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startledstars · 3 years

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It's really sad that you've convinced yourself to accept evil because God will better you for it. You can believe in God and believe that he wouldn't want evil to happen to you or anyone else. That's a problem with Christianity though. A lot of religious, cult peoples have a "by all means, even evil, necessary for the greater good" mentality and that's not okay. I'm so sorry you believe your god is abusing you and that you're okay with it. Life or the universe is both good and bad, not god. The trials in life aren't there to benefit you, it's there so when you get through it, you'll grow and learn and prevent it from happening to someone else, not be blessed as an individual. A supreme being of love doesn't dole out pain or evil. Someone who loves you wouldn't hurt you with such abuse that you call it evil. You need to believe this in your life, not in just some spiritual way. Please don't ever justify evil for a cause for good. Please. No one deserves that.

Hi anon,

First of all, thank you for this question. I can honestly see how my previous post can make me sound like a battered, self-deluded housewife trying to justify a miserable situation. Just a few months ago, if someone said what I said today, I would sincerely pity them too.

I actually agree with 90% of your message, and the 10% is a misunderstanding: I’m not being abused by anyone right now, least of all God. I don’t think anyone deserves to be abused. I do not accept evil. I despise it. And while I don’t think God wants people to suffer evil, if you look at the world, you see that He allows just that.

You can’t believe in an all-powerful God who can change or prevent or reverse any situation instantly, and pretend that he doesn’t have absolute power over evil too. God has power over evil, but there are times when He lets evil run its course. The question is, why?

You also said:

“The trials in life aren’t there to benefit you . They’re there so you can help other once you get through them.”

I agree with the second part of the statement, but disagree with the first. The trials in life, even the most horrible suffering, are used by God to benefit you, too. I’ve experienced these benefits firsthand.

(If there is a single thing that God doesn’t use to benefit you personally in the long run, as in eternity, can you say he’s 100% good? Even one exception means He falls short of that 100%. This sounds really extreme, but it’s a great thought exercise.)

And you’re right in saying that God does not ‘will’ evil. That’s why I said that he ‘allowed’ me to be abused by evil people. In other words, he gave me to other people with free will and wicked intentions. He allowed their will, instead of imposing his own, because this is one way God gives freedom to his creations.

I have been abused over and over again, for years on end. These evil people were actually the ones closest to me; my parents, one grandparent, and a parade of so-called ‘friends’ who never really treated me like a human being. The abuse started when I was under 4 years old. Every single one of my abusers have tried to convince me that their abuse was actually an expression of love, and I believed them, even while they relentlessly tried to snuff out my will to live.

(Anyone who’s been abused and is coming out of it will understand how the abuser does this and what effect it has on you. It is a horrible thing.)

While the abuse was taking place, I didn’t know it was evil, and I did not know they were evil. This world teaches us to not believe that evil exists, or that evil is somehow exclusive to genocidal dictators. The world teaches us that abusers aren’t evil; they’re victims of their own twisted psychology, and can be ‘fixed’ with the correct treatment.

This may be true, but the reason evil people become evil is because even if they are aware of their shortcomings, they’d rather project their dysfunction than take any responsibility for fixing themselves. Evil people actively refuse to change for the better, and are only interested in dragging other people down. They are incapable of love, though they can imitate it well enough.

So, how can God give a child into the hands of people like this, and still be considered ‘good?’

I can only speak to my experience, but due to the length and extent of my entanglement with evil people, I can:

Say with confidence that evil exists, and if there’s such great evil in this world, there must be a greater good.

Recognize potentially problematic individuals and avoid them

Recognize the potential for evil within myself, and work to prevent myself from becoming abusive. (Even as a ‘victim’ I had developed abusive tendencies. I am not innocent. This is Another Fucking Pill.)

Cut off toxic relationships without a single glance backwards; I have not been abused by anyone for months now, on any level, and if someone tries to cross a line, I assert myself firmly and confidently. Most victims of abuse either become abusers, or fall prey to other abusers. I avoided both these traps.

Strengthen my faith and relationship. When there’s an abusive/controlling person trying to ‘get me’ (anyone with a job will understand) I pray to God to remove this person from my life. He does, every. Single. Time. Because He also doesn’t want me to fall prey to anyone ever again; He’s already let me see what happens if I trust the wrong people.

Recognize ‘good’ people too and build relationships with them. Because many people are good, have the right intentions, and don’t need you to make excuses for their shitty behavior because they behave just fine on their own.

Appreciate the healing power of God. If God allows you to suffer, he will use that suffering to make you wiser and more powerful, then carry you out of the fire and make you brand new; better for the pain, but also like the pain never touched you in the first place. If you met me irl, you would never guess that I’d ever struggled as much as I did. This goes for appearance too; stress should age people rapidly, but I actually look much younger than I should, untouched by the burden of all these years. He did that.

Ok this answer has gotten so long and there’s so much more to say even though I mostly agree with you anyways lol. Also thanks for the comment on ‘cult mentality,’ because once again, you’re right, and that deserves it’s own post. I believe that all cults are Satanic, and Satan tries to imitate God. To imitate God, you need to really, really understand how God works. So Satan knows that only God uses evil for good, which is why cults employ this mentality; it’s another way the devil mocks the creator. It’s another lie, but to lie, you have to know the truth first. Hope that makes sense; cults can’t use evil the same way God can.

Tl:dr evil is never justified, but if God allows evil, it is because that evil is a ‘channel’ for greater good, like the labor pains to bring a child into the world. I do not condone evil, and people should never knowingly hurt others or let themselves be hurt. But if it happened, God allowed it. And if God allowed it, it’s for a good reason.

Thanks again for the message and for sharing your perspective. I hope this gives some food for thought, because that’s what you’ve done for me. Merry (late) Christmas and hope you have a great 2021 :)

#spiritual awakening #spiritual awareness #spirituality #I have so many thoughts on everything and want to be concise without losing any finer points #so here we are #hopefully anon can at least skim this #listen to deepen your relationship with god you do have to question him constantly #faith is never blind #and he’s the ultimate intelligence and ultimate goodness so he WILL answer any sincere inquiry #including “how can you do this to me? it makes me want to hate you.#because above all else God wants you to be honest with him and youself #and that means really grilling him about evil #you can’t skirt the issue just because it’s painful

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prorevenge · 4 years

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Stingy, narcissistic boss negs and skimps on employees, so I damage his ego with some a-hole tax.

Let's call my asshole boss Eugene, since his stinginess reminds me of Eugene Krabs from SpongeBob Squarepants, except Krabs is nowhere near malicious. In order to display the full satisfaction of this revenge, I will have to describe a few (but not limited) things Eugene did that entitles him to being a complete jackass.

For the context, Eugene owns a small company that provides artistic services of some sort and never hired full-timers (which I later learnt that it was due to his stinginess). Initially, when I saw the open part-time position, I thought it was ideal for me as I had external commitments, and needed some sort of income. The job offers about 550USD per month (I don’t live in the US, this is a rough conversion), but only required me to clock in about 90 hours a month. It wasn’t a very good offer, but good enough for me as I considered myself to be inexperienced in field. Note that Eugene had seen my portfolio and knew my ability level before hiring me.

The first couple of months was fine, I worked the hours I was supposed to and got paid accordingly, occasionally extending my shift at my own time due to the nature of the work, but I didn’t mind. I guess Eugene saw this as an advantage he could exploit later on during my employment. It is also important to note that Eugene would often ask about my well-being, how did I spent my weekends etc. At this point in time, it all seemed like courtesy talk so I didn’t pay much attention to it. He would ask about my previous employment and my reason for leaving, which I answered honestly that their work system was unsuitable for me. This will be important later.

Eugene gradually began to grow more impatient towards me, often blaming me for not being able to match up to his ability. Remember when I was inexperienced thus the payrate? Eugene had over a decade of experience in this expertise and he expected me to be at his level when I was only 3 months in. The stress was intense and I began working longer hours just to keep up and produce work at the best quality I could. I was under the belief that if I worked hard enough, my effort will speak. Even though this was only a part-time position, I overcommitted my time there and took pride in my work. My external commitments were barely scraping by. I was exhausted, but thought I was doing a good job until Eugene “spoke” to me one day.

Eugene pulled me into his office and lectured me on my work etiquette, saying that I wasn’t putting enough effort he was considering letting me go. At this point, I was beyond confused. Did he really not see the effort I put in? Was I delusional in thinking that I was actually doing well and my work had been improving? I tried speaking up but he quickly diverted the topic, telling me he knew the reason why my previous employer hated me. It was because I was lazy and fussy with my job. To say I was in disbelief was an understatement. Not only did I believe I did my best with every task handled to me, Eugene had registered my flaws during casual conversations and twisted my words to his advantage. I had no idea how to react and simply ask him what expected of me. He instantly replied that he would like me to double my hours working for him, at the same monthly payrate. His reasons? It’s my fault that I am not experienced enough to produce quality work, thus it should be under my own responsibility and time to make up for it. My external commitments didn’t matter, he said, as this job was my only source of income and should be kept as priority. It finally dawned to me that Eugene was a narcissistic sociopath who was only held conversations so that he could learn a person’s weaknesses for his manipulation.

Now, if you read my title, you will see that Eugene was not only a narc but also stingy af. Eugene is obsessed with maximising his profits. Any business owner would love that, I agree, but Eugene is down to every cent in immoral and even possibly, illegal ways. He would sell a service to a client, and upon receiving the deposit, deliver something else. He was smart enough to keep his contracts vague (for both clients AND employees) so that nobody could not take legal actions against him. More than often, his clients would be left to wits’ end as it would be too late and expensive to engage another vendor by the time they realised they had been scammed. Eugene would then demanded another set of payment to deliver what he had originally promised, overcharging the client an average of 100% to 200% more that what was agreed. Eventually realising that they’d been played, most people would be too exhausted to pursue further action and prayed for the project to be over so they didn’t have to deal with his antics anymore. This inaction probably fed Eugene’s ego that he could get away playing dirty every time. There are many more things I would like to rant about Eugene, but this is prorevenge sub, not recruitinghell so most of you would like to get to the good stuff soon.

So in my country, employers are required to pay a certain amount of tax for every local employee they hire. While it is not exactly tax, it is obligated by law and negligence will result in a hefty fine and possibly jail time. These “taxes” are technically contributions for the employee’s retirement funds, which is payable by every employer. Employer can deduct a certain percentage of the contributions from the employee’s wages. This law has its own complications since there are a certain group of people exempted from it, such as students or interns. Now, Eugene is the classic example of narc who thinks that he is smarter than everyone else. He felt that he was smart enough to evade the law by drafting a contract with vague details to protect himself, and was deluded enough to believe that everyone would believe him as long as he sounded convincing. In other words, he thought of people as sacks of potatoes with no opinion of their own. If anyone was to have a perspective, it had to be his way or the wrong way.

I stayed in Eugene’s company for about 4 months, before I felt too mentally overwhelmed. On the day that I left, I called in to check on my Contribution account and just as I had expected, Eugene hadn’t paid a single cent over the past 4 months. The officer on the other end of the line asked if I would like to report this as a case, guess my answer.

A week later, I received an update from the Contribution Board, saying that Eugene had disputed my case, claiming that I was only an intern and thus, exempted from the law. This jerk was playing dirty as a last attempt to steal from me. As I had mentioned, Eugene thought of himself as a smart man, and probably felt that the officer would rule the case in his favor since he had world-class convincing skills and his vague “contract” would have protected him either way. Fine, Eugene. So you think you can get away just like any other time. You must have gotten pretty confident by now. Well, not this time, Eugene. I wrote a 2 pages long email to the Contribution Board Officer, with every reason and evidence I can find on how am I not an intern, like Eugene claimed. Knowing his antics, I went the extra mile to research all the exempted group and wrote every possible reason on how am I NOT in the category. Excessive? Yes. Worth it? HELL YES.

I didn’t hear from the Officer for 2 weeks and when I finally did, he informed me that Eugene had agreed to pay my contributions. Remember when I said employers are permitted to deduct a certain percentage from employee’s wages? Due to his negligence, Eugene could no longer do that and had to pay the full amount, on top of the fines that incurred along with it. If he had dutifully abide by the law, it would had only costed him a third of what he had to pay. So that’s a bit of asshole tax for you, Eugene. Now that I’ve gotten back what I was owed, I have decided to move on, but the story did not end there.

A ex-colleague of mine, NJ, who is still working for Eugene told me that during the 2 weeks I didn’t hear from the Officer, Eugene was busy fighting for his stand by giving every reason that I an exempted individual. The officer, having seen my email, soon got tired of his nonsense and gave him a deadline to pay up or he’ll be brought to court. NJ said he had never seen Eugene so defeated before. To top it off, it seemed like karma had finally caught up to him as he started losing more and more clients due to his unethical practices. The fine came to him when he had no clients that month so it was a very obvious dent in his bank account. Ultimately, it was not a huge amount, but knowing Eugene’s stinginess and ego, I think the damage was enough to qualify for this sub.

(source) story by (/u/anonymous_bun)

#prorevenge #by /u/anonymous_bun #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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moodyvalentinestories · 5 years

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O Thomas Hunt, Wherefore Art Thou My Professor? | Chapter 41

Summary: It’s time for… the hearing!

———————————————————————————————————–

Monday through Thursday passed in a blur. If anyone had asked me what I’d done the entire week, I wouldn’t have been able to give them a precise answer. I’d gone to class. I’d done my schoolwork – though sloppily, as I couldn’t focus on much except the hearing looming ahead. At some point, I’d talked to my friends, too, and I remembered them telling me everything would be all right. I hadn’t believed it then, and I still didn’t.

One thing I did know was that Hunt made good on his promise – he’d ignored me for the entire week. He hadn’t said a single word to me. Hell, he hadn’t even looked at me. Though I knew that would change sooner rather than later. He may not have been the head of the committee, but he still was a part of it. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, I had yet to find out. I assumed it was the latter, though.

So the days had come and gone, and before I knew it, it was Friday. I forced myself to get up early and put some effort into my appearance. After all, I needed to make a good impression. Yes, two of the committee members had already made up their mind, but they weren’t the only ones making the decisions. While I didn’t quite believe it, I’d hoped I would at least be able to convince them that I deserved to be here.

At exactly seven-thirty, Ethan, Addison, and I met up at the main building.

“I’ve taken care of everything,” Ethan assured me. “Lisa, Holly, and Chris will be here in time. The board has received copies of your three projects. And, should it come to that, I have tissues, too.”

Addison hit him in the arm. “Hey, a little more confidence.”

“For… tears of joy, of course,” he tried to save the situation.

I sighed. “It’s fine. I’m not deluding myself into thinking I’ll come out of this still a student at HWU.”

“Both of you, stop it. Weren’t you the ones who went out and found project number one on the very first day of finding out Rachel was on probation? Where’d that spirit go?” Addison said. “I, for one, believe in you.”

“Well, here goes nothing,” I said and we walked inside, where we took a seat outside the door.

Not too much later, Ethan and I were called into the room. Well, this was it.

First, Bianca and her friends were called in one by one to deliver their statements about me. All of it baseless accusations, of course, but Professor Singh seemed to take them by their word. Ethan, basically acting as my lawyer, and I did our best to defend me, but it didn’t seem to do a lot of good. Or maybe it did. I couldn’t exactly tell since Professor Singh’s face seemed to be made of stone and Hunt… well, he seemed strangely absent-minded. It was obvious that he would have rather been anywhere else than here in this room.

When Bianca’s entourage had all given their statements, Professor Singh announced that it was now time to bring in the industry professionals who would vouch for me.

“First, the defence calls Lisa Valentine to the stand,” Ethan proclaimed.

“Mr Blake, this is not a courtroom,” Professor Singh said, clearly done with Ethan’s antics. “Just… let her in.”

Someone opened the door and the pink-haired singer entered the room. I assumed Lisa looked more like what Professor Singh had anticipated I’d look like than I did. I started to worry that she wouldn’t accept her testimony. Ethan noticed me getting more nervous.

“She’s been in the industry since she was a child,” he reminded me. “She’s definitely an ‘industry professional’.”

So Lisa was asked to tell the committee about my character and work ethic, which she did. She told them I had been easy to work with and that she’d quite enjoyed it. It was clear to me that Professor Singh didn’t much care for Lisa’s opinion of me, but she took notes nonetheless. I just hoped they were good ones.

Next up was Chris. He, like Lisa, only said good things about me as a professional but was also able to go more into detail about my character. I may not have entirely agreed with everything he said, but I appreciated that he did his best to make me look good.

“One more question, Mr Winters,” Professor Singh said once Chris was done with his statement. I got a queasy feeling. “I have heard rumours you were more than just friendly with Miss Fields. Which, of course, would cloud your judgement. Is there any truth to those rumours?”

Oh no. Oh hell no.

“Absolutely not,” Chris said. This statement made Hunt straighten up. Great. Now he decided to pay attention? Just… great.

I looked at Hunt intently. Was he going to say something? He would have to, right? His eyes met mine for a split second, but he looked away immediately. Crap.

But he didn’t say anything. He kept quiet. I assumed he didn’t want to reveal he knew or, worse, cared about my personal life.

And I was thankful. Not only for his silence but also for helping me out before. Had there been any photos, any proof, everything could have gone to shit.

“Good. We will move on, then. Thank you for your time, Mr Winters.”

Chris got up and left but not before giving me a reassuring smile. I smiled back, but it probably wasn’t all that believable.

“Next, we’re bringing up Holly Chang,” Ethan said as Holly walked into the room.

“Who?” Professor Singh asked and my heart sunk.

“Holly Chang,” she said. “I wrote the script for Triangulaire.”

“Which doesn’t make you an industry professional. What other screen credits are on your resume, Ms Chang?”

“Well…” Holly said. “I…”

“She wrote Permanent Wound,” Ethan jumped in. “That makes her a legend!”

“More like a cautionary tale,” Professor Singh said. “Permanent Wound is most famous for never being made!”

“Only because no one was worthy of making it!” Holly exclaimed.

“Duly noted. But it is the decision of this board that Ms Chang is not an industry professional.”

Finally, finally, Hunt said something. Though he didn’t get far. “With all due respect, Priya–”

“Silence. This is my final decision.”

“We… we request a brief recess to find someone else,” Ethan stuttered. I hadn’t thought anything would rattle him. Then again, no one could have expected this. Not even Hunt, apparently!

“There are no breaks, Mr Blake. If there is no one else, the board will have no choice but to–”

“Article 42-f!” Ethan said.

“What was that?”

“Article 42-f of the university bylaws? It states a thirty-minute break must be allowed for lunch.”

Professor Singh thought it over for a few moments. “Very well. You’ve got half an hour. I suggest you use it wisely.”

“Thank you, Professor Singh,” I said. Not that it would make much of a difference. But at least she was giving me a chance.

Ethan and I left the room and were met with a confused Addison. “Is it over already?”

I shook my head. “But it might as well be. Professor Singh didn’t accept Holly as an industry professional and now… we’re one short.”

“But you’ve worked with so many people… I’m sure we can find someone! Scarlett, maybe? Or someone else if she’s not available. We have to at least try.”

“I don’t think–”

“Rachel, please. Don’t give up yet.”

She was right. I couldn’t just give up like that. Not when I’d been given a chance.

“Alright. Let’s call everyone we know who might be able to help,” I said and started dialling the first number.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm didn’t last long. Call after call either went to voicemail or, if I was lucky enough to get someone on the phone, they told me there was no way they could make it. By the time the thirty minutes were up, I still hadn’t found anyone.

“I suppose this is it then,” I said. “I’m going to miss you guys.”

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Tags: @silversparrow02 @hopelessromantic1352 @alleksa16

#professor hunt #hollywood u #hollywood u: rising stars #Thomas Hunt #wherefore art thou my professor #rachel #hwu #hwu hunt

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tenjouu · 5 years

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revolvere (2/?)

facetious plot summary: Lancelot loses his magic upon traveling back in time to the day of Alice the Second’s arrival. How will he save the world equipped with only his winning looks and charisma? Read on to find out! lmao!

1 | 2 : delegations

This time around, Lancelot learns to delegate.

No wonder he couldn’t come up with any good plans once he’d entered office. He was overwhelmed with the work and never could ignore the impending doom of his world, so it affected his productivity in some ways. Work smarter, not harder.

His officers reluctantly write yesterday off as an ‘off-day’. He’s back to his aloof persona, which gets them off his case, but he hires two aides to deal with the sheer mountain of paperwork on his desk, which gets them kind of back on his case, but they can’t really say anything about it since they know how busy Lancelot is.

It’s not unreasonable to buckle under the pressure. And with the war brewing, his work literally increases tenfold. Lancelot doesn’t have anything to prove about being able to do all of it himself.

(“What?” Kyle would probably say, if you asked him about it. “He’s obviously an impostor. The real Lance would never pass up the chance to be unreasonable about his workload.”)

But Lancelot begrudgingly admits being king wouldn’t take nearly as long if he didn’t have to read all this shit. The glorious part about kingship is really nothing. Sometimes, he has inspections, meetings with foreign dignitaries, trips to the Civic Center, but those are few and far between.

His daily work is more like managing the salt directed at Hearts Quarter from the Diamonds (claiming political favoritism), charters for new institutions by nobles who have money, grievances and civil cases to be scheduled for later dates, his pet project of reforming the criminal system, marriage proposals from wealthy families within and outside of Cradle, requests for funding, requests for money, requests for more land, requests for a peace treaty—

Necessary, but some of these things are not quite like the others. The problem is that Lancelot never knows which ones he can throw out on first glance because no one reviews the documents before he does. But Lancelot doesn’t really have to address all of these himself.

(He repurposes an unused chamber room into a new office.

“Reject all of the marriage proposals but diplomatically,” he tells his new aides. “If the charters are for a good cause, accept them. I will give you a list of my scheduled council meetings, so arrange court dates as necessary. I don’t care for the time, but not after dinner. Assuage Diamonds Quarter that there’s no favoritism here; I have no patience for either faction and therefore cannot discriminate on principle.” He pauses. “Maybe don’t put it quite like that. If someone asks for an audience with the king, determine for yourself whether it’s of importance and respond. If you have any documents you’re unsure of, place them on my desk, or just ask me.”

The two of them stare at him with wide eyes. The woman looks a little stunned. The man is positively flabbergasted. He must’ve wrecked their impression of him irreparably.

Once again, zero fucks.

Lancelot turns to survey the massive towers on his desk.

“And utilize paper organizers,” he adds as an afterthought. “Label the bins so I know what is what.”)

All in a day’s work. Now that he doesn’t have to read all of those papers himself, he easily has time to join his officers for dinner.

So he does. He never particularly was good at fitting in during social functions, and he might have been too ashamed to do anything about it once before, but he finds himself no longer caring.

Among other things that he says to them, one of them is: “I’m ordering you all to hire aides if you need them.”

Apparently, that’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back, because Jonah finally confronts him after dinner.

“King Lancelot, forgive my forwardness, but recently…” He grits his teeth, clenching his fist in the hallway. Lancelot looks down, impassive. “…Have you been well? My understanding is that you have decided to hold off on annexing the Black Army, but you’ve changed…your usual modus operandi.”

Lancelot claps Jonah on the shoulder, and Jonah jerks from the contact. “I appreciate your concern, Jonah. But this isn’t a worse way to do things. What good is it for a single man to make all of the decisions? It’s good to have fresh, young opinions in the state. It’s the only way we can evolve.”

“Then, about the girl, Alice…?”

“I want her company, even if for just one day,” Lancelot says simply.

Jonah is rendered speechless.

“Now,” Lancelot reminds him gently, “hire an aide. And tell Edgar to as well. Or I’ll punish you two for direct disobedience.”

— . . . —

“I could retrieve Alice for you,” Edgar offers him, like how he had the first time.

Lancelot shakes his head. “You’re busy as is,” he says. “I trust that Sirius Oswald will follow through.” He turns a critical gaze to Edgar. “You heard from Jonah, I assume?”

Edgar is amused about the whole thing. “Well, if my king orders me to, then I can’t disobey,” he says amicably.

— . . . —

Kyle clearly thinks the whole thing is out of character, but he shrugs. “I don’t know what changed, but good for you, Lance,” he says supportively.

Zero hums in agreement.

— . . . —

So the whole magic thing is a bit of a problem.

He had some kind of guarantee of holding his own against Amon, figuring he would use the power vested in him to beat the hell out of that deluded, infantile megalomaniac, but now he’s as magically conductive as a plain rock. And that plan evidently didn’t turn out so well considering he regretfully took his final breath in Harr’s sturdy arms.

Everyone still thinks he can use magic, so he’ll let them think that. Amon’s due to check in on him in a few days, but Lancelot isn’t worried about the timing.

Sirius doesn’t disappoint. Not even a week after the Central Quarter confrontation, and Lancelot wants to laugh when he finds the Black Army’s Ace and Alice being escorted down the hallway by Zero. He keeps himself composed though as he offers Alice a cool smile. Sirius must’ve thought the offer was too good to pass up—and he must have realized that it was a show of trust. That Lancelot was testing him.

“He seriously never does that,” Godspeed mutters to her. “Stay on your guard.”

Alice looks uncertain, nods to her guard, and follows Lancelot into his office.

He closes the door behind him, unfazed by Godspeed’s challenging glare.

“Please sit,” he gestures to the chair before his desk. “I’ve already poured tea. And I’ve prepared your favorite desserts.”

Alice blinks down at the tray in surprise upon registering that the pastries are indeed her favorite. It’s not as if Lancelot was unobservant during her time in Red Headquarters. Edgar was always busying about, finding ways to smuggle in her favorite things. He’d offer to let Lancelot have some too.

“Thank you,” Alice says, tense as Lancelot takes the seat in front of her.

“Relax,” Lancelot says. “You’re here as a guest. You will not be harmed.”

Easier said than done, he thinks wryly as Alice tries and utterly fails to loosen up. He can understand maybe why—he wonders just exactly how Sirius convinced her to come. What was it he said? ‘I would like to get to know her better’?

“I like baking,” she blurts, tracing the rim of her tea cup.

“I know,” Lancelot hums. He definitely knows. She’s damn good at it too.

Alice makes a face, opening her mouth to no doubt follow up with something else out of the blue, in a misguided attempt to let Lancelot ‘know her better’, but Lancelot holds a hand up.

“I actually already know you quite well, Alice,” he says. She doesn’t look reassured—in fact, possibly even more apprehensive than before. “Maybe I should tell you more about myself instead.”

“Please do, King Lancelot,” she says, smiling stiffly, finally looking up.

Lancelot resists the urge to smile at the humor in this situation. She must have a direly wrong impression.

Well, here goes.

“Do you know of the Magic Tower?” he asks. She nods. That saves him the explanation then. “I plan to overthrow a man who is currently looking down from a very high place in there. I’d like your help in passing messages along to the Black Army. The peace treaty needs to be kept under wraps so that this man doesn’t suspect anything.”

“Oh, thank god,” Alice breathes. That’s her first instinctive reaction. Her second is to blush, delightfully red, when she remembers where she is. “Oh, that was terribly rude of me! I apologize—“

Lancelot laughs. “You did well to be wary of strange men,” he commends her, “but you’ll find that there are stranger men out there.”

Alice doesn’t look like she disagrees. But her eyes narrow thoughtfully.

“Forgive me for my forwardness, but...why should I believe you?”

“There’s something that I need to protect,” he says with iron resolve. “I cannot give up on the future of this country. Even if it costs my life, I will protect the people. In another world, I would have tried to go it alone.”

In another world, he did.

“But I think it would’ve turned out differently if I had been honest from the start. I’ve decided to place my faith in the strength of others.”

He inclines his head.

“I cannot make you believe me. I can only ask you to trust me.”

She has always been a good judge of character. She was so good for Edgar. Lancelot finds himself strangely relieved when she finally nods, eyes shining with determination. She believes him.

“I’m telling Ray and the others,” she says. “They’re the ones who can make an informed decision about this.”

“I expect no less,” he replies. “But you must keep the details of our deal from any spies. I’m sure there are bugs planted in Blackwell’s army, just as there are in mine. For now, only tell him and Sirius.”

Alice acknowledges his command and takes a sip from her tea. Peering over the rim of the cup, she asks curiously, “Why are you telling me all of this, King Lancelot? You asked me to trust you, but it seems you’ve risked quite a lot to trust me.”

“I have nothing to lose by telling you,” he responded. “Either the Black Army chooses to believe you or they dismiss your words as ludicrous and baseless. The master of the tower thinks I’m completely under his control, and I’ve built up quite the reputation for belligerence.”

“But you know Sirius will believe you, and Ray believes Sirius,” she muses.

He knew she was clever. He wishes more than ever she’d stay in Red Headquarters. Now that he thinks about it, before death, he was so busy preparing for the final confrontation that the amount of time he had was impossibly little.

He hadn’t seen her for four days then. Now that he thinks about it, he missed the Alice of his world. And if his officers—Jonah, Edgar, Zero, Kyle—were here, they would miss the brightness that Alice brought with her everywhere too. As it stands, he’s the only one in the Red Army who remembers and knows to mourn the loss of her company.

“And I’ve told you already,” Lancelot interjects, amused. “I know you quite well. I knew I could trust you. I even know your birthday.”

“I was going to ask about that, actually,” she gasps. “How do you know everything? Are you psychic? Does magic make you psychic?”

“If you want to think of it that way.”

Her eyes are wide with wonder when he brings up the next topic.

“You will be in even more danger now that I’ve brought you into the fold,” he warns. “We’ll need a believable story, and I already have someone in mind who will protect you from the tower since they’ve certainly caught wind of your existence.”

Knowing better than to disagree about needing protection, she simply accepts it with a nod.

“So I’m to play...the Red King’s lover, who is a ward of the Black Army?” she says slowly.

“It need not be reciprocated by you.” Lancelot has no intention, after all, of actually making a move on Alice. He won’t be stepping over his retainer’s toes in the matter. “Given the public perception of me, it would be laughable for you to fall in love with me. So instead, I suppose I’ll have to fall for you.”

Strangely, her face looks troubled. “King Lancelot, you don’t give yourself enough credit,” she says earnestly.

“Says the woman who came in dreading my declaration of undying love,” he shoots back.

She flushes. “That was before I got to know you better! No one in their right mind would agree immediately, no matter how beautiful the other person is!”

“Thank you, Alice,” he says, dry as sand. “I’m not against pretending that the infatuation is mutual. But it’s better for my reputation if these tea parties appear to be against your will.”

“Isn’t it worse for your reputation?”

“Don’t worry about that,” he replies, unconcerned. “I don’t care for bettering my reputation in the good way. Now, if Blackwell’s Ace asks what happened in here, tell him that you were absolutely disgusted by my arrogance and domineering personality.”

“King Lancelot,” she sighs at him in farewell. He notes that she’s taking the tray of pastries with her.

“Be sure to play your part,” he says, letting slip a trace of fondness.

“I will!” she says, pretending defiance when she opens the door.

“I’ll send for you,” he calls calmly as she closes it.

One of his favorite people, going.

He didn’t realize this is what it’s like to watch the back of a person who is leaving you before you can leave them.

It’s bittersweet.

Godspeed’s repulsed scowl is sour icing on the cake.

— . . . —

The guard that Lancelot has in mind is someone that he knows is powerful. Now that Lancelot actually has time after dinner on week days, he goes to the cat alley in Central Quarter and lies in wait.

Loki shows up without fail.

“Oh,” he says, surprised but also unimpressed. “The King of Hearts.”

His love for cats trumps his wariness of Lancelot, because he doesn’t flee on the spot. He lowers his basket of goodies and the felines swarm him.

A stray cat, enjoying the warmth of Lancelot’s lap and the gentle scritch-scratch of Lancelot’s fingers, is the only one who stays back.

“Didn’t know you liked cats, o’ king,” Loki adds, trying to draw a reaction, when Lancelot doesn’t say anything.

A king befitting Lancelot’s reputation might’ve spouted some pompous line like, ‘They’re elegant, clever little creatures.’

Lancelot opens his mouth and what comes out is, “They’re nice and soft.”

Loki makes no effort to conceal his jaw dropping. “Excuse me?”

He doesn’t take it back. “I like cats,” he says. “I didn’t think it was mutually exclusive with kingship.”

Loki shakes his head. “It isn’t. The Black—oh,” he cuts himself off emphatically, realizing what he was about to divulge.

“How’s Harr?” Lancelot prompts suddenly.

Loki narrows his eyes. “Fine,” he huffs, tetchy, and ignores Lancelot for the rest of the hour.

—

Lancelot kind of has a schedule though. He said he’d send for Alice in a few days to give her time to convince the other two, so he simply can’t wait for Sirius to put him in contact with Harr when the truce hasn’t even been officialized in secret yet.

Without magic, he can’t see past Harr’s invisibility barriers, and therefore he can’t possibly hope to navigate the forbidden forest and find him that way.

So he comes back to the alley two days in a row. This time, he’s the one bearing gifts. Food waste after dinner in the barracks is a big problem, after all. Another thing he’ll have to fix when he topples Amon’s reign in the shadows.

“Cheshire Cat,” he says. “I need to speak with Harr. Tell me where he is.”

“I don’t know,” Loki says, eyeing Lancelot’s payload. “You could check Central Quarter. Can’t you sense him with your magic?”

They both know if Harr doesn’t want to be found, then he won’t be. Lancelot wonders if he can lure Harr out somehow. He has no illusions that Loki is a cunning young man who could just as easily turn the tables on Lancelot. The sooner he’s put into contact with Harr the better.

So he leans close and says casually, “I no longer have magic. And save some of that for Harr.”

“I—I was planning to,” Loki snaps, his face transparent with shock.

— . . . —

He’s a genius.

Harr confronts him two days later.

#ft #ikerev fanfic #lancelot loves his friends #fic: lance changes the world #i'm on a roll!!!!#please enjoy lol #alice & lancelot solidarity #it's canon that lancelot was fond of alice in edgar's route #i guess i'm kind of basing this off of edgar's route then?#but i've literally said 'to hell with pacing' with this one post #harr will soon make his entrance as a hilariously comprehensively lost wizard who's trying to make heads or tails of his old friend lancelot #ready yourself for the harlance you know i only have one thing on my agenda #lancelot: the efficient worker

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crimethinc · 5 years

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Between the Sun and the Sea: Icarus at 12th and L–A Voice from the J20 Black Bloc and Kettle on the Practice of Anarchy

Several blocks before the L & 12th Street intersection, I was already feeling that the march had run its course. At each cross street, we met a line of police, sirens blaring. A few brave souls still managed to fell some final windows on the periphery. Yet while the Bank of America windows had crashed in triumphant cacophony, these windows struck the pavement with an urgency that reflected our increasingly dire situation. We had no destination, no end goal. It felt as though we were running solely to evade police. I knew that it was time to break from the group, yet I still held a kind of separation anxiety.

Leaving has always been hard for me. Dispersing consistently feels liken a haphazardly unthought-out ending tacked onto an otherwise compelling novel. A novel that begins with, “Collectively, anything is possible—you can do whatever you’d like” and ends with, “Everyone goes their own way and pretends to be normal.” Leaving the bloc means leaving the safety of a powerful mass of people, often to wander the streets immediately adjacent to crime scenes, alone, with police looking to single out suspects. There was a rumor circulating that, given their history with lawsuits, the DC police would be unlikely to mass arrest. This false prediction spelled doom for us unlucky rioters, as the police did just that. It was with these thoughts circling my head, alongside memories of past dispersals gone awry, that I decided to stay with the march.

I was with a few friends. We stayed together. We kept track of each other. As the march shrunk in size, we paired off and prepared to jettison ourselves from the bloc. We turned to face an alleyway on L Street between 13th and 12th. I knew very well that this could be my chance to safely exit the march. My friends bolted down the alleyway, not knowing what lay the next street over. For a moment, I thought to follow suit, but decided that too many of us in one place might attract police attention. A few minutes later, I was trapped between a wall and a riot shield. Facing the corridor that had offered safe passage just moments earlier to anyone brave enough to step down its halls, I contemplated the hesitation that had led me to this fate. If there’s anything I can say from my experience being pinned against that wall, it is that a split second of intuition in the street is worth more than weeks of prior planning.

The kettle was where I made my biggest mistake. It was there, and the moments just before, that I put almost no effort into escaping. The police had us sardined together so tightly that I gravely underestimated our collective potential within the kettle. I thought that I was about to be arrested with at most seventy people, less than a third of our actual numbers. I was primarily among strangers. In my heart, I felt that I would participate in a second attempt to charge the police line. It was my fear of being cast as a leader, in a film produced by live-streamers and on-duty officers, that kept me from voicing my intent. Yet if there was any time to risk collective trust and courage, it was there, where we were most vulnerable.

There was larger reason I was compliant in my own captivity. I felt myself above persecution. There are two reasons why one would go willingly to their arrest. The first, they think that they haven’t committed any crime. The second, that they committed a crime so flawlessly that they could not possibly be convicted of it. Both of these presumptions involve a false sense of security; neither save you from prosecution. Though I did not delude myself with the pretense that I had performed a perfect execution of black bloc tactics, I considered myself “high-hanging fruit.” I was counting on the prosecution to be lazy, to lack the funding or time to convict me. When I was in the kettle, I was convinced that I wouldn’t actually be arrested. At worst, I would be charged with a misdemeanor, slapped on the wrist, and eventually end up with a check from a class action lawsuit. Instead, I had to navigate the next year and a half with looming felonies.

I had not come to DC innocently. I knew the risk, the potential repercussions. I chose to look them in the face. The pepper spray and stun grenades were terrifying, but not unexpected. In some ways, they heightened my senses and fortified my convictions. My heart races when I look back on the march—but not from trauma, nor from anxiety. It drums in vigorous reverie, recounts the last time it beat with purpose.

Over the following year, I was forced to tame my heart. In court, I stilled my breathing, attempted to hide my guilt. I kept a caged life. The legal procedure left me fraught with anxiety. I clung to the safety and certainty of routine. I denied every passion, every risk, in hopes that I would be able to convince a jury that I was simply not the adventurous type. My heart sat and sulked. I came to learn that, as a friend so elegantly put it, “The process is the punishment.”

Felonies change things. I catch glimpses of understanding in the eyes of my friends who have faced prosecution to this degree. One of the beauties of black bloc is that I might be anyone under this mask; a restaurant server, a designer, a nurse. Once donned, the mask allowed me to act in ways a nurse can only dream.

To be unmasked is to be held in purgatory between selves. I was no longer the person I was in the streets, yet I could not return to being who I had been just days earlier. At its core, the bloc hinges on the moment when we shed our black clothes and return to normalcy. While there have been times where I’ve de-bloc’ed with a profoundly different understanding of the world, I was still banking on returning to work with only one less sick day. As time passed after J20 and my charges remained, I realized there was a possibility that I might never return to being the person I had been before my arrest.

During the interim awaiting trial, I chose a course of action that seems common among anarchist pending-felons. I applied to college.

For me, college was an attempt to regain some agency in two different ways. In one way, I was trying to influence my potential sentencing. If I could convince a judge that I was an upstanding citizen, then he or she might be a little more lenient in punishing me. Going to college was also an attempt to salvage my future, a future I felt was starting to escape my grasp.

At the time I was arrested, I did not consider myself to have a clear vision of the future. Yet in the wake of my arrest, all successful futures seemed out of reach. Success felt like a mirage, shimmering, hazy, always on the horizon. My case continued and evidence mounted against me. I scrambled to claim any sort of successful future I could before a conviction made one unobtainable. I raced towards the horizon without drawing any closer to it, meeting the same scene in every direction. My charges sent me spiraling and forced me to examine my feelings of helplessness.

When I did so, I realized that all along, I had held within me a concrete image of success after all. It was not the unimaginable utopia I had believed myself to be pursuing. On the contrary, it was all too familiar; I had simply kept it intentionally obscured from myself. When I honestly consulted myself about what constituted my image of a successful future, what I found was indistinguishable from the world I already knew—only in the future I had been imagining, I had a little more money, a better presence on social media. I had been so disgusted by this vision that I had I banished it to the horizon of my mind.

The anarchist canon has changed dramatically over the past decade. Today, we are not as steeped in subculture. Our politics rely a lot less on consumer choices. We’ve come a long way from the cornerstone pieces of the early 2000s. Early CrimethInc. texts took the Situationist exhortation “Never Work—Ever” literally, proposing a sort of exodus that often looked more like voluntary exile; today, as work becomes more and more a part of our social as well as professional lives, the proposal seems unthinkably absurd. We have largely escaped the cultural pitfalls of the punk scene, expanded our access to funding for our projects, even created our own platforms so that anarchist ideas can proliferate. Along with these conscious efforts to grow and develop nuance with age, for me, something has shifted silently in the background.

I gave up my resistance to work—even took up office at some of the same companies I believed were bringing about an apocalyptic nightmare. I closed my eyes, clicked my heels, and repeated “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” I justified my increasingly indiscriminate use of money, sought to tally up my influence on the world. I became obsessed with power, quantifiable power. I searched for any sign that the anarchist movement was gaining traction, that one day way we could finally make “The Switch.” My measurements for success had paralleled social norms; now they began to overlap with them. Soon Anarchy was just something I believed in. Aside from sharing meals and resources among friends, it was not something I practiced.

To some, the black bloc is a tactic, a means to an end. For me, having lived through a myriad of outcomes, black bloc is a practice. Black blocs are a practice in timing: when to return teargas to the police, when to leave an intersection, when to smash windows, when to disperse. As in all practice, some days are better than others. To be in bloc is to experience what can be possible when the laws that typically govern us are momentarily superseded and how to act when our adversaries try to reassert them. When we participate in black blocs, we are attempting to learn the balance between exercising an otherwise impossible freedom, at the cost of our safety, and maintaining a modicum of safety so that we can continue to act freely.

Every night as I mulled over my legal predicament, I would ask myself the same questions. “Are black blocs a pertinent part of the way we do Anarchy today? Are they just hollow tradition from a bygone era? Are they worth risking the world you inhabit daily for a fleeting experience, however ecstatic?” I think of my friends who are a little older than I, who have better jobs, who were noticeably absent from the march on January 20. For many people, their little ration of worldly success is not worth the risk.

When I look back to the texts that inspired me as I was coming of age in radical politics, I trace a common thread binding them. Travel logs, accounts of underground healthcare, epics of animal liberation—at their core, all of them conveyed the same story. They told that There is a Secret World Concealed Within This One; a world that I had long since forgotten. The once-common anarchist saying “Another world is possible” is no longer spoken between friends. It is not overlaid on images of riots, nor commonly held as an anarchist truth. I mourn it’s absence. There are those who would say there is no life outside of capitalism, that we are bound to this world by birth. Only recently has the premise emerged that being born into a position invalidates your ability to transcend it.

The truth is that we alone are the visionaries of our success. We define our values, sculpt our objects of beauty. If we build from the blueprints of power and safety laid out in this world, then we will make more of the same. But I believe that we are capable of breaching the precedents of modern life. We can imagine less abhorrent futures, create lives worth living—but to do so, we must abandon the worldly successes we seek for validation. If we want to continue to experience the transcendental, unbridled ecstasy of black blocs, the practice of anarchy and experimentation, then we must create and maintain worlds in which the consequences of a felony rioting conviction are not so dire—worlds worth leaving this one to get to. Another world is not only possible, it is waiting for us. We must believe in our ability to reach it so we can find the strength to depart. We have to let go of our attachments and truly believe that we are capable of taking flight.

In the kettle at 12th and L Street, I felt like a young Icarus, hurtling towards the sun, only to plummet into the sea. All exercises in freedom have these risks. To those who dare to soar, may we also learn to swim, and never fear the consequences of singed wings.

Despite its abrupt end and unfortunate outcome, the march on January 20, 2017 was one of the most inspiring, vitalizing moments of my life. Despite its obvious challenges, I am thankful that facing charges has given me time to reflect. Let me take a moment here to explicitly state, with a clear mind and certain heart, that—having eluded conviction—I would 100% do it again no questions asked. I hope someday to share an experience of elation similar to that of J20 with the readers of this piece. If and when that day comes, may we both avoid arrest and get off scot-free.

With love,

a CrimethInc. ex-defendant

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son-of-alderaan · 6 years

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When Jasper Pääkkönen walked out of the audition room after reading for the main white supremacist role in BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee was absolutely convinced the actor was born and bred in the States – which is fittingly symbolic for a film based entirely on false perceptions, impersonations, and doppelgängery of almost Shakespearean proportions.

“At some point Spike looked at my last name, which has a lot of umlauts, a lot of dots,” Pääkkönen told Mashable during an hour-long phone interview as he was driving through the Finnish countryside towards the capital.

“Spike stops me in the middle of the scene and goes, ‘Hold on, hold on, hold on! Where are you from?’ And I go, ‘um, Helsinki, Finland.’

That’s right – the most vociferous character in Lee’s poignant and powerful reincarnation of 1970s Colorado Springs white supremacy terrorism is portrayed by an actor from the country ranked as the world’s happiest in 2018.

By the time the audition was done, Lee's mind was blown. “‘You’re not from Helsinki, Finland – you’re from Alabama,’" Pääkkönen recalls Lee saying. "And he starts laughing. I wasn’t sure if it’s a good laugh or a bad laugh."

youtube

Turns out it was a very good laugh, because Pääkkönen was cast right there and then as Felix Kendrickson, who epitomises the kind of misguided white male privilege and extremism that infected and filled the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s — and has once again reared its ugly head alongside the rise of far-right populist politics around the world.

Felix, a Holocaust-denier and terrorist, is second-in-command of a Klan branch being infiltrated by an undercover police team, led by Colorado Springs’ first black officer – Ron Stallworth (portrayed by John David Washington – Denzel Washington’s son). The movie, based on Stallworth’s memoir, remains more or less historically accurate – he infiltrated the Klan, and was, on paper, a card-carrying member, and yes, he really did speak to David Duke on the phone (portrayed by Topher Grace in the film), the then-Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

And not just when he was undercover, but more recently, when Duke allegedly called Stallworth to complain BlacKkKlansman made him look bad.

Pääkkönen's character embodies the toxic rage fueled by a flawed ideology.

Felix is, in many ways, David Duke’s doppelgänger – they are two sides of the same coin. While Duke – always the wolf in sheep’s clothing, tempering his outbursts – is presented in the movie as the precursor to Trump and his "Make America Great Again" slogan, Felix is the extension and epitome of that racist rage as it has been normalised today. He does not hide that fragile yet militant, determined yet deluded, look we’ve been forced to familiarise ourselves with – from pictures of the tiki-torch-carrying white men during last year’s Charlottesville Unite the Right rally to video of alt-right members performing Nazi salutes.

BlacKkKlansman was released exactly one year after the deadly rally, where a woman, Heather Heyer, was killed by a man who deliberately crashed his car into a group of protestors.

Those unspeakable scenes are featured in the film itself because Lee isn’t just making a period drama here. BlacKkKlansman is, above all else, about how the past continues to exist in the present, albeit in different guises. And Pääkkönen's casting is a powerful statement in a commentary about the global spread of an ideology that some may have thought was starting to fizzle out. But then again, as Lee keeps reminding us, nothing is as it seems on the surface.

youtube

When Pääkkönen was 17, he spent a year in Maryland as an exchange student at Baltimore’s Owings Mills High School during the 1997-8 school year. He says that experience exposed him firsthand to how racism has permeated the social fabric in America.

“I remember my first weeks of high school is when I realised white and black students were two completely separated groups,” Pääkkönen says. “You get boxed by the colour of skin and everything else is sort of secondary.”

And as most classic high school coming-of-age stories go, Pääkkönen’s time at Owings Mills hit its critical point at prom, one of the quintessential institutions of the American way of life. Pääkkönen took his closest friend from school as his date, and to his surprise, the decision was met with outright protest by “a lot of the people in the community, my host family, some school friends — white school friends.”

The issue was that his date was black and, as Pääkkönen was told, "you don’t do that in America."

"I was breaking the unwritten rule," he says.

Dapper 18-year-old Jasper Pääkkönen's prom night.

That was 20 years ago in a fairly upper-middle class district, in a school with diverse cultural backgrounds. Mashable reached out to the school's principal and vice-principal regarding Pääkkönen's recollection of his time there, but received no reply.

As the central thesis of BlacKkKlansman keeps reminding us, the battle against racism and xenophobia is far from over – although the pattern is perhaps somewhat different in Finland, where everything has changed over the past 20 years. Today, the Nordic country has come to be recognised around the world for its respect for human rights, freedom of the press, education, and healthcare.

After completing his exchange year and going back home, Pääkkönen kept in touch via Facebook with his American friends and prom date over the years. “She used to send me articles about Finland, completely blown away by the fact that we have this society that seemed to her like a utopia," he says. That stayed with Pääkkönen over the years — the fact that two teenagers in the 1990s could be living such different lives.

The cast of 'BlacKkKlansman'.

Pääkkönen received some coaching and assistance from the exchange student organisation before moving to Maryland to help prepare him for these inevitable cultural differences. "They kept telling us, don’t believe what you see," he says. "If you get shocked by something, just give it some time and you’ll start understanding it.

"I remember I kept telling myself during my first month there, 'This skin colour issue can’t be true,'" Pääkkönen says, bursting out in uncomfortable laughter.

"Six months later, I had to accept the fact that my first impression was the right one. I was different from the other white kids because colour wasn't the precursor for whom I made friends with — I was seen as that foreigner trying to change traditions."

When Pääkkönen told Lee about his time at Owings Mills, Lee responded with the three words that underscore most 'Spike Lee Joints': "Welcome to America."

Spike Lee on the set of 'BlacKkKlansman'.

Pääkkönen continuously found himself lost in translation. “People in Baltimore wouldn’t believe me when I told them I’m Finnish and when I told them what life here is like," he said. Then, once back home, people would show the same kind of disbelief when he shared stories of how segregated his school was in the U.S.

When Lee met him, the director was convinced he was the guy for the part — "That's my guy," as Lee said in an interview.

"When I got a call from my agent about the audition, I was told there's no script, but that I was going to be sent two scenes," Pääkkönen says. "That's all I had."

There was no mention about the location in those scenes, but there was a general sense the scenes were taking place somewhere in the South. So he WhatsApped a friend from Kentucky, who recorded the lines for him. For a couple of days he replayed the audio recordings and learned to mimic her accent until it felt natural.

When he learned the film was set in Colorado Springs, Pääkkönen booked an accent coach. But Lee told him to forget about it and do everything just like he did in the audition. "Don't change anything," he said.

Felix attempting a bomb plot against civil right activists.

Yet, even though the latest Spike Lee joint was Pääkkönen's first Hollywood project, it was not his first film portraying a white supremacist.

“I made a Finnish film about five years ago, called Heart of a Lion, which is a film about neo-Nazis, and I had to get pretty deep into it to understand my character,” Pääkkönen says. “I worked with a reformed neo-Nazi for a while, a very prominent figure in the 1990s in Finland, trying to understand what motivates these people.”

While the histories of the spread of nationalism and racism differ across borders, the consequences, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, follow a pattern — an increase in hate speech and crimes, the emboldening of xenophobic political discourse, and the activation of fractions of society that have hitherto remained on the fringes.

Lee recently visited Pääkkönen in Helsinki and addressed that exact question. "‘Don’t think this is a film about just American problems,'" Pääkkönen recalls Lee telling reporters there. "'It’s a film about what’s happening here and in France, in the UK and all around Europe. The rise of the far-right movement is quite prominent in the States, but it’s just as prominent in a lot of European countries as well.'”

Felix is the only character who is suspicious of the detectives.

If BlacKkKlansman is a powerful political statement about the enduring grip of racism for Spike Lee, for Pääkkönen it was actually a reset button on his relationship with America. Following the release of the movie, he says he would be stopped randomly on the street by people thanking him for bringing Felix to life.

"I remember this older black lady, who looked deeply into my eyes and held my hand in hers and said, 'Thank you so much for portraying this hatred,'” Pääkkönen says.

Pääkkönen has always been an outsider looking in on the cultural divides that underpin everyday life in America. For the first time with this film, he says, that barrier was broken.

"You realise that they didn't just go into the movies and watch the film as a story about America in the 1970s without having too much emotional attachment," he says. "The personal experience that comes through when you receive that feedback is quite a shocking revelation into how serious it is. And what people have lived with and what kind of hatred they’ve encountered in their own lives."

When asked if he's received any negative feedback following the film, or if he's been targeted by far-right trolls, Pääkkönen says he hasn't — at least not yet.

But then, just as 20 years ago during prom, Pääkkönen today remains firm in his moral code. "I’ve been an actor for 20 years and I’ve encountered all kinds of criticism, so I couldn't care less about some racist idiots trying to @ me today."

#jasper pääkkönen #spike lee #blacKkKlansman

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deathordecaf · 6 years

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A (not so) Brief Introduction

Hello to you, entirely hypothetical reader!

My Name is Alessa —or rather that is the name I will be using for the sake of privacy. You see my intention with this blog is two-fold:

To share the information & tools I have learned regarding mental health, in an accessible format for myself, those like me, and those who wish to simply satiate their curiosity.

To keep a record for reflection on my personal journey, in an attempt to provide myself with some perspective on my conditions and appreciate the progress being made, as all too often we are blind to our progress when we need to recognise it most.

As such some of the entries here may be, well, personal. This may not be just so for me, but to those close to me as well. So for the sake of privacy pseudonyms will be used.

But enough waffling! This brief introduction is rapidly growing in length, so in no particular order here are a few key things about me that may provide context to myself as the narrator of this blog:

I am 25 rapidly approaching 26 —making me practically a fossil in Tumblr terms

I come from the land down under

I have a very Australian attitude to swearing in that I often fail to notice I’m swearing at all. Those who to umbrige to so-called “strong language” may not appricate my liberal usage in writting.

I was Diagnosed with Generalised anxiety & OCD at approx. 15yrs

I was also diagnosed with ADHD (ADD at the time) and like many 90′s kids (particularly girls), my parent did not take this to be a legitimate concern and neither treated nor informed me of my condition before they themselves forgot that incident entirely!

I have been on and off a number of antidepressants since my GAD diagnosis. Predominately SSRIs with a couple SNRIs threw in for good measure.

SSRIs and SNRIs show mixed to no results until I was in my early 20s when the newest pills on the block would (after making me disoriented and sick for a week) make me feel fan-fucking-tasic! For About a month or so before my inevitable plumment into my realisation, once again, that i was in fact human garbage & hiding under my desk until the fear subsided in another few month.

I do not like taking SSRIs; it’s not them, it it’s me.

I was bullied ruthlessly in primary school In an attempt to escape the constant bullying we tried changing my school, this was an abject failure and I returned to my previous school and dealt with the bullying I knew.

By the time I reach high school I developed a 0% drama policy, made A number of close friends

I took a Gap year after high school, to really wallow in depression for the first time and ensure that I cut with as many of my social ties as possible, before they realised the truth that i was actual human garbage.

Despite not correctly completing enough qualifying subject in my senior year of High School to apply for university; I took an “alternative pathway to study” test the year following my graduation and scored in the top 5% percent of participants and then enrolled in an art programme in University the following year.

I began a perpetual cycle of dropping in and out of university and working until I became frustrated with my lack of direction or purpose, then returning to study again.

I studied Sociology partially because it interested my and partially because I thought I was to emotional to study psychology like I wanted.

I realised I would never leave this cycle without ongoing professional help.

I was sexually assaulted and had a complete mental breakdown and finally sought the help I needs.

I was now suspecting my Dysthymic + GAD +subclinical OCD combo I’d been labeled with was less than accurate and went to a Psychiatrist for a differential diagnosis

I was was diagnosis with ADHD (again, but this was news to me) and my Psychiatrist agreed the after somewhere in the vicinity of 6+ variety of SSRI was a good enough sample sizes to say they were a good Fit.

I begin taking dexamphetamine (for ADHD + off label depression treatment) and Mirtazipine (for anxiety + chronic insomnia I have had since childhood)

Thing start getting better

Now here’s the “good” bit

I have a job a love

I’ve decided paying for education is for suckers

I’m planning to start a new business to run while working this current jobs (i already have 2)

I’m working on two art projects

My partner and I are living together for the 2nd year so I now know he won’t leave randomly (because that’s definitely NOT a thing i have immense fear around as a result of a number of traumatic events that I’m pretending to not be effected by)

I’ve finally committed to being a vegetarian

dropped 10kgs

I’m hardly sleeping

I’m bursting with amazing ideas

Secretly convinced I’m going to change the world or at the very least Australia (because I’ve got to be “realistic”

I feel amazing, people love me, I love me

So because I’m finally “normal”, i decide i don’t need therapy anymore I’ve decided I CAN BE MY OWN THERAPIST JUST AS WELL!

I’ve even done the “responsible” (please read: deluded) thing and doubled my Mirtazipine dose myself (with out having to waste my doctors time) to help me sleep again, although this doesn’t work so I start combining it with alcohol to knock myself out (this is also increasing)

I’M FINALLY MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME! WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?!

I am depressed

I am more depressed than I have even been

I am not eating because I don’t so the point

It takes me an entire day to sit up right

I keep trying to work, but it’s poor, the stripped my hours back to nothing

I’ve been thinking of hurting myself to try and let the negative feelings out, but i settle for writing nasty thing about myself on my skin and hiding them under my clothes as a reminder that I am human garbage.

We can no longer afford our rent so we move in with my partners parents.

I go to the general practitioner near by she doesn’t want to write a mirtazipine script but does, she asks if I’m okay... I confess I had planned on killing myself a few night ago while visiting my father and his new family and that I only stopped myself because I couldn’t guarantee my three half siblings wouldn’t find my body and be traumatised. I confess I still want to hurt myself and that a feel I am a burden. She wan’t me to go to the hospital immediately but I talk her into a referral instead on the provisor i check in a week later.

At first i hide the for my partner but I confess what happened and i week later i’ve packed my bags and gone to the hospital.

It’s a mess, they ignore me, constantly forget my name, and take my medication away until they can confirm with my psychiatrist that i’m telling the truth. At first all I do is sleep

I don’t realised it but this stress triggers another hypomanic episode, and as I am clearly no longer depressed... they let me go. They don’t notice I’m on a power trip and intentionally making them uncomfortable by mentioning their mistakes in front of my family and laughing about it to my partner.

The goes on for another two week i’m increasingly annoyed by people telling me to pace myself “can’t they see i’m fine?”

Until I experience my first mixed episode. I have never been so scared of myself in my entire life

I’m completely unhinged. Even my partner with all the patience in world sits beside me as body is wracked by sobbing and says “maybe your right. maybe you’re not going to get better” a little part of me dies.

But I’m determined, I’ve spent to last few months actually taking care of myself for the first time in years. I’ve gotten back in contact with my psychiatrist and see hm once a week.

We had concluded I have some degree of Bipolarity and c-PTSD in addition to the ADHD and anxiety.

My mirtazipine has been increased again and Yesterday I’ve started taking Limotrigine and a mood stabilisers

I’ve begun a DBT course (which is part of a university trail to verify the affectivity).

I’ve started learning to embrace slow routine, monitoring my moods and have been drinking in all the possible information I can on my condition

This bring us to now.

I’m still a work in progress but I’ve come a long way and I’m already doing so much better than just 3 months ago. I have decided I will study Psychology like I’ve alway wanted. But I’m not rushing myself to be ready and I will do limit myself to three subjects at a time instead of the typical 4.

Until then my goal everyday is to do 4 simple things:

Ride my exercise bike for 30mins a day

Water my plants as I’ve started a small garden to ground me

Shower once a day

Always to my meds

So that’s an overly long overly intamate look at me... so how are you?

#intoduction #bipolar #bipolar II #cyclothymia #cyclothymic #mental health #biography #tw:suicidal ideation #recovery #mental health recovery #hope #i want to get better #baby steps #death or decaf #me #personal

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marta-bee · 6 years

Text

More Infinity War Blathering: On Death and Stuff

(Cross-posted from LJ.)

Let’s talk some more about Infinity Wars. I mentioned earlier tonight at Tumblr I had Theories with a capital T, revolving around the concept of Chekhov’s gun, which just means you don’t put a revolver on the table in the first act unless you mean on using it in the fifth.

Before I go further, the usual warning: spoilers.

I’m not the first person who watched this movie and noted more than a few plot holes. In my first-flush reaction I focused on perceived points of departures from how favorite characters were built up in earlier films (another warning: I am a film-only fan and am approaching them without much if any reference to the comics). M’Baku, for instance, who I felt became “brother” with T’Challa a little too quickly; or Peter Parker’s embracing being part of the Avengers. But what really struck me this time made very little sense but were set up very particularly and precisely in that non-sense. These don’t add up, but it’s not because the film-runners are being careless.

Starting with the opening scene, which incidentally seemed much better suited to a DCU than a Marvel movie, it’s just so dark. (It helped me enjoy the movie a lot more this second time, that I knew it was coming so wasn’t thrown for a loop. It’s also very out of character that Heimdall would open the Bifrost to save the Hulk, of all people. He’s so defined by his devotion not just to Asgard and Asgardians, but to the rightful sons of Odin in particular. Well, there’s two of them very much in need of rescue. The only conclusion I can draw is that Banner is in danger in a way the other people aren’t. Or perhaps -- because that still doesn’t explain why Heimdall would care about Banner in the face of so much Asgardian loss -- Hulk’s survival is crucial to those refugees’ salvation in a way that’s not immediately clear. Understandable, really, given the dark tone: hope is not an emotion easily accessible in the moment.

And where does Heimdall send Banner? Literally crashing into the entry way of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Remember, Heimdall is defined by his sightedness. He’s supposed to see everything that happens in all the realms, which if you know much about temporal mechanics seems rather similar to being able to see into the future, or perhaps even multiple alternate futures. And he sends him right into the lap of the only Marvel characters we’ve come across who’s even more sighted than Heimdall.

Let me make a brief digression into my other pet theory. I’ll be upfront in y biases: I love Loki. I hate the thought he’s permanently dead. But if we’re looking at things that are made oddly explicit -- things that only really need to be clear if that necessity is significant, plot-wise -- consider a few facts:

Asgardians can fake their death quite effectively -- Heimdall revealed he was alive when he summoned the Bifrost.

Asgardians can survive without breathable atmosphere (only way Thor can survive until the Guardians’ arrival), which also suggests the possibility they can survive without breath full-stop.

Loki is a trickster-god. I mean, obviously, but he makes a point of emphasizing that fact with a man whose trust he’s trying to preserve.

Loki is also Odin’s son and Thor’s loyal brother (as loyal as he’s capable of), he chokes up over that fact. He chooses Thor’s life over the tesseract, which he was so captivated by.

All of which suggests to me that, first, Loki probably could survive, and second, his attempt to get close to Thanos is shrouded in trickery. I don’t think Loki actually intended to die or thought he would because for all his growth since Avengers I still don’t see him as the self-sacrificing sort.

As I said, I have a soft spot for Loki and I fully admit this could be me deluding myself. But it gives me hope, and as I think about it, it does have a kind of clever logic to it that I’d like to see play out.

Speaking of self-sacrifice, there’s another time we see someone summon an infinity stone out of thin air and offer it up to save his friends: Doctor Strange with the time-stone. Why, especially after saying specifically if he had to sacrifice Peter or Tony(and we can presume the Guardians wouldn’t get a free pass) to save the stone he’d do it. The cuddly crowd-pleasing read of that scene is Strange has changed his ways, he now realizes it’s wrong to sacrifice people to fulfill his oath/purpose or save the stone. But I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here. He knows they can’t fight Thanos and win. Going toward him or fleeing him, Thanos will find the stones. The story about Gamora only shows how driven he is, and how skilled.

Let’s step back a moment and ask: why is Strange so devoted to protecting the time-stone. It predates Thanos and the practical good of keeping the gauntlet incomplete. Sure, he’d prefer half the universe’s population not die, but I think at a more basic level, he recognizes the danger in changing time. That’s what the time-stone lets you do. And that’s his motivation: not getting to the best possible outcome in this timeline, but preventing cosmos-destroying consequences of manipulating time into a fundamental contradiction.

Thanos is uneducated on this point, which I think makes him very vulnerable. He can clearly sense when a stone isn’t real, and he’s already suspicious Strange is trying to fool him. He can’t just conjure up a fake. But are we really so sure Thanos would know if the stone had been altered, not enough to keep it from completing the gauntlet, but perhaps not giving him control over the full range of time.

Let’s work with a bit of a hypothesis here. Doctor Strange, master of time, in his showdown with Thanos where he creates all those emanations of himself, isn’t actually just projecting trickery; he’s calling multiple versions of himself from multiple timelines to fight against Thanos. So when Thanos forces Strange back into “alignment,” he’s not identifying the “real” Strange so much as committing himself to a single timeline. Then when he takes the time-stone he’s actually operating within a much more constrained field of reality (for lack of a better term),and he’s just too blinded to see it. Then when Thanos uses the time-stone to manipulate time in Wakanda, he thinks he’s controlling the only timeline that will unfold, but it’s actually only applying to a certain subset of reality.

It’s late, and I’m not well enough versed in theories of time to dig into this. But think of it this way. There are multiple possible realities we could have, different timelines like different lanes going down the same road. Strange essentially creates a crisis point in the time continuum by bringing all of his different selves together, and Thanos forces them back into one reality -- maybe the one he started in, maybe not, but the important point is when he tries to manipulate time, he only has control over a portion of them and he’s too unlearned to realize that. So maybe there are a thousand lanes on this road, and once he’s committed himself to a fraction of the timelines that are really possible, he may be able to choose which of ten different lanes the universe will proceed along; but he’s clueless to the fact he’s only choosing between those ten lanes, and the other 990 are proceeding without his notice.

At its most basic, this might mean Thanos thinks he’s manipulating time and mastering it, but in reality there’s this whole realm of possibility he’s not touching, not controlling, because he’s thinking (wrongly) everything is already under his own power. So when Thanos manipulates time to prevent Wanda from destroying the mind-stone, he’s convinced that means in actuality she can’t destroy it, that he’s handled that possibility, but he’s really being fooled.

Because when people of unknown loyalty summon infinity stones out of thin air,there’s usually some trickery involved. Also a plan to survive.

@vulgarweed pointed out (and I agree) that “we’re pretty much flat out told that Dr Strange gave Thanos the time stone because of a future he had seen.” Right -- he saw the one future where Thanos is defeated, which means he knows what necessarily has to happen to defeat him. I don’t see any possible way to keep Thanos from taking the stone, once they reach endgame, so that future would have to keep Thanos from using the time-stone or some of the other stones (but time-stone is the one Strange has experience with) in as disastrous as a way as he might want to.

Giving Thanos the time-stone, letting him think he’s using It properly but really constraining his field of operation is a pretty effective way to delay if not flat-out defeat him. To pull it off, Strange has to trick him into thinking he actually did beat him and now has the correct stone. All the drama with Tony accomplishes that pretty neatly, particularly if Thanos is making the same mistake Ebony Maw did in assuming Strange and Tony were actually close. So Strange really is sacrificing Peter to save the time-stone, or at least to protect the universe from its misuse. He can’t possess it, which means he damn well better make sure whoever does possess it doesn’t end up blowing up the (or all the) timelines once they take it.

That’s loyalty to his stated mission, I think, but it has the added bonus that once Thanos starts manipulating time (which he does before he completes and uses the gauntlet), getting killed doesn’t preclude other timelines where you’re not dead. After all, remember in the Marvel universe(s), no one really stays dead except Uncle Ben.

One last thing: I find it really interesting that Eitri (the giant dwarf smith) tells us his forge is capable of reopening the Bifrost. If I’m right and the Bifrost is a way not just of moving between space in the same timeline, but between different timelines/realities, that could be a really cool way to undo some of Thanos’s damage.

#marvel #meta #infinity wars #loki #doctor strange #spoilers #my meta

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bazypitchandsimonsnow · 6 years

Text

Catching a Cold

Rating: T

Genre: Fluff/Angst

Word count: 4589

Summary: Simon gets a terrible, destructive cold.

Read on AO3

AN: Wow another long one. Not as long as flowers, but still pretty long. Hope you enjoy it :)

Simon

I wake up feeling like my head is filled with cotton and my nose is on fire. Clear snot drips out of onto the pillow below. It even hurts to breathe.

“Shit,” I mutter. My voice is high pitch and clogged. I cough and green mucus comes out. Crowley, of all the things that could get me, and it’s fucking a cold.

And like my day couldn’t get any worse, Baz walks out of the bathroom, looking impeccable as always. He looks at me with a disgusted frown.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” He says.

“I have a cold,” I say.

“Obviously. You sound horrible.”

“Fuck off.” I wish I could sound more intimidating but my voice makes that impossible.

Baz chuckles. “That barely works when you’re healthy, Snow. Nice try.”

“Hey you-” A tickling in my nose makes me stop. I feel the sneeze building bit by bit. But something else builds too. Like a charge in the pit of stomach. It’s too late when I realise what it is.

“ACHOO!” The air explodes around me. Streaks of lightning shoot out in every direction. Baz ducks for cover, hands braced on his head. Once my vision clears, I look around. The walls are singed and there’s electricity still swirling around my head.

“Aleister fucking Crowley, Snow!” Baz shouts as he stands back. “What the fuck was that?!”

“Um, I think my magic is, uh...reacting to the cold.”

Baz groans and shakes his head. “As if you weren’t destructive enough already.”

“Hey! It’s not my fault! I-” Oh no, the tickling starts again. Baz’s eyes go wide with fear.

“Shit,” he hisses. “Snow, press your tongue behind your top two teeth.”

“Wha-”

“Just do it!”

I press the tip of my tongue there as hard I can. I feel like an idiot. But then, the tickle start to fades and eventually goes away completely. Once fully gone, I let out a sigh, as does Baz. I wipe the snot away and turn to him.

“Now what was that?” I ask.

“My little sister has very severe allergies in the spring. My step-mother uses that trick to stop her sneezing fits. Luckily it works on large children as well as small ones.”

I glare as best I can with bloodshot eyes. Baz is certainly not intimidated though. I stand up out of bed, but the entire world suddenly decides to tilt sideways. Everything is topsy turvy. I stumble forward, about to fall on my face, until two strong hands grip my shoulders to steady me.

“Whoa whoa, don’t stand up.” Baz’s voice is surprisingly soft. There’s barely an edge to it. “Get back on the bed.”

I sit on the mattress, my head hanging down. Everything is still spinning. I try to focus on the floor for some semblance of stability.

“I’m going to try a spell,” he says, still soft. “Get well soon!”

His magic hits me like a heatwave and wraps around my body like a warm blanket. But the warmth slides off me, pooling at my feet.

“Hmph. Why isn’t it working?”

“My body knows I hate you,” I chuckle. “Doesn’t want your help.”

Baz growls. “Or maybe your magic agitating cold is spell proof. You’re going to have to get over it the old fashioned way, I guess .”

I groan. “I have a project to hand in though.”

“I’ll do that,” Baz replies. “Just get back in bed, you idiot.”

“But-”

“No buts. Lie down, now.”

With one last annoyed humph, I do as he says. The usually annoyingly lumpy pillow feels like a goddamn cloud now. I sigh and snuggle into it. Baz carefully pulls the blanket up to my shoulders. I open my eyes, but my vision is too blurry to see his face clearly. I wonder what he looks like, how he’s looking at me. I frown.

“Why are you doing this? You could kill me right now, easily”

“Because you’re utterly helpless right now. And despite your deluded opinion of me, I’m not a complete monster. I won’t kick a man when he’s down. Plus the sooner you get better, the sooner I won’t have to worry about being hit by a stray lightning bolt.”

I huff, closing my eyes. “Right. Don’t want to be a pile of ash.”

He scoffs. “Go to sleep, Snow.” With that, I hear him walk away. Once the door is closed, I let myself relax. I bury my face into the pillow and drift away into sleep.

“Snow? Snow? Simon, wake up.”

I blink open my gummy eyes. There’s little sunlight coming in through the window. Crowley, I must’ve slept the whole day away. Baz is leaning over me. And I swear he almost looks concerned. Probably just afraid I’ll fry him with my literally explosive sneeze.

“You just called me Simon,” I mumble.

“No, I didn’t. You’re sick and obviously hallucinating.”

Baz is holding stuff in his hands. A stack of papers in one, and a large ceramic bowl in the other. I squint at the bowl.

“What’s that?”

He holds up the paper. “Your homework. Of course it will only be of use if you decide to do it.”

I shake my head. “Not that, arsehole. The bowl.”

Baz places the papers on his side table and lowers the bowl towards my face. The smell of salty broth wafts its way into my stuffed nose.

“Soup,” Baz says. “Compliments of Cook Pritchard. I told her how utterly pathetic you were, plus how imperative it is you get better before burning the whole school to the ground. So she made you soup. Now sit up and drink it.”

With immense effort, I sit up on my bed. The room isn’t spinning as much as before, so that’s a good sign. Baz carefully places the soup in my lap and puts a spoon in my hand. I swear his fingers linger on mine, but it’s so brief I must be hallucinating more. I take a cautious sip. It tastes great. I hum in approval.

“Good?” Baz asks.

“Very,” I reply, taking another sip. The warmth it clears my aching head slightly, enough to let a sudden thought to smash in. I inhale sharply, which causes another coughing fit, and a curious look from Baz.

“You alright, Snow?”

“Oh Crowley,” I rasp out. “Did you tell Penny I’m here? She’s probably going to freak out.”

Baz rolls his eyes. “Of course. Bunce ambushed me after class, demanding I tell her where you are or she’d smite me where I stood. I told her, she didn’t believe me, then I told her again and swore on my mother’s grave, and then she was convinced.”

I sigh. “Oh thank Merlin. Is she coming up here? I’m guessing she wants to come up here.”

“She wanted to. But I told her we should keep you in quarantine for now in case anyone else could get the more violent symptoms.”

“You’re not worried about getting sick yourself?”

“I don’t get sick.”

I nod slowly. “Right. Because you’re a vampire.”

Baz glares, seemingly trying to murder me with just his gaze. “ Because, I have a good immune system. Now drink the rest of that soup. It will keep you hydrated and give you nutrients.”

With an annoyed huff, I keep drinking it. I’ll admit, it does make me feel better. Soon I look back up at Baz, still sitting on his bed facing me. “How are you so good at this?”

“I have four younger siblings, Snow. If one of them gets sick, they all get sick. And since I never do, I help my parents.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to help me.”

He makes a “pfft” noise, blowing a strand of hair out of his face. “Magically destructive illness means automatic truce in my book. And I told you, I’m not a complete monster.”

He doesn’t say anything else. Just keeps sitting there, silent, frowning slightly (but his face always looks like that). He doesn’t elaborate, leaving that statement hanging in the air. And honestly, I’m not sure if he’s trying to convince me or himself with it.

“Alright,” I finally say. “Truce. Until I’m not at risk of blowing you up.”

He nods once curtly. “Good. Glad that’s settled, Snow.”

I slurp down the last of the soup. (It’s really good.) Baz makes a disgusted noise at my manners. But he still takes the empty soup bowl from me and puts it on my desk. I lie back down.

“Now,” I say. “What did I miss in class?”

Baz raises an eyebrow. “You really care?”

I shrug. “I need something to sleep off my cold. Schoolwork is boring enough to send me right back to dreamland.”

“You really plan to sleep through your entire illness?”

“It’s only a cold. Should be gone in a day or two.”

“Achoo!”

Boom! A lightning bolt assaults the opposite wall and the black mark gets bigger. Five days. I’ve been sick for five fucking days and the only good thing is that I've figured out how to make my electric sneezes focused in one area. Now it just shoots out in front of me. Still makes Baz flinch though, understandably. He does so just as another sneeze bolt lets loose.

“Aleister Crowley, Snow,” he says from his bed. “Are you getting any better?”

“Obviously not,” I grumble, blowing my nose again.

“This is so weird. If this is a normal cold, then why won’t it go away?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

I flop down on the bed and groan. This is a nightmare. Penelope is pretty sure I have some unknown magical plague. She’s researching every minute outside of class. Agatha convinced Baz to bring me scones along with the daily soup. The Mage would care if he was bloody well around.

Baz has been surprisingly understanding. He brings the aforementioned soup and scones everyday, tells me what I missed in class, and even wrote out an assignment for me I dictated to him. Merlin, he even edited it for me. I really wonder, is this Baz pretending to be a nice person? Or is this how he actually acts but just treats me like crap? Am I the exception or the rule?

Either way, I think I like...this. This weird illness inducing truce. I definitely like it better than fighting.

“I feel like death,” I whine.

“You’re not dying, Snow,” Baz replies.

“How do you know, Mr. Smartypants?”

“Because I’m supposed to kill you. And the universe is not kind enough to let you die of a cold before I can do so.”

I roll onto my side so I can see him better. He’s reading his book with a completely blank expression. No indication he’s bothered by what he just said. It bothers me though. Usually I wouldn’t say anything, just accept it and move on. Maybe it’s my cold messing with my head, but I can’t let it go.

“You really think that?” I mumble. “That we’re going to kill each other?”

Baz flicks his eyes over to me. “Don’t you?”

I shrug. “I know I’m supposed to. It’s what everyone says. But I don’t know.” I look down at my bedsheet, tracing circles in the fabric. “I...I don’t think I'd want to now. You’ve been so nice to me through all of this. Why would I kill someone who’s being so nice to me?”

He scoffs. “Because I’m a Pitch and you’re the Mage’s heir. We’re doomed to die by each other’s hand. If the Humdrum doesn’t get you first.”

“Stop talking like your father and talk like yourself,” I snap.

He doesn't say anything for too long. I slowly lift up my head. Baz is looking at me, and it’s not with disgust, or contempt, or even blank resignation. In fact, he looks almost...pained. His eyes are round and open, his lips pressed together in a thin line. He’s got a death grip on his book so hard his knuckles are ghost white. It’s like he wants to say something but he can’t get it out. The anxious ache in my stomach grows with every passing second.

“Simon-”

Then I sneeze.

It comes out of nowhere. The bolt sails towards Baz’s head. He yelps and ducks down just in time. When he looks back up, it’s with the familiar expression of contempt.

“Fucking Merlin and Morgana, Snow!” He roars. “You nearly killed me!”

“I’m sorry!” I shout back.

“I don’t fucking care how sorry you are! If I’m going to die it will not be by your idiotic cold!”

“It was an accident.”

“Like hell it was,” he snarls. “Thought you could lull me into a false sense of security then get me, huh? Nice try, Chosen One.”

I gape at him. Does he really think I’d do that? That I’m capable of something so manipulative? “N-No of course not. I-I- How could you- I would-”

“Shut the fuck up you stupid stuttering numpty!”

He pushes himself off the bed and stomps to the door.

“W-Where are you going?”

“Out,” he mutters. “Away from you.”

With that, he walks out and slams the door closed with enough force to shake the room. I’m left there, frozen, in too much shock to move. What the hell just happened? It was an accident, I know it was. But my stupid words wouldn’t work like usual. And now he’s gone. There’s nothing I can do.

Slowly, I lay back down on my bed and stare out the window. I don’t cry. I just let myself wallow in self pity. Mentally hitting myself for doing that. Fuck, we were getting somewhere, and I messed it up. Messed it up like I always mess up everything.

I really am the worst chosen one that’s ever been chosen.

Baz hasn’t spoken to me in two days. Fuck, he hasn’t even so much as looked at me. No more homework help or soup. (Penny’s been bringing food instead.) It’s all just unbelievably tense silence. He stays out of the room too, goes out at night for longer that he ever has before. Like right now.

I’m on my back, staring at the ceiling. I’m surrounded by snotty tissues. I can’t sleep. That stupid day is still mulling around in my head all this time. It was an accident. I know it was...right? I didn’t mean to. The sneeze just came out of nowhere, no warning. I didn’t want to hurt Baz. It’s just this stupid cold.

What if it was subconscious? What if deep down I did? Oh god, am I really that much of a monster inside? I can’t be, I can’t be, I can’t-

I can’t breathe.

I bolt up and put a hand to my chest. It’s like there’s an elephant on my lungs. The whole world is spinning. The horrible thoughts keep bashing into me over and over again. You’re evil, you’re a monster, you tried to kill him after all he did to help you. It’s like the world’s worst time loop. Every inhale is a struggle. My magic reacts with me, pushing to the surface, making my skin simmer and glow. Fuck, I think I’m about to go off.

“Snow? Simon!”

Baz’s voice is distant to me. I faintly hear him run to my bed. He crashes onto the mattress, eyes wild with fear.

“Baz,” I choke out. “Can’t- Can’t breathe.”

“Oh my god, oh my god,” he mutters. “Is it your cold?”

“N-No. Head. T-Thinking- Won’t stop.”

Baz’s fear fades slightly. He looks more determined than anything. Suddenly, he takes my head between his hands, looking me right in the eye. (I think he does, it’s all too spinny.)

“Simon,” he says firmly. “You’re having a panic attack, okay? I need you to try to calm down and control your breathing.”

I try to wrangle in my mind but it won’t listen. The thoughts slip out of my grasp every time. My body keeps heating up. I shake my head violently.

“C-Can’t.’

“Shit,” he hisses. After a second, he grabs my wrists presses both my hands to his cool chest. “Simon, I want you to feel me breathe and try to sync up with it, okay?”

I nod vigorously.

“Alright. Listen to my voice, feel my lungs. In,” he inhales, “1,2,3. Out,” he exhales, “1,2,3.”

I focus on the feeling under my palms. It’s the only constant, grounding thing I can detect at the moment. In, 1,2,3, out, 1,2,3. Baz does it over and over again, keeping his grip on my wrists tight. Before I know it, I’m breathing just like him, my magic isn’t about explode, and the world isn’t spinning anymore.

I can finally see Baz’s face clearly. I’ve never seen him so scared, eyes wide and brows near his hairline. He hasn’t let go of me. But...I really don’t want him to, actually. His touch keeps me steady. It reminds me of the real world. That I didn't really kill him.

“You okay?” He says softly. I nod, and he sighs, the fear sliding off his face. “Thank Merlin.”

The exhaustion washes over me. This whole experience has completely drained me. I can’t help but yawn.

“Go to bed, Snow.” Baz starts to let go of my wrists. I inhale sharply. No, he can’t leave now. The second lets go I feel untethered, weightless, like I could drown in my own mind again.

“No,” I say, grabbing Baz’s hands tightly. He looks at me curiously. “Don’t go.”

“Snow, wha-”

“You’re, you’re keeping me grounded. Just stay. Please.”

Baz looks at me for what feels like eternity. His lips hang open. I watch his eyes for a sign of choice. He’s probably going to shove me away. Call me an idiot or something. The last thing I expect is for him to sigh and nod slowly.

“Alright,” he whispers. “Just face the other way in case of a sneeze.”

I nod back. “Okay.”

I lay down on my side, facing the window. I brush the snotty tissues onto the floor, giving me a better view of the twinkling stars. After hearing the sound of Baz kicking off his shoes, I feel the mattress shift as he lays down next to me. We’re still holding each other's hand. I refuse to let go. But it’s more awkward now, my arm bent behind me. It’s definitely preventing me from falling asleep.

Fuck it. I grunt and pull our hands in front of myself, putting Baz’s arm across my waist. He lurches forward as a result, inhaling sharply. His chest is maybe a millimeter from touching my back. Our bodies are practically lined up.

“Snow, what are you-”

“Can’t sleep if my arm twisted,” I mutter. “Neither can you.”

He humphs annoyedly, but doesn’t move. Our fingers are weaved together, resting in front of my stomach. I can feel his breath hit the back of my neck, sending a warm shiver down my spine. Usually, Baz’s constant presence makes me tense, like I’m walking on eggshells or a minefield. But now, it’s the exact opposite. I don’t feel panicked or drowning as long as I can hear him breathing and feel his skin on mine. Clinging to his hand, it’s like clinging to a life raft.

“Goodnight, Baz.”

“Night...Simon.”

I squeeze his palm once, just lightly. And I swear he squeezes back.

I wake up just before dawn. Orange light is dancing on the horizon outside the window. There’s a weight across my side. And something warm on my back. Something warm and breathing.

Oh. Right.

Baz has moved closer in his sleep, (though he didn’t have to move that much in the first place.) His nose is nudged into my neck, his chest pressed against my spine. Our legs are tangled together. We’re still holding hands too, together arms across my side, fingers interlocked.

Basilton Grimm-Pitch is sleeping next to me. Curled up next to me. And it feels...really nice. I like him like this. Under my thumb, under my hand. Not off plotting or hurting others or hurting himself. Part of me wants to never let him move from here ever again.

I let go of his hand and slowly turn to face him. He’s breathing evenly, lips slightly open (and he calls me a mouth breather.) He looks so relaxed, and kind of, pretty. His hair is all mussed, raven strands hanging in his face. The dawn light makes his pale skin practically glow. Maybe I never will let him get up. Maybe I’ll just keep looking at him for eternity.

His eyes blink open. And slowly, they focus on me. He looks very shocked for a second, but then he relaxes as the memory of last night returns. Though his eyes still look a bit scared.

“You’re still here,” I whisper. “You stayed all night.”

“You begged me to stay,” he replies, voice equally low.

“But you didn’t have to.”

He shrugs, something he rarely does. “I’m allowed to be nice sometimes.”

“You keep saying that. Maybe...you’re just a nice person.”

“Am not.” His nose curls up in disgust. “Stop trying to ruin my reputation, Snow.”

“Actually, I really think you are.” I trace a finger down his jaw and his breath hitches. “You’re a nice person, Baz. A good person.”

I run my finger up and down, and his eyes flutter shut. He lets out a shuddering sigh. I feel his hand clench behind me. His face pulls in, like he’s in pain. No, I don’t want him to be hurting. So I move my hand upward and rub his forehead with my thumb. Trying to erase his tense lines with my touch. Slowly, his grip loosens, the lines fade, and his eyes open, just halfway.

“Simon...” he sighs.

Then I kiss him.

I don’t exactly know why. The impulse enters my mind and suddenly my lips are pressed against his. A still, chaste kiss. Baz inhales sharply, head pulling back slightly. For a second I think he’s going to push me off. That I’ve made an enormously stupid mistake and now Baz is going to fry me alive for it.

But then he pushes back. He grabs my shirt at the small of my back and hauls me even closer to him. It’s like there’s a fire burning between us. Growing bigger with every way mouths move, slotting together like that’s all they’re meant to do. Baz’s hand presses hard into my lower back, like he’s making sure I’m really here.

I wonder how long he’s wanted this. I wonder how long I’ve wanted this. I’d say I didn’t, but then why is there this list in my head of all the things I’ve always wanted to do to Baz? Like this.

I push my hand into Baz’s hair. It’s smooth and slips through my fingers, just like I always thought it would. I clench my fist and shove his face into mine. Suddenly, he breaks off.

“Sorry,” I say (I’m out of breath, it’s embarrassing.)

“No, it’s... How’s your cold? Do you still feel sick?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Worried about catching? I thought you didn’t get sick.”

“I don’t. But a lightning sneeze could turn me into a pile of ash.

Oh right. I’ve completely forgot about my cold until now. I take a breath through my nose, and though it's not exactly clear, it's better than before. My throat isn’t as scratchy either. I smile, earning a confused look from Baz.

“Actually,” I say, “I’m feeling a lot better. I think you might be curing me.”

He rolls his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Snow.”

“You called me Simon before.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Baz .” I cup his cheek. The annoyance drains from his face with a single sigh. Crowley, who knew one touch could make him relax like this? He puts his hand over mine, long fingers around me.

“Simon,” he says softly. “What are you doing?”

“Holding your face, obviously.”

“No. I mean, what is this?” He gestures between us. “Is this just an impulsive illness induced decision? Or...something else?”

I chew on my bottom lip, and sigh. “Well, I’m usually unsure of most things. But, I’m sure that I like this. I like you. I like you being nice to me, I like being nice to you. I like knowing you’re okay. These past few days, when I thought I almost killed you, I thought I was going to lose my mind. Fuck, I had a bloody panic attack over it. And I’m so sorry for that, I really am. I just, I know I like this better than fighting.” I bend my head down, too scared to look him in the eye. “Do...do you?”

Baz lets go of my hand, and for a second I think he’s going to push me away. Tell me that he hates me, that he hopes I rot in hell after putting me there. But then he grabs my chin and tilts my head back up to face him. His mouth is stern, determined, but his grey eyes are soft. Softer than I’ve ever seen them before. He traces his index slowly up my jawline. When his fingers tangle in my hair, it sends a shudder down my spine.

“Yes,” he breathes. “I do. Of course I do. Crowley, I've always wanted this.”

I’m taken aback by that, eyes widening. “Really?”

“Yes. Almost since we met.”

My breath hitches. His utter candor hits me right in the heart. For once, there’s nothing guarded about his face. He’s not hiding behind a bored expression anymore. He’s letting himself be vulnerable to me. And I like it. I don’t want him to hide from me anymore.

I grab the back of Baz’s neck and tap my forehead against his. He takes a deep breath, his eyes fluttering shut. Dragging his hand down my spine, he settles his palm against the small of my back.

“Then let's have this, Baz,” I whisper.

"Simon," he sighs. "I do want this, I really do. But there’s still a lot of stuff in our way. You have to know that.”

“Of course I know. But...we can do it, right? We can figure it all out. If we can get through this shitty destructive cold, we can get through anything.”

Baz chuckles, shaking his head against mine. “I think an impending civil war and a super villain are a bit more difficult.”

I shrug. “Yeah, I guess. But we’ll have each others backs. We can beat it together. And for now, let’s just...” I sigh, letting my eyes fall shut. “Let’s worry about all that later, alright? I don’t want to think about tomorrow. I want it to be just us for now.”

He smiles softly, eyes opening just a bit. He pushes us closer together. I bury my face in his neck, and he pushes his nose into my hair.

“Yes. Let’s, just be us right now.”

“Good.”

So we just lay there, holding each other, letting the world happen around us while we stay still. Because while we’re here, we’re not the Chosen One and the Pitch heir. We’re just two boys who care about each other with all the time in the world.

I've hated being in this bed the past week. But now I never want leave it again.

AN: Yeah it got super sappy at the end, I know. I'm a sap king/queen. Next up: side characters!

#carry on countdown #coc 2017 #carry on #snowbaz #simon snow #baz pitch #sick fic #fluff #angst #mysnowbazfic

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cannibalcaterpillar · 6 years

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First time sleep paralysis; TRIGGER WARNING~

I don’t know how to do these. Uh..animal abuse/death? ~

So this morning (LITTLE AFTER 3AM GO FIGURE) I began my first horrifying adventure into sleep paralysis. This is something I’ve heard stories of and read about but never even came close to myself, tho I do I have night terrors often, they are VERY different.

Unlike most of what I read there was no demon that crawled from the darkness of the room to fuck me. No, I think maybe I was the demon. And I’m still shaking and terrified this was a vision and not just a nightmare as it took place at least a year from now because it centers around me mudering Cujo, and he was a fully grown monster hunter.

It’s interesting because I thought this was JUST a demon raping you thing, and this was nothing like that but I could still see myself asleep and the dim light from my salt lamp (that shouldn’t have been left on so it kept my attention) in the corner of my eye. I could see my breathing and I could feel that I wasn’t able to move. Spooky.

As a mentally ill gal on the psychosis spectrum who is unable to be medicated (that’s another story) honestly one of my biggest fears is myself. My symptoms as I age. In this particular horror story it started simple. Just a whisper. Oh you know the ones, the sneakiest whispers that aren’t noticed for their volume, but for the optimism and comfort with which they can inflect that it’s perfectly fine to murder. The ones that make you consider if it’s really that easy and fun.

Dream caterpillar was weak and almost instantly ready to accept these things as fact and within no time at all she was convinced that beheading Cujo was not only necessary but would free up some of the evil he’s been holding onto. The delusion, was that he would live through it all totally fine so long as I put his head back.

This is incredibly hard to write about as it just happened and I’m still shaking. It was actually the worst sleep incident I’ve ever had. (And I’m a CSA survivor!) anyways this was like an unedited video without time jumps or even time seeming to pass. It was all spent in a bathroom I’ve never seen that had no windows. And without breaks or even glancing away I watched myself saw off his fucking head. I WILL NOT go into detail. Once was enough.

It didn’t stop there tho. That was just one part of his purification. So as if this is the most normal thing on the planet (I was fully deluded now) I got den and told him to help me sew the head back on. He of course reacted as any a sane person who loved Cujo with all of his heart would.

As if a switched flipped in me I immediately hit him in the face and became something else. I was much more aggressive and scary, and I basically hit/bullied him into sitting on the floor shaking with this fucked up home ec project in his lap. Again. No breaks, no looking away, no blinks. I watched him in real time be traumatized by me. It was fucking hard. And every time I tried to move or wake up, the unmoving salt lamp made me more sure I couldn’t escape this trap.

As you may have guessed, he didn’t come back once his head was back on. And that broke my delusion and brought me flaming, crashing into the reality of the situation. Cujo, my heart. My soul. My service dog and best boy, gone by my own crazy fucking hands for no reason.

Immediately I blame den and start screaming and foaming at the mouth he needs to fix it. Just get a new puppy and we’ll call it Cujo he’ll be reincarnated and he’ll be just like he always was. WE CAN FIX IT WE CAN TAKE IT BACK HES OK. Just constantly screaming that over and over as Den went catatonic holding the corpse, and I started ripping out fistfuls of hair from my head.

And then Den woke me up to say goodbye before he left for work. I don’t know how long it took for me to calm down and come out of that but the suns up now so it wasn’t fast. I’m really sad he had to leave. I don’t know how the fuck I’m gonna shake this one off. I’ve never experienced something this intense in my sleep. It just HANGS there and I’m still even now convinced that was real and this is the dream.

I’m sure this had something to do with the original Cujo having rabies and being tested, but there was no mention of that being the evil he was hanging on to. I dunno. But baby’s got his shots so hopefully this shit stops.

TL;DR I had a bad dream I killed my dog and now I’m sad.

#sleep paralysis #paranoid delusions #actually schizophrenic #animal abuse #decapitation #mutilation

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doctortwhohiddles · 7 years

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Spot on Anon

So I found the ask that seemed to have sent Gator over the edge. I copied the ask since it’s too long to screencap. Gator’s response is in italic.

All right Gator, let’s see if you’re brave enough to post this (I bet you won’t).

So you call us obsessed and deluded. Have you seen my blog? I dare you to find post were I analyze Benedict’s private life. I dare you to find a post were you see me analyzing every photos taken of him and his wife. I really don’t think you can say that about your blog, can you?

You see, us “nans” as you like to call us live in the real world. A world were Ben is happily married with two children. A world were we know that we don’t have a say in his private life and nerver will. A world were we don’t feel the need to insult a complete stranger to feel better about ourselves. You think what we’re doing to you is disgusting? Honey, that’s nothing to what you’ve been doing to Sophie and her kids for the last 3 years. What we’re doing is calling out your lies and your behavior. You’re the bully dear, not us. Let me prove that to you.

1) You never, ever call Sophie by her name. Always by some mean nicknames, like Zero or Octopus. That’s a totally normal thing to do for someone your age. NOT.

2) You over analyze every single photo of Benedict. Always saying there’s something wrong with him. Unless Sophie isn’t in the photo, because then he looks great. Even in pictures were Sophie was cropped out of. You always scream “Photoshop”. Because for some reason, you can’t bear to see them together.

3) You change theories every 5 seconds. Case and point, the last pap pictures. You started saying that Sophie ambushed him, then when your pal Aeltri decided that it was photoshoped, you changed your story. Because you can’t have an original thought by yourself. And now you’re saying that Sophie is using an old photo to mess with Ben. So which is it? I’ll tell you, it’s none of the above.

4) You’ll believe every lie told to you without questions, as long as it paints Sophie in a bad light. Case and point : the whole Groucho Club story. Again something started by Aeltri. That story is a hoax started by someone who thinks the Royal family are giant shape-shifting lizards. But when someone says something nice about her, you need proof in triplicate with a court seal to believe it. But yeah, we’re the ones that are obsessed.

5) Every time there’s a sighting of Ben and his family, you automatically deny it. You try to look for anything that would discredit it. Again, by ignoring all the facts. And when you can’t, you make up some bullshit theory. Case and point : the whole “it’s too hot in Atlanta to go biking”. But apparently, it’s not hot enough to stop Marvel from getting him to run around in full Doctor Strange costume. And by ignoring that plenty of people live in Atlanta and go by their business, even in summer.

6) You actually think you have mutuals with Benedict. If you haven’t hear from your sources in a while, it’s because they got bored of you. You were trolled. Do you honestly think that anyone with compromising info on Sophie would go to a no name blogger from nowhere USA instead of going to the police or selling the story to the tabloids? In what world does that even make sense?

You want to know why we screencap your blog? Because you crave attention, and reblogging gives you notes. Which is the only thing you want, not Ben’s well being. Because if you cared about that, you would delete your blog and apologize. And to answer one of your anons, we’re not trying to convince ourselves by calling out your lies. Neither are we trying to convince you. Because it’s crystal clear that you’d rather die than to admit you were wrong. No we’re exposing you for what you are, a bully, a liar and a fraud.

I don’t know if I’ve seen your blog, because you sent this in anon. (I try to avoid any seriously devoted Benedict blogs). I never said all nanny fans are obsessed. But if you are the one buying 16 photo ops in one day with Benedict, you are obsessed. As far as craving attention? WTF? Nope. I don’t care how many notes I get. I’m not in this for me. Never intended to even get involved in the fandom at all. It wasn’t until I saw how horrible Sophie was that I even started posting. I have absolutely nothing to prove to you or anyone. And I’m not the one sending in anon hate to someone with a different opinion/outlook on something, so how am I the bully? I’m not going to dignify the rest of your rant with an answer. Everyone who actually really follows my blog already knows what my response would be. Just know this, I care WAY more about Benedict’s wellbeing than I do about being right. So stop projecting onto me and take a good look at yourself.

Let’s analyze Gator’s response shall we? She first starts by attacking fans lucky enough to go the LFC and have their pictures taken with Ben. I don’t know about you, but that reeks of jealousy. I take comfort in knowing that Ben’s security team have Gator on their watch list. It wasn’t until I saw how horrible Sophie was that I even started posting. That’s Gator speech for “My internet boyfriend found a IRL girlfriend and I can’t take it. I’ll spend my days shitting on her to feel better about myself”. And I’m not the one sending in anon hate to someone with a different opinion/outlook Saying that you think she looks ugly is an opinion. Saying that she’s a drug addict whore, a blackmailer and an abuser is slander. There’s a huge difference between the two. A difference that every bully seem to forget. I care WAY more about Benedict’s wellbeing than I do about being right. I almost choke with laughter when I read this. If she truly cared about his wellbeing, she’d apologize and delete her blog. Not make up even more disgusting lies about Sophie and her family. But she’s right when she says she doesn’t care about being right. If she did, she would have stop by now. I’m not going to dignify the rest of your rant with an answer. Of course she won’t. That’s because she can’t. That anon is spot on about Gator and the rest of the SGB. Even Gator can see that. And we know what your answer would be. It’s the one that Ben and Sophie would like to give her : fuck off.

#gatorfisch #sgb #Sophie Hunter #benedict cumberbatch #you can block me if i'm annoying you with my posts

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bluetapes · 7 years

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Blue Tapes is an algorithm

The long Q/A version of an interview I did with Kristoffer Patrick Cornils for the German magazine HHV on the thinking behind the Blue Tapes project.

What was your motivation to start the label back in 2012? What are you goals with the label?

Distracting myself from the doom, really. I think that’s all any creative endeavours are. I started the label as a visual art project to give myself something creative and positive to occupy my time with after I’d been knocked on my arse by a particularly nasty bout of depression. I think it was helpful to just have this little hobbyist project that involved going away and spending a lot of time thinking about colours and sounds. Before starting the label I had been a music journalist and I was sick of the sound of my own ‘voice’ and everyone else’s, really. Doing something small and simple and abstract and just for me was very rewarding. A few months into that, other people found it, and some of them liked it.

Stylistically, you don't seem to have any boundaries. What does a record have to bring to the table to be released through Blue Tapes, or what is the lowest common denominator between Katie Gately, accapella Death Metal and the keyboard improvisations of a 13-year-old?

Blue Tapes is an algorithm. There are three axes and the artists that score most highly along these axes are the ones I choose to work with. The axes could be labelled a) Is this something that people have heard before?; b) Do I like it?; and c) Will other people like it? That last one is the hardest to quantify. I’m never short of finding amazing, innovative music that I love, but I’ve lost so much money through doing the vinyl series in particular that I’ve had to face up to the fact that there’s not much point in releasing records that only a tiny proportion of humans will respond to.

(I mean, having said that, my next release IS a microtonal ambient black metal LP…)

Although there is a lot of musical diversity throughout the series I do put a huge amount of thought into why I might want to release something and it has been curated to make sense as a series, even if the only person that it ultimately makes sense to is me? From a marketing perspective it’s a nightmare, obviously.

How do you find the artists that release on Blue Tapes? Do you do your A&R work on the internet or do you rather use your personal connections?

For the early releases, I would often have an idea of the KIND of thing I would want to release - say an acapella death metal album - and then I’d go online and try and find somebody who with a bit of convincing and a bit of imagination could deliver that. Soundcloud was a pretty invaluable resource for this.

Some very good friends of mine started the 20 Jazz Funk Greats blog back in 2004. I started blogging for it more after starting the label and I found a few of the artists (Plains Druid, Unfollow, Trupa Trupa) through that.

Very rarely it might be somebody who contacts me (hi Benjamin Finger) but mostly it’s me trying to imagine the music I want to release and then finding the nearest thing to that sound in my head in real life. (Without me having to get my hands dirty and make it myself… because I suck at the music.)

In 2014, you have launched X-Ray Records, a vinyl sublabel to Blue Tapes. What was the idea behind that and how do you decide if a record's coming out on tape or vinyl?

This is part of the process that I’m still tinkering with and trying to get right, but mostly it just came down to whether it felt right to do so. I’d had the visual concept for the series in my head for a while, and it made sense to try and reissue some of the bigger tape releases on vinyl cos they’d had an impact and a lot of people had missed out. Mostly I just really wanted to own a copy of the Tashi Dorji album on see-through vinyl so I took out a bank loan to get one! Sort of a foolish enterprise, but I’m unrepentant.

People can subscribe to your tape or vinyl series and even Blue Tapes shirts. What was your idea behind that subscription service and how have people responded to it so far?

There’s a small coterie of subscribers who I guess are kind of at the heart of the BT/XR family.

The first germ of an idea relating to Blue Tapes was that I was really into making cyanotypes at the time and I wanted to find some kind of a purpose for them, to justify their existence, so I had a sort of mad idea to make a series of limited edition t-shirts with cyanotype prints on them, that you could subscribe to. I was quite excited by it as a concept but it probably wasn’t destined to register with the outside world very well! Somewhere down the line, instead of the art being a t-shirt, it became a tape with a piece of music or other sound on it and an image that could collectively be represented by a serial number, rather than a title.

I always thought the subscription element was important in a way, because I think the series does only make sense if you view it as a curated body of work rather than discrete entities, but admittedly that’s not actually how people consume or usually think about music.

Your artwork is very recognisable not only because it's, well, mostly blue. What's the concept behind that and how do you create those washed out effects?

So the process I mentioned before, cyanotype, is a pre-camera photographic technique that uses sunlight and water and chemicals to create images. It was originally developed for scientists and engineers to reproduce diagrams or other plans. Because the chemicals produce a blue-coloured print, they became known as ‘blueprints’.

I find analogue processes a lot more interesting to think about than digital processes, so cassette tapes and cyanotypes made very natural bedfellows for me.

Some of the images are created using other ‘alternative process’ photographic techniques - those very ‘washed out’ colours are done using a technique called transaquatype, where you use water to try and intentionally make the colours run - but I think the best ones are the cyanotypes, particularly the cyanotype abstracts.

The X-Ray series, as suggested by the name, takes a very different approach. Is that perhaps a reference to those literal X-Rays from the Soviet era on which people cut music because they lacked the ressources for vinyl?

The name is a reference to that, for sure. But it also links back to the cyanotypes. The first step in making a cyanotype using the modern method is to create an enlarged negative of your source image on acetate. These enlarged negatives are pretty cool objects in their own right, and I started to think they’d make really cool vinyl packaging. So, for instance, if you take the Tashi Dorji LP, the artwork is actually the negative of the original tape artwork.

Held up to the light it looks a little like an x-ray, so X-Ray Records. It could have been ‘Negative Records’ or something but that sounds way too much like a hardcore label! And, y’know, also the Soviet thing.

Some of the earlier releases lack pretty much any information, which can be quite confusing for people who don't neatly organise their collection like I do, I guess. How do the artists respond to this serialisation? I can imagine that some would see their work compromised if they had to name it after a catalogue number.

No one’s really complained about it, but you’re probably right. I think with this thing it was almost like starting a band or something, rather than joining someone else’s band. I was able to say, look, this is the concept, if you want to be a part of it then cool but if not then no worries. It IS confusing and I would never judge anyone for not wanting to get onboard with it!

But it was important to me to present the series as a process that was configured to output a singular piece of art every month, rather than as a ‘label’, which actually felt more dishonest - it’s not a business, it doesn’t make any money. The aesthetics of the label and its cataloguing were contrived that way to try and make the ‘art’ the physical rectangular object that you hold in your hand, and as a self-conscious attempt to get away from the idea of the ‘album’, which for a while I genuinely thought might be one of the most boring ways there is to present music.

Maybe I also thought that by starving the listener of as much context and extraneous information as possible I might help them to have a more honest/profound relationship with the music, in the same way that music always sounds better when you listen to it in the dark. (Note: This is wishful and possibly deluded thinking.)

The vinyl series has titles, though.

You've put out around 30 records so far, but what would you say is the most important one? Strictly personally speaking or in regards to the label.

In regards to the label the most important one was the Katie Gately tape. It’s also just an important piece of music, I think. It set a new bar.

I do think there is a common trait that unites a lot of Blue Tapes music, despite the disparities in genre, and I think it’s unique to us because I don’t hear it in that much other stuff that I listen to as a music fan, apart from some ancient musics like gagaku sometimes. It’s a quality rather than a sound - and often the releases that have the most of this quality, or ‘feeling’, are the ones I’m most fond of.

It’s entirely subjective and also very difficult to describe, but the way I experience it is like the sensation you might get when you’re really exhausted - like, exhausted to the ends of your nerves - but instead of it being a sick feeling, it’s euphoric. Your brain switches off, stops decoding things, and stimuli wash over you - but not in a passive, bored way, they seep into every nook and cranny of your consciousness and flood it with colour and sensation. Almost like a high, I guess, but a sober, unpsychedelic one. I’m not a religious person but that particular communion I have with this music is the closest I get to something spiritual in my life.

These feelings and ego-annihilating qualities seem to be more present in very minimal music - the Tashi Dorji, Library of Babel and Mats Gustafsson records are swarming with it - but I hear it in some very maximal music, too. I hear it in Jute Gyte.

I don’t know enough about Pauline Oliveros to know if this is what she was describing with ‘deep listening’, but you could reasonably apply the term to the sounds we’re presenting for you.

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