHRIEK!: Thirst The class focusing on women and minorities in horror is back with a screening and discussion of Park Chan-wook’s Thirst, about a saintly Catholic priest transformed into an insatiable blood-drinker and sex fiend by a risky medical experiment. Here’s an excerpt from the review Lindy West wrote at its release: “Thirst is a horror movie, albeit a silly one. Actual scares are few to none—instead, Sang-hyun’s painfully earnest consternation at trying to live as an ethical monster (losing his priestly virginity, daintily sipping a comatose man’s blood straight from the IV) make it a funny, cartoonish, and strangely sweet fable about ethics versus instincts: ‘Is it a sin for a fox to eat a chicken?’ Unfortunately, Thirst drags on for a punishing gazillion hours—ethical monster shacks up with manipulative harpy and the complications pile up like bodies (because, you know, they literally are bodies)—and you feel like you’ll never see your home or your mom or the precious golden sun again.” It might not be the most positive of reviews, but you’re guaranteed to get a good discussion out of it with organizers Evan J. Peterson and Heather Marie Bartels. Naked City Brewery Sunday only

Suspiria Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s reinterpretation of Argento’s film Suspiria is a precisely choreographed mindfuck, and progressing through the film’s six acts feels like peeling off layers of an onion until you reach the reeking core. It’s swift, brutal, and breathtaking, but it’s also frequently bogged down by overcomplicated subplots and distracting details. The original premise remains the same—ancient ballerina witches trying to live forever by sacrificing students—but this time around, the Markos Dance Academy is located right next to the Berlin Wall in post-World War II Germany, and Susie Bannion (a very meh Dakota Johnson) is a runaway Mennonite from Ohio. Whatever parallels Guadagnino hoped to draw between the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust and the bloody chaos going on inside the coven ends up feeling more confusing than profound. CIARA DOLAN AMC Pacific Place & SIFF Cinema Uptown

A Star Is Born If you’re entering the theatre simply desiring a couple solid musical numbers, then your $15 will not have been spent in vain. Unfortunately, the movie falls flat as only a two-dimensional vignette of common misogyny can. Ally, the lead character played by Lady Gaga, is a woman who knows she has talent but needs to hear that she is sufficiently pretty to be an appropriate vehicle for said talent. Like any woman vying for a piece of the proverbial pie, she is just one man away from success. One man to lead her, to mold her, to push her through to the finish line. This man-shaped void is filled by her father, her husband, her manager, her producer, her choreographer, and her photographer, all of whom take credit or receive credit from other men for her creative output and appearance. A Star Is Born is a classic tale, meant to be mutable, fluid, to adapt within each age it is reimagined. But the flaws of the inherent narrative are too real, too every-day damaging to continue being told in the form of a cinematic fantasy. KIM SELLING Various locations

Voyeur Presents ‘The Prowler’ The November edition of VOYEUR brings “one of the bleakest noirs ever made,” Joseph Losey’s The Prowler, about a man who’s determined to get what he feels society owes him—an unhappily married woman played by Evelyn Keyes. Scarecrow Sunday only

Widows Arriving a week before Thanksgiving, Widows is an overflowing plateful of entertainment, piled high with juicy plot, buttery performances, and plenty of sweet genre pie. It’s a mash-up of pulp and prestige that shouldn’t work well on paper but plays out tremendously well on-screen. Director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) cowrote the twisty script with novelist Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects), and while the interconnected webs of Chicago’s crime underworld and its racially charged local politics contain more than enough intrigue, the performances are what’ll grab you. I mean, just look at this cast: Harry (Liam Neeson) leads a crew of career criminals (including Jon Bernthal and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) in a heist that goes disastrously wrong, leaving their widows Veronica (Viola Davis), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) with a serious problem when crime boss Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) and his enforcer brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya) demand they return the stolen money. The real fun is watching McQueen, Flynn, and this ridiculously large talent pool of actors lay the groundwork for a slick, rich, tantalizing thriller, and then connecting all the dots. NED LANNAMANN Various locations

Also Playing: Our critics don’t recommend these movies, but you might like to know about them anyway.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Instant Family

Nobody’s Fool

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Venom

Stay in the know! Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app (available for iOS and Android), or delivered to your inbox.

Source: https://www.thestranger.com/things-to-do/2018/11/15/35633515/30-movies-worth-watching-in-seattle-this-weekend-nov-15-18-2018

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The women who make a dwelling gaming on Twitch

New Post has been published on https://workreveal.biz/the-women-who-make-a-dwelling-gaming-on-twitch/

The women who make a dwelling gaming on Twitch

Two years in the past Chelsea quit her job as a pharmacy technician to play video games.

“I went to paintings in the future, and I was like, ‘I would sincerely be making more money if I had stayed at domestic and kept gambling video video games than coming here,’” she says. That week she exceeded in her resignation. Women are also gaming on twitch

Chelsea is one in all a developing quantity of Australian women making a residing from Twitch.tv, a live-video-streaming platform that allows humans from all around the world to observe one another play video games. It’s additionally a social network: chat rooms are embedded into consumer pages next to video streams, permitting the broadcaster and target audience to engage in actual time. Going using the username X mins, Chelsea has grown to be famed for her competencies in the name of Responsibility – a lot so that gambling it online has come to be her bread and butter. Each night approximately 10 pm she turns on her webcam, chats to some her 330,000 fans and receives to work.

Twitch has come what may escape becoming a household call no matter its excellent reputation: the company claims it has nine.7 million active users on its site each day and more than 2 million streamers a month. Amazon noticed its capability in 2014 and bought it for $970m, even though the selection left many commercial enterprise commentators scratching their heads at the time.

The employer doesn’t have the handiest deal in on-line interactions: it also lives streams some the sector’s largest online game tournaments, in which expert gamers compete in stadiums in front of hundreds of people and thousands and thousands of online visitors. Audiences for recreation games routinely surpass the ones of mainstream television – but one way or the other the scene manages to hold the illusion of being a lifestyle.

While a tiny quantity of games ends up tournament megastars, other lawn-range streamers make their money through fan donations and sponsorships. Popular streamers are provided with the option of partnering with Twitch to install a subscriptions function on their page, which offers customers the possibility to pay a fee folks$4.99 a month to the streamer’s channel. Twitch, of course, takes a slice, but 1/2 the subscription fee is going without delay to the streamer, and maximum customers subscribe to assist their favoured games.

“It becomes base profits for streamers, in place of just relying on tips, which one month can be $a hundred, which subsequent month will be $4,000 – you by no means recognise,” says Mia. She is a relative newcomer to the sector of live streaming. Although she has been gambling video games considering she become a child, she most effective found Twitch approximately 18 months ago, via an internet pal. “I didn’t have gamer friends … and it’s not something which you might just stumble throughout,” she explains. “While I discovered Twitch and noticed that such a lot of people have these kinds of friends and were doing notable matters and sharing they enjoy together, I merely without a doubt desired to get on board.”

Mia, whose display call is SeriesofBlurs, died immediately in. “I was running my usual complete-time activity, and then I would come domestic and begin streaming without delay … and then visit nighttime and then repeat,” she says.

She knew in no time that she desired to come to be a complete-time streamer, but constructing up a following Even as preserving down every other task turned into tight. Then there had been the social implications. “I’d constantly be having to shield it, now not simplest to my pals, who were like, ‘Why aren’t you popping out?,’ however to myself as correctly, because I had numerous self-doubt.”

Being an expert gamer sounds like a dream come authentic and an increasing number of Australian girls are making it their career – a lot of them the usage of Twitch as a platform, making everywhere between the equivalent of the minimum salary to loads of thousands of greenbacks a yr.

twitch

Whether or not it could be a decades-long profession, although, stays to be visible. While there are numerous men whose live gaming careers seem not to be hampered by way of their age, the range of ladies over the age of 30 visible within the gaming sphere is relatively small. “It relies upon on the game,” says Chelsea. “I’ve seen a few Sim Town and Civilisation video games, and I’ve seen older girls there, but it’s very rare.”

Kat, whose username is Lower fruit, is some other excessive-profile Australian gamer with about 240,000 followers on Twitch. “It’s miles a dream activity,” she says. “It’s a whole lot of money for gambling video games. It’s far a dream. So it might be a form of difficult to move away from that. So I would love to be doing it so much time as possible till I burn out. However, I am open to and that I’m exploring different things as well.”

Like much of the web world, streamers and their followers are often recognised handiest using their first call or chosen on-display handle. This semi-anonymity is each a boon and a burden for female gamers. Harassment frequently comes via a pseudonym. On the same time, to protect themselves, some ladies deliberately maintain their personal information, consisting of their surname and area, even their age, out of the equation. Mum or dad Australia is the use of best first names and display screen handles on this piece for that reason.

Mia, Chelsea and Kat are fantastic about their career preference. “as long as I hold putting attempt in, I foresee that I ought to do it for the next five or 10 years at the least,” says Chelsea.

Mia says: “on the end of the day, I’m doing what I love.”

How gaming have become a boys’ membership Surveys during the last couple of years advocate that, far from being a tiny minority in a male-ruled industry, ladies make up at least half of-of the gaming population. But notwithstanding being among a growing wide variety of seen, high-profile women in professional gaming, all of the women Father or mother Australia spoke to had something else in common, too: a sense of isolation.

The gaming industry markets itself unequivocally as a boys’ membership. For this reason, girls’ entry into this space is followed by using dangerously loaded assumptions from a bit of their male target audience.

“I sense like being a gamer has usually isolated me,” Mia says. “developing up in a girls’ college, it wasn’t virtually commonplace to be into video games.”

Chelsea recollects having comparable emotions. “I’d continually be so excited for my friends to depart so I ought to sit down down at my computer and play games all night,” she says.

She didn’t tell her friends about her gaming at the start. “It was an aspect that I kept at the lowdown. It wasn’t a lot of shame; it’s just I felt like [they] wouldn’t apprehend it the manner that folks who play the video games do.”

Kat says: “I had some desirable girlfriends that did play games in excessive college but they form of grew out of it. And I guess that turned into the component: they grew out of it and me in no way did.”

It changed into boys who delivered Kat to gaming. “I had boy cousins, older boy cousins, and also you just can’t assist it. If they’re playing it, you need to play too.”

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however if half of the gaming population is a woman, how could a technology of lady game enthusiasts develop up understanding so few different women who play?

“It’s no coincidence that most video game shops plaster their partitions with promotional posters for motion games, shooters and struggle games,” writes Tracey Lien in a chunk for the net magazine Polygon.

Lien explains how in 1983, the online game market spectacularly collapsed, largely because of being flooded with sub-par product. An industry that changed into, till then, largely gender-neutral, and protected many women at both the executive and improvement stages, began scrabbling round for a manner out of a financial hole. Lien writes that when the crash, “the sports industry’s pursuit of a safe and reliable market caused it coming in at the young male. And so the advertising campaigns started. Video games were strictly advertised as products for guys, and the message became clear: no women allowed.”

The Australian game developer Leena Van Deventer argues that the consequences of this gendered mass marketing are most apparent inside the present day technology of 20- and 30-something gamers. “ladies have constantly been there,” she says. “girls have been instrumental at the beginning of games and tech. However, our era remains very much dealing with the hangover of being instructed it’s now not for us and the result that has had in our establishments and in our way of life.”

In other phrases, if a technology of girls grew up questioning they didn’t know any girl game enthusiasts, it was due to the fact they had been cowed into silence by using a subculture that repeatedly told them video games were not for them.

Nowhere is this greater apparent than in the development of Gamergate – a mostly nameless on-line harassment campaign, concerning rape and death threats, which centred on discrediting some of the ladies inside the gaming network, which include the developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and the critic Anita Sarkeesian. It established, greater than something, that there are deep pockets of vitriol within the gaming international reserved mainly for girls.

“women’s look performs a larger position [in their success] than their real gameplay,” Chelsea says. “While guys’ appearance, it does not count if their gameplay is exceptional.”

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And with regards to creating wealth, there are delivered expectancies. “I used to be without a doubt concerned approximately getting donations because of what could be requested,” Kat says. She started streaming While she becomes at college studying journalism. Her connection became low quality – “I don’t even realise how people saw me thru the pixels” – but it became sufficient to permit her to construct a strong following which ended in some very generous donations.

“There are a few bizarre matters that streamers get requested to do, like sending panties – people email and ask for that,” she says. “Or like, photos in their toes in exchange for money.”

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