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passionate-reply · 3 years

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Do you “fucking love” science? Have you ever been blinded by it? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because that goofy little number isn’t really supposed to be on Thomas Dolby’s debut album in the first place. Find out about all the awesome OTHER stuff that’s actually meant to be here, in this new installment of Great Albums! Transcript below the break.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’ll be talking about a stellar album by one of those artists who have gone down in history as “one hit wonders,” despite producing a deep catalogue that’s often more impressive than that one song they end up known for: it’s The Golden Age of Wireless, the debut LP of Thomas Dolby. Chances are pretty good you’ve heard his big hit, “She Blinded Me With Science,” before...at least, if you’re American.

Music: “She Blinded Me With Science”

Like I said, if you’re American, you’ve heard this one before. If anything, it’s oversaturated! But if you’re from elsewhere in the world, you might not know it. Growing up in the US, I went through the whole gauntlet of alleged “one hit wonders” of 80s synth-pop, and a great many of them turned out to be British artists who had perfectly respectable careers in their native UK: Gary Numan, Soft Cell, and OMD, for example. Thomas Dolby is also British, but he’s apparently more famous here than he is across the pond--which is still not that famous.

He really ought to be, though, because The Golden Age of Wireless is a true masterpiece. Or, at least it WAS, in its original form. It’s actually a tough album to talk about, insofar as it’s hard to pin down what exactly constitutes “The Golden Age of Wireless.” It’s had quite a few different pressings, and a variety of different track listings. And the original version of it does NOT include “She Blinded Me With Science.” While I’d never argue that it’s a bad song, since it is insanely fun, and catchy to the point of being irresistible, it really does not belong on this album. I’m sure it helped them move copies of it, but its inclusion kind of ruins the vibe, to be honest. Its in-your-face and flamboyant hooks make it feel like a very unwarranted intrusion on an otherwise fairly serious and contemplative LP, which seems to have been intended as a fairly tight and thoughtful concept album.

Aside from that glaring issue, there are a few other tracks that have appeared on later versions of the album that weren’t there from the start, namely, the two tracks from Dolby’s first ever-release, a double A-side of “Urges” and “Leipzig,” as well as “One of Our Submarines,” the B-side of some versions of “She Blinded Me With Science.” All of these tracks are excellent, and mesh with the thematic and sonic character of the album quite well. “One of Our Submarines” in particular is often considered one of the best tracks of Dolby’s career--melancholy, claustrophobic, and stinging in its poignant sense of tragedy. It captures the misery and futility of modern war, as well as the sunset of the British Empire after the Second World War...and there’s a sample of a dolphin, too. It’s easily the track that I most wish had been included from the very start.

Music: “One of Our Submarines”

But now that that’s over with, I’d like to drill down and talk about how the album operates in its original form, as the artist intended. Like I said earlier, The Golden Age of Wireless is best understood as a concept album, and I think of it in a similar league as classics like the Buggles’ The Age of Plastic, OMD’s Dazzle Ships, or even Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. The original track listing opens with “Flying North,” a stellar introduction to one of the most prominent themes of the album: freedom!

Music: “Flying North”

“Flying North” is an exultant anthem of self-determination, and one clearly mediated by “metal birds”--aeroplanes, that is. It’s a celebration of the independence allowed by technology, and a rather winsome one, in which this almost macho image of a heroic pilot takes center stage. The final track of the album, “Cloudburst At Shingle Street,” is a bit more esoteric, but seems to be aiming for a pretty similar idea overall, and I’d argue that the two of them form thematic “bookends.”

Music: “Cloudburst At Shingle Street”

“Cloudburst At Shingle Street” leads us through the technological evolution of mankind, from swinging from trees to paving concrete beaches--but the spacey synth warbles beneath those lines give them an ominous bent. The assertion that we might be heading into a cloudburst “mindless,” “naked,” or “blindly” is unnervingly cynical, but, we’re told, “there’s no escaping it.” Despite all of these signs that our better judgment should be resisting the temptation of this miraculous cloudburst...this triumphant, rising coda, with its powerful choir encouraging us onwards, seems to muddle the whole thing. The untethered, free-roaming nature of modern life isn’t always this sexy and exuberant, though--consider the track “Weightless,” as a counterpoint.

Music: “Weightless”

“Weightless” certainly seems to be about modern transients of some sort--in this case, traveling by car--but never lionizes them or makes them too terribly enviable. Instead, the focus is on the image of the draining fuel tank: the constant emptiness and craving for meaning, validation, and genuine love. No matter the allure of this very American, Route 66-like setting, the gas stations, cinemas, and decadent diner meals along the way are never any real substitute for an emotionally authentic life. That setting is, of course, a wistfully backward-looking Midcentury one. Nostalgia and childhood naivete are also among the album’s major themes, and are expressed the most clearly on “Europa and the Pirate Twins.”

Music: “Europa and the Pirate Twins”

Narratively, “Europa and the Pirate Twins” is a bittersweet story of childhood playmates who never quite re-unite, despite promising to be together again someday. The really interesting wrinkle is the fact that the narrator’s beloved Europa has become a famous celebrity as an adult, and the narrator is essentially a fan of her despite their real-world relationship. It’s an uncanny, confused parasocial relationship dynamic that feels extremely contemporary, despite the fact that it’s ultimately more of a commentary on the rise of teenager-oriented marketing during the Midcentury than anything else. The strange, often unhealthy relationships between young people and mass media, particularly radio, are another one of the major sources of tension on The Golden Age of Wireless. “Europa and the Pirate Twins” is also one of the more interesting tracks, instrumentally, featuring a prominent harmonica part, performed by Andy Partridge of XTC. Given how much the album strives to be about the future and past simultaneously, steeped in nostalgia and utopian visions alike, it makes sense to hear Dolby blend elements of traditional folk or popular music with forward-thinking synth-pop sensibilities. Listen also for a flute on “Windpower,” and a substantial amount of guitar on “Commercial Breakup,” a song that proves Dolby certainly can rock, if he feels like it.

Music: “Commercial Breakup”

The cover art for The Golden Age of Wireless isn’t exactly the most iconic, but I’ve always thought it was very beautiful. You’ve got this very eye-catching, lurid, pulp magazine style illustration of Dolby as a diligent, yet glamourous engineer, radiating with the complementary colour palette of orange and blue, the perfect picture of retro cool. But it’s framed and inset, to give us a conscious sense of observing something that’s coming to us from another time, an artifact preserved. That patina and sense of the antique is amplified by this dull-coloured background, which actually shows a marble sculpture gallery in a museum, though that’s tough to make out unless you have it right in front of you. The numerous shades of irony operating here are another thing that make the album feel strikingly contemporary.

I’m also a huge fan of the album’s title. “Wireless,” if you weren’t aware, is an old-fashioned term for radio. Radio itself is a strong theme on the album, most obviously on the track “Radio Silence,” but the use of the term “wireless” isn’t just another piece of retro nostalgia--I think it’s also evocative of that sense of free-flying, untethered independence I talked about earlier. The first half, i.e., “golden age,” is perhaps even more important. “Golden age” is an extremely loaded term that brings a number of rich associations to the table. “Golden ages” are simultaneously longed for, but not fully believed in. They’re bygone eras that usually felt like nothing special to the people who actually lived through them, despite their greatness being palpable to anyone reflecting on them in hindsight. In every golden age, there’s a poetic tragedy.

I think that even if someone did buy this record just to get their hands on “She Blinded Me With Science,” they’d probably be at least a little bit disappointed in what they got. The album does have some decent pop singles, chiefly “Radio Silence” and “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” but they’re still humming with nostalgia and unease, and not without some substantial experimental DNA.

Music: “Radio Silence”

While they cut the single weirdest track on the album, “The Wreck of the Fairchild,” they still retained some fairly ambitious tracks, such as “Windpower”--clearly an ode to Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” It’s hard to be angry with an electronic musician for trying to rip off Kraftwerk, since they all do it one way or another, and in this case it invites a natural comparison between two great concept albums focused on the theme of radio.

Music: “Windpower”

Overall, though, The Golden Age of Wireless is still a reasonably accessible album on the whole. Possibly not what you expected, and certainly, a work that’s more sentimental and affecting than good for the dance floor, but as far as poignant, ballady, diesel-punk odes to the tragic techno-optimism of the Midcentury go, I’d say it’s not all that hard to get into! Dolby does have a pop core, as an artist, that he’s quite capable of selling to us if he chooses to. For proof of that point, look no further than the single “Hyperactive!” which he followed this up with a few years later:

Music: “Hyperactive!”

When discussing an ostensible one-hit wonder, there’s a distinct temptation to resort to “they deserved better” style rhetoric. On one hand, yes, I do think more people should hear Thomas Dolby’s music, and that it has a lot to say to us. I’m all about obscure music finding new life and being appreciated. That said, in the case of Dolby, I think he basically got what he wanted, in the end. He’s always been more keenly interested in music’s many behind-the-scenes roles than he has in chasing pop stardom himself--he’s produced music, and scored a number of films and video games over the decades. It feels kind of wrong to tell someone who’s successful at one thing that they “deserve” to be successful at something different, just because we may want to hear him do it, or because we esteem one skillset more highly than the other. Ultimately, The Golden Age of Wireless is a Great Album on its own terms, whether Dolby ever decides to grace us with another synth-pop release under his own name again--which he did in 2011, with A Map of the Floating City. But it’s his decision, as an artist, and the fact that he can choose to or not is a luxury that allows him integrity. I think that’s the way it ought to be.

My overall top track on this album has got to be “Airwaves,” a song in which the narrator dies, tragically and suddenly, in an automobile accident. It’s not the sexy, “Warm Leatherette” sort of car accident, but rather a dismally realistic one, that shows quite frankly how undignified death can be. Sometimes, we aren’t so much doomed heroes as we are frightened, sickly children, defeated by our own fickle bodies. The last thought our narrator gets is “I itch all over, let me sleep”; their honour perishes just moments before they do. Meanwhile, the radio is a constant presence throughout, and serves as both something to anchor the scene in the droll and quotidian, as well as ultimately becoming something transcendent. The promise of “airwaves” is not only the human interconnectedness made possible by technology, but also a hint at the ultimate destiny of human souls, a kind of ethereal afterlife in the sky. The meandering lulls of the verses contrast sharply with the song’s eerily soaring refrain, which enhances that feeling that those “airwaves” occupy some sort of higher plane. On that surprisingly heavy note, that’s all I’ve got for today, so thanks for listening!

Music: “Airwaves”

#music #album review #album reviews #thomas dolby #one hit wonder #one hit wonders

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solacefruit · 4 years

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hello! something i really enjoy about your stories is how naturally you blend worldbuilding and stories within the actual story itself - do you have any advice on how to do that effectively? i always worry i'm going to too far into "just listing off facts about the world" in the middle of a story if i try and include TOO much worldbuilding, but i'm a big lover of worldbuilding and have a hard time not planning out every detail

Hello there! Thank you so much. Stories within stories (fun fact: this technique is called mise en abîme or mise en abyme) is something that I’m really enthralled by and that I’ve worked hard to try to get the hang of in my own work, so it’s wonderful to know it’s something you enjoy about my writing! That feels very good to hear.

As far as advice goes, I can offer the following thoughts:

Whatever amount of world-building you think is enough, go slightly under it. What I mean by this is that very often less is more when it comes to building a world (see my notes on Pullman’s Northern Lights here). By using a bit of restraint and cutting things down just a touch on your final edit, you can help yourself resist the thrall of the too much gene that many writers experience when talking about their world-building. Ask yourself “does this need to be here, or am I just excited to share it?”

Unfortunately, if it’s just the latter, it’s probably a good idea to trim it: lean storytelling keeps readers hungry, and hungry readers usually ask for more. Trouble is, as a writer, you’ve got to be the one to remember that it’s always better to leave while a crowd is wanting more than stay until the crowd is begging you to stop. (cough several media series we could mention cough)

An example of this would be in a world where there are ten gods. In your first chapter, you don’t need to list all the gods. You can maybe mention one or two, and perhaps imply there’s more. Immediately, that creates mystery and a sense of a larger world; a reader gets to wonder, who are these other gods...

You mentioned you’re a planner, so I want to reassure you: keeping the story trim doesn’t mean all your planning is wasted! If you, the writer, knows the details of your world, it will come through in everything you write. The fact you know all the answers means you have a lot of control over what you want to reveal, when, where, and how. Which leads me to:

When possible, world-build obliquely. What I mean by this is that a lot of world-building can be done in subtle ways, that leave impressions of the world without having to be told directly by a character. You also can stretch out details, sprinkling them only here and there, meaning that it takes multiple chapters to piece together concepts or institutions or other world-building elements.

Doing this can help make it never feel like an exposition dump or listing off facts, because you’re putting only tasty little morsels in (sometimes hidden) for readers to find or look back on later. The reason for it is the same as why keepers will scatter-feed animals in enclosures: enrichment. If you dump it all in one place, the animal will eat, get full and/or bored, and won’t feel good. But if you make it into a puzzle to solve, the emotional reward of finding and figuring things out for yourself is so much nicer than whatever you’re finding, usually. (Sorry to keep using animal metaphors for readers, but like... it works).

An example of this would be something like:

Anwar turned the corner onto the opulent mosaic path of the shrine district and continued towards the temple of Kenuf, furthest from the city centre. On either side, acolytes of all kinds were leaving offerings--jars of salt for Meshut, baskets of yellow lilies for Pesht--and the air was thick with the smell of incense, making his eyes water slightly. He walked as quickly as he could past the grinning crocodile faces carved on the outer wall of the second last temple, before greeting the black-robed bell-keeper outside of Kenuf’s shrine.

I’ve made this up off the cuff so none of it “means” anything, but if we look at what’s here, we learn the following:

there’s at least four gods, possibly more

Pesht’s devotees leave yellow lilies, but we don’t know what Pesht is god of yet

Meshut’s devotees leave jars of salt, but ditto above

Kenuf’s shrine is furthest from the city (does this imply it is least favoured? or maybe least used?)

all gods seem to be named in consonant-e pattern (pe-, me-, ke-), but we don’t know yet if this is meaningful or coincidental (but if you wanted it to be, make all gods and maybe royals have this same pattern and just... leave it. let your reader infer from the text that the pattern signifies divinity)

the unnamed god is represented by crocodile iconography

the bell-keeper of Kenuf wears black robes (is this a uniform, or just a fashion choice?)

Anwar does not feel comfortable with the unnamed god in this passage (scared? disdainful? a mystery...)

A “too much” passage would offer lengthy descriptions of every shrine, listing what the offerings were and what the acolytes and other staff wore and Anwar’s thoughts about how he felt about each of the ten gods. It’s not impossible to write something like that that’s good, I do want to point out! But if you’re looking to slim things down, less is more, space out details over multiple chapters.

Write for your ideal reader, who is clever and attentive. Some writers fall into the habit of over-explaining their world (resulting in info-dumping) because they don’t trust their readers to get the “right” vision of their world, or because they’re worried readers will overlook all the cool stuff they’ve put in. I can recommend not doing this and part of getting to that point is imagine you’re writing for the perfect reader of your story, who does get it and will look for all the cool clever tricky things you sneakily put in. Will every reader be that person? Definitely not! But if you write for that reader, you will elevate your work, rather than dumb it down and make it heavy with unneeded hand-holding.

This kind of overlaps with the above in the sense that it boils down to “you’re allowed to leave things out, let readers make the intellectual leaps based on the pieces you give them” but it’s also saying that you’re allowed to let things rest. Put in subtle symbolism and never draw attention to it.

Additionally, as the creator, you know all the information about the world, which is a huge power and means you can choose the exact right moments to reveal meaningful, revelatory details. For example, somewhere around chapter three or four:

Anwar closed the door of his room, walked to the wall shrine, and fell to his knees, pulling the curtain aside.

“Ye’emer, it is done,” he said, looking at the floor. “It is finally done.”

In the distance, the bells of the temple of Kenuf began to ring: a strident sound, sharp and mournful. The dawn acolytes must have found the body already.

He reached forward, carefully placing the offering on the black silk of the tiny altar. The chips of animal bone looked like stars at night, bright white in the dark.

“I don’t know why you chose me,” said Anwar, forcing himself to look up.

The burning eyes of the crocodile statue stared back.

And now you get to go ohhhh. You know the name of the god now, you know the offering, you know (or at least can speculate better at) why Anwar felt so uncomfortable near the temple. If you time when you reveal world-building details, you can make them do so much work for you in telling your story.

Make up lies about your world--or at least, untruths. This maybe sounds counter-intuitive, but there is a logic in it. Most of us are not experts on our world, and your characters should be the same. They should be biased in their perspective, or limited by what they know, or perhaps even inclined to embellish details. If two characters talk about the same event, make them have personal feelings about it! Unless your character is a historian, their account of a historical event probably isn’t going to be totally correct or certain about all the details, and that’s not a bad thing. You can use that to weave in ambiguity or intrigue, or leave out important facts that will become relevant later, or contradict it later with a different telling and make the protagonist have to question who to trust or what’s the truth.

As a species, everything we do is stories. The concept of a nation is a story we tell ourselves about what it is to be “us.” Who we each are is a story we are always telling to ourselves: I am me because I do x, I am me because I don’t do y. Often, these things aren’t The Truth so much as they are A Truth, so when it comes to writing stories into your stories, don’t forget to think about the stories characters are telling themselves about who they are. And remember that all characters are unreliable narrators, because they’re people and they’re filtering the world through their perspective. You can do so much with that.

Use stories to create meaningful parallels for the larger narrative. If you’re featuring a story (which I’ll call tale from here, to cut down on confusion) within your story, it needs to be doing something more than just telling the reader facts about the world or passing the time. One way to make sure you’re doing that is thinking about parallels, which is to say, think of how the tale can impact the “real world” of your story. This might be the protagonist having a realisation or plot breakthrough, or later deciphering out important information or applying ideas from the story to a problem they encounter.

You also can (and often should) create tonal and emotional parallels within the tale as well and/or use tales as a form of foreshadowing. For a very basic example, in a story that involves a protagonist who gets trapped in a big horrible maze later in the book might feature a version of Minotaur in the Labyrinth as foreshadowing, and the character might have a fleeting thought about it that later will resurface with new significance.

I hope some of this is helpful to you! Good luck with you writing, and please write in again if there’s anything I can help with.

tl;dr: my tips are:

do a little less and space out what you tell your reader

don’t say directly what you can imply or gesture vaguely at

write cleverly and time your moments

make use of ambiguity

make the story impact the real world

#reply #advice #i really hope some of this makes sense. it's a difficult question to answer in a post #because honestly you could do six weeks of seminars just on world-building. this is like a hyper condensed minimal example version.

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sootbird · 4 years

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Hey Rox, random question. How can one learn to draw? I mean, I got the whole take a pencil and a paper and practice everyday but I mean, after doing that you understand proportions, light, perspective? Naturally? Just by practicing everyday?

Artists telling people just to practice art and not giving them any solid starting place is a bullshit cop-out and something I’ve probably said at some point, but I’m going to rectify it now by giving you a comprehensive guide to starting art.

Some people may disagree with me (and honestly I recommend asking other artists this same question to see what they say and what you yourself agree with), but I think no matter what kind of 2D art you want to make, you should start with traditional, realistic drawing or painting. The reason for this (aside from anecdotal evidence of it working for me) is that learning to draw things that occur in real life gives you a foundation for branching out into different styles or media down the line. Even if you want to draw cartoons or anime, learning realistic drawing will help you, because it will familiarize you with the complicated shapes that more cartoony drawings simplify or exaggerate. For example, if you learn to draw a realistic nose, then you can see different ways to turn that realistic shape into a simplified version of itself. Practicing realistic art can also help train your eye and get you accustomed to different techniques such as line quality, shading, color theory, composition, and various types of art materials, or media, as I will probably begin referring to it as.

So, the next step is to figure out how the hell to start learning to draw realistic stuff. I will help, using written descriptions, tips, and videos I have found online to help you.

First off is Materials/Media.

You can make art with practically anything. Anything from the humble paper and pencil to the most expensive and high-end art supplies. You can burn a piece of wood in a fire for a bit and then use the charred end to make marks with. You can use mud to paint with. You can dip your toe in ink and use that as a paintbrush. My point is that you can really get creative with it and I think creating art should be a joyful experience, not a painful one.

Art supplies can be very expensive, so for beginners I really do recommend a paper and pencil. Not a mechanical pencil either, but one of those wooden ones. They work well for drawing because you can use both the point and the side of the lead to make marks with. I also recommend getting a good eraser. My favorite kind are the grey kneadable ones, because you can squish them into any shape you need for any particular area that needs erasing. I’ll link to some on Amazon later on.

You can practice pencil drawings on lined paper (I have a whole lot of sketches I did in high school that are just on lined paper), printer paper, cardboard, etc, or you could invest in a sketchbook. Cheap sketchbooks are pretty easy to find, like they have them at my local grocery store, but you can also find them online for fairly cheap. Sketchbooks are made of different paper depending on the media (drawing materials) that you’re using. Paper intended for pencil drawings tends to have quite a fine grain for smooth blending, whereas paper in watercolor sketchbooks is rough and absorbent to suit the wet medium. You can get a sketchbook with any paper you want, really. I’ve done pencil drawings on pastel paper before, because it was the only paper around, and it still looked nice, just different than it would on finer grain paper. What materials you choose to use depends on the look you’re going for, and you’ll figure that out more with experience.

To start with, just grab some paper and a pencil and start making marks on it. See how many different looking marks you can make on the paper. I’m not really talking about shapes persay, but literal marks with the pencil. Thin lines, thick lines, scribbles with lots of pressure or just a little bit of pressure. Scrape the side of the pencil along the paper and see what it does. Try blending the lines with your finger. Just take some time to play with the material without getting hung up on creating anything. Do this sort of experimenting with any new art material you’re introduced to. The first thing you should do with a new tool is acquaint yourself with it, and that’s what this is doing. Get used to how the pencil feels in your hand and what motions feel comfortable with it. Keep in mind that you don’t have to hold the pencil the same way as if you were writing. Often if I’m shading with a pencil, I will hold it with all of my fingers around it and use my thumb to put pressure on it.

Now, shading.

Shading and mark making go together, because shading is basically using the marks you’re making with your pencil or pen to indicate lightness vs. darkness. To practice mark making and the techniques that are used for shading, I recommend watching this video and drawing along with the exercise. The artist uses pens in it but you can do it with pencil too!

When you’re ready, you can start trying to shade basic forms (shapes). Shading gives a two dimensional shape a three-dimensional look. It turns a flat circle into a sphere. Once you learn how to shade basic shapes, you can pretty much figure out how to shade just about anything. For example, once you learn how to shade a sphere, you know how to roughly shade a head! And what is an arm if not a cylinder? A nose if not a pyramid?

There are lots of videos online for practicing this. Here’s one that’s pretty good.

This is where I recommend starting. Once you are more comfortable with that, here is a list of things that you can look up and try to get a handle on, in what I think is a pretty alright order.

Perspective (one-point, two-point, three-point)

Value, Tint, Shade

Drawing negative space

Foreshortening

Composition

Drawing from life

Color theory

It would take me a very long time to outline all of this stuff, which is why I’ve given you that list of stuff to look for online. There are a lot of great resources out there and I recommend searching for them and comparing them. I can’t go into depth on everything right now because there’s a LOT of stuff, but I hope the little outline I gave you will help give you a foundation and know where to look and what to look for! If you have any questions about specific stuff, feel free to come and ask me about it and I’ll try to help.

Here are links to some cheap art materials on Amazon:

Grey kneadable eraser

Sketchbook for pencil

Pen set

There are lots of other listings for stuff like this online, so do check around for what you want! The ones I linked are just options.

I hope this helped! Thank you for the ask anon, and good luck!

#ask box #anon #art tips #art instruction #long post #beginning art #sorry i petered out at the end it's just i'm so fuckin hungry rn #i'm about to lose my mind i haven't eaten all day like an idiot #Anonymous

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guerilla935 · 4 years

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My Favorite Games That Made Me Care About How I Looked

I’m very self conscious about the way I look in video games. Not only is it normally very easy to change an outfit or get a haircut in a video game it also says something about how I’d like to be perceived, especially in an online game. There are a lot of games that allow their players to express themselves in a lot of really fun and unique ways and I think that it’s really special when you get to celebrate a style that you would never get to portray in real life. These games that I am about to talk about are all games where I was able to look at my character and feel some ounce of pride at something that I had created. Some full disclosure for these images, I pulled them from official gaming outlets and developer blogs but none of these that you are seeing are my original characters. If anyone would like to request to see any of my characters from these games (or any other games!) I would be happy to go and grab screenshots of those characters.

Grand Theft Auto Online

This is a pretty easy choice for most people. I chose specifically GTA Online over any GTA game or Red Dead game because I think the really special part about this is its setting. Your image is not only your character and your outfit in GTA Online but also your car, your house, and your business. There are a lot of different places to choose to call home and there are a lot of things to get “invested” into. For example, my good friend mojo5 runs a night club and wears suits and spends a lot of time gambling at the casino. That’s a character that would be different than mine who dresses and acts like a street racer. It gives your character a kind of personality and back story that is hard to achieve in other games. I have always kind of considered Grand Theft Auto Online to be a modern MMO of sorts, a playground. And as much as it is a huge lobby where you wait to start activities, it is also a sprawling city-space where you can essential live, make money, create this fun fictional life for yourself. And as far as fashion goes, the outfits, the cars, and the real estate help you shape that fantasy. Basically, I can tell you that I spent way more time customizing my character than I spent in actual activities in Grand Theft Auto Online.

Saint’s Row Series

I love Saint’s Row. It is very similar to the last entry in this article but has this unique and goofy style that makes a lot of things okay that I would never do to my GTA character. In Saint’s Row I can have a neon blue Mohawk wielding a 10 foot melee weapon that is designed to look like something extremely unmentionable while driving a night rider space car that is also a tank and it’s totally fine because in the next cut scene you are about to fight Roddy Piper in Keith Davids nightmares. The games are incredibly wild and I love how I can let loose with a lot of different styles, and in the same way that I feel like I am creating my gritty street racer in GTA, I can make my goofy crime lord super hero secret agent in Saint’s Row. I think specifically in Saint’s Row 2 I took it a little more seriously because the tone of the game is a little more serious than the other entries however I have a specially place in my heart for how wacky each game allows me to be.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

You knew we couldn’t just not talk about Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With the current situation, the Animal Crossing community is insanely huge. I cannot avoid the heap of Animal Crossing videos and screenshots all over social media. On my island of Sandover Village, I am patiently awaiting the Able Sisters to set up shop so that I am able to put in codes from everyone else’s custom designs that I’m seeing on twitter. That is because I have on my phone a stockpile of sweatshirts, sweaters, robes, and hats that I am actually really excited to show off in game. I tried to create some of my own but I am not one of the gifted seamstress’s that there seems to exist on the internet. I am not very far into Animal Crossing but by looking at other peoples games I know that I have only scratched the surface of my options in the game. I have to commend Nintendo on the amount of individualization that the design pro feature gives to its players. I have never seen a game give players the option to design their own clothing and it makes the social experience of the game feel so fresh.

Dark Souls III

One of the most badass games that I have ever played as far as character design is concerned is Dark Souls III. When I put on a new set of armor I sit in awe of how it looks because I can see each tiny tear in the cape, every dent in the helmet, and the wear and weight of the armor. I was dragged through this game by some friends (because I could never in a thousand years have the patience to beat it by myself) and I followed them to every cursed swamp and death crypt because I wanted to see every weapon and every armor set. You look absolutely ghoulish in every armor set and I love it to death. This game allows so much in the way of customization and I think it helps that almost every gear set is good enough to get you through the entire game and that allows you to play with a lot of different looks and game play styles. This game is tough, really really tough, but you look really good even when you die.

Splatoon 2

Splatoon 2 is a really special online shooter. I think in the month that I played this game religiously the thing that kept me playing was coming back to the stores to see what kind of clothes were in stock and what kind of items I could steal off the players in the lobby. I think that the developers of Splatoon 2 knew that the players were in it for the threads because every reward for playing the game was most likely a piece of clothing. The clothing options kind of vary from academy prep to Patagonia camp wear to skater outfits. And it comes together in this very hipster overall aesthetic that blends really naturally. The game features a mechanic that I really like wear you can walk up to anyone in the online lobby and look at what their wearing and order it. By the time I logged on the next day I had (a noticeably weaker version of) the exact same item but it really makes you feel like anything you see, you have access too which is really cool. And the ordering of the items kept me coming back to play every day.

Final Fantasy XIV Online

I’ve heard it said many times that the real end game content of Final Fantasy XIV Online was the glamor and housing systems, and for most people they aren’t wrong. I will never stop being surprised at the outfits that players can put together in this game. I have seen millions of players in my 750 hours in Eorzea and I have not seen two characters look the same. The customization options are really limitless and I truly believe that. I played a healer mage and in my time at max level I had outfits that made me look like a cowboy, a thief, a fox spirit, a grim reaper, and even one that made me appear like a real healer mage. The clothing options throw a Final Fantasy twist on every kind of style that they set to replicate. So even though all the outfits can be wacky they never feel out of place in the world. If you want a game that you can make almost 50% just about customizing your character and taking it out to the town to show it off or in big raids to flaunt your style then this might be your game.

Pokemon Sword And Shield

Pokemon is still trying to get it right but Sword and Shield is Game Freaks best attempt at trainer customization. The clothing options in the game are very European, well, they have always been that way but they are ESPECIALLY European in this one. Probably the greatest customization offered is the hair which in the world of anime characters is the most important one. I loved designing my character in this game but it was just so brief because shopping in this game is so boring as most clothes in the actual stores are very samey which makes the act of shopping pretty boring most of the time. I would roll up to a new town really excited to see what kind of stuff they had in the shop but it was just new colors for the same weird duffel bag that your character had already. Note that the game is mostly about the Pokemon so they really didn’t have to put any trainer customization in the game to make it a good game but they did a half decent job putting this much customization in the game and I feel like it’s going to keep getting steadily better the more times they implement this feature into their games. Big plus, you can design your trading card in the game and it is the most adorable thing and feels like a huge payoff to have a cool card if you’ve put a lot of effort into your trainer.

Soul Calibur VI

So I haven’t actually played Soul Calibur VI, I bought the game and went immediately into character creation and started making my own roster of fighters that I ended up using maybe once or twice and moving on from. The character creator in this fighting game is really special. So the idea is that you choose a character that already exists and you keep their move set and fighting style but change how they look and immediately the things that came out of the community were hilarious. Some are kind of terrifying but they come shockingly close to being somewhat recognizable. For me it almost comes down to that being someone who is unfamiliar with the cast of Soul Calibur VI I cannot tell the difference between actual characters from the game and characters frakensteined together in the character creator. As on of the most fun character creators I’ve ever used I think it’s at least worth googling what other people have created.

God of War (2018)

The newest God of War introduced something that we never got in the older games and that was the ability to change out what Kratos was wearing. While it was important in the game to maximize his stats, it also made you look cooler and cooler as the game went on. I wouldn’t say that you have a lot of options of things to wear in this game but I always felt bummed when I picked up something with relatively low stats that looked amazing. Later on the armor sets become more like trophies for completing hard tasks. The design of each piece of armor is really intricate and amazing to look at and while you can’t just pick whatever you want, I really wish that you could.

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

In the Reaper of Souls expansion pack a new vendor was added to Diablo III that changed the way that I looted in the game. The vendor was called the mystic and she would make a piece of gear look like any other piece of gear of the same type. This meant that I could look amazing all the time without sacrificing strength. The way that the database of appearances you could pick from expands over time gave so many options that I couldn’t decide at some points. The coolest armor in the game was now accessible at any time. And the armor in Diablo III looks tight, sometimes I would argue that unless you pick some unique stuff it doesn’t make that big of a difference because of the isometric point of view in the game but it is really fun to have an added layer of customization in Diablo.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

So this is actually a section dedicated to Nexus Mod Manager because Skyrim in itself doesn’t actually have a whole lot of variations in the ways you can dress. But with the powers of modding you can now do absolutely anything and there are a whole group of 3D modelers out there getting you immersive and lore friendly items that make you look a whole lot cooler. The wonderful world of modding can turn kind of creepy very fast, a lot of very suggestive mods are out there and a lot of very inappropriate things so you know, a fair warning. It’s incredible when you can make it work and keep it from getting to the level of ultimate Skyrim. You can change and add clothes and weapons, add hair styles, and even add entire races into the game. Sometimes though I really believe that I like browsing mods a lot more than I like actually playing with them but I found that it is really satisfying to download a mod like Immersive Armors and see just how much it changes how diverse the selection of armors that not only you but everyone in the game now wears can be.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

So I believe that some other previous Zelda titles had the ability to change Links outfit but never to this extent. What I think is the coolest part about the clothing system in this game is that you wear certain clothes to survive certain climates but you can also forget all that and make a yummy meal instead that lets you be warm wearing the desert clothes in the snow. The amount of armors that you can amass in this game starts off kind of underwhelming but becomes really fun and interesting and serves all sorts of fun fan service for fans of the series. This game doesn’t have the versatility and variety of some of the other games in the series but any game that lets you cross dress to sneak into a city of warrior women is credited for its costume design in my book.

League of Legends

I have spent a shameful amount of money on skins. I hate League of Legends and I hate most of the business practices of Riot Games but their skins just look good. I can appreciate when someone I don’t like makes something good and they consistently pump out awesome looking skins that are frankly worth the money if you play the game regularly. Back when I played this game daily I put up way too much money, even I think about 18$ just on a skin that changed colors when you typed a specific command. Anyways that’s really all I have, there aren’t a lot of games where I like the skins, especially the fact that they are mostly behind pay walls but League gets a pass I suppose.

Destiny Series

I used to be really into playing a specific game mode in Destiny named Iron Banner. I played a lot of it in Destiny and a good portion of them in Destiny 2. When you played enough Iron Banner in a year you were able to collect an armor set to commemorate the achievement. Almost all the cool armor in Destiny has purpose to it. Not only do you get to decide how you look but it also is you showing off the fact that you completed a raid, were really good at sparrow racing, or kicked major ass in the crucible. Each armor was recognizable and everyone knew what it meant. I think that is what makes the customization in Destiny so rewarding, its that it is in itself an actual reward for completing hard tasks that not everyone will be able to complete.

Code Vein

Out of all the anime games I’ve played I think what stands out to me the most is that their character creators have all been really bad. This is where Code Vein really shined. Code Vein has this dystopian vampire aesthetic that is really unique and allows for a lot of ways to make cool characters that fit into the look of the game. I don’t think that what they’ve done here is completely new but they have this style that is exciting to play with. Making a revenant is fun and builds this anticipation for the rest of the game. I also respect the games decision to allow you to make modifications to your character after the game has started which is not something that most games would allow. Code Vein has these cape’s that you can wear to gain abilities and those are cool to add onto your outfit but I don’t think that it outshines what the character creator has done here. It’s a niche thing I guess but if you have always wanted to make your own anime vampire then this is it.

A Persona

I really like making characters for a reason. I think a lot of the escapism of video games hinges on me placing myself into the character on the screen. That’s why I love what you can do in games like Animal Crossing that is all about creating exactly what you want and Final Fantasy XIV Online where you get to exist and share in a world as a persona of sorts. Being able to customize a character in a video game does not make that game good or bad, but I think that when you are given the option the developer is given an opportunity to make it a very special experience and allow you to be unique within a community of people online. And the internet has made that sharing of characters really special, allowing everyone to see how unique of an experience you can have with a game by beating it with “your character”.

Special Shout Outs For Stylish Games And Characters

SSX series being dripping in 90s style

Also NBA Street Vol. 2 for the same reason

Persona 5 for being the most stylish game ever

Halo because space marines rock extra style points

Katana Zero for being badass and 80s neon will always be in style

Specifically Graffiti Mario in Super Mario Sunshine he had flair

Samurai Legend Musashi for having a stylish game case but being a horrible game

Devil May Cry just for existing

46 notes · View notes

uzumaki-rebellion · 4 years

Text

“Wet Sugar” [Part 22 of 30]

Summary: Erik and Yani face serious troubles...

Mature Audience. NSFW. Smut.

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"Behind my pride there lives a me, that knows humility Inside my voice there is a soul, and in my soul there is a voice But I've been, too afraid to make a choice Cause I'm scared of the things that I might be missing

Running too fast to stop and listen It's time to step out on faith, I've gotta show my faith It's been illusive for so long but freedom is mine today I've gotta step out on faith it's time to show my faith…"

– "Strength Courage & Wisdom" - India.Arie

Erik was late arriving for breakfast in the front house. He jogged around the compound trying to offset tension in his body. Lack of sleep made him cranky. He felt like he was losing focus of the big picture.

The other mercs went through plates of bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, biscuits, and grits. Erik put together a plate of lighter fare, some fruit, wheat toast, and a glass of orange juice. He glanced at Leona who replaced a platter of bacon with fresh sausage links and was surprised to see Yani's cousin Cee Cee in the kitchen pulling out hot biscuits from the oven.

When breakfast was over and the crew wandered down to the gun range to discuss departure dates and future rendezvous points, Erik straggled behind in the kitchen.

His eyes peeped Cee Cee again as he placed his orange juice glass in the sink. Leona wiped down the kitchen counter with a soft blue cloth.

"She won't work here anymore," Leona said with a soft voice.

Cee Cee leaned against the dining table in the other room watching him and Leona.

There was no need to ask why.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Leona nodded.

"Me too."

"How is Sweet Pea?"

Leona smiled big and wide.

"She good. Spending more time with her father…and sister…"

Erik went to the fridge and grabbed a bottled water.

"That's good," he said.

"She still ask about her Baba—"

"It's okay, Miss Leona—"

"Him don't need no explanation. Don't even talk to him about nothin', Auntie."

Cee Cee brought in empty bowls and brushed past Erik, shoving him a little.

"Cee Cee—"

"Fuck him. I told Yani he was just using her—"

"Quiet your foul mouth, gyal!"

Cee Cee looked startled by Leona's voice.

"Auntie—"

"We can still be cordial. Kind."

Leona's eyes took in Erik's dower expression.

"They are both doing well, Mr. Killmonger."

Erik left the kitchen, his legs moving so swift he could still hear his name on Leona's lips.

It hurt.

Like hell.

A physical pain that lodged in his throat and wouldn't leave his belly any peace.

He hated being at the compound. And now that she was gone for good, all he saw were dreary days ahead until he left that tiny rock.

During the meeting with Klaue and the other mercs, Erik once again found himself compartmentalizing his thoughts to keep sane. He also found himself looking forward to London. He needed to be around family, people who loved him, and to be in a new environment. What was once a warm paradise had now become a cold underworld.

Yani had turned all of her social media private. He had no more access to her or glimpses of Sydette. She cut off all contact. Blocked his number.

It hardened his heart. But it was for the best he kept telling himself. His bags were packed.

He was ready to vanish.

###

Linda was always hovering around Killmonger.

It drove Yani crazy.

Not because she cared about them being together, but because it was intentional on Linda's part.

The bulk of Erik and Linda's time together was spent with Klaue of course, but there were those times that Yani thought Linda was purposely being dramatic in front of her to get a reaction.

Touching Erik and grabbing on his arm after meals. Laughing a little too loud with him when Yani passed by with dirty laundry or cleaning supplies. Even when Yani used different routes to move around the compound, Linda found a way to be there.

"What's wrong with you?" Leona asked.

Yani stacked glasses and dishes in the cupboards then rinsed her hands in the sink.

"Nothing."

"Not with that face."

"Got a lot on my mind."

"Want to talk about it?"

"Just school stuff. Figuring out my schedule for next term."

Her Aunt watched her but didn't question her further.

"They still at the gun range?" Yani asked.

Leona glanced at the small viewscreens near the fridge.

"Yes."

"I'll be back—"

"Yani."

"Yes?"

Leona put her arms around Yani.

"I know it's not easy."

"I'm fine, Auntie. For real."

"I hear you say that, gyal, but mi know the truth."

"See you in a few."

Yani looked around her surroundings before she snuck a towel from the pool area and made herself blend into the foliage as she slipped down the hidden path. She hummed a little bit to herself as she pulled off her t-shirt. Adjusting her bikini top, she was glad that she opted to wear her swimsuit under her clothes. After a quick dip, she could throw her shirt and dark sweats back on with no one even knowing she had been in the water.

Reaching the final curve that opened up to the cove, Yani stopped and clenched her fist inside her bundled shirt.

Linda was sprawled out on a towel in a pink one piece. Erik was right next to her on his own towel, shades covering his eyes. A pounding pressure struck her left temple and a dark heat rose in her chest. The cove felt polluted with their presence. Nothing was sacred anymore and Yani wanted to cry. Why would he bring her down there? He knew that was her water…

"Taking a break?"

Linda stared at her as she smoothed out her beach towel.

Yani kept quiet. Erik didn't even budge. She wanted to kick sand on him.

"The water is actually a decent temperature," Linda said.

She stood up and walked into the water, allowing the water to reach her chest.

Yani pulled her shirt back on and turned around to head back to the kitchen with her Aunt.

"You down here too?"

Neal's predatory smile made Yani feel worse. Unger was behind him wearing trunks. She backed up from the two of them.

"The water is great!" Linda called.

Yani walked past the two men and when she glanced back, Erik was still sunbathing. He hadn't moved an inch.

Yani acted unbothered for a long time, but the last straw was watching Linda walk out of Killmonger's room giving her orders to bring him soup. Slinking around in a gauzy house dress and telling her not to disturb him. They probably fucked all night, using up another box of condoms, and expected her to clean their messy sheets.

That man had the damn nerve to make her bring him food to that bed. Just an excuse to rub her nose in his new sex life.

She wasn't hurting for dick though.

Zachary turned out to be a capable replacement.

The sex was…different. Calm. But satisfying.

They started hanging out together. Lunch dates. Occasional dinner dates. She brought him to social events with her friends and then finally brought him around family again. She kept Sydette out of the equation this time around. She didn't want to put her daughter through the attachment of another man who might not be a long-term partner. It was better that way. Sydette still asked about her Baba, but Yani kept her busy with daycare, play dates, and time with Chez.

Chez.

Who knew he could get his shit together to act as a father for once? Maybe Killmonger had knocked some damn sense into the man. Sped up his maturity. Being forced to give him Sydette was heart-wrenching, but in the end, it gave Yani the freedom to do things for herself on the weekends.

When Killmonger tried to tell her that he missed her, Yani became enraged. After screaming at him in Klaue's house, she was done. There was no way to be at the compound with him there. She went back to her apartment and blocked Killmonger from any access to her.

Zachary helped her forget. Especially that night when she saw Killmonger at the Bacchanal. He had the damn nerve to ask her to dance as if they were chummy like that anymore. When he walked up on her she wanted to spit in his face, tried her best to keep her hands to herself when she felt him standing behind her, all that body heat of his fanning out onto her. Thank God her homegirls kept him in check. They prevented her from clawing his face. Him standing there with short hair, almost clean-shaven, like he was pretending to be some new dude for her. Fuck him.

The lap dance she gave in front of the crowd was a declaration to him that alla her thickness was off limits to him for good. Once she was back in her apartment, she called Zachary over and finally gave him her sticky sweetness.

Strange though.

She gave Zachary everything on her couch, but not in her bed.

The bed that Killmonger bought her.

Each time she had sex with Zachary they did it in his bed at his place, or on her couch. Never her bed.

Different hands on her body, different energy around her, different conversations in her house made it easier to loosen Killmonger from her thoughts.

It wasn't full-proof though.

She caught herself having lucid dreams of Killmonger fucking her. She'd wake up with her pussy throbbing like she could feel him inside of her. Her slippery wet dreams felt so real. Swollen wet folds greeted her fingers when she woke up from those erotic imaginings. Bitterness slept in her mouth with his name still trapped there. Zachary would have his sheathed average length sink into her, and sometimes she would catch herself daydreaming of Killmonger in the middle of the act. Zachary could get quite worked up, but it wasn't the ferocity she was accustomed to. She wondered how long it would take to shake the ghost of that nigga's dick from her pussy. She wanted to hate that man to help her forget him. How could she when he still haunted her in her sleep and in another man's arms? It was crazy. But she knew it would pass. It always did eventually and then she was over it.

Erik seemed to be over it. He didn't bother to stay out of her way anymore, and when he passed her by it was like she was a non-entity.

She treated him the same and eventually, she became numb to his presence.

Almost.

Her last day working came once Leona received permission from Klaue to have Cee Cee trade jobs with Yani from now on.

Taking one last walk around the property searching for Jerome, she encountered a sobering sight. All the men and Linda hovered around Erik and Neal as they fought one another in an open circle. Hand to hand tussling. Shirts off. Both wearing loose joggers. Neal was using boxing moves that Yani was familiar with, but Killmonger was making moves that frustrated Neal. It was that capoeira he knew and some other fighting style.

Her heart thudded as she watched the two men give one another bruising punches. Neal lost his cool completely when Erik used his bare feet to strike his face with a series of tight cartwheels and backflips.

"Get him, Killmonger!" Linda shrieked as she tossed water from a bottle at both of them. Neal was able to get in some hard hits and when his fist made contact with Killmonger's cheek, something ignited in that man and his hands became swift weapons against Neal's chest and stomach.

The others urged them on and Yani felt herself getting queasy watching blood spurt from Neal's mouth and cuts from Killmonger's face from bare knuckles. Neal gave Killmonger a powerful uppercut that made him stagger back clutching his jaw. He flexed his neck and lunged for the man, placing him in a tight headlock. Killmonger punched the man and more blood flowed.

Neal twisted his waist and Killmonger shoved him onto the ground.

They traded more blows until Neal charged Killmonger knocking him onto his back. Yani gritted her teeth knowing the hard cement would break skin. Killmonger reached up and grabbed Neal's throat, his powerful hands choking tight. Neal thrust his hands up and broke Killmonger's hold on him. Rolling away from the leaner man's weak punches, Killmonger swayed his body in a dance-like rhythm around Neal causing the other man's frustration to bubble over. Neal reached for a thick broken tree branch lying on the ground and beat Killmonger with it. The abuse didn't last long once the branch was snatched from Neal's hand and tossed aside. Yani's Ex lost it.

Killmonger beat the man so bad that Unger and Shipley had to drag him away.

"Jesus…Killmonger…!" Linda shouted.

"Thought you were gonna back that shit up homie…said you could show me some things. Whatchu show me, huh? Nothin' nigga. You ain't want this—"

Huntsman helped Neal to his feet and away from Killmonger.

"Lemme go! I'm not done yet!"

Neal thrashed against Huntsman.

"Trust me, you're done. Go clean yourself up," Linda blurted, her fingers touching the wounds on Killmonger's face.

"Anyone else want a taste? All that talk…"

Killmonger spit on the ground. What splattered there was dark against the cement. He wiped his chin and his heated eyes darted around, challenging the others.

Linda's eyes were riveted to Killmonger's. She handed him a beer and he took a deep swig. Grabbing it away from him, she drank down the rest spilling it on her shirt.

"Making a mess," he said.

"You wish," she said.

Linda reared back and kicked Killmonger in the chest. Surprised, he dropped down and swept his legs against hers knocking her off balance. Linda recovered and threw up her fists to box him.

What was wrong with them? Was this their entertainment?

Yani couldn't take it anymore and left them to their violent play.

###

A sheet and pillowcase were tangled in the dryer as Yani pulled them out. She couldn't get the images of Killmonger fighting out of her head. Folding the linens, she wondered how he could be so brutal and willing to harm his own body when it wasn't necessary—

Killmonger barged in carrying a knit bag of dirty clothes. His left cheek looked slightly swollen, and he had a small bandage over his right cheekbone. He halted near the doorway for a second when he saw her, then went about his business of checking the washing machine. He tossed his clothes in, reached up for laundry detergent, and ignored her completely. He wore a tight t-shirt and camouflage pants. A Glock was tucked in the back of his waistband.

Yani continued folding sheets over on the wide folding table next to the dryer.

"There any more fabric softener?" he asked looking up at the shelf above the machines.

Yani reached under the folding table and lifted up a new bottle of softener. She slammed it on the washing machine and continued folding.

Killmonger took the bottle and opened it. He glanced at her for a moment and stuck the softener on the shelf above him. Lingering after his clothing load started, Yani felt irritated.

"You need somethin' else?"

"Nah. You?"

She rolled her eyes at him.

He sauntered over to the door.

"Why did you take her down there?"

"What are you grumbling about now?"

"That was my place…my private spot to swim and be alone—"

"You gonna stand there and whine about people swimming? You don't own nothing here—"

"But you know how I feel about that place!"

Yani's shrill scream shocked her own self, her fists clenched and pressed against her thighs.

"I didn't take her down there. She said she followed you and discovered it. You didn't do a good job of protecting your playground. She told the others about it. That's on you."

Yani reached out and struck him in his chest. She was shaking so hard as her nails raked across his keloids.

"What is wrong with you?! Bitch—"

He pushed her back against the folding table and Yani reached up and grabbed onto the silver chain he wore around his neck that had an onyx and silver ring on it.

"What you not about to do is have me come up out myself!" he yelled.

Grabbing her arms, he held them against her, his face hard and close to her face. His gold teeth gleamed in the laundry room light. Her hands shook furiously at her sides and she tried her best to keep tears from pressing out of her lids, but he saw it.

"Fuck, Yani…calm down…it's not that serious," he said placing his hands on her shoulders.

"It is for me."

"You right girl…you right…forget what I said."

She pulled back from him and started folding the sheets again. He didn't move from where he was and when she looked back at him, all she could focus on was the bruises on his face. It was like she was staring at a stranger. How did it come to this so fast?

She couldn't breathe. The room felt like it was closing in on her.

He reached out and cradled her neck, pulling her in close. His other hand stroked her arm and when she shuddered, he lifted her up and made her sit on the laundry table, her ass warmed up by a clean bed sheet.

"Hmmm…"

The groan in his throat was swallowed by her mouth when his lips sought hers out. His tongue pushed her lips apart and he leaned into her so her breasts pressed into his chest. The ring on his chain poked her.

She had forgotten what his mouth and lips felt like. No, that was a lie. She missed how his mouth and lips felt like. His tongue snaked around hers and her legs automatically opened wider for him. She gasped when he yanked up her shirt and unfastened her bra. Reaching behind himself he pulled his gun out of his pants and sat it next to her hand on the table. She watched him raise up his shirt and pull half of it over his neck, showing a chest and abs that were worked out more from when she last saw it naked.

Plunging his tongue down her throat again he stayed on her mouth until she felt her insides squeeze with anticipation. Hot breath in her ear, and hotter lips on her neck, Yani leaned back giving in more by the minute. He licked around her neck and she bent her head forward so he could lick her tattoos and give tiny kisses there.

His fingers hooked into the band of her loose cotton sweats and her hands jerked back to hold them in place.

His tongue slipped into her ear and the wet warmth made her stomach drop and her hands grabbed onto his shoulders.

"Baby…" he sighed, tugging on her pants again.

She let him drag them down, rocked her hips forward and lifted her ass to help him get them down to her ankles. He pulled down his pants and fisted his erection. His eyes sought hers and she felt all tension leave her body with a rising desire to join their bodies together again. She placed her fingers around his fat wet glans and squeezed. His eyes slammed shut and his mouth parted, the gleam from those gold slugs taunting her. Her skin tingled wanting him to bite her flesh. She placed his tip against her opening and when she enveloped his length, she didn't exhale until he was firmly rooted.

"Daddy gotchu all upset," he said digging in her pussy hard.

She gripped his length tight and his eyes stayed on her face.

"Taking it like a good girl…Daddy's good girl. All this dick…yeah…stretching this fat pussy out right. Don't be mad. Daddy's sorry…ohhh shit…you putting it on me girl. You still mad at me? Huh, that why you gripping me so fucking tight? You squeezin' Daddy's dick…ah fuck…keep squeezin' on this pipe….do that shit girl…punish me, Baby…teach Daddy a lesson…."

Yani's head tilted back, her mouth alternating between staying parted and becoming a tight pout. She felt so full. Zachary could never hit her walls like that. He was unable to hit the bottom of her pussy like Killmonger's extra inches. Her facial expressions must've excited him because Killmonger never looked away as he stroked her deep.

"Been keepin' this pussy tight for me…" he grunted.

He lifted up and pulled her pants all the way off so he could push her legs back on the table. The angle tugged on her clit and he rode that position while he continued watching her face. It was hard to keep her eyes on him as she closed them occasionally because she couldn't stand the intense pressure on her walls. He was moving in a way that prevented her from getting full contact stimulation on her clit. The tugging of her hood had her moaning under her breath. She wanted to scream but there was no telling who was around to hear her cries if she truly let go of what she suppressed.

"Look at me, girl. Keep them eyes on me. I like watching your face handle this dick-"

"Nigga it don't take this long to throw some clothes in the…oh, shit, my bad nigga—"

Shipley's flustered voice took in Yani's pussy being plowed righteously. Killmonger got in four more good strokes before he even stopped. Yani grabbed her shirt and pulled it down. She pushed off of Killmonger's dick and pulled on her pants.

Shipley's eyes stayed on her the entire time and Yani felt so much shame. The man held the door wide open.

"Yani!" Erik called.

She left, half walking, half running past Shipley and down to the cove barefoot.

Out of breath, she stepped into the water just to feel the coolness revive her feet. She would never come back there again. Not to the healing waters that caressed her toes, or the compound that had taken care of her since she was fourteen. She couldn't face any of the people. Especially Shipley. He would confirm that what they all whispered about was true.

The sun did a slow crawl to a blood-red sunset. Her body felt hot and sickened and embarrassed by the day.

She stripped and walked further into the water.

She wasn't shocked to hear a splash behind her as she swam further out. She heard his arms stroke through the placid water.

"Yani. You okay?"

He swam around her naked until he could see her face. They both tread in deep waters staring at one another. Killmonger tried reaching out to her, but Yani swam back to shore and pulled her clothes back on. She felt empty. Cold.

It hurt to walk away from her once special place.

And him.

###

On a lazy Sunday when Chez had Sydette, Klaue summoned her to the compound. Her Aunt texted her and said Klaue wanted to see her right away.

Yani was hesitant, worried that she would run into Killmonger or worse…Linda.

But the compound was quiet.

Klaue sat by his pool drinking a whiskey sour, and when she stood before him, he waved a hand for her to sit in the lounger next to him. She felt nervous, her eyes flitting around expecting Killmonger to show up and throw off her emotions.

"Sad to not have you here anymore, Yani."

Klaue's eyes were runny and pink. He had been drinking for quite some time. Salmon board shorts and a white polo shirt adorned his body. He offered Yani a drink but she declined.

"Here," he said, handing her an envelope.

A check.

Her eyes popped out at the amount.

"Mr. Klaue…"

"That should cover the cost of your schooling, lab fees, etc…"

Yani's heart sped up.

"Your family has taken care of this property for many years. I want to repay that…we want to repay that."

"We?"

"The bulk of that comes from Killmonger. He suggested some sort of severance package for you before he left."

"He's gone?"

Her eyes couldn't hide what she felt.

"It's always all work and barely any play. Family business. He didn't want me to tell you that he gave you part of that. But I wanted you to know. It's obvious that he cares about you and your Aunt. You got very close, didn't you?"

Yani turned her head away from him and focused on the check.

"Killmonger. Complicated. Volatile. Loyal. Easily my best…also one of the meanest men in the trade…and yet…"

Klaue stared at her.

She kept her eyes steady, but her fingers trembled. There was enough money in her hand to take care of herself and Sydette for the next few years. At least until she found a nursing position somewhere. It was beyond school tuition. It was a chance at a real life on her own.

"Thank you—"

"Thank him. He was the most generous. I'm taking care of school. He's taking care of the rest."

"Incoming call. Limbano, Robert."

"Duty calls. Excuse me."

Klaue lumbered up from his seat spilling a bit of whiskey. He shuffled down toward his main house and Yani ran to the front house apartment.

"Auntie!"

Leona sat in front of her tv with Cee Cee watching a nighttime soap.

"What is it?"

Yani shoved the check in her face.

"What is this?"

Leona's eyes widened and her mouth fell open.

Cee Cee grabbed the check.

"Shit!" Cee Cee yelped.

"Who gave you this? Klaue?" Leona asked.

"Klaue…but mostly Killmonger."

"Why him do this?" Cee Cee asked.

Leona's eyes stayed with Yani's. Auntie knew, Yani was sure of that.

"Quick, go put it in the bank!" Leona said shoving Yani out of the apartment.

Yani grabbed her Aunt's arm.

"Why didn't you tell me he left?"

"I didn't know."

"I gotta go!"

Yani ran all the way to her car and drove straight to the bank.

Once the deposit had been made, and she waited to make sure the full amount showed up on her deposit slip, she sat in her car and felt the full weight of regret. Pulling out her cell she typed him a message. Erased it. Typed it again.

She swiped his number and felt her chest and stomach get tight waiting for him to answer.

But he didn't.

###

"My God, Addae! Look at my nephew!"

Erik stared at his Aunt Serah as she held her face with her hands staring at him in her front door. He had surprised his play Aunt by arriving a day early. But the bigger surprise was waiting for him in his Aunt's visiting room.

"Fuck outta here! Watchu doin' here, girl!"

Erik ran up and picked up his play cousin Marisol and twirled her around. He dropped her back on her feet and took a good long look at her. Marisol was breathtaking. Skin so rich with unblemished dark skin. Onyx eyes. Perfectly symmetrical features that could be cute and loveable one moment, but fiery and capable of trouble in the next. It was hard to believe sometimes that his play cousin who had been an ashy-legged crybaby tagging after him through the streets of Sao Paolo, and annoying him to no end, grew up to be the raven-haired beauty before him.

"Auntie sent me a ticket since you were skipping us this holiday."

Marisol's voice was a balm to his ears, her Portuguese accent bringing him back to Brazil and her mother's beef dumplings and rice.

"Looking good, cuz," he said.

"And you're looking big. I see you are eating well."

She bent her body low to the ground, her ginga smooth, her hands rocking toward her chest.

"Ready to play already, cuz?" he said.

Erik countered her moves in a mirror-like fashion.

"Oh no, not in my living room with my expensive artwork in the way! Take that outside!"

"We'll stay tight Auntie," Erik said kicking up his foot and tangling it with Marisol's hands. His cousin did a front walkover and twisted her legs around.

"My God, you two can't be together for five minutes without testing one another!"

"Oi quem mandou levar! Essa carta pra sinhá! Oi quem mandou levar! Oia la Besóuro preto. Oi quem mandou levar…!

Marisol's singing voice stirred Erik's movement, his hands and feet flew faster and Marisol held him off.

Erik joined her in the singing and Serah picked up one of her standing statues of a Cameroonian warrior and moved it from their dangerous leg kicks.

"I see nothing has changed, you are both still hard-headed," Serah sighed, standing back from them. She began clapping her hands, keeping the song rhythm going.

Erik did a slow backflip and he swayed in front of his Aunt and sang to her another capoeira song.

"A capoeira meu amor…a capoeira me chamou…a capoeira meu amor…a capoeira me chamou…"

His voice was choppy but true, and Marisol joined him as he serenaded Serah.

"Such a charmer!" Serah said.

She grabbed Erik's chin and kissed his forehead.

"Go wash up. Dinner is ready and you are lucky I made a lot since we weren't expecting you until tomorrow night."

The moment Erik smelled Serah's cooking in the kitchen he had forgotten all about St. Thomas and Klaue and Linda and—

His cell phone chirped up missed calls that finally caught up to him in London and he scrolled and erased many that were unimportant. But a certain number popped up on his screen and he stared at it. No text, but a voicemail.

Yani.

"Thank you."

Damn.

She had the money and Klaue opened his big mouth.

"Yani? Who is that?"

Marisol stared at his fingers and he swiped the phone off.

"I swear, every time I see you, it's someone new."

"Shut up."

"It's true."

Serah headed to the kitchen as his Uncle carried his bags to a guest room.

Erik unpacked, and once dinner was served and eating commenced, he put away thoughts about Yani and focused on his family.

His Uncle Addae caught him up on the political happenings in London and other parts of the U.K. Serah gave him a couple of books covering ancient sculptures from Central and East Africa to help him pinpoint pieces he had to look out for. They spent two days going through her archives online and she used 3D imaging to give him a feel for shapes and sizes. He already knew the vibram tattoo on his gums would verify any authentic Wakandan pieces with vibranium in them. They took a family trip to visit a few museums, and Erik took discreet pictures of the layouts of each, prepping himself for future trips if the need arrived.

The rest of his time was used playing chess with Marisol, catching up on friends, family and old girlfriends back in Brazil, going out dancing with her and taking long naps together on the couch like they used to as kids after binging bad horror movies all day.

When his Aunt and Uncle went out to do last-minute Christmas shopping, Marisol made him take off his shirt so she could look at his scars.

Her face took on a pinched intensity.

"JaJa," she whispered using his family nickname as she touched the new lesions that had finally healed after his Angola trip.

"I did it myself. Didn't want to bother you with it."

"How many more must you take?" she said.

"As many as I need to get me what I want…hey…don't make that face. You know what it is—"

"JaJa…"

"I'm done talking about it."

He picked up his laptop and turned on some soft music, setting the computer down on the coffee table in front of them. He pulled his shirt back on.

"I'm not putting any more on your body."

"I do it myself now. No need to bother you with it."

His lips felt tight. Her eyes looked away from his.

"Who is that?"

Erik tried to change the screen images that played with the music on his laptop, but Marisol was too fast. Her thin dark fingers swiped his screen and pulled back the last three images that flashed past.

"JaJa…did you…did you have a child?"

Erik closed his eyes for a moment and sat back on the couch. Sydette's big smiling face filled up the computer screen with his face right next to her. It was one of the last pictures he had with her that Twyla took when he said goodbye to his little girl. They were all dimples in that photo.

"She's mine, but she's not really mine—"

"Don't talk semantics. Is that your baby? Who is the mother? Wait…did Disa and you?"

"No. This baby belongs to someone else—"

"But is she yours?"

Marisol's dark coal eyes looked hopeful.

"No. Her mother is someone I was seeing."

"Show me."

"Not right now, Marisol…please…I'm not-"

"No worries. No pressure then."

She touched his face.

"JaJa…"

Yani still lived in his throat and deep in his chest. Shit. His own cousin could see her on his face.

Marisol patted his chest.

"She's a beautiful child. You both look very happy together."

"I was happy."

"You can't stay that way?"

"Nah…it's too complicated…"

"Hmmm, I've heard that before. This must've been serious. Complicated is in some Disǎ territory. This baby's mother have you wound up like that again?"

Erik's eyes cut away from Marisol's. She was so much like his mother in many ways. Able to read his emotions inside his silence. His fingers reached out and held Marisol's hand. Squeezed it. He leaned forward and scrolled through a photo folder and swiped open a picture of Yani and Sydette inside Klaue's car. The night he left her for Angola.

Marisol stared at the photo and he was met with bright white teeth from her lips.

"They are beautiful. Were you with them before you came here?"

"We didn't part in the best way."

"Do you ever?"

The smirk on her mouth was playful but understanding.

How many times had Marisol witnessed all his messy entanglements? Played referee when he was being sloppy with his dick? Jumped in front of women in her own home town throwing hands over him in public when he was being young and dumb and uncaring? Marisol knew so many of his darkest secrets and shared in two of them. Truth was, if she ever changed from being a teacher, she could be the most brazen killer.

She had a reason to be.

Years ago, they both experienced the trauma of their Aunt Lia's death at the hands of assassins, and that bloody history stained and bound them both. When he was nineteen and she was barely eighteen, they had done the unthinkable together. For revenge. For their Aunt and for his mother.

Erik touched Marisol's black shining hair. It looked like wet ink and smelled like the coconut oil he used to dress his locs in when he was younger. It was a calm smell. Familiar. Soothing. She smelled like coconut oil when she seared a sterile knife into his flesh giving him his first keloid scar on his collar bone. For the cop who captured his mother in Oakland and paved the way for her to be extradited and die a lonely death. Erik was fifteen then.

Marisol gave him three more when they both took out men in Sao Paulo, and he gave her the one and only marking on her body. Under her left breast. She had mixed an ancient concoction she found from an elder in Candomblé who had ties to some ancient maroon scarification rites. It was the start of the map on his body. The story carved into his flesh over the years.

Marisol was there from day one. She was the only one who knew the truth when his family questioned the strange rite. His Uncle Bakari may have suspected some things, but no one else was bold enough to ask for the truth. His past piercings on his face were just youthful experimentation before the Naval Academy. But the scars…

He leaned his head on Marisol's shoulder and she stroked his hair.

"Can you go back to them? Is it a done deal?"

He shrugged.

"You love them?"

He nodded and Marisol sighed.

"Maybe…maybe you shouldn't go through with your plan. This could be a sign for you…"

Erik pulled himself away from her and closed up the picture on his computer. The music still filled the room with hollow sounds.

"Does she love you?"

"She once did…now, I dunno. Like I said…complicated."

"You should fight for this then…wait…listen to me…sit down, JaJa. Hear me out. Perhaps what you really need is there. In that woman. In that little girl."

"I owe them, my parents—"

"Your parents would want you to be happy and free of this. Auntie Lia would want you to have your own life…I want you to have that."

"I'll have it after…"

Marisol leaned forward, pulling her soft shiny curls into a top knot as she moved away from him.

"You'd throw away a guaranteed happy life for an uncertain future? Uncle N'Jobu and Auntie Cali would feel hurt if they saw you now—"

"I feel them in here all the time!"

Erik clutched at his chest. The anger in his voice flew out and Marisol flinched and stepped away from him. He slammed his fist into his chest.

"I carry Baba and Mom in here everywhere I go and that woman…that baby…they pushed themselves in there too and I can't carry them all."

"Hey…hey…JaJa…listen—"

"No you listen! I owe them. My Baba. My Mom. I won't be able to fully rest until I have finished this for them."

They heard the front door open and Serah's excited voice calling to them. Erik jumped up and wiped his face. Marisol reached for his arm and squeezed it.

"We can finish this later—"

"Nah, I'm done talkin' 'bout it."

"I feel sorry for you."

"Don't."

"Fuckin' stubborn—"

"Like you ain't either."

Marisol pursed her lips and went to greet their Aunt and Uncle.

It was time for tree decorating and baking cookies and Erik was happy to see his Aunt feeling like a kid again wrapping gifts for all of them, and making constant face chat calls to Erik's Grandfather and Marisol's mothers. The energy was festive and light even though Marisol's words weighed on Erik's mind. She just didn't understand. He couldn't change his plans midstream.

He was satisfied knowing Yani had funds to build a foundation for herself and Sydette. That was enough for him. He could move on knowing she was good and the baby was good. That was all he could give them. Nothing else.

###

It came from one of the cruise ships that docked at the port a week before Christmas. Tourists came and went with the seasons for it was the ebb and flow of island life. No one thought to quarantine the sick little white boy from Wales when he first showed signs of the sickness, and when his parents trotted him out to a burger stand, the sickness spread among a few island adults and children. It wasn't until the boy died a week later from respiratory failure that health officials were able to trace where it came from.

When it hit St Thomas, it was like a firestorm and spread among the old and young children alike. Most adults were able to pull through, but several babies and toddlers did not. Five had died in two different hospitals already before Yani even knew her own baby was in danger.

"Hey Sweet Pea," she said watching her daughter climb up the stairs with her father. It was Sunday evening the time of handing over Sydette back to Yani so they could spend a few days together with her family before New Year's.

Chez held his other daughter Star in his arms, and Yani noticed right away that something was wrong with Sydette's sister.

"Is she alright?" Yani asked.

Chez held the little girl against his chest as he watched Yani pick up Sydette. Star's coloring was paler than usual and her sweaty brow concerned Yani.

"She hasn't been feeling too well the last two days."

"Take her to the doctor."

Yani stared at her own child. Sydette looked fine.

"Ursula is taking her tomorrow. We've been giving her liquid Tylenol—"

"Chez, I don't think you should wait. Take her now."

Yani reached out and touched the child's forehead. It was clammy and hot. Star had rapid breathing and her lips looked milky blue.

"She's sweating out a fever—"

Star's head lulled back.

"Oh God, Chez!"

"Star!"

Chez ran down to his car with the baby dangling nearly lifeless in his arms.

"I'm calling Ursula!" Yani yelled down to him.

She held Sydette tight as she spoke to Ursula letting her know the condition Star was in. Afterward, Yani jumped online to check for symptoms, and when she read of the children already dead, her stomach lurched. It was contagious.

Sydette looked fine and her temperature was normal. Pacing her living room, Yani called her roommate Nanette who went to Puerto Rico to visit her baby's father with Azriel.

"Don't come back to St. Thomas. At least not until after the New Year—"

"How is Sydette?"

"Alright. I'll keep you updated with news."

"Thanks, Yani. Do you think it was one of those unvaccinated kids?"

"The news doesn't say that here. It spread from China to Europe. Now it's here because of that little boy."

Yani watched over Sydette, feeding her liquids and bathing her carefully.

Later that evening Chez called her back.

Star had what the dead white boy from Wales had.

Yani was on winter break from school and she didn't have to take Sydette into daycare. Staying in their apartment, Yani looked after her daughter and prayed that she was one of the lucky ones. Star's condition worsened, and when she was placed in critical care, Sydette came down with the same exact symptoms.

Yani vacillated between anger at Chez and Ursula and anger at herself for her daughter's poor health. They should've taken Star in the moment she fell ill. Instead, the virus incubated and it was passed onto Sydette.

In the hospital, Yani sat near her daughter's bed as she was pumped with fluids and medicine that hadn't worked for any of the children that died.

Her Aunt Leona and mother stayed by her side as Sydette's condition became more fragile. A new drug was administered and for a few days, it looked like Sydette and Star were improving. Yani was able to get some rest then on an uncomfortable chair.

"Go get some sleep, your mother and I are here," Leona said as she passed her niece a paper cup filled with chamomile tea.

"I don't want her to not see me," Yani said. She was exhausted and scared.

"At least go stretch out in your mother's van."

"No. I want to be here."

All the ill children received round the clock care, and Yani's nurse training allowed her to be calmer than most of the parents on the same floor as her. Staying clinical and remaining alert in the room helped her a little bit.

Watching her baby girl shit on herself and sweat profusely with constant shivers was horrible to witness. Sydette had a fever so high that the doctors worried about her having seizures. Whatever this new virus was, it had the medical staff in a chokehold.

"A baby died on another floor," Yani's mother said walking in with two coffees in her hand.

"Why would you come tell her that?" Leona scolded.

Yani's mother tried to comfort her with a hug, but Yani's pressure was up. Her temples throbbed. She was losing her clinical edge. Sydette wasn't getting better. Star wasn't either. In fact, Star was declining rapidly.

Chez was in and out of their room, comforting one baby mother after the other. He looked distraught and heavily disheveled. His clumsy attempts at trying to keep humor among them to lighten things backfired and Yani found herself stressed even more with his presence. Ursula was constantly texting him to return to Star's room. All the waiting and doctors not knowing what to do wore them all down to gristle. Chez was pulled into two different directions. They would rip him in half.

"Just go be with them," Yani said with deep frustration in her voice. Star was the sicker of the two children and needed Chez the most.

She held Sydette's small hand and couldn't believe the weak little body withering away on the hospital bed was her child.

Twyla and her other cousins came to visit and hold vigil so Yani could eat and relieve herself in the restroom. The more people came parading into the room, the more frightened Yani became. Four days in, Star was put on a breathing machine, and Sydette was trailing behind her.

All she could do was cry.

###

Erik walked into his Aunt's flat full of good cheer and good lager. He went on a pub crawl with his Uncle Addae and they were both lucky that they were clear-headed enough to hail a cab and give comprehensible directions.

He was ready to crawl into a warm bed and sleep off a good buzz, but Marisol greeted him with his cell phone in her hand.

"It's been buzzing non-stop," she said.

"Why I left it to begin with," he said. His words were slurred and he kissed her cheek heading to his room.

"There are a ton of texts, JaJa. Someone talking about your Yani—"

Erik snatched his phone from her hand.

Fifteen messages in an hour. But it wasn't from Yani's number. It was her cousin. Twyla.

Erik swiped her number quickly. It was still early on the island.

"Big Man…"

Twyla's voice sounded all wrong.

"Twyla—"

"Yuh have to come here. Sydette is dying…she nuh 'gon make it. She sister Star passed away this morning. Please come back here. Fast. She's on a respirator and the doctor wants to remove it…"

Erik sobered up instantly.

"Dying?"

"That virus. It spread here. Sweet Pea got it and her sister had it too…and—"

The phone gave muffled sounds and Erik could hear Yani bawling in the background with her mother yelling in heavy patois.

"I have to go. Get here. Anyway you can…please. It's bad."

Erik held his phone for a long time to his ear, even after Twyla hung up.

"JaJa?"

Marisol touched his shoulder.

Erik bolted up from the couch.

"I gotta leave. I gotta get outta here—"

"Where are you going?"

Serah stood in the middle of the room watching him and Marisol.

It was the dawn of a new year, and his baby girl was going to leave the world. That had to be a mistake.

"I gotta go!"

Marisol followed him to the guest room and helped him pack his duffle bag.

"JaJa, what is happening?" Serah asked.

"I'll call you when I get there."

His eyes felt wild in their sockets and he could barely focus on his belongings being tossed into place.

"Marisol? Do you know-?

"He just has to get back—"

"My little girl—"

"Little girl?" Serah's face looked puzzled at his words.

He prayed that he would make it back in time.

Rushing out of the flat, he flagged down a cab that shuttled him over to the airport. He lucked out on a red-eye that could get him to St. Thomas. It was leaving within the hour. His body shook with fear. He was always too late.

When the vibram tattoo in his lip itched as he played basketball with his little homies at the age of 10, he ignored it until the sky above him glowed with streaks of blue clouds above his father's apartment complex. He ran so fast to get to that top floor…but he was too late.

When his grandfather placed him on a plane at eleven with his Aunt Shavonne and Uncle Junie to get to a Sao Paulo prison to see his Mom…it was too late.

Fate always fucked with him, held him back from going forward to get to the ones he loved in time.

All he had on his phone was the address of the hospital and a room number.

His anxiety crippled him on the plane and by the time he dropped down from the sky back onto that tiny rock, Erik was full of fatigue, sorrow, and anger at himself. The last time he saw Sydette in person, she was comforting him, lifting his spirits, and making him grateful to know her tiny soul.

Why did he give her a check instead of himself? What could money do for her now?

The dread in his chest carried him along with the cab ride to the hospital.

God please…don't let me be too late again.

Let me say goodbye properly this time…

###

Chp 23 Here

Tag List:

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@allhailqueennel @bartierbakarimobisson @cpwtwot @shookmcgookqueen @yoyolovesbucky

@raysunshine78 @the-illllest @terrablaze514 @l-auteuse @amirra88 @jimizwidow @janelledarling

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@tyees @eye-raq @writerbee-ffs @chocolatedream30

#wet sugar #erik killmonger #killmonger fanfiction #erik stevens #n'jadaka #klaue #black panther fanfiction #mbj

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idkthisisjustforfanfic · 5 years

Photo

two years too late, chapter t h r e e

You were sitting at your desk on Monday morning when the message came through. Alyssa’s name lit up your screen, the house emoji sat beside the small letters as your hand jerked forward to grab it out of habit.

Alyssa (10:21am): THERE’S A PHOTO OF US AND HARRY

Alyssa (10:21am): Can’t see our faces tho don’t worry

Alyssa (10:22am): Just the back of your head and my ear, really

Shit, shit, shit.

She’d attached the picture and sent it: your arm, your hand, your hair. Alyssa’s ear and jaw, Erica’s leather jacket and unmistakably, Harry’s shoulders and back. You looked it over again, studying the image as you pinched it to zoom in.

You couldn’t tell that was you. No way. Unless your mother or sister was looking, Jessie and Bryn might not even be able to tell. It was dark and the quality of the picture was poor but you could definitely see that you had a drink in your hand. You could also see that you were stood remarkably close to Harry.

Fuck.

You took a deep breath, hoping to steady your pulse and ignore the way your vision was blurry in the corners.

“Question!”

“Jesus!” You exclaimed, looking up quickly to see a startled Whitney with her hand on her chest--just as alarmed by your reaction as you’d been by her presence. “Sorry, hi.” You dropped your phone quickly, letting it crash down to your desk.

“Sorry, oh my god,” she let out a big breath, rebounding from the adrenaline as a laugh escaped her lips. “I was just hoping we could meet later. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“No, m’sorry--you just--proper scared me,” you said, leaning back in your chair and blinking a few times--your heart still catching up with your brain.

“Your performance review is overdue,” she said. “We were supposed to do it at the six month mark, but you know how things are,” she waved a hand to dismiss the timeline.

“Sure, yeah. After lunch?”

“Two-thirty? We can meet in my office.”

“I’ll come to you,” you nodded, offering confirmation before she turned to walk away.

You picked up your phone again quickly, new messages from Alyssa coming in faster than you could read them.

Alyssa (10:24am): OKAY just kidding there’s one of your face. Blurry though!!!!

Alyssa (10:24am): From down below. Someone must have taken it looking up to the balcony where we were?

Alyssa (10:25am): You would never know that was you

She was trying to reassure you, trying to keep your heart from beating out of your chest as all of the thoughts flooded through your brain like a tsunami, waves quick and forceful.

Okay, so it wasn’t like knowing Harry was the end of the world. You’d been doing that for nearly 13 years and you’d managed fine enough. The problem, as you saw it, was more along the lines that your employer and coworkers had no clue that someone your website wrote about frequently was recently spending his nights on your couch with a glass of wine in hand.

Something about that sounded weird, and you were sure that Whitney wouldn’t go for it.

You pulled up the new photo, holding the screen uncomfortably close to your face to study the grainy pixels. Of course--the one moment that he slung his arm around your shoulders was the one this person had chosen to capture.

Y/N L/N (10:26am): Where are these? Can we get the person to take them down?

Alyssa (10:26am): They came up on my instagram explore tab. Random fan accounts.

Y/N L/N (10:27am): Fuck.

Alyssa (10:27am): I don’t think you should worry. They’re so blurry you can’t even tell if you’re a man or woman.

Y/N L/N (10:28am): Great even better!

You dropped your phone into your desk drawer after telling Alyssa to keep an eye on the photos. She was right: they were blurry. You were hoping with everything in your soul that Carly was too busy to even check the internet today (unlikely, seeing as your job relied on that), or if she did, that she’d be too excited about the new gossip to even pause and consider the fact that the hair in the photo looked an awful lot like yours.

So you waited. You contemplated sneaking out to meet Alyssa for lunch, taking a look for yourself at the accounts that had uploaded the photos. You decided against it, though, when you realized that your absence might make you look even more suspicious. Flying under the radar as much as possible seemed like a good option.

You kept your head in your work: a list about the funniest memes about Christmas, a quick round up of the weekend’s best celebrity tweets. You heated up your lunch and ate at your desk, hoping to avoid Carly at all costs.

You were successful up until you slipped into the kitchen on your floor to fill up your water bottle, hoping to blend in to the late-lunch crowd. Carly stood with her back to you, but soon turned around, her festive red sweater made her hard to miss. Upon meeting eyes with her, you looked down to your watch, pretending as if you’d suddenly remembered a meeting you were late for.

You weren’t one to shy away from confrontation, but this one didn’t feel totally work appropriate.

“Haven’t seen you all day,” she said, pulling her lunch from the microwave before offering a smile. “Busy or what?”

“Swamped,” you lied, pushing your water bottle up to the cooler in defeat, the bracelets on your wrist clinking together. “Ate at my desk, been pretty productive, so s’all good.”

“Feels busy around here in general. Christmas and shit,” she shrugged. “There was breaking news this morning that Harry went out on a date this weekend. I don’t know if you saw it--pictures and everything,” she wiggled her eyebrows as if you’d bite at the bait.

You licked at your dry lips, a heat rising to your cheeks. “Really?”

She nodded, grabbing a napkin from the counter. “Can’t even tell who it is, probably some random model or something. I doubt it’s hard to find someone to sleep with when you’re Harry Styles, though, so--” she turned to head back towards her desk, calling over her shoulder. “Come find me later, we’ll grab a coffee and do edits together!”

You promised you would, thankful for the fact that she was an hour behind her target for the day and still hadn’t eaten. It gave you time to gain composure as you wove through cubes and conversations to make your way to Whitney’s corner office with sweeping city views.

A sunny and cold day on the other side of the glass windows reminded you that winter was here--the small amount of snow left reflected sunlight like a broken mirror on the ground. Whitney had a folder on her desk and waved you in when you knocked, cell phone up to her ear.

She ended the call and thanked you for making the time, telling you to shut the door behind you, affording privacy to your conversation about your numbers and pay and overall transition into The Scoop.

You told Whitney that you thought it was going well--you felt up to speed with the platform the website used, felt like you were staying on top of your category (even if it wasn’t your favorite). She complimented you on your ability to use humor in your stories and on social media platforms to enhance the mission of the website, she even said you’d been the second top writer for this quarter.

“Rarely happens with someone so new,” she smiled, leaning back in her chair as she crossed her legs. “But be real with me--are you liking it? What do you wish was different? Any big fears?”

You bit at your lip, contemplating whether or not to disclose your desire to cover more news. You didn’t want to seem ungrateful or entitled, but you also trusted Whitney to handle any feedback you threw her way. “I mean, I guess I’d be interested in doing some more long form stories. Editorials or something.”

She nodded, waiting to see if you had more to say. When you let your lips press back together in a thin line, she offered a small smile. “I’ll certainly keep that in mind,” she told you, her tone made it sound like she was letting you down easy. “Gabrielle does most of the editorial pieces and Carly handles a lot of the pop culture news stuff that comes up for the entertainment department.”

You nodded--you knew the hierarchy. Gabrielle had been here longer than both you and Carly combined. She was only a step or two below Whitney and she seemed to sniff out good stories like it was second nature. She almost never wrote a flop.

“Yeah, no, sorry, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” you said, already regretting the words that you’d let slip.

“You’re not ungrateful,” Whitney said. “You’re looking for more growth. I like that. I’ll certainly keep it in mind, Y/N.”

“I do have a random question,” you said suddenly, the four walls of Whitney’s office feeling like a safe enough place to play out a scenario of what ifs.

“Yeah?”

Whitney--as hip as she was--likely wasn’t paying attention to every waking detail of Harry’s life. You doubted she saw the photos and you figured you could be vague enough in your question.

“Has anyone here ever had a conflict of interest issue?”

“Conflict of interest?” Whitney spoke the phrase like she didn’t know what it meant. You knew she did, so you gave an example.

“Yeah, like, has anyone ever used their own tweets in a story or promoted a friend’s band or--I dunno, been friends with a celebrity that we cover?”

She let out a laugh, as if all of the examples were far fetched and unlikely. “I mean,” she shrugged. “Candace from beauty one time got in trouble downstairs for doing a whole write up on a makeup brand her sister was COO of,” she clenched her jaw and grimaced. “But no one up here--you’re all smarter than that.”

Right. Okay. So there was that.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Oh, just curious,” you waved a hand in the air, letting a forced laugh out as you looked out the window. “Sounds like a shit show.”

“Yeah--I mean, she got in trouble, but they figured it out. Anything else? I’ve got all of your stuff to proof before I head out early for yoga.”

“Nope, all good on this end.” You stood and gathered your water bottle and notebook.

Whitney reopened her laptop and checked her phone. “Thanks for meeting with me, Y/N. We love you here and you’ve been a rockstar.”

You offered her a smile, appreciative of the praise and encouragement. Once she let her eyes fall back to her computer, you hurried over to your desk, reaching for your phone and praying that the photo hadn’t traveled any father.

You composed a quick message to Harry.

Y/N (3:17pm): Coming to yours when I’m out of work. We need to talk.

The one problem about going to Harry’s after work was that he wasn’t home. So instead of storming into his apartment like you’d imagined, you had to wait patiently in a strange hallway in a big office building in Midtown.

You checked your watch obsessively. You’d only been there for seven minutes so far, but it still felt like too long. You were rehearsing the words in your head, tiny fragments of an argument playing out before you even had the chance to tell him about the photos or the anxiety that came with them.

You had no clue where you were. He’d sent another pin of his location and told you to text him when you arrived. A man at the front desk swiped a card for you to enter and instructed you to head to the 49th floor. So here, in another indistinguishable hallway (this time without a neon green wall), you waited.

“Hi, hey,” his voice sounded from a doorway behind you, your body instinctively moving in the direction of his voice before you even locked eyes. “Everything okay, what’s wrong?”

His arms tried to envelope you, but before they could, you put a hand up to his chest. “We have to talk.”

“Okay,” he drew the syllables out, his head dipping to the side as he looked past your shoulder. “Come with me,” he took your hand and pulled you back towards where he came. Through a doorway, past a few people. A fitting, you realized. He was at some sort of wardrobe fitting.

People stirred at tables beside you, yellow measuring tapes draped around their necks and white chalk stained their fingertips. He offered a smile to one woman in particular, one who seemed to be more interested in your presence than the others. He pulled you towards the other side of the room, your palm sweaty from the touch of his skin and the swirling desire in your head--the kind you tried (but failed) to ignore.

Eventually you were in a back stairwell--one that was similar to the hiding spot you’d found last week at work. The door shut behind you, and Harry leaned his head out to ensure that no one was around to eavesdrop, he turned to offer you his full attention. “Alright, go.”

“Did you see the pictures of us?”

“Pictures?”

“Pictures.”

“No.”

You rolled your eyes and reached for your phone in your pocket, pulling up Alyssa’s message and opening the two attachments she’d sent. “These.” You flipped it around to let his eyes scan over them.

He hummed and took the phone in his hand, the other reaching to rub the back of his neck. “I take it you’re not happy about it.”

His eyes raised to meet yours, your voice faltering as you spoke. “I--no, I just--I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to work where I work and be photographed with you.”

“Because of your friend?”

Carly--he meant Carly.

“No, not because of Carly. Because of me. It’s a conflict of interest, Harry. I can’t be your friend and potentially have to write a list about the ten funniest things you’ve ever said in interviews!”

He cracked a smile at this, but it faded altogether when you squinted up at him.

“Alright,” he cleared his throat. “I mean, it’s blurry,” he brought your phone back to his face and inspected it more. “You can barely tell that’s you. If I didn’t know what you look like, I wouldn’t even guess.”

You swallowed, wondering if he ever studied your features like you did his. The dip in his top lip, the way his eyes crinkled at the sides when he laughed.

“What’s the big deal, anyway? We’ve been friends forever, a lot of people do know that, you know.”

You couldn’t help but pull a face at his words. Friends forever? You corrected him. “Friends who haven’t had regular contact for the last, like, six years. Haven’t spoken at all in the last two.”

He let a breath out, one that told you he was bothered or angry or something. “Because I thought that’s what you wanted!”

You took a step back from him, suddenly overwhelmed as a thousand questions burrowed their way into your mind. “Whatever--I don’t even want to,” you cut yourself off. You weren’t ready to dig up the details of December 29th or launch into a conversation regarding the untethering of your friend group. “I just--I can’t fuck this job up, it’s a really good job.”

“You’re not going to fuck it up, Smalls!” His words were harsh now despite the use of your nickname, his eyes wider than before as he tried to reassure you. “It’s just a photo. No one will know that’s you. We’ll just be careful.”

It didn’t feel that easy.

“I mean, it might get you more reads, y’know.” A laugh tumbled out of his mouth with ease, a complete lack of awareness of the weight his words held. You pulled your eyes up to look at him, a heat in your chest present that he hadn’t ever ignited before. At least, not in the angry sense.

“Are you implying that being friends with you will further my career and that I should be thankful for that?”

“No, I didn’t--I just mean that people love to read your stuff anyway. S’hilarious. If people knew that we were friends, that would make people really interested in you--more than they already are,” he tried to soften his words, flatten out the intention as if he hadn’t meant what he said.

You shook your head, your gaze on the cement floor as you wondered why you even answered his text four days prior. Now, as the sun tried to peek through the dirty sliver of a window in the stairwell, answering felt like it was a bad choice.

“I--okay, Harry--I’ll see you around,” you turned on one foot, hand on the doorknob before he could get in front of you.

Monday, December 11th

Harry S (11:34pm): I’m sorry about today. I wasn’t trying to be a dick.

Harry S (11:46pm): Sleep well

Tuesday, December 12th

Harry S (10:19am): What are you up to after work?

Friday, December 15th

Harry S (1:15pm): Alright. You’re mad. I get it. I was a dick.

Harry S (1:15pm): Can we please talk?

You always wished you were strong willed. You could be, in a lot of ways. Like the time you and Jessie took a painting class and you were complete shit. You spent hours researching the right brushes for the right types of paint and eventually, you figured it out. The summer heat back home turned sticky as you’d paint in your bedroom at night, a fan blowing sweet relief until you’d climb into cool sheets.

Or even the time you’d decided to stand up to Holly McAdams in Year 3 when she told everyone that you had cooties. The playground went silent when you called her a liar and told her to put her energy towards good instead of evil.

But when it came to Harry--you’d never been so lucky. He always had a charm about him that seemed to seep into your brain and turn it all to mush, tiny roots that wrapped around your neurons and seemed to rewire you entirely. Which is why, on Friday afternoon, you finally broke and called him on your commute home.

“Hi,” you said into the phone, holding onto the handrail in your subway car as it rounded a corner. The reception was shitty underground, but you committed yourself to the phone call and would recognize a dropped signal as a sign from the universe that it wasn’t meant to be.

“Hi,” he said.

You waited, unsure if he’d launch into an apology or let you take the first step. Silence.

“Sorry I’ve been ignoring you. I was busy at work and I fucked up a list and Whitney has been out sick--” you realized you were doing it. You were apologizing when you hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d been the one to fuck up and now you were apologizing? You back tracked. “And yeah, I mean, you were a dick, so.”

He laughed, the sound immediately easing some of the tension between you. “I get that. I’m sorry--I should have known that you’re not,” he paused. A woman beside you sneezed into her elbow, you inched away from her to avoid contamination, sandwiched between strangers. “You’re not impressed by the fame,” he spoke dramatically, your lips involuntarily twitching towards the sky--or, in your current situation, the ground above.

“I’m sure not. Never have been, never will be.”

“Are you out of work now?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

You let out a sigh, you’d been dreaming about it all day. “Nothing--I’m going to sit on my couch and eat a bowl of cereal and pray that I don’t catch whatever is going around the office. I already kind of have a sore throat and I’m not trying to be sick for Christmas.”

“Well,” he laughed. “I wish you the best with that, then.”

A tangle of disappointment in your gut when he didn’t ask you to hang out.

“Thanks. I’ll--uh--talk to you later?”

“Yeah, Smalls, talk to you later.”

You hung up, sliding your phone back into your pocket and shrinking into your coat for the remainder of the ride. When you climbed the twenty three steps to ground level at your stop, the sun had already sunk below the skyline, traces of light sneaking between the buildings on your block.

Alyssa had worked from home for the day, turning the living room into an office as she sat sprawled out on the couch. She’d also been coming down with something--her nose red and dry from all of her tissue use.

“Hi,” she greeted, pulling out her headphones and looking up at you when you came through the door, the room once again lit with the glow of Christmas lights. “How was work?”

“Fine, long, T-G-I-F,” you laughed. “How do you feel?”

“Somewhat better. Still crappy, though. How’s your throat?”

You dropped your purse to the floor and hung up your coat. “Worse than this morning. I talked to Harry though.”

She pulled her earbuds out and grinned up at you. “Was he so apologetic? I feel like he’d feel so guilty knowing he upset you--”

You shot her one of those looks: the kind that told her she was getting too wrapped up in his charm and fame and good looks.

She cleared her throat. “But he was a dick so he should feel guilty.”

You kicked your shoes off, the leather of your boots falling against the wood floor before you settled into the couch. “He was apologetic--but it was quick. Who knows when I’ll see him next, maybe when we’re home.”

Alyssa bit her tongue--you could see that she had something to say but you didn’t press it, unsure if you had the emotional energy for a conversation about why being friends with Harry again wasn’t the smartest idea.

She looked back to her screen, finishing up a few emails as you sunk into the couch, your eyes glued to your phone as you read through comments on the picture of you and Harry.

I bet she’s just a friend--they look totally platonic.

HE’S TOTALLY DATING SOMEONE!

Skjdhfkjdshfkjdhk!!!!

The picture is way too fucking grainy how are we supposed to sleuth this one out?!

Alyssa sighed and closed her laptop. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Ugh,” you let out a groan, exiting out of instagram quickly to avoid showing her the things people were saying. If you had to guess, you’d say that Alyssa had a similar nightly ritual over the past few days. Wash her face, brush her teeth, climb into bed and read what strangers were saying about you online.

The only good thing, really, was that people didn’t know it was you.

“I’m not in the mood to cook,” you said.

As soon as the words left your mouth, your phone buzzed on the coffee table, the same obnoxious picture of Harry in an apron lighting up the screen as you both brought yours eyes down to the buzzing technology, then back up to each other.

“Answer it,” she said excitedly, her lips curling towards the ceiling.

You shot her a look as you reached for it. “Not on the first ring--can’t seem too eager.”

“As if you’re not eager,” she teased, returned the eye roll pleasantry, pulling a laugh from you as you answered the call.

“Hi,” you said quickly, pressing the speaker phone button and holding it in the air between the two of you on the couch.

“Hey--I’m following protocol and giving you a warning that I’ll be over in like--eh--four minutes.”

“What?” You asked. “Why?”

Alyssa looked around the room nervously, taking an inventory of the items that were hers. She sprung into action quickly, trying to declutter her home-office--notebooks, sharpies, her glasses and tissues were spread out around the living room space.

“I’ve got food. Figured you wouldn’t want to cook if you weren’t feeling well.”

Alyssa stopped dead in her tracks, turning to you with her hands over her heart and lips in a lovestruck frown, completely enchanted by his words. You lifted your middle finger in her direction before turning towards the back of the sofa. Alyssa headed into her bedroom.

“You don’t have to do that, I mean--thank you, obviously, but, I totally get it if you’re busy.”

“M’not,” he said simply. “Stuff is dying down now anyway since we’re leaving soon.” You noticed his pronoun choice, casually dropped into the sentence as he kept talking. “I’ll wait until the coast is clear, alright? Just buzz me in when I text you.”

“Yeah,” you said. “Alright.”

Alyssa popped back into the room when she heard you hang up, her brows raised suggestively.

“What?” You asked, your tone slightly defensive as she pulled her head through the neck of her sweatshirt.

“Just, interesting, is all. Awfully sweet of him.”

You stood from the couch, watching as she bent over once more to gather more of her belongings from the area rug below. “Oh come off it,” you said.

She pulled a face, confused by your slang as she reached for a pen that had wandered beneath the coffee table.

“S’not a big deal,” you edited your words so she’d understand. “We’re friends.”

She hummed in disagreement, you trailed behind her towards her bedroom, socked feet gliding along the hard wood. Alyssa’s room was dark, the beige walls covered in posters of bands and movies. Her bed was unmade and the floor was littered in clothing of days past.

You leaned against the doorframe. “How could you think we’re anything more than that after hearing the full story of what happened that night?”

She shrugged nonchalantly, giving you a dismissive look. “S’been a while, things change. You don’t just bring food to your sick friend.”

“Sure you do,” you narrowed your eyes at her. “That’s exactly what friends do, Lyss.”

She picked up a shirt from the floor and folded it into quarters. “Just seems like there’s always been chemistry. One shitty night--as embarrassing as it was--doesn’t mean there’s not chemistry.”

You thought on her words, careful to not let them settle too deep in your heart. They floated in the air in front of you, vanishing altogether when an electric buzz leaked through the intercom by the door.

You ran over--quick to make sure he could sneak in undetected--and held a thumb to the button to grant him entrance.

Seventy-three seconds until there was a knock on the door, a pizza in his hand, and a bottle of wine pulled from the shelf in the kitchen. Alyssa--who was never one to turn down some Pinot Noir--had chosen the nicest bottle you had. A gift from her mother when she got a promotion.

Eventually, the three of you were sat around the coffee table, throw pillows serving as seats as you reached for second slices. Music drifted from the small speaker on the bookshelf, the scene similar to that of last weekend, except this time Alyssa was here. It was funny how things with Harry could feel exactly the same as they’d once been, yet entirely different in the same breath.

“Did she ever tell you about the time that we stayed up all night at Jessie’s house when we were fourteen because of some stupid internet challenge?”

Alyssa pulled a smile, her eyes darting over to me quickly. “Of course she didn’t.”

“S’cause it was stupid. You’re the one who barely made it. Everyone else was fine but when five AM came you were seriously dragging.”

He contorted his face into one of mock-offense. “Excuse me for having good sleep hygiene and a healthy need for some shut-eye.”

“You guys were allowed to have co-ed sleepovers at fourteen?” Alyssa asked, holding a hand up in student fashion. She folded her pizza in half, a boat of cheese and grease and pepperoni.

You let out a laugh, knowing that Harry’d want to explain the mastermind plan that he and Adam had come up with nearly ten years ago.

“So we did this thing, where the girls would tell their mums that they were at someone’s house. So they’d say they were at Bryn’s, but Bryn would say she was at Y/N’s,” he smiled in your direction--the adrenaline of lying to your parents came back as a small wave, less exciting than in times past but still enough to keep a grin plastered to your face.

“And the guys would do the same. We always said we were at Adam’s though--and I dunno what Adam would say cause his parents never asked any questions. So then we’d go to Jessie’s because her parents were always away for work, and--yeah, madness would ensue.”

“S’where we first drank, pretty sure that’s where Adam finally called Sophie Kneeland and asked her out over the phone.”

“S’also where Smalls blacked out the first time when we were fifteen or sixteen,” he let out a laugh and turned to Alyssa.

Her eyes went wide as she folded her legs beneath her. Your stomach dropped though, seeing as now didn’t feel like a good time to recount all the times you’d done stupid things when you were drunk. You could probably spend hours on that topic alone.

“Okay--alright, anyway,” you said, clearing your throat quickly. A car horn beeped outside, momentarily shattering the safety of the cozy room.

“Hey, also,” Harry wiped at his mouth with a napkin and pointed a finger at your roommate. “Did you appreciate my warning--a whole five minutes!”

“Four,” you said, his eyes rolling in response to your correction.

“Better than zero,” Alyssa nodded, taking a sip of wine. “Maybe we can work you all the way up to asking before you show up,” she teased.

Harry frowned at this. A dimple appeared in his cheek and he looked over to you quickly. “I brought food--” his gaze drifted back to Alyssa. “And enough for you, if you forgot.”

“You should have seen her cleaning up all her shit in here,” you laughed. “Notebooks every where, like a bomb went off.”

“I was working,” she defended. “What did you do today, Harry?”

“Hmm,” he thought aloud. “Woke up at eight--went to the gym. Showered and finalized the set list for the next leg of tour. Had a meeting with my manager and PR team about what’s coming up after the holidays. Lunch, then I had to go back to a fitting for more wardrobe stuff. Talked with Erica about the flight home, side note,” he looked to you. “Then I got your call and decided to come here.”

You were both quiet for a second--Alyssa had been challenging him, her assumption that he’d had a quiet day that couldn’t have nearly been as busy as hers. He took a deep breath and took a swig of wine.

You knew that he was busy--you’d always assumed that being famous came with plenty of downfalls and responsibilities, but hearing them all listed out in succession without a breath in between made induced a wave of guilt to pass through your veins.

Of course it was hard for him to keep in touch, if even his slower days looked like that.

“But about the flight,” he pointed a finger at you and then set his wine glass down. “Two tickets on the red eye for the 20th. I’d say we could charter something but first class on the big planes is always really nice. They give you a free eye patch.”

“Eye patch?” Alyssa asked, her tone drifting up in confusion.

“The ones you sleep with.”

“Eye mask,” you nodded.

“Oh whatever, you knew what I meant,” Harry squinted his eyes and reached for the bottle for a refill.

“What do you mean a big plane, though? How big are we talking?”

“The double deckers--they have little cubbies in first class. Little doors and everything--super private, which is nice.”

“You fly on public planes?” Another question from Alyssa--your personal peanut gallery--as you watched Harry take the stopper out of the bottle before pouring more into his glass.

“Yeah--s’better for the environment.”

Alyssa’s eyes went wide and she got that same look when he’d said he was bringing food--her brain and heart melting inside her, almost spilling out onto the oriental rug.

“Alyssa,” you said her name quickly as you stood from your orange and yellow throw pillow seat. “Want to help me with something in the kitchen?”

“What? What do you need help with?”

“Uh,” you looked around the room, trying to think on your feet. “The leftovers--the pizza.”

Harry, sat on the floor between the two of you, looked up. “I can help.”

“No.” You said quickly. “You stay. Pick a new playlist,” you instructed, hoping that a responsibility would keep him occupied. You gave Alyssa a prompting look, causing her to reluctantly stand and follow you around the corner to the kitchen.

“Can you not with the faces?” You asked, turning around once you were shielded by the wall between the two rooms. “Any time he says something relatively endearing you look like you’re about to combust or orgasm or something.”

“If I was about to orgasm, you’d know it,” she smirked, her voice low and sultry as you rolled your eyes. You’d grabbed the pizza on your way, so you reached into a drawer for aluminum foil and then tossed the box into the garbage.

“You get my point.”

“I do--but come on, Y/N! He’s literally acting like your boyfriend! Buying you a plane ticket even though you already have one? Bringing you dinner because you mentioned in passing that you weren’t feeling well? And now he’s climate conscious, too?!”

You passed her the foil-wrapped pizza and she put it into the fridge. A shrug of your shoulders, as if to dilute the air around you.

“He’s alright,” you said, the words an act of self-defense, an antidote for the love potion Alyssa was verbally concocting.

She rolled her eyes when she turned around to face you. “Relax, will you? It’s alright to be into him.”

“No it’s not, Alyssa,” you said, your voice more firm now. “You don’t know him, okay? You don’t know what happened back then and the way our friendship was and--just, leave it alone, alright?”

She paused, her eyes scanning your face, both of you staring at each other in silence. The kitchen clock ticked on the wall, seconds scattered through the room.

Harry’s voice floated above the music from the other room, “some classic Christmas tunes, yeah?”

So you left it at that. There was no need to defend yourself more than you already had, the reasons stacking high as to why shouldn’t go down this road. Harry was on two feet in the living room, swaying back and forth to the music as Alyssa followed you back to the couch.

You poured yourself another glass of wine, watching as he playfully took Alyssa’s hand, spinning her into his side as they waltzed in circles around the coffee table.

You pulled your carryon closer to your body, wishing you could absorb it into your being as you forced your way past people already in line. Sorry, excuse me, sorry, thanks, gotta get by.

The airport was busier than you expected. Your mum had told you on the phone that the afternoon would be the worst time of day, a wave of relief washing over you when you confirmed that Harry had booked the red eye. That relief vanished altogether when you stepped foot into the bustling airport, children running, intercoms beeping.

Your passport was in your hand, the ticket slipped between pages filled with colorful stamps. An elbow into your stomach, you hiked the bag up your shoulder more.

“I’m so sorry, hi, name is Y/N L/N, I was supposed to board already, uh--my friend is already seated I think.”

The woman at the desk looked at you with an unimpressed stare, her fingers clicking on the keyboard as she held a hand out. You assumed she wanted your ticket, so you thumbed it out of the booklet and slapped it down.

Her eyes scanned the paper before the computer did, when it beeped, the expression on her face changed. “Oh, Miss L/N,” she smiled up at you. “No worries, we can take you to your seat right now.”

“Oh, I can, I’ll just take myself,” you said awkwardly, looking around to see who else she was referring to. Other gate workers were nearby, clad in the traditional British Airways uniforms as the airport continued to buzz with Christmas cheer. Apparently flying first class had its perks.

And you would have already been seated if you’d just agreed to travel to the airport with Harry, but you had plenty of things to tie up at work before heading out for a whopping 12 days. It wasn’t typical to take so much time off in a role like yours, but Whitney was feeling generous and you’d agreed to work a few days remotely.

So instead of sitting in the back of the same black Chevy Suburban with Roger narrating the drive, you’d crammed your suitcase into the trunk of an Uber and hoped that the traffic out to Long Island wasn’t impossible.

It was.

A man with a friendly smile took your bag from your shoulder, leading you around the counter and on to the jet way, veering left at the fork. The temperature shifted as you moved farther from the structure of the airport--the winter New York night seeping in through the cracks of the beige tunnel walls. Posters of happy travelers and airport workers smiled down on you, to fly, to serve. Their eyes watched you pad down the dull gray carpet towards the plane.

Smiles from flight attendants when you crossed the threshold, greeting you by name as your companion put an arm out, urging you in before him.

The interior of the plane was dimly lit a calming blue--the windows shaded electronically, making them appear to be black eyes into the night. You passed a galley stocked with coffee, tea, British Airways water bottles, heading down an aisle past cushioned seats--ones much nicer than the economy class you were used to flying. You’d assumed this was your section--each seat had armrests big enough for giants--but you passed through a curtain to find a section of small cubicles, not much different than your office.

One on each side, two in the middle.

“Had to give up the window for you,” you heard a voice sound from two rows ahead. A dimpled smile looked your way, when you met his gaze, you shook your head.

“This is incredible,” you looked around, taking in the sight of other suited men and bejeweled women settling in for the trip. “I didn’t even know shit like this existed.”

The man set the bag down on your seat, disappearing without a trace as Harry handed you something wrapped in plastic. “Your eye mask,” he delivered it with two hands, bowing his head to pull a giggle from your lips.

“Seriously,” you took it from him and let out a huff as you pushed the bag to the floor, slumping into the extra-roomy chair. “This is absurd. The traffic was terrible and I almost thought they wouldn’t let me on.”

“Shoulda come with me,” he said simply, his tone almost melodic. “The club they let you wait in is even better.”

You looked around again, surprised that Harry was able to exist in peace in front of so many strangers. “I can’t believe you fly on these--you don’t get mobbed?”

He handed you a packaged piece of chocolate from a small cubby in the wall in front of your chairs. A flat screen stared back at you, your fingers tugging at the wrapper before plopping the candy into your mouth automatically.

“Not really--these people are all too busy with their own shit,” he motioned around the room, both of your eyes landing on a man who was animatedly speaking into his cell phone. “A few pictures, maybe. If we’re lucky we’ll sleep.”

You nodded, content for a moment to just catch your breath, take in the surroundings of first class, and just be. Harry reminded you of the plans you’d set with your friends: a reunion at the Red Lion on the 23rd. It’d be the six of you for sure, but there’d likely be others who you’d all invite--running into other classmates at Sainsbury’s or Costa wasn’t unheard of.

You’d done the same thing in years past--your entire class heading for drinks and catch up conversations when everyone was back in town. The only difference was that this time, Harry would be tagging along.

If anything, you were more nervous about the six of you being back together than you were about seeing people like Maddie Winslow or even Kenny Tilley. None of them knew about that night. Luckily--as obnoxious and outlandish as they could be--Jessie, Adam, Jake, and Bryn had managed to keep their mouths shut despite knowing the ins and outs of what had happened.

Which, when you thought about it, meant Harry had, too. He hadn’t told anyone about the things you’d said or done. He didn’t rub it in your face or try to embarrass you in front of anyone else. The details of December 29th, 2015, would hopefully stay between the six of you for a long time to come.

After a good fifteen minutes on the runway, the plane was airborne. Estimated flight time six hours and thirty-five minutes, if we’re lucky, the captain said. You told Harry about your week and the things you’d rushed through this afternoon to leave work before 4pm. He laughed about the traffic and poked you in the shoulder when you rolled your eyes at him.

Thirty minutes later he turned to look at you, a strand of hair dipping down to his forehead.

“Smalls,” he said quietly.

“Hmm?” You turned to look at him, mid-chapstick application.

“I’m glad we’re hanging out.”

You stared at him for a second, your face tingly and hot when his lips twitched up into a smile. You nodded, broke eye contact, and capped your chapstick. “Mhm, yeah, me too.”

“Smalls,” he said it again, this time you looked at him more seriously.

“What?”

“Can we talk about it?”

You could have sworn the world went silent--the hum of the plane’s four engines suddenly muted as he stared back at you with emerald eyes.

Somewhere in the world there were ocean waves so high they could knock a boat off course. There were rainforests and mountains and deserts so dry they made the airplane cabin feel humid. You wished, as you sat next to him, miles of space between your feet and the ground, that you could be anywhere but here.

You opened your mouth to speak, words escaping you. You shook your head.

“Y/N, I just--”

“No,” you said. “Forget it. We both said we would forget it.”

He licked his lips, quiet for a second as he dropped his gaze to the carpeted floor. You stood up quickly, hoping an escape to the bathroom would place air and time between the two of you. You were stuck, though. You pushed the button twice that was meant to open the sliding door out of your tiny space--a human height shield from the other passengers.

You pressed it again, more frustrated each time your finger met the hard plastic.

“Here,” he said behind you, reaching past you to press the button right beside it. “You were pressing close.”

“Right.”

The door slid open, a flight attendant offered you a smile as she waited for you to exit in front of her. Down the hall, into the bathroom--much bigger than economy. A full length mirror, a toilet that actually resembled a toilet.

The door shut and latched behind you. Silence. You couldn’t talk about it with him. That would be more embarrassing than the night itself. What were you supposed to say? I’m sorry? I didn’t mean it? I did mean it? You’d said all of those things before--in quick succession and with a heartbeat so fast you could have passed out.

A knock on the door. One second, you called out, turning the water on for a moment as if to make it sound like you were doing something other than panicking. You brushed past the stranger on the outside, offering an apologetic smile before heading back to your seat. When you got back, Harry had headphones in and a movie on the screen in front of him.

Thank god.

He smiled at you subtly, leaning forward to offer you a glass of champagne--someone must had dropped them off while you were losing your shit in the bathroom. You took it from him without a word, taking a sip as he took one earbud out of his ear and offered it to you. You pushed it into place and leaned back in the chair, still trying to catch your breath, grateful for the fact that he dropped it.

You didn’t need the whole plane ride to be awkward. If there was ever to be a moment for the two of you to talk about the ghosts of Christmas past, literally, it wasn’t right now. The trip would be nice with a movie and a nap--free chocolates and eye masks, too.

And besides, champagne tasted better at thirty thousand feet.

here’s what first class looks like for Harry and Y/N

read the other parts here

AN: big thanks to those of you reading big thanks for all of the messages!!! be sure to let me know what you think? Anyone want to take a guess as to what happened on 12/29/15?

tag list: @clorenafila @ainsleesolareclipse @castawaycths @harryspirate @wanderlustiing @ursamajor603 @thurhomish @omgsharry @jdcharliewhiskey @stepping-into-the-light @rachkon @jdcharliewhiskey @sad-little-asshole @ainsleesolareclipse @clorenafila @shawnsblue @gendryia @g0bl1nqueen @laula843 @pinkpolaroidgirl @4592222 @flooome @craic-head-horan @a-woman-without-a-plan @awomanindeniall @shaw-nm @staceystoleyourheart

#harry styles fiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fan fiction #harry styles writing #1dff #harry styles story #@harry styles writing #harry styles blurb #harry styles imagines #harry styles fic au #harry styles fic #harry styles writings #harry styles masterlist #harry styles x reader #harry x reader #harry styles reader insert #tytl #two years too late

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incarnateirony · 4 years

Text

I get blends of innocent beans confused with what queer coding is or isn’t, and malignant beans misappropriating points, so we’re gonna do a quick run through.

Queer coding started as a malignant thing. The truest use of the phrase “queer coding” came from stereotypes and villainizations that straight people found sCaRy. This is like, why Scar seemed classically flamboiyant, or a variety of Disney villains were long, lanky, gestured exaggeratedly, wore eyeliner, etc. There’s a million examples but I’m not going to cover them all because I think you get what I mean. At the time, straight culture was painting gays as bad so painting villains as how straights perceived gays was like, super useful, cuz it creeped the straights out oOOoooOOo.

When people talk about queer coding enforcing stereotypes, if you’re talking about the original form of queer coding, this is inherently true. However, coding reached other levels, and has adaptive forms.

For example, watching (as I’ve been mocked for saying 10,000 times, but because it’s needed) The Celluloid Closet will clear up a lot for you. Subversive queer coding is when queer creators use a great deal of things to communicate with a queer audience past censorship. The film documentary (if you can’t read the book -- which I understand, it’s difficult to find) clears a whole fuckton of this up.

There’s some things that, quite frankly, we as gays know as part of our language. It is what it is. While it’s not a stereotype, it’s quite literally a language I highly warn straights against stepping into, because then they flounder around confused on what’s our actual language and what’s a stereotype

A truly innocent bean asked of me yesterday, well why then is menthols fair subversive queer coding? How is that not a stereotype?

Well like, because it’s facts. And that’s really, really hard to wrap ones’ head around from an outsider straighty perspective or even someone who’s queer but trapped heavily in a hetnorm world outside of where this is visible and/or in the wrong demographic otherwise. A black person who hangs out with black people of all orientations is not going to blink at a media dude getting menthols generally, because it’s one of the cultures that statistically engages in it to the point of memes about Kools or whatever. That’s not my culture, I can’t comment on much beyond that, but it’s just something to take note of.

But even if you don’t want to take someone’s word on “no, seriously, white dudes smoking menthols is queer culture and literally like a great sign for a hookup to another queer white dude”, google the various intersections of gender and menthol, race and menthol, and sexuality and menthol.

This isn’t pulled out of thin air. These were populations quite literally heavily targeted by Big Tobacco and, by nature, are the ones that smoke it, whereas Big Tobacco put(s) on airs of masculinity and chick-magnetness to smoke good ol non-menthol shit. It’s literally marketing. Yes, it does literally impact who buys product and yes, it does after generations have a noticeable affect. Track the numbers I told you to google down and you’ll realize less than 3% of menthol smokers identify as straight white men (depending on the way the numbers sort out and the year of polling, often 1.x%, 3% is the liberal number).. Lemme tell you, on the street, that’s an “okay, honey :)” when you do find it. Maybe a little pat on the head. An invisible brochure for Welcome To The Gays. Like, White Men make up more than 31% of America and they still refuse to tally more than 25% of the US as queer [some censuses as low as 6% and LOL] so like-- that should be like minimum 25% of dudes available and nope, 1-3%)

(that’s not to say all gays or even all white gays smoke menthol, but this is that rule of “not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers” in loose application.)

But understanding these things, these signals, from the outside is utterly flabbergasting to people.

No, someone making an immasculating joke is not subversive queer coding. No, a dude wearing a certain kind of shirt or eating a certain kind of food generally isn’t queer coding (Unless it’s a rainbow flag BITCH IM GAY shirt, or uh, maybe for food quiche or hummus? I mostly joke for the latter two, but that’s the kind of self ball punching queer community sometimes does to itself in awareness that yes, there ARE elements. No, eating hot dogs and burritos isn’t gay. Yes, we make make penis jokes. No, that isn’t itself queer coding.)

When a queer author codes a piece, it’s designed to communicate to the resonant audience. It also may not communicate to /all/ gays. The language of a middle aged cis gay man that lived through the AIDS crisis is a whole other fuckin adventure from the language of 17 year old trans gays squatting behind their Xbox, it’s just fact, it’s just what is. Completely different cultures and lives being lived, completely different experiences resulting. A few things here or there may connect across generations but some shit that’s written by a gen Z gay is gonna whiff by a boomer gay, sorry. Also just facts.

Explaining exactly what is and isn’t queer coding is almost impossible beyond the fact that “if you don’t get it, it’s probably not for you.” -- At the same time, that leaves the problematic room of people taking that grey area and packing in a bunch of shit and we’re back to ground zero on the original problematic queer coding.

I once read a meta of uh-- I’ll just say, [Fantasy Character]. The fantasy character had an addiction problem that gave them villain-like attributes. Someone implied the “villain coding” made it queer coding. Okay like. Fucking absolutely not. Because if the show in question WAS doing that, first off, that’s literally the kind to make mockeries of gay people so you literally shouldn’t be reaching for that and second off they’d be doing that lanky sassy bitch with eyeliner bullshit like Disney villains with it, give or take. You don’t apply this shit in reverse, “he has villain attributes and so he’s gay” is literally the worst possible angle to take a discussion while trying to slap fight in a representation arena. Like I can’t say enough DO NOT DO THIS SHIT.

If you wanna write fic or headcanon whoever as gay or whatever have fun but like once people keep trying to talk about “coding” you’re talking about conscious elements inset by the authors. Does a character have a bunch of on the record sexual encounters that just happen to include dudes persistently even if we don’t exactly get the exact angle or Proof Of Dicking? That’s gay (also depending on the phrasing, as settled in older stuff, that’s just deadass queer text and settled long before this fandom ever had pissing matches about this shit in older cinema.) Does the character happen to be respectful and use like gender neutral pronouns on people? Sorry folks that unto itself isn’t gay, that’s gays writing allies at best, unless you can give specific and directly applicable situations relevant to the character rather than eternally vague blogging through and swearing up and down it’s just about their partners or some shit. Yelling it in general though, sorry, no.

Does the character engage in things or events with non-het gendered partners that in the very least are heavily coded into the areas of relationships even if they’re unclear (eg, do they routinely go out with non-family people and hold deep or meaningful conversations in things that LOOK like a date, even if nobody SAYS it’s a date) -- congrats, you have coded text. Alone it could even be queerplat stuff, depending on the suprastructure of the plot, text, subtext and everything else around it (same way, gasp, a man and a woman can sit at a table and not necessarily be in a relationship, but if they’re trading courting gifts and having unique and powerful exchanges or have big like, “the heart is the thing that binds us together uwu” shit, we all figure out what the fuck is going on like grown assed adults.)

It’s easier to list things that are NOT subversive queer coding:

Insults against gay people

Immasculating commentary

Random foods short of it deadass being a gay author making fun of some gay meme shit in some gay equivalent of ‘right in front of my salad’

Favorite colors or clothing

---

We got it? Good. Rule of thumb though. Deadass unless you are involved in some thick-ass queer culture don’t try to queer code shit. I don’t even care if you’re queer yourself because that doesn’t mean you’ve actually been subject to the culture in a meaningful way. There’s 30 year old bis that grew up in white picket fence suburbias on top of trust funds with hovercraft parents guiding them through 17 degrees and keeping them out of party culture that married a het-passing relationship and settled down and started having babies and their grasp of queer culture ends at what they perceive out of memes online, if they even hover in actual queer crowds online at all as much as general ones. That person literally is not going to speak much of the language. They aren’t. At best they’ll speak the language of 30 year old trust fund het-married bisexual mothers which, I mean yeah, technically some queer language but that’s a very, very fucking niche experience path right there compared to street-dwelling club-goers that attend pride, hold D&D parties with all their coworkers they figured out are gay on the weekend, occasionally brick a window in a riot. The latter is gonna have a far more diverse queer experience. And by such, a far more diverse queer language.

That’s not even to gatekeep. 30 year old trust fund het-passing-marriage bi-mom is in fact bi. So yeah, they’re queer. But we’re talking about language and culture, which is related to but not something you inherit. It comes by lives and experiences.

And I think this is where a LOT of the fucked up early Queer Coding fuckery comes from in discourse. Yes we have a language. Hell, to some extent a few things might even kinda BE stereotypes but there’s a certain amount of living and being where you know the difference between “this is a stereotype made by straight people villainizing us that has no idea what we’re fucking like” or “this is a stereotype born out of mass marketing that targeted and victimized then imprinted on an entire population that we’ve come to recognize among ourselves.” Or even “this is a stereotype but FUCK YES it’s one we embrace, go get fucked, straights.” And it’s not NEARLY as ambiguous as fandom circle jerks try to make these things out to be in the interest of wanting every interpretation to be valid or every character to be gay or not wanting to admit some person may know what the fuck they’re talking about more than they do.

Huge point on that last one though, because like. I’ve seen some angry straights that are pissy about the show try to throw wrenches in the gears by concern trolling as if in defense of the gays about “offensive queer coding” and most of the time they’re basically that “how do you do fellow kids gays” meme. “How do you do gays I am very concerned about *checks notes* the twitters talking about gay men walking fast” and half the time turn around like two tweets later like “besides the character doesn’t even have a lisp anyway” or some bullshit that is outright offensive ass stereotyping while they’re out here trolling over the fact that a gay man admits to diva worship as a cultural trait.

General rule of thumb: ask a queer culture immersed gay about queer coding.

Shipping culture in the blue hellsite is not queer culture, for the record. Even if a bunch of queerfolk are in it.

Thanks.

Sincerely,

A very tired gay

#supernatural #spn #fandom #queer coding

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ofcmckenna · 4 years

Text

new york’s very own mckenna asher was spotted on broadway street in jimmy choo romy pumps . your resemblance to taylor hill is unreal . according to tmz , you just had your twenty-first birthday bash . while living in nyc , you’ve been labeled as being materialistic , but also devoted . i guess being a taurus explains that . 3 things that would paint a better picture of you would be wrists covered in makeup swatches , a perfectly blended halo eye , and never being seen without perfectly manicured nails . ( i once made a fake account to expose information about myself just to get more followers ) & ( cis-female & she / her ) + ( lia , 19 , she / her , cst . )

hello , loves ! it’s me , lia ( i also play margo ) back again with another trash child that i’m hoping you’ll all love as much as i do <33 i first came up w kenna many years ago and haven’t had the opportunity to write for her in a long long time , so i’m really excited to bring her here ! as always , if you wanna plot go ahead and LIKE THIS and i’ll happily come love you down . if discord is more your jam , hmu there too @ 𝐛𝐛𝐧𝐨$𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥#1904 . love y’all !!! 💕💓💕

S T A T S ↴

-- * FULL NAME : mckenna sophia asher -- * NICKNAME(S) : kenna ( preferred name ), kenny , ken , mick -- * AGE : twenty-one -- * D.O.B : may 10th -- * ZODIAC : taurus -- * GENDER : cis-female -- * ORIENTATION : bisexual biromantic -- * HEIGHT : 5″7 -- * NATIONALITY : american ( has dual citizenship in america and wales ) -- * BIRTHPLACE : colwyn bay , wales -- * OCCUPATION : youtuber / makeup artist -- * TRAITS : devoted , ambitious , hard-working , materialistic , stubborn , patient , sensual , reliable , organized , possessive , imbalanced , attention-seeking

B I O G R A P H Y ↴

honestly i am........ too lazy to make this a nice bio so plz forgive me for settling on bullet points ,, but at least that’s less reading for you !!!!

mckenna’s father is from wales and works as a plastic surgeon for the rich and fabulous and her mother is from new york and works a beautician and stylist for celebrities . together they had 5 children in total , the kid in the very middle being kenna . the family spent most of her childhood living in wales before moving to new york just before mckenna started high school

all of her siblings are really talented . it must be in their genes or something to have an affinity for the arts . her older brother is in a popular band . her older sister is a principal dancer . her younger sister is an incredible painter . and her younger brother is like six so he’s still coming into his own but there’s no doubt that he’ll be a prodigy at something

and what about mckenna ??? well she tried following in her brother’s footsteps by learning a bunch of instruments but none of them clicked . after that she tried to take dance classes with her sister but it was clear to see that she had two-left feet . she could barely draw a perfect circle , so painting like her younger sister was out of the question too . eventually she tried to pursue an acting career , auditioning for tv shows and movies but never booking anything more than a handful of commercials

so she spent a majority of her life feeling pretty inadequate compared to her siblings . she just wanted to be good at something , anything really . and she wanted to be praised for it . luckily , she eventually found her thing . though it was sorta unconventional : kenna figured out that she’s good at makeup . it’s basically an art form in itself and since she had the time on her hands to practice , she got pretty good at it

she started posting her looks on social media , gaining a little bit of attention on her instagram and later even starting a youtube channel ( at the time it was called pinkglitter2234 bc she was like 13 and cringey ). doing makeup and making youtube videos was her new favorite pass time and pretty much all she did throughout high school . kids in her school started recognizing her as “the the girl who talks funny and makes youtube videos” ,, so that’s pretty cool ig

it really wasn’t until her senior year that her channel gained a serious following . by the time she graduated she worked her way up to 1m subscribers and just a few hundred thousand away from having 1m on instagram too . CRAZY . and since youtube had become a serious job to her that she wanted to continue doing , she figured that she’d take a gap year off just to focus on that and building her personal brand . so she moved out and got an apartment in the city , paid for all by herself ( though mommy and daddy’s money certainly helped furnish it with all her lavish stuff ) and got to WORK

that ONE gap year turned into a gap... three years ??? she never applied to university and honestly she doesn’t plan to anytime soon ! her social media career has never been more poppin’ tbh . she has like over 8m subscribers on her main channel ( now called makeupmckenna ) and just a little bit under that on her vlog channel . she’s had various partnerships with different makeup brands , colourpopcosmetics , morphe , and lancôme just to name a few . on her channel she also does fashion / styling videos , which has gained her attention from several brands that have sent her pieces to promote and invited her to see their shows at fashion week and whatnot . big money moves basically !!

okay now for her secret : basically ,, kenna is hard-working don’t get me wrong , but she’s also obsessed with increasing her following and is willing to do anything if it means signal boosting herself and becoming more successful . so basically , at one point she made a fake account that posed as one of her “haters” “exposing” her-- and since no publicity is bad publicity , it got more people talking about her and following her . she even made a sob story youtube video in response to the “hate” she was getting and the rumours that were sparking because of it . the account has since been deleted but that doesn’t mean that the screenshots of the rumours aren’t still circulating the internet . it’s been a few years since the “scandal” but that doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t get talked about from time to time

P E R S O N A L I T Y & F U N F A C T S ↴

personality-wise : kenna is a sweetheart ! at least on the outside ! like she lowkey has selfish motives sometimes when it comes to gaining online popularity , but outside of social media she is genuine and goofy and a good friend i swear . would give you the designer clothes off her back if you’re close to her . also affectionate because she’s from a big family that actually has a healthy relationship with each other ( minus kenna’s minor jealousy she used to harbor as a kid... she’s kinda grown out of it now as a young-adult who’s successful in her own right ) so she loves to love . super materialistic though . loves shiny things and owning the newest trendy stuff . definitely thinks that money can buy happiness and she’s super stubborn so you cannot convince her otherwise . loves attention , will do just about anything to get it but if it doesn’t fit her “pristine girl next door” image then she’ll have to do it in secret . and since she has made a name for herself as being “innocent” , she doesn’t party too much . just not a big fan of that lifestyle

just bc she never went to college DOES NOT MEAN that my girl is dumb .. she actually likes to keep learning new things by constantly reading and trying out new skills . she’s v much a jack of all trades but a master at none . minus her ability to beat her face and talk to a camera lol

she’s fluent in both english and welsh , and used to have an accent when she was younger but has since taught herself to sound super american . she thinks it makes her more appealing idk

very family orientated and keeps in close contact with her siblings and parents despite the fact that they live all around the world doing their own things

has collabed with loads of famous peeps not just for youtube videos but getting to do their makeup for gigs . she’s gotten to a point in her career where she’s able to bridge the gap between influencer and professional artist y’know what i mean ??

loves dogs . has a dog named tate who frequently makes appearances in her posts :)))

consumes an unhealthy amount of caffeine daily

doesn’t know how to drive . doesn’t even have a license or anything and who knows if she’ll ever learn tbh

she’s bisexual but has only come out to her close friends and family . hasn’t outwardly said anything to her following but they can probably make assumptions considering who she’s been seen getting close to . like it’s not a big deal to her , she likes who she likes , but also doesn’t think it’s anyone else’s business besides whoever she’s dating / sleeping with at the time

W A N T E D C O N N E C T I O N S ↴

EDIT : i have in fact made a wc page so peep that here if ya want ! xox

#wealthyhq:intro #oh yes MA'AM we are in business now #plz plot w my baby i'll love you forever

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intersex-ionality · 4 years

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I read your post on your other blog complaining understandably or you mention the photorealistic animals on his dark materials and the lion king. I am not sure I like over- I do not mind hyperrealistic paintings but- I think you mentioned its harder for photorealistic animals to emote and they kind of look freaky. Pikachu looked more expressive in Detective Pikachu. Though I guess he is photorealistic in those trailers? Havent seen the movie. I wish the lions had more expressive faces

There’s a set of terms for describing this visual trend, and I don’t actually know it. So I’m using my best approximations, because I lack the technical terminology. In fact, I so thoroughly lack it that when I try to look it up, I end up being given weird unrelated resources because search engines aren’t telepathic.

But, there’s different kinds of realism. Which, I mean, that sounds so fuckign stupid when I say it like that?

But there’s realism in the sense of, “this is live action stuff that can and does exist in real life, albeit sometimes touched up in effects to make it more visually coherent.” That’s stuff like the sheep herds in Brokeback Mountain, which were at the time considered a breakthrough achievement in CGI. They’re visual re-creations of real things that really exist in the real world. So, realism.

Photorealism, as I use it in that post, refers to making versions of fantasy things that don’t actually exist (such as talking lions, or pikachu), but which have physics and designs that are approximately compatible with our perception of the real world. Much like taking a photo of a sculpture of something that doesn’t actually exist. In the picture, it makes sense. It looks like it fits. It matches our sense of realism as it applies to visual media, even if there’s no equivalent thing in actual reality.

This degree of... I guess fictional realism?

This degree of fictional realism doesn’t necessarily have to conform to anything about actual reality, however. It’s lions that can make human-like vowel shapes with their lips, it’s a robotic suit of armor that a normal ass man climbs into and becomes deific, it’s whole ass pokemon. It’s clearly a fantasy element, but it blends well with our expectations of reality within the medium. Much like the physics of Captain America’s shield tosses don’t actually match real world physics. They just look normal enough that the average audience member doesn’t question their presence in the art piece itself.

Hyperrealism goes one step further. It doesn’t merely concern itself with looking good enough not to disrupt the average viewer’s focus. It wants to make these fantastical elements as close to indiscernible from the real world as possible.

That’s where we start running into trouble.

Because, they’re fantasy elements. They’re not real. They can’t behave realistically, because there’s no real for them to approximate.

So, someone decides on what the “realness” they’re trying to achieve “should” look like.

And those someone’s are often not concerned with how well these effects integrate into the actual story being told, the emotions trying to be evoked. They’re often concerned more with pushing the boundaries of technical achievement.

And, let me be clear: pushing the boundaries of technology is a good thing. It’s how we develop better tech!

But, if you push those boundaries based only on making an even better version of the thing you did 5 years ago, then stagnation is inevitable because you aren’t pushing the boundaries in the direction of what you need to do now, but what you needed to do in the past. Likewise, eventually, you move out beyond what is actually useful.

Using the lion kind as an example, because it’s just so very rife with good examples.

Ten years ago rendering a full coat of multiple-hair-colors and multiple-hair-lengths fur was an ungodly process. It was expensive, it was difficult, and the results were often clunky.

However, the resurgence of film franchises like Star Wars and the MCU have spent the last decade doubling down on hair-and-fur techniques in CGI, to the point that they’re.... basically solved? I mean there are obvious failures, but the techniques and tools now exist, where they didn’t before.

Compare the modern Lion King big cats to the at-the-time groundbreaking big cat in Life of Pi. The difference is staggering, right? It almost makes you think, holy shit, the Lion King remake actually did open the medium up to a whole new level.

Except... did it?

Compare the modern Lion King now to a modern peer, say Rocket Raccoon in Avengers, and you can see that the “great technical strides” aren’t actually that significant in terms of the utility they bring to story telling.

By focusing on making the animals as realistic as they possibly could, they sacrificed a lot of the empathy-building expressiveness needed to make an audience connect with their characters.

It’s not bad, but it works more as a tech demo than it does as a story.

And then, because of the deep conflict between the fantasy elements and the intense sense of “real world” physics and limitations that they’re going for, flaws that wouldn’t even be noticeable in a less obsessively engineered product become so obvious as to be jarring.

For example, the dance sequence in Hakuna Matata. Because we have these animals that are designed to be so realistic that even actual footage of actual lions doesn’t look as crisp and integrated into the environment, the fact that they’re singing and dancing is really jarring. And then the singing and dancing is also, necessarily, limited by the heavily restricted ranges of motion that the models are allowed to perform...

It’s an attempt to make something too real, to bring into reality something that cannot exist in reality, and it often comes at the expense of basic storytelling techniques.

Now, this is not to suggest that hyperrealism cannot be used for artistic and storytelling purposes in its own right. Of course, it can!

But shoving it where it was neither warranted nor wanted creates a conflicted, muddied end product that doesn’t express what it needs to express.

In short, let fantastical elements be fantasy. Accept that they’re not going to look like the stepped out of the real world, and then take advantage of that necessary disconnect to create something that really expresses and emotes.

Now, again, I don’t think these are necessarily the best words to describe the phenomena I’m trying to describe. But I don’t know what those words are, so I’m doing what I can with what I have.

If you happen to be more involved in visual media and the technical aspects thereof, and you can help me out here by telling me the actual right words, I would appreciate that a lot.

#Anonymous

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mysticsparklewings · 4 years

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Draw This In Your Style!

Draw/Recreate This In Your Style, post the original art alongside it (on platforms that support it, elsewhere you can just link back to the original instead), and either tag it with #dtiySparkle or tag me, MysticSparkleWings (xxMysticWingsxx on Twitter) directly and I'll retweet/share/etc. it! No deadline, just create at your own pace!

____

You know, I constantly go back and forth on "celebrate milestones!" vs. "don't be that person that won't shut up about how many followers they have and the numbers and etc." Mostly because I usually find it annoying from other artists, even if I don't find the artist themselves annoying. It's complicated. I know it's important and in many cases helps grow a following further, but it also just gets exhausting, you know? Both to see it and to try to do it.

Still, I've been wanting to make a "Draw This In Your Style" (DTIYS) for a while now, but it didn't seem like the kind of thing to just do on a whim. It felt like there should be a reason for at least the first one, provided it went well enough to make me want to do more. I noticed a few weeks ago that I was approaching 1,000 followers on Twitter* and I saw an opportunity, knowing that 1. It would take me a while to finish the artwork (go big or go home, yes?) and 2. It would take a few days for the numbers to stabilize so that I would actually hold steady at 1,000+ and not be 1,000 one minute and 998 the next. (Followers go up and down like a see-saw over there)

*Thanks exclusively to Art Shares. I'm very sure I'd still have less than 100 if it weren't for those--and please don't be fooled by that number. 1,000 isn't teeny tiny, but in-depth interaction from a handful of people will always mean more to me than zero or minimal-at-best interaction from thousands/millions/etc, and frankly, my interaction over on Twitter is basically non-existent compared to the interaction I get here on dA, which precisely is why I prioritize dA over all other social media. It means more to me; it feels infinitely less passive.

But...I kinda didn't want that to be the only reason for the DTIYS. It just seemed...I don't know, cliche? Not right, somehow. Fortunately, the Twitter milestone happens to coincidence with I think I've finally stabilized around 300 followers on Instagram (after being stuck between 250 and 290 for months, consistently going up and down 2-3 people at a time), and I've also garnered over 400 watchers right here on dA.

The Twitter milestone is technically the biggest, but honestly, the dA one means a lot more to me. I thank each and everyone one of you, my fellow deviants, for thinking my art is worth the watch.

And I especially thank those of you--I'm sure you know who you are, I won't name names just in case anyone's not comfortable with that--that consistently fav and/or comment on my work. Your support and encouragement are why I keep doing this, despite the frustrations I may have along the way and aside from an innate need to create.

Speaking of which, if you're a loyal Sparkler I think now I'll get to the part you might know me best for; the long description of the artistic process!

Like I mentioned before, I noticed the milestone stuff a few weeks ago and thought now would be as good a time as any to get started on a DTIYS, so I started trying to brainstorm something that would be both fun for me to make and fun for others to recreate. I was having a little trouble on this front, so I took a trip to Pinterest and re-visited some boards I use to save potential draw ideas/inspiration on.

I was thinking I wanted to include a fairy since I've been wanting to get back into drawing them more regularly and fairies-via-Winx-Club is where I got my start here on dA and indirectly into getting more serious about my art in general. I was also thinking something with galaxies since those are usually fun to make and are a good way to make an otherwise plain or simple piece more interesting. I didn't want this to be too terribly complicated if I expected other people to draw it, but I also didn't want it to be too boring. And, of course, I was hoping for something I could lean into my mixed-media prowess with.

All that turned out to be quite the balancing act, but after some scrolling, I had some ideas and ended up with a sketch of a fairy in a teacup, with place-holder wings and a place-holder rose on the cup. The wings I knew would be easier to do the lines digitally (even if the final art was traditional, which I was planning on), and the rose I wanted to be slightly more sophisticated than my typical stencil-made roses, which I thought would also be easier to experiment with digitally. I was right on that front, thanks to some of the public domain images on PixaBay.

Beyond that, my original idea was fairly different from what you see here; I was thinking black hair, a fairly vampiric look, for the fairy, more typical butterfly wings, a red rose on the cup, and then an abstract galaxy wash, more watercolor-y and less saturated, for the background. And to be fair, that's still an interesting idea that I might return to at some point, but even as I worked on and finished the digital linework (fully planning to print them and then do what I wished with them traditionally, as has become a norm for me) something in the back of my mind told me that vision wasn't the right one; Not for this project, anyway.

Fortunately, I was a busy enough bee in between working on the lines for this that I partially had to step away from it to meet other time constraints and I could afford to step away from it and have some time to ponder what I wanted to do.

In my pondering, I kept coming back to the galaxy/constellation thing I've been experimenting with lately (Exhibits A, B, and C ). I hesitated at first since I knew for sure I didn't want to do the whole drawing that way and I wasn't entirely sure how to decided what to do with what.

Of course, after thinking about it a bit more, I decided I'd take a risk in doing the background and wings in the constellation style, and then somehow do the rest in a more traditional way. I'd have some more time to think about that while I was re-tooling the wings digitally for said constellation style, after having discovered that made life so much easier during my previous experiments with it.

I'd know from the beginning that I wanted to do metallic accents (most likely silver) on the cup and saucer, which in this case meant I'd need to use either watercolor or heavy-duty mixed media paper for them, and I definitely had to use watercolor paper for the wings/background. The mixed media will work for the galaxy technique, but the colors don't blend quite as nicely and I was concerned about how that might affect the overall look here.

Still, I didn't want to watercolor the fairy herself at least, which left me with a choice of alcohol markers or colored pencils. I was thinking pencils for the hair for texture, markers for the skin for the lack thereof. But I typically don't like using alcohol markers on watercolor paper. The additional texture feels too rough on the nib and it's almost like I can feel the paper soaking up extra ink.

I also thought that doing the background and the fairy on the same piece of paper was asking for a very big watercolor-y mess, so between that and the paper concerns, that led me eventually to deciding to split them up.

And somehow in there, the idea occurred to me that I could get a bit adventurous (read: crafty) and actually separate the various parts of the fairy and cup out a bit and not only solve my paper problem, but also makes things a little more interesting.

After yet more pondering (if you can say nothing else about my art, you cannot say it isn't well-pondered by the time it's finished!) I settled on having the layers as follows:

background/wings (watercolor paper)

back part of the saucer (mixed media paper)

the fairy (with her arm and bit of hair carefully plopped over the next layer; mixed media)

the cup (mixed media)

the front of the saucer (mixed media)

Or at least that was the plan, and if I discovered problems in this plan then I could adjust as necessary.

So I got to work on the background, which was fairly straight-forward. I layered on paint and blended to essentially my heart's content, and then let it dry overnight since it was getting late by the time I finished it, or rather the first layer. I came back to it the next day and layered on some more paint to fix some blending issues and darken the whole thing up some more.

While that second layer dried, I got to making the lines for the additional layers and cutting them out--uncolored for the time being, as I figured the layering would need to factor into that a bit--and setting how exactly they'd fit together. The only modifications to my plans I had to make, which I, fortunately, had the foresight to do while I was cutting, was to leave two little bumps at the "bottom" of the fairy (where her body meets the cup) so that she could sit probably as both in the cup but also with her hair and arm hanging over it. The little bumps were a sort of "grounding" behind the cup to hold the rest of her in place while the other pieces were wedged on top.

I hope that makes sense, it's a little hard to explain without seeing it for yourself.

Anyway. I'd also had the foresight to transfer an outline of the fairy and cup lines onto the background before I started painting, which helped with making sure everything was placed...semi-correctly...on the final piece.

I say semi correctly because despite my best efforts when I went to glue everything together it looked right in-person, but the digital scan would later reveal to me that in fact, the layered bits had all shifted slightly to the left and curved inward a bit more, like a right parathesis: ) But I'll come back to that in a minute.

Once I was convinced my layering gambit was going to work out, then I started toying with colors and ideas for the layers themselves. The clearest idea I had out of the gate was to do the rose in a galaxy style too, rather than just plain watercolor like I'd originally planned (teal for the leaf though because green wouldn't have fit with the rest of the palette and blue would've blended too well); either way, I figured it wouldn't pose much of a problem on the mixed media paper since it's such a small area. The biggest challenge would be the stars, but even then you could say the same thing: It's such a small area that star dispersion with a pen really wasn't that big of a challenge to make look convincingly like random star placement.

I went back and forth a bit on the other colors, but I ultimately decided that I liked the idea of soft purple skin and dark(ish) blue hair, maybe soft pink lips and a little blush, for the fairy herself. And I also decided to do a little warm-gray shading on the cup with markers, as opposed to just leaving it white.

The lips turned out so nicely I was tempted to try doing the blush with the same markers, but I have very mixed luck with marker blush (sometimes it blends nicely, other times I get a nice line despite my efforts), and so I decided to play it safe and do it later with pencils instead. Fortunately, the rest of the skin and the cup (both done with Copics specifically as that's where I most easily found the colors I needed) went nice and smoothly, as is the nature of markers on this mixed media paper. (Seriously; Strathmore 400 series Mixed Media works wonders with alcohol markers for layering and blending!!)

The hair was a little more complicated because of the color I was hoping for, but that didn't matter too much because half-way through I decided to change things up a bit and I added little bits of pink and purple into the mix, intentionally following the rest of the galaxy-ness of what I was doing. It's not much, but I think it was the right choice.

While I waited to make sure the cup was good and dry, I went to splatter town on the now-dry background, as was necessary for the galaxy look, and then used my phone to shine some extra light on the paper so I could see my lines and dots for the wings. And after giving the white gel pen a moment to dry, I then went back in with my PanPastel, as is custom, to make the wings glow. I have also now learned that a blending stump/tortillon is good for blending out the pastel in a tight space, while a dry paper towel or tissue works to semi-remove it if it goes on a bit too thick.

Everything, after drying, was then assembled and attached to the background with some handy-dandy tacky glue which was fortunately fairly quick-drying for liquid glue, stuck fairly well without me having to add a whole lot of it, and also not a sloppy glue mess everywhere.

I did have to carefully go back over some of my lines for the cup and hair after everything was assembled because I forgot to do so over the metallic paint and pencil wax before assembly, but it also worked out okay since a couple of corners for the hair got snipped a little short, so I could sort-of fix it by extended the corner on the paper underneath. (In hindsight this works a lot better in-person; on the undoctored scan the placement looks pretty off or incomplete)

And of course, with everything assembled, that brings me back to what I was saying about the scan earlier.

Like mentioned, everything had shifted a bit during placement and gluing, and I could more clearly see the lines I had missed in that process on the scan. Unfortunately for me, while in-person everything looks relativity fine, on the (undoctored) scan this shifting made the balance feel way off, at least to me. The fairy and cup were too far to the left, meanwhile, the ring wing stuck out too far on the bottom.

I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the scan, using the content-aware move tool half a dozen different ways before I conceded it just wasn't going to do what I wanted, and then my next-best idea was the extend the background to the left a bit. In doing that, I discovered the warp tool worked to my advantage for that, and so I decided I'd trying fiddling with it and see where it got me.

It's still not perfect, but it's better than it was. In the end, I used the warp tool to tweak the angle of each part of the wings and that made up for some of the balance problems without also compromising any of the lines (which was the biggest reason why the content-aware tool wasn't working; it kept messing up the lines or other parts of the drawing in the process). At the very least, I was able to do enough that it only really bothers me now when I start looking for the off-balance-ness.

I also ended up doing some minor touches, mostly just smoothing out certain lines and small tweaks, but once the balance problem was finally somewhat solved it was pretty much done. (Aside from, of course, me then also adding the words on top so people know what this is at only a moment's glance.)

The end result, both scan and traditional. I'm really happy with. The piece is plenty interesting to look at, but it's also not too complicated, especially when you break down the individual parts that make it up. (Literally and more figuratively.)

Thus, I can only hope others find it interesting-but-not-too-complicated enough to try their hand at recreating it. Even if no one takes me up on my "Draw This In Your Sparkle Style Challenge though, I enjoyed making this all the same and I'm really proud to share the art itself with you guys.

Hopefully though at least a few people will take a stab at it and I can focus on that and not explode from impatience in regards to various not-really-art-related things I'm currently waiting on.

____

#drawthisinyourstyle #dtiysparkle

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shawn-does-stuff · 5 years

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Shawn Mendes: ‘I’m 20. I want to have fun’

by Michael Cragg

Shawn Mendes is the red-hot poster boy of pop. His videos have been viewed 6bn times and he has more than 42m followers on Instagram. But don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him… just ask a teenager

Shawn Mendes is standing in his underpants in a suite on the fifth floor of a London hotel as a 200-strong crowd of screaming teenage girls gathers outside. “Everyone who doesn’t need to be in the room, leave the room,” he says politely but firmly, in a soft Canadian drawl. Pop’s current poster boy should be used to causing a stir. His #MyCalvins campaign (following in the footsteps of Justin Bieber in 2016) broke the internet earlier this year, inching the 20-year-old teen phenomenon – three US chart-topping albums, 30m monthly listeners on Spotify, more than 6bn video views – closer to tabloid supremacy and global domination.

At the Brit Awards that night, Mendes will cringe as presenter Jack Whitehall ribs him about “suspicious packages”, so it’s curious to hear him describe the Calvin Klein opportunity – and the subsequent results pored over by his 42m Instagram followers – as “a goal of mine at the top of 2018. As much as it’s a stepping stone for me to play a stadium, it’s a huge moment for me to step in front of a camera and take my shirt off. I don’t see one being less meaningful than the other.”

The air is thick with earnestness as we sit down for lunch in the hotel restaurant. I blurt out a question about whether he had to wear extra padding. “No,” he says, eyebrow raised. “They’re really good underwear.” Did they send you some free ones? “Yeah, I have boxes of them at home.” He lifts up the bottom edge of his T-shirt and pulls at the waistband of his underwear before quickly pulling his shirt back down. You’re not wearing them today are you? “Not right now,” he says sheepishly. “I should be.”

Mendes’s boy-next-door appeal and laser-guided ambition feels rather wholesome, with his sensitive, heart-on-sleeve pop-rock bops such as 2015’s UK chart-topper Stitches, positioning him as perfect boyfriend material in pop’s all important fantasy world. If Bieber is the unknowable loose cannon, then Mendes is pop’s picture-perfect head boy. But it’s clear that exposing himself so literally has its downside. “The last 48 hours have been so consuming, just reading what people are saying about me [on social media],” he sighs. Do you have to read it? “No, but there’s something about being human that makes you. I’m scared of social media and how much it affects me,” he continues. “It’s literally become infused with who I am.”

Last October he apologised to his 21m Twitter followers, claiming he was worried that what he was posting wasn’t meaningful enough. “For the first time I realised how many people are listening,” he says. He now monitors how often he goes online and tries to take regular breaks, using meditation to relax. “I don’t think of myself as conceited, but I definitely spend a lot of time reading about myself,” he says.

Mendes famously has three daily rules – going to the gym, two vocal lessons and never saying no to a selfie with a fan. He’s managed the first two so far and “took about 200 selfies yesterday”. Despite this, his rise has chimed with a shift in the upper echelons of pop – its recent exponents being anti-pop stars Adele, Ed Sheeran and (with her goofy dancing style and eternal quest for relatability) Taylor Swift, who’s now a friend. Even One Direction – whose blend of teen-orientated, guitar-led pop paved the way for Mendes – always felt like they were trying to play down the pop star element.

“The more open the world is getting, the more people are craving real,” he says. “I don’t think people want to see a made-up person. [In the past] there’s been a lot of dressing up, and I still think that stuff is amazing – like I’ll wear a sleeveless top – but at the end of it, when it comes down to you, I think it’s about being authentic.” For all this talk of authenticity and being like everyone else, I tell him, you’re also a pop star begging people to look at you. Do you have to believe your own hype? “Of course,” he says, his eyes darting over my shoulder to the mirrored wall behind. “You have to. If you wake up every day and say, ‘I’m OK,’ you’re going to just be that. If you wake up everyday and look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m great, let’s go sell out that stadium,’ then you will.”

You could say he’s been in motivational training for a while now, having started out as a 14-year-old YouTube star, uploading acoustic covers of songs (Bieber, among others), before switching to the now defunct social media platform Vine. He taught himself to play the guitar via YouTube tutorials at home in the small town of Pickering, Ontario, while one of his first public performances was in a plaza in Portugal where his family – mum Karen, a British estate agent, dad Manny, a Portuguese businessman, and younger sister Aaliyah – were holidaying. While his parents were shopping, Mendes hopped up next to a statue and belted out a Bruno Mars song. “I was sweating and I thought, ‘Dude, if you want to be a singer, you’ve got to at least be able to stand on this statue and sing,’” he says of that moment.

Where was that pressure coming from? “It was from myself, which is pretty much a big statement on my personality at 14 years old.”

While he says he loved school, his early fame – after signing to Island Records his debut single, Life of the Party, was released when he was just 15 – meant he was bullied. “People were cruel at first,” he says, clearing his throat and fiddling with the rim of a cup of green tea. “They just thought it was so stupid.” He’d skip school every Friday to attend influencer events in which social media stars met fans who already assumed they were friends. “I was taking 1,500 selfies a night,” he laughs. “You quickly learn that what you love to do is a job, but I don’t resent what I do. I don’t hate taking selfies.”

Success was rapid, with his third single Stitches breaking the US top five and peaking at number one in the UK. That same year he supported Swift on her 1989 stadium tour. How did he cope? “This life is more real to me than anything,” he says. “If I were to walk down the street and no one recognised me, I’d feel something was wrong. When I was really young [fame] morphed who I was. If it was to become normal, it would feel un-normal to me.”

From the outside, I say, the other recent pop artists who can relate to that are Britney Spears or Bieber, people who have had issues with growing up in the spotlight. “A couple of times I’ve worried about that, too, but outside of all this I live a really normal life,” he says slowly. “You have to make an effort to carry your own bags, drive your own car and not be afraid of the public. I don’t blame people at all who stay inside. I understand how it could be terrifying to go to a restaurant and eat because you’re scared someone’s going to take a photo of you.”

Is that more intrusive than a selfie? “I’ve been so lucky that fans have been taking photos of me eating since I was 15, so I’m a little bit numb to it,” he says, his tone rarely deviating from preternaturally calm. There’s probably an Instagram account called Shawn Mendes Eating, I joke (I check later and while there’s no account, there is a hashtag to follow). Can it feel as if he’s being watched? “I’m inherently [aware of] that all the time.” If it ever gets too much, he leaves rather than making a scene. Are you a people-pleaser, I ask? “Yeah, is that bad?” he smiles. “It can lead to failure, but if I fail trying to please everyone, then that’s OK.”

Mendes spends a lot of time contemplating people’s perceptions of him. Last year he publicly criticised a Rolling Stone cover story, expressing his regret that “the positive side of a story doesn’t always get fully told”. I assume it’s because the piece mentioned his penchant for smoking weed, a detail that had upset some fans. “That didn’t bother me,” he smiles. “Actually, I was happy about that because maybe it’s OK for them to understand that weed’s not a big deal.” He says he hasn’t smoked in three months.

Another part of the story focused on rumours about his sexuality. “For me it’s hurtful,” he says. “I get mad when people assume things about me because I imagine the people who don’t have the support system I have and how that must affect them.” (In late 2017 he posted an emotional Snapchat story: “First of all, I’m not gay. Second of all, it shouldn’t make a difference if I was or wasn’t.”) He sighs and says: “That was why I was so angry, and you can see I still get riled up, because I don’t think people understand that when you come at me about something that’s stupid you hurt so many other people. They might not be speaking, but they’re listening.”

He says the reason he criticised the article was over a small detail in which he mentioned Dua Lipa and her boyfriend, and how amazing it looked to be in love. “It made me seem so creepy,” he says. “If anything, the article made me realise your career isn’t over if people think you’re not perfect.” You could see how the creepy singleton tag might irk him, and also why it might stick – a lot of Mendes’s biggest singles play on the idea of him as the emotionally needy bloke who gets messed around and comes back for more.

Are you bored of being The Nice Guy? He splutters, clears his throat and sits bolt upright. “Yeah, I am! It sounds so stupid – to be a nice person is the best thing in the world – but, yeah, I’m 20 and I just want to have fun. What I don’t want to do is live the rest of my life thinking, ‘I wouldn’t do that because I’m known as Prince Charming.’ The second that someone corners you into a personality, you don’t want to be that person any more.”

Two weeks later, Mendes is onstage in Amsterdam. In keeping with the floral artwork for his recent self-titled album, a 50ft rose snakes up to the ceiling from the so-called B-stage where he’ll later serenade the throngs of teenage fans and nodding dads with a handful of ballads. Replica light-up roses (€20 a pop at the merch stand) bob about in the dark as Mendes runs through a hugely entertaining, PG-13 simulacrum of a rock show to ear-bleeding screams (“God I’m so old,” a woman sitting behind me yells as she surveys the crowd).

Keen to further align himself with the pantheon of rock’s smiliest exponents, tonight Mendes segues from a cover of Coldplay’s big-hearted anthem Fix You into his own, the Kings of Leon-esque In My Blood, a song that surprised fans by touching on depression. Tonight it’s transformed – with the help of a ticker tape explosion – into something close to catharsis.

“There’s nothing like being on stage – you feel like Superman!” he’d said earlier, claiming it to be better than sex or any high. “My goal now is to enjoy what I do more and more because otherwise it doesn’t fucking matter. I used to think it was all about the crowd, but I have to be happy within myself.” As he takes his millionth selfie, his face radiating pure elation, you believe he might be.

Shawn Mendes plays London O2 on 16, 17 and 19 April

Fashion editor Helen Seamons; grooming by Anna Thompson using Bobbi Brown and Monat; lighting by Michael Furlonger and Tilly Pearson; digital operator John Munro; fashion assistant Penny Chan; shot at 12th Knot, seacontainerslondon.com

#shawn mendes #shawn peter raul mendes #observer magazine #the observer

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davidcoopermoore · 4 years

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Transcript from “Shape of Education to Come” podcast

I was recently a guest on the Shape of Education to Come podcast hosted by Devin King. I like to transcribe these, especially when I'm talking in a semi-professional (as opposed to formally professional) context. (It turns out that when I'm not transcribing audio for a living I find it relaxing in small doses.)

This is lightly edited for relevance (I snipped some Taylor Swift content that wasn’t related to teaching, but kept in the Taylor Swift content that was) and coherence. You can listen here.

SEC:

David Cooper Moore, tell me what you do.

DCM:

Hello, my name is David Cooper Moore. I am a media literacy educator in the United States -- I’m based in Philadelphia.

The past four years I was the media and blended learning coordinator at an alternative high school for kids who had become disconnected with high school, dropped out, or were in danger of possibly dropping out or failing out of high school. Before that I worked in media literacy enrichment mostly with the Media Education Lab, which is now at the University of Rhode Island, but that I got connected with when it was in Philadelphia at Temple University.

I’m a certified English teacher, so I teach English but I also teach media arts, and I just got a consulting gig to do a digital literacy curriculum with the Free Library of Philadelphia, so I’m taking a year off of teaching to do that, plus a lot of other life stuff going on with kids and houses and things. So that’s kind of my general log line.

SEC:

What would a digital literacy curriculum look like?

DCM:

That’s a great question. The classic framework that I go by is one that Renee Hobbs at the University of Rhode Island uses, which is: access, analyze, create, reflect, act.

Media literacy is this really big tent movement and academic field of study that encompasses questions like how do we access information? How do we use things in both digital and non-digital media worlds? How do we make meaning out of it through analysis? How do we compose -- how do we make stuff? But also how do we reflect on its impact on our lives and how does it inform the way that we take action in the world?

So any digital literacy curriculum to me goes back to that kind of a framework, especially those first three, access/analyze/create. I think reflection and action are imbued in media literacy practice but the access/analyze/create part is what a lot of educators and folks that are in education don’t always know how to do, so I’ve always been attracted to the media literacy field because of the way that it really is non-negotiable that those three pieces of accessing information, making meaning out of it, and creating with it are really fundamental. It’s such an expanded view of what counts as texts, how we make meaning, how we communicate in the world.

SEC:

We’re definitely going to come back to that. What you’re talking about is really huge, there is a ton to that, which is why there’s a curriculum for it. So we’re gonna come back to that but first of all, I wanted to think back to when I think I first became familiar with your work. It would have been over a decade ago, when you were doing music writing.

DCM:

Oh yeah, that’s right! Those are my two non-education things, I’m a filmmaker and I’m a music writer, and those actually are the things that got me interested in the intersections between media and education, which led me to do this kind of work. The work I’ve been doing for the past ten years is just the synthesis of the media stew I’ve been bathing in my entire life since I was a little kid, culminating in my young adulthood with making movies and writing about music. But you know, for my professional life, it turns out they don’t really give you huge paychecks to make movies about your family or write about underrated pop albums.

SEC:

So I know that you started out as a critic. I don’t know if you’d say you’re a critic.

DCM:

Yeah, I was a formal music critic for a couple of years. I actually wrote for real publications.

SEC:

Do you think that good critics make for good teachers?

DCM:

I think that there are overlapping skills.

I taught in the classroom for four years. I took a position as a full time teacher because I really wanted to get my five years as a teacher under my belt. I really wanted to teach full time because one thing that I knew very clearly from doing enrichment work was that it’s just different. Classroom teachers do different types of work than a lot of other people who educate others do -- college professors, enrichment educators, people that do coaching, mentoring.

There is something very different about full-time teaching, and so to that extent I think that the critical sensibility is a good one to have in the classroom, but it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about whether someone is a good teacher, and I don’t know if it’s in the top five, in terms of the key traits you need to have to be a good classroom teacher. A critical mind might be part of it, but honestly if the kids don’t really care about your critical insights I don’t know how effective a teacher you’re going to be. I certainly found that when I tried to use my own criticism directly it was pretty hit or miss. It’s as likely as any other text to engage students.

Teaching is really about the relationship you build with the students you are working with. I do find that a lot of folks that I know who are critics do make good teachers. I actually know some music critics who are high school teachers, that’s their day job. But I’m not sure there’s anything inherently better. It’s better to “be a music critic” about music than not to be, but there are probably other things that are more important for teaching.

SEC:

I guess what I was wondering was if the critic sensibility of looking closely at something and assessing its value and worth lent itself to the way we think about classes and systems and what’s valuable and ways to approach student learning? I wondered if being able to think critically about what we do could come from that critic sensibility.

DCM:

One thing that I’ve noticed with music critics -- the people who are really good music critics tend to be really good other things, too. They tend to be good thinkers in a lot of fields, and they’ve chosen music but they could have just as easily chosen politics or film.

And I also find that a lot of folks that are thinkers and writers in other spheres often show their worst instincts when they’re writing about music. So that’s always fascinated me about music as a medium, that it is so predicated on our viscerality, our feelings about it, how we feel about it, and we try so hard to put that into this kind of critical thinking language, but a lot of times we just use the critical thinking language to say the really biased or weird thing that true critical thinking wouldn’t have us saying. I read a lot of critics, who are very smart, who when put in an uncomfortable space will just use their critical faculties to say something that I don’t think is a very “critical thinking” thing.

Good teachers are more likely to uncover the good music critic within themselves than the music critic who does that [uses critical thinking language for non-critical-thinking insights] is likely to access their inner teacher.

I think classrooms do this kind of naturally. You have to be openly curious and humbled and not allow any of your preconceived ideas about what’s going to be the right thing to guide you too often, because the students will just knock you down. Students are really good at sussing out inauthenticity. So when you’re using those critical devices to prop up something that needs questioning, the people who are going to do that first are your students.

One thing I found teaching is I would say something that I’d never thought twice about and my students would say, “why do you say that?” Maybe there’s a song they’re listening to I don’t like and I say “oh, I don’t like this song,” and there’s a student who really loves the song and they’re like, “I really love this song! It’s my favorite song!” And I have to think about the song differently now because I’m in a situation where I’ve been kind of put off-guard and I need to actually use my real self-reflective critical thinking.

So I think there’s this great synergy between criticism and teaching but I actually think it kind of comes from the teaching side more than necessarily from the criticism side. Being a good teacher helps you be a better critic in a way that I’m not sure that being better critic helps you be a better teacher.

SEC:

One of the things you mentioned there was the idea that it comes from a feeling, bad music criticism or bad criticism just comes from that feeling rather than an analysis. And I wonder if we see that sort of thing in education because I don’t know what your experience with teachers are but there is a certain kind of teacher who has been around for a long time or even a short time and has a feeling of what things work, and doesn’t want to change their practice.

DCM:

I think that the thing that interests me about feeling in music is the way that feelings can destabilize us. And I think what you’re describing are teachers who are doing almost the opposite, teachers who feel highly stabilized in their classrooms. That’s what I’m always skeptical of. It’s the teacher that feels like nothing could possibly happen to them to change anything about what they think or what they do.

It’s not that I’m the most open-minded and amazing person, it’s just that I have a lot of experiences where I think I know something and the teaching experience really knocks me down a peg. It can be humiliating, in fact! When you realize that what you just expressed that you thought was teaching critical thinking, isn’t.

For instance, when I’m talking to young, predominantly black, and predominantly low-income students who are 16 to 19 years old about the news, I could get up on my high horse -- I read the Washington Post every day and I do this and that and yada yada yada, and talk about the credibility of sources. And then they start telling me about things that are actually happening in their very own backyards and neighborhoods that I know nothing about. And who am I to say that the way that they found that information is better or worse than my way? I don’t mean that obviously means I’m not better or worse, I might be better at something, but I need to think about it more carefully, because the assumption I went in with that I had the knowledge and the students had the brains to absorb my knowledge, it didn’t work out that way.

It’s not even that it can’t work out that way. I do have knowledge sometimes and they can absorb the knowledge. But the teacher who isn’t open to being humbled unexpectedly is not going to be able to improve their practice in the way that the teacher that is can. That isn’t to say you need to go cut yourself down at every opportunity and completely take out all your confidence, it’s just that it’s complicated and again, students are going to be able to push you in ways that other types of relationships don’t.

So that’s what I’m looking for in teachers, and I think music does this to people. When you really hate a song and you just explode with anger about it, I mean, the kind of feeling that that can instill in you, I can’t think of a lot of other media that can really do that. But I can definitely tell you some experiences that people have had in classrooms, where the kid did that one thing and you just exploded, you didn’t even know that was your trigger. Like, “oh my gosh, that kid that wouldn’t sit down, that really bothered me for some reason, I have to analyze that!” I think music does that. I think there is something about the combination of feeling and analysis that is so tied together in music, I think there’s an echo of that in how we learn about ourselves in the classroom.

SEC:

This was obviously a very big week because on Pitchfork this week they reviewed all the Taylor Swift albums.

DCM:

All the Taylor Swift albums! I know! Where were they when I was actually writing for them in 2006? They didn’t ask me to write up the self-titled album. I had it before anybody did. My friend actually burned me the self-titled Taylor Swift album and mailed it to me. In the mail. I was there, man! I was there!

SEC:

What did you think of her first album?

DCM:

I loved her first album. At the time I had taken a critical turn. I was really interested in teen pop music, so I was writing about it at an old website called Stylus Magazine, a really cool online space. And it’s funny because I think people can look back -- I’ve worked in elementary media literacy and all this stuff and it seems like maybe it’s all of a piece, of me being really curious about youth culture. I’m actually not that curious about youth culture. I just really liked the teen pop music at the time personally! So I got into it and I was writing about it and that got me into youth culture only because of the ways in which people were writing about young people.

I thought it was just bizarre -- High School Musical had just come out. Taylor Swift had not quite broken yet. She was still trying to be a country star at that time. And people were just writing about it -- you saw this when One Direction got really big, too, these recycled teenybopper losing their minds takes. And so it forced me into understanding youth culture, and that got me connected with the Media Education Lab at Temple. I was a grad student there at the time. I thought I should actually try to understand what’s happening in youth culture, because I mostly just liked, like, listening to Ashlee Simpson for myself.

When Taylor Swift came out, I saw this as a really ingenious way to try to find a space outside of Disney which at the time was starting to build its music brand through Hannah Montana and High School Musical, and she was doing this thing where she was trying to capture the country audience with the same moves that they were doing in the teen pop music. And it was interesting to watch her really struggle in country music. She had a couple hits on country radio but there was always this talk about her inauthenticity and how she’s not really country and whatever else. And then when Fearless came out it seems like it was just this explosion, that young people just flocked to her and created almost a whole separate genre of Taylor Swift. She is her own genre now. I think she has been since 2008. She stopped being a country star about a year after she started.

But what’s interesting to me about the Pitchfork thing is how uncontroversial that is now. Of course you’d cover Taylor Swift! She’s the biggest American pop music star probably in the world. I think she’s maybe bigger than Beyonce by a nose? They’re probably the top two, right?

SEC:

Probably!

DCM:

Why wouldn’t you be interested in writing about that? At the time you just couldn’t do it.

SEC:

It was part of the rockist sensibility that was still in the ether then. Poptimism was still kind of coming out. For me, I remember when I was in school I was teaching Grade 8 and we were doing a music video lesson, and a student wanted to watch “Teardrops on my Guitar.” And I remember being snooty about that then, and I think I probably looked down on that student and I almost guarantee that student noticed that. So for me, that’s a lesson to check yourself. It’s so easy for us to look at student culture and say, that’s not my culture, that’s not good. And we saw that even in Pitchfork, which was the leading credible source of music.

DCM:

Yeah, you know, it’s funny, because you have those experiences, and you have such a personal relationship with students whether you want to or not. I consider myself a progressive educator and I’m all about relationships, but there are some really healthy boundaries that teachers need to have from their students. And part of that can have to do with their popular culture. You also don’t have to be the hip teacher that insists on being really into all the music your kids are into. It’s more about your authenticity to yourself in your relationship to the students.

But at the same time, if you don’t like Taylor Swift, there are a lot of ways to engage with the student who loves Taylor Swift honestly without making the student almost a representative of a social problem. You still have to teach that kid math! You still have to have engagements with that student who loves Taylor Swift. And that is such an important part of that person’s identity. But as the teacher, that’s the field that you have the least control over. You really have almost zero say in how that student is going to take their own popular culture and make meaning out of it.

And so in a way it was actually kind of healthy for a place like Pitchfork to stay away from Taylor Swift, because the only thing that would have happened is that they would have gotten somebody who doesn’t listen to Taylor Swift to write some sneering thing about it. Or do the thing where it’s like, “well, begrudgingly I’ll admit there are a couple of songs here.” But something interesting was obviously happening with Taylor Swift from a social perspective. I happen to think it was pretty god as music, too -- your mileage may vary with that.

SEC:

If you were going to give yourself a Pitchfork rating as a teacher, what would you give yourself?

DCM:

Well you have to understand about Pitchfork ratings, because there’s a science to it, right? It’s a little code between music nerds. Anything under a 7 and above a 5.8 means “I listened to it, it was fine, you shouldn’t really even bother to read this review, because I’m not really sure how I’m feeling about this one right now.” Anything between a 7 and a 7.5 means this is a solid album that I don’t quite have the traction on, or I really like it but they won’t really let me rate it higher. I don’t think they do that any more. They made me change some of my ratings sometimes.

SEC:

Did you give a number? I thought it was the case that writers didn’t give the number.

[Ed note: Pitchfork editorial gives scores now, but when I wrote for Pitchfork in 2004-2006 writers gave the initial score and it was discussed editorially if necessary.]

DCM:

Yeah, I gave the numbers. Writers gave the numbers then and there was sometimes an editorial decision about it. I infamously tried to give the Arcade Fire’s first album a 10 and they wouldn’t let me. We negotiated it down to a 9.7, which I think is kind of funny. It’s too bad, because it turns out it’s really more of a 9.4, but that’s OK. I mean, I was really obsessed with it at the time. It settled into a 9.4.

Nah, I’m just kidding, 9.7 is the perfect score for that album, I think.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah -- Pitchfork ratings are very specific, so as a teacher, I actually don’t think--I only taught for four years in a classroom so I am ineligible for anything above a 7.6. That’s the cap of the album that was great and some people are going to love that album, but no one is going to talk about it in the critical conversation at the end of the year. So you’re going to see a lot of individual writers’ favorite albums that they don’t feel comfortable giving a bunch of Pitchfork hype to get between a 7.3 and a 7.7. After that, once you get into the 8’s, you’re getting into the critical conversation.

So I would give myself over four years...a 7.4.

SEC:

One thing that jogged my memory and made me think you were someone I should talk to is that you were posting on Twitter a list of observations you were making as you were coming to the end of your year, and the end of your job.

DCM:

I had this manic spell in the first week after I left where I just had all these disconnected thoughts. So I started a big Twitter thread, and now I’m writing some of that stuff up. I don’t know if I’m going to do anything with it. It’s nice to just write, I’ve written like 30 pages of observations.

I didn’t write anything while I was teaching for a couple of reasons. One, I felt really overwhelmed with the job of it -- I don’t know how many of your listeners are teachers and how many aren’t, but I feel like the lack of understanding that people have about the kind of job that teaching actually is from a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour type of day-long standpoint is one of the fundamental things that keeps people from truly understanding education problems in general. I don’t know if it’s true in Canada versus America but certainly in the U.S. -- anything that’s bad in Canada is probably just worse here.

So I started writing these observations because there were so many scattered thoughts, and I didn’t feel comfortable reflecting on it formally anywhere, because it was happening to me in the moment. I felt some protection of my students and not wanting to use them as examples of things, use pseudonyms or whatever. But now I’m kind of processing it and I really am reflecting a lot on it.

A lot of what I learned makes me think of Annette Lareau, who wrote a great book called Unequal Childhoods, which tracks different social classes of folks raising kids in Philadelphia -- middle class, working class, and poor, more or less. I think she didn’t really hit that many super affluent families and she honestly didn’t seem to engage with that many really poor families. There were a couple. And her big sociological insight was around this idea of middle class versus working class parenting philosophies.

The middle class parents, maybe unconsciously, maybe consciously, go through what she calls concerted cultivation, which is the idea that your children are investments and you cultivate them to become a certain type of person. A lot of this is based on the kinds of scheduling that you do and the activities you do and the way you teach kids to question authority, in ways that promote power. So middle class kids learn to ask the doctor questions, whereas working class kids don’t ask doctors questions because doctors are experts and you don’t ask experts questions--because that’s why you’re seeing them. Working class families tended toward something she called the “theory of natural growth,” something like that [ed note: her phrase is the “accomplishment of natural growth”], the idea being: let the kids be kids, set pretty firm distinctions between the adult world and the child world. So there are these authoritarian elements of the working class philosophy, but generally kids have a lot of space to themselves. They just kind of do what they need to do as kids. There are often many more siblings and other folks from the family that are of comparable age.

And then she tried to deal with poor families. And really most of the book that I remember when she’s writing about children growing up in poverty is thinly-veiled horror at the daily existence of their lives. Having to take a bus for an hour to try to get food stamps so that you can go get some bread, but it’s not enough. She’s just detailing the horrors of American poverty.

And I think I understood this all better in working in the environment I was working in for so long, and getting to know the students, and getting to know the distinctions between students. That’s another thing that I think happens, especially when people write about, quote, “urban education” -- by which they’re usually talking about high populations of students who are black or people of color -- you just homogenize the group benevolently. It’s like a benevolently homogenous group, so you’re all for the kids but you can’t see the distinctions between the kid who’s got the working class parents and the kid who’s really suffering from acute poverty and needs other kinds of assistance. So working so closely with so many with those kids helped me understand how poverty and working class families in our country are so intimately connected, and they’re part of what you could argue is the same socioeconomic bracket. What poverty is in America, to me, is just what happens when the bottom drops out of the working class and there’s nothing to protect anybody.

So what I had to do in working with my students was to really develop an understanding of who they were as -- I sound like John Lennon in the ‘60s, but -- who are they as working class people? And that was a lot of my own learning as a teacher. I had things I could teach -- everybody needs to know how to Google and how to make movies and how to write. But what I had to learn was what this whole social arrangement was, and how students’ lives before they ever came into my classroom affected both their attitudes toward learning and where they were going with it. That was most of what I learned.

So when I started reflecting it was like, “God, I don’t have a whole lot of cool pithy quotes about education because, like Annette Lareau, I’m just kind of struck by the horror of poverty, and I don’t have a lot to say about it!” How do you help this kid to learn...? “...But this kid is homeless! Oh my god, how could you let a child be homeless?” Those were the kinds of things I was dealing with.

It’s the kind of work I want to do -- but it’s a lot to process. How to write about it is very complicated.

SEC:

Let’s talk a little bit about how you found out who your students were. That relationship aspect is really important and I think a lot teachers believe in that, but I also think they are uncomfortable about how to go about that or what they might uncover when they go about it.

DCM:

I always told my students “I keep it 85.” They keep it a hundred, I keep it 85. I’d say, I’m your teacher, so there’s 15 percent of things I’m not going to tell you anything about but of the 85% of things I will talk about, I will be 100% honest about 85% of things. And that was important for me to be able to share with my students within boundaries that I set for myself but know that every time I talked to them I was coming from a place of honesty for myself. Because it allowed them to be honest with me, and so our dialogue kind of worked when they had trust in me.

The way they trusted me was to know that I was not putting on an act for them. I was who I was. And that meant some warts and all stuff -- we would talk a lot about how I’m a white male teacher and that’s a thing. We’d talk about school shootings and they’d say, “why do white guys do that stuff?” And we had to have conversations about that. I didn’t always have the answers, but we could have the dialogue because everything was kind of fair game in terms of what they could bring to me and how I would respond--as me. Even if that response was “I can’t say that, I can’t speak to that, I don’t know.” So that’s one of the ways I built trust.

What’s funny is that I think a lot of the teachers at my school thought that because I had an interest in popular music, that was something that gave me some capital with my students. It appears that way from the outside because I would know all of the music that they listened to, including the music they made. A lot of my kids made music, so I would always want to know who they were. But I don’t think that my fellow teachers understood that I didn’t actually like most of the music my students listened to and I wouldn’t have sought it out if they hadn’t been listening to it. But because they were listening to it, and because it was such a huge part of the classroom -- it was coming out of headphones and speakers and laptops all the time -- I wanted to know what this stuff was, because I was curious about it.

Some of it I ended up really liking. But I think that’s irrelevant, whether I liked it or not. The point was I was curious about it and I took it really seriously, the music they liked. Understanding what it was and why they liked it was really important for me. That was an element of the trust, but it’s connected to the first thing I was talking about, which is the honesty piece. I honestly was interested. I think for teachers that honestly aren’t interested in their kids’ music, don’t force it. It’s not going to work. Whether it is better to take an interest in your students music or popular culture or whatever or not, I don’t know. I read something the other day, some educator Twitter who talked about how they pretended to be interested in sports every year. They were so glad the basketball season was over so they didn’t have to pretend to be interested anymore for their students. And I was like, that’s terrible! If you’re not interested in basketball, just say that! I mean, be honest. And if you feel you should be interested in basketball because your students are interested in it, then come to it from a place of honest exploration of it and -- you know, if you still feel like it doesn’t matter, just be real with people about that.

It goes a longer way being honest with students about yourself and your shortcomings and everything, along with your strengths. That’s the other piece -- when I knew stuff, I told my kids, look, I’m sorry but I know a lot about this so I know you’re telling me this way you found this thing on the internet, and I’m telling you I know more about finding this thing on the internet than you do. I feel very comfortable saying that, this is the better way. But I limited the number of domains in which I would claim that kind of expertise. I tried to limit it to being on-topic in the classroom. I wouldn’t try to know everything about everything. When I don’t know stuff or don’t like stuff or don’t feel a certain way and feel comfortable enough to say it, I’m honest with them. In that way, you build a certain level of trust.

The other thing is -- and I hate to say it -- I was also the permissive uncle in terms of classroom discipline at my school. I’m the guy who you go to and he gives you the ice cream and mom and dad get upset: “We don’t give him ice cream and now he’s gonna ask us for ice cream every day for two weeks!” I was also that. But I don’t think that that was as big of a factor as my sense of wanting to know my students, within limits, and wanting them to feel that they can know me as well as I want to know them, that it’s two-way. Whatever I want to get from them, they should be able to get from me. And that’s why I was the permissive uncle. I don’t actually care that this kid did this in my class, so why would I go through the work of writing it up and making it a thing, when I don’t actually care about this? Now, from an organizational standpoint that’s not a great approach to take. I get that. Things break down when there’s not consistency among classrooms.

I guess it’s just to say, I wanted to know who these people in my room were, and that’s how I saw them. One thing I started writing when I got off of Twitter was that I think we have it backwards, especially for the age group I worked with, which was 16-21. Most of them were disconnected from formal school, although not entirely (it’s very complicated, especially in Philly). I feel like we tend to call kids “kids” in situations where we should think about them as adults, and we tend to call them adults in situations where we should be thinking about them as kids. To give you an example, we say that because this young woman has a baby even though she’s only 17, well, that makes her an adult. But because you are throwing pencils in my classroom, you’re a kid. Right?

And I would kind of flip that in my mind -- I didn’t realize I was doing this until I was reflecting on it. I’d say, look, if you’re 16 and you have a baby, this is a kid that just had a baby. Let’s think about the impact of the baby on this young person’s life. But if you threw a pencil at me in my room -- why did this adult in my room just throw a pencil at me? I’m not saying you should think about things this way or it’s better this way, I just realized that that is the approach that I took philosophically to who my students were. I was working with adults and they were adults in all the times when I most wanted to call them kids, and they were kids in the times that I think, maybe not me, but society wants them to be adults. Incarceration, teen pregnancy, all these big scary social problems, you have to think about what kind of things a person is going through-- and what is a person going through when they’re going through it at sixteen?

I think my students would judge me higher than a 7.4 as a teacher. But I also think that there were certain jobs I had as a teacher that I wasn’t as good at as other people are, and I’m pretty open about that. Organization of time. Having the plan set. Having the boundaries set. Making the space safe for learning. Making learning happen even when it’s hard. Those are the things that, because I was so interested in how people are feeling, “are we there today,” sometimes I could lower my standards, I could let the discipline slip and it affects other people’s learning. There are some teacherly things that I think I have a lot of work to do in my own professional development.

One way I started thinking about it early on was, in my first year, I was reading the John Lennon biography. (It’s weird I’ve mentioned John Lennon twice so far. I do love the Beatles.) And they’re describing Hamburg, their first big tour in Germany, how they got there with their songs and they realized after the first night that they’d played all their songs and they didn’t know anything else.

So they were in this crucible -- but not of creativity. They didn’t go to Hamburg and write their best stuff. They wrote their best stuff after Hamburg, after they’d gone through this crucible of performance. Performance, performance, performance. Play it again. When you run out of something, pick an old showtune that someone half-remembered. Steal songs from other people. Play the thing you just heard the other band play and see if you can do your own take on it. Not because it’s creative but because you have so much time to fill and you don’t have enough material. That’s how I felt after my first year teaching. There was so much time and I’d gone through everything, I felt I’d left it all on the floor in my first year and I had nothing left. I was already resorting to Googling lessons and trying to figure out what the hell I’m gonna do tomorrow.

And so I realized in my disposition, I’m thinking about the difference between being a composer or a songwriter versus being a performer. And how those things are often connected but they’re not the same. So maybe I’m a Carole King--a really good songwriter but it’s often better if other people sing my stuff. Even though there’s a couple things only I can sing. Other stuff, other people should probably do.

My relationship between curriculum and teaching is like that. I’m like a singer-songwriter more than I am a performer. That was a good realization to have, because it means there are some things I’m just never going to be the best at, and if I’m teaching full time again I need to work with those limitations. But that hadn’t hit home before. I could have abstractly said something like that before I was a full-time teacher, but you gotta feel it. You gotta understand what it feels like to run out of material and be empty and have nowhere to go. Every teacher goes through that. It usually happens in the first year if not the first month.

SEC:

That idea of teacher as performer--there’s a lot to unpack in that. When you’re a performer, what is the thing you’re trying to be? I don’t know that a lot of teachers think about who they’re trying to be. There’s a lot of thought about what they are trying to do. Not who they’re trying to be. Who you are informs a lot of what you do.

DCM:

Yeah -- it’s an imperfect metaphor. I mean, I think teaching as performance is only one, maybe even small element of teaching. There are a lot of non-performative teachers who are just really good at the nuts and bolts of getting people in a room to do something. That is a good teacher, too. It was more about the difference between imagining lessons and putting them into reality. Maybe because I’m a music guy that’s where my head went with it. But it is interesting to wonder, if teachers were performers, are there rock stars versus second-chair violins? Different ways to perform? I dunno, I don’t want to go too far with the metaphor, it’s tenuous enough as it is.

SEC:

I wanted to go back to one of the things you talked about in your observations. You were working at an alternative high school and a lot of the students who you were working with had so many gaps, or there were things in their background that had made them not love learning or not feel confident in learning. I’m curious about how in the high school situation, it’s hard to catch up with that background. I mean, maybe this is a Philly question. Where I am, we were the poverty capital of Canada for a long time, we may still be. There may be some overlap here. So what do you do in those cases? Because you talk about scaling up form elementary and how that might not work.

DCM:

It’s hard, because the tendency is to scale up from young. So where did you lose it with math? I have to be careful about my language here, because I don’t want to play into deficit thinking. I also don’t want to do the thing where I say there’s no such thing as a deficit, because if you talk to a student about their math abilities, they’ll be like, “I have a deficit! Please help me!”

If you find the point where the student disconnected -- to give an example I like to think about from my work, because it controls for a lot of other stuff -- take a student who is more or less engaged in the project of school and has not decided that school in and of itself is a bankrupt institution, but who also has real challenges with math. If there is some kind of specific learning disorder, it hasn’t been diagnosed, and it’s probably too late to be diagnosed, and it’s specific to math. What do you do?

I think the way that people tend to go about it, that I’ve seen, is to figure out what should have happened in fourth grade and figure out a way to do that fourth grade piece in high school. And I think that’s a problem, because I don’t think that it works very well, and it especially doesn’t work for kids who are not motivated. If it could work for anybody, it would be the student who is already motivated but happens to have this missing piece from fourth grade.

In this student’s case, it was literally that they had a bad math teacher in fourth grade and they struggled and failed math and they were kept back. So the kid gets to high school about a year or two late because of this math issue that he’s had that’s been unsupported, and now he’s at our school. And the question is, how do we work with the student who has a math issue? For me, the answer is one on one instructional time. And I hate to say that, because what it means is that the classroom itself is not the space to deal with this.

And that’s a very uncomfortable realization that I started to have as I was working through this with my students -- that I can differentiate, differentiate, differentiate, but when the gaps are so large...I don’t know. I feel like this student needs an hour of an expert’s time that is a reading specialist or a math specialist. Then there needs to be something else happening in the classroom environment.

I think a lot of the issues are a little like that. From the reading perspective it’s even more complicated, because these practices of literacy are so intertwined with content knowledge, background knowledge, cultural context, how you were taught phonics from a very early age, basic decoding that may have happened in weird ways.

What you can do at the high school level is you just set the bar really high for everybody, but you don’t assume that anybody actually knows how to read. You set the bar for everything else really high, and you don’t do the basal reader with the sixteen year old. If they’re interested in mass incarceration, you read about mass incarceration. But they may not be able to read what you’re using --so you use the exact same resource and you use every trick in the book to get them reading as much as they can -- chunking it out, working on smaller passages, connecting it together. I don’t know what all the best practices here are. I’m probably going to go back to school at some point to learn some of this stuff, in terms of literacy coaching.

I do think that we tend to level kids in ways that are really counter-productive to their ability to see the point in education in a big picture sense. When you’re going into school and you’re sixteen years old and you’re reading the “adapted reading” that is really not very good--these adapted readings tend to be very poor quality. I had a person that I worked with who used a website that would replace words with easier words with an algorithm. I would read the results and think, this is garbage! You took a really cool article and you changed all the words in it! You can’t just do that! “I’m gonna take this song that I love but I’m going to change every other note in the melody and I’m sure it’ll be just as good.” That’s not gonna work.

So I think you treat the group that you’re with as capable of taking whatever they can talk to you about. And then you think of literacy as a very specific set of practices, and that different pieces of it need to be emphasized in different ways. For my students, maybe everybody has to do some pretty high level vocabulary and then there are a lot of strategies for how do we chunk out this reading, which is really difficult for some kids, only a little difficult for other kids, and pretty much in the comfort zone for the others. You kind of have to sit down with the kids and go through it sentence by sentence, talk about it, re-read it--OK, so what is this saying? Why does it say it like this? And for the students who struggle with print literacy, it’s just going to take longer. I don’t know if there’s any way around that.

I don’t know what it looks like in the long-term, because I also don’t know what the proper amount of time is. I also feel like students weirdly have too much time in school and not enough time with some fairly uncomfortable, hardcore learning. They spend a lot of time in this building but the times at which they’re really doing cognitively challenging work is not nearly as concentrated as it needs to be.

I played piano as a kid, and practice is awful. I had to practice every day, and as soon as I stopped practicing every day I got worse. I could practice for one hour and then I was just done. If I could practice for an hour every day for a week, I got better, and when I didn’t do that I got worse.

But I feel like the problem is that in school, you don’t have one hour, you have six hours, each of which is a one-hour block. But you can’t practice for six hours. You can’t do cognitively challenging work for six hours. So it seems like the better thing to do would be to really target the time when you are doing the most cognitively challenging stuff, do it for an hour, and then take a break and do cool stuff that’s not that.

But I don’t know how you square that, because every teacher kind of feels like they’re in their own little island of content and they don’t realize that by the time you have the kids for fifth period they’ve been doing this all day. They’re not even doing cognitively challenging hour-long work. What ends up happening is that everybody kind of blands out. So you’re doing 20% cognitively challenging here, and 50% here, and maybe 0% there because you were asleep that period. It’s just not organized very well for what I think the challenge really is, which is that learning is really hard, the more you miss early on the harder it is to make up later, and the ways that you make it up later require more investment and more resources, not less. We want to do the opposite. We want to say, what’s the fastest way we can get this kid to learn all the crap they didn’t learn in the last twelve years? Well, I don’t think you can. Maybe the answer to that is that it’s not possible. I don’t know.

JEC:

We’re coming up on an hour now and I didn’t talk about any of the media stuff -- we’ll set up another call. I’ve enjoyed all of this time and want to put it all up.

DCM

Sure! You basically got everything I’ve done except the media literacy work, which is fine because actually media literacy is a whole separate thing we could talk about.

JEC:

That’s good. The work of Julie Coiro and Renee Hobbs, their work and your involvement in that, has been really interesting to me as I’ve been doing the same thing as you have in a lesser scale for the last few years. I really want to talk about that. So I’ll start wrapping it up and ask, what would be a resource you might recommend to someone?

DCM

The one book that I recommend to people is Inside Teaching by Mary Kennedy, whose big project as a scholar is understanding why reform tends not to work in schools. The reason it doesn’t work is that most reforms don’t fully grasp the day to day practices that teachers have to accomplish to do their job. And if you don't understand the very intimate details of on-the-ground work in schools, there is no reform that's going to change anything, because you don't actually understand what you’re doing. You have an idea, but you don’t know how to implement it at all.

Inside Teaching is a series of observations about how teachers manage in the classroom. They manage their time, they manage their resources, they manage their sanity, their tranquility. And that, to me, was one of the single biggest insights I ever had about teaching, and I reflected on it a ton when I was doing my full-time teaching, which is that teachers really value tranquility in the classroom, and soundness, this feeling of safety and quiet. And the reason is because they're teaching for so long that if you don’t have that, you burn out immediately.

It’s one thing to be a cool engaging college professor and teach people three days a week and you have a little seminar room or whatever -- I’ve done that kind of teaching, it’s a blast. And I can be on all of the time! As you can probably tell already from this conversation I can be very on. But if you teach full time, you get there at like 8 a.m. and you leave at 5 p.m., you can’t be on for that whole time. You will physically blow a circuit. So her observation about what teachers do to manage that was so interesting.

She has this really big picture critique of reform movements in education that are not ground-up from teachers. What I like about it is that she doesn’t have any clear ideas about what teachers should be doing, just that if you don’t have their buy-in, nothing that you do is actually going to matter very much. And the other insight there is that there are really good reasons why schools operate the way they do, even in the most dysfunctional school systems and spaces, and you should really put some effort into understanding exactly why things are the way they are. Because if you change one thing about it, you don’t realize you’ve also changed five other things that are connected to this one fix. There’s no way for ideas to fix organizational issues if you don’t really understand how the organization works.

I return to that book a lot because it just it’s really a nice perspective on what teaching is, and why a lot of our best ideas about education don’t actually seem to work when you put it into effect. And the answer is it works for something, but not for teaching. This cool idea you had is a good idea for something, just not for this. It’s because there’s no way to sustain it. So that’s the book I would recommend.

If you’re a science teacher, I just read a cool science book. I’m the type of person that thinks the last book they read is the best book ever written, and then promptly forgets it existed after I read the next book.

The book I just read was Life Ascending by Nick Lane. It’s a science book and it goes through, from this microbiology perspective, everything from the origins of life through the development of most of the major processes of life, and it was a very cool, cosmic look at everything. I kept reading it thinking, “God, I wish I was helping teach a science class again, because I could talk about this stuff and kids would be interested in cells because they would know why it’s like this.” I never knew! There’s so much stuff I actually never knew even though I, quote, “learned it in school.” I learn it again later and I’m like, “oh, I didn’t know this at all! I don’t know anything about this!” I could have told you what mitochondria were but now I actually understand mitochondria--it’s profound. I love that book because every chapter is like that for something science-related and I have a really hard time finding accessible math and science literature that makes accessible not only what happens, but why it matters and what the context is, so that was cool.

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coopdigitalnewsletter · 5 years

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8 Oct 2019: The AI will interview you now. Uber work. Amazon rumours. Facebook leak.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Bladerunner fandom]

The AI will interview you now

Face recognition technology and AI is being used in job interviews in the UK “to identify the best candidates”, says the Telegraph. Unilever and other use HireVue’s AI to

“analyse the language, tone and facial expressions of candidates when they are asked a set of identical job questions which they film on their mobile phone or laptop. The algorithms select the best applicants by assessing their performances in the videos against about 25,000 pieces of facial and linguistic information compiled from previous interviews of those who have gone on to prove to be good at the job.”

It’s not doing face recognition, it’s doing behaviour recognition. Something like: “These facial and speech behaviours are correlated with the interviewee being a good employee - thumbs up, +4 career points”.

It’s natural that this feels a bit wrong because humans are unique and special, right? In truth though, they are bound by fairly predictable behaviours, and really it’s not that hard to have a computer watch the face of a human and make judgements. It’s science you can trust, and in fact it weeds out bias because the machine doesn’t care, unlike a human interviewer who’ll bring loads of messy biases. So it’s a good thing, it’s progress.

Oh sorry wait, it’s a science you can trust as long as the data the machine learning model was trained on was large and unbiased. And as long as none of the interviewees look different to the ones in the training data. And as long as the machine learning doesn’t inadvertently amplify any systemic biases in the hiring organisation’s practices (or Hirevue itself’s). And as long as interviewees can meaningfully give consent to be catalogued by a machine. And as long as no discrimination law is being broken by having the computer say no. And as long as some job applicants aren’t freaked out by being video-interviewed by a Voight-Kampff machine.

Here the newsletterbot is guilty of bias: it believes humans to be sufficiently complex that it will be hard to effectively “machine learn” the problem that is organisations, their people, their culture, their politics, the webs of motivations and incentives, their jobs and the humans that might potentially fit well.

Still, HireVue says they’re serious about ethical and accurate machine learning, so fingers crossed 😬. An interesting read on video interviews. YouTube is full of videos about how to do well in a HireVue video interview, here’s one. Watching them, you’re struck by the asymmetry: the machine and later an employer watching your interview video, but you seeing nothing except the questions and the webcam’s black eye. So interviewing would be perhaps be a bit fairer if the employer also had 30 seconds to consider and 3 minutes to answer on camera the interviewee’s questions.

Unrelated, but relevant because it’s about bias and how it and power are inadvertently expressed in technology: “Google contractors allegedly offered darker-skinned homeless people $5 dollar gift cards to scan their faces for facial recognition software”.

Uber work

Uber’s temp agency platform, Uber Work has launched in Chicago. The company says: “We believe that finding work shouldn’t have to be a job in itself. For positions as diverse as being a prep cook, warehouse worker, a commercial cleaner or event staff, Uber Works aims to make it easier to find and claim a shift.”

Here’s a fictional look at temp workers in 2023, and hopefully Uber Works doesn’t nudge work in that direction. Something that empowers shift workers is a better model: “crowdsourcing information about what it’s really like to work somewhere, turning it into recommendations about employers that could be better for you” (from plucky UK startup Poplar).

Elsewhere, a successful taxi co-op: “A worker owned taxi coop in Southend has grown from 6 to 70 drivers. They repaid all their investors and returned £3000 to their members last year. The same year Uber left the area after failing to compete with them.”

Amazon rumours

Amazon to sell its Go technology to airports, cinemas, sports venues? Interesting if true - eventually there would be a tension between the platform and the grocery businesses (see also: Ocado in 2017ish).

Amazon is said to be hiring property experts in UK.

Similar rumour: but in Los Angeles. A dozen leases have been signed in Los Angeles, reports the Wall St journal. 7 burning questions about Amazon's new grocery chain.

Facebook leak: trust deficit internally?

A Facebooker leaked audio of an all-team Zuckermeet. The media reported it as FB boss Zuckerberg saying he’d fight (too) hard against politicians etc, but the transcript suggests that his comments were actually fairly standard stuff. This story is more notable for the fact that an employee recorded and leaked the meeting - growing cultural/trust deficit internally, perhaps?

Cryptocurrency news

Paypal has pulled out of the Facebook-led Libra cryptocurrency consortium, saying that it’s not you Libra it’s me. Rumours: Mastercard and Visa aren’t so sure either.

Police auctioned off £240,000 of cryptocurrency confiscated from a hacker - if it had been a confiscated 3 Series with a spoiler kit and spinner rims you’d have expected to be able to snag a good deal, but money’s money so maybe there wasn’t a discount in this case.

“The pain in my jaw from holding just one cryptocurrency had reduced me to an all-liquid diet. I was not cut out to be a trader.” - a good piece on the subsistence lives of small-scale cryptocurrency traders (also a decent backgrounder on cryptocurrencies).

Other news

How grocery pickup is evolving - supermarkets trying to make click-n-collect faster.

Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino's over website accessibility - see previous story on this.

Climate Action Tech: “empower technology professionals to play our part - to meet, discuss, learn and take climate action” - needed because the tech industry uses a lot of energy.

No good urban ebike deed goes unpunished. “Horrible. One good deed rewarded with a scary blend of the so-called sharing economy, the commercialisation of communal spaces, and authoritarian surveillance capitalism, all sugared with the unbearable style of wackaging. May every dockless bike and scooter scheme go bust as soon as possible.”

Workshop tactics for agile teams - looks good.

Job ad for Ocado developers is neatly placed in the website’s code.

Previous newsletters:

Most opened newsletter in the last month: competing with Amazon Go. Most clicked story: Why don’t we just call agile what it is: feminist.

News 1 year ago: curated convenience and paying with your data.

News 2 years ago: eGovernment (single digital market) and first mile logistics (Amazon keeping inventory in retailer warehousing).

Co-op Digital news and events

What the data and feedback show about 3 digital services in our Food stores.

Public events:

Manchester WordPress User Group - Wed 16 Oct 6.30pm at Federation House.

Tech for Good Live vs the climate crisis - Thu 17 Oct 6.30pm at Federation House.

Business Growth Hub - Moving your business forward - Mon 21 Oct 12pm at Federation House.

Meet the expert - marketing approach - Tue 22 Oct 12pm at Federation House.

Meet the expert - hints and tricks on social media - Wed 23 Oct 1pm at Federation House.

Human values in software production - Tue 5 Nov 6pm at Federation House.

Practitioners Forum: vital lessons for key co-operators - Thu 7 Nov at the Studio, Manchester.

Pods Up North , an event for podcasters - Sat 23 Nov 9am at Federation House.

Mind the Product - MTP Engage - Fri 7 Feb 2020 - you can get early bird tickets now.

Internal events:

Digital all hands - Wed 9 Oct 1pm at Fed House Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 9 Oct 3pm at Fed House 6th floor kitchen.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Mon 14 Oct 10.15am at Fed House 5th floor.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 14 Oct 1.30pm.

What has the web team been up to? - Tue 15 Oct 1.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Health show & tell - Tue 15 Oct 2.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Engineering community of practice - Wed 16 Oct 1pm at fed House Defiant.

Targeted marketing (CRM) show & tell - Wed 16 Oct 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor breakout area.

Membership show & tell - Fri 18 Oct 3pm at Fed House 6th floor kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at [email protected]. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s word gardener @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

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closetcasefabray · 5 years

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Blue + Yellow (2/2)

so i’m never drinking again (meaning i’m not going to drink until a few days from now), but i did some stuff around my apartment & recovered before looking this over. it’s in decent enough shape i figured i’d post it on my night in. so here's the second/final part of b+y, a soulmate clexa au. thanks for the likes & reblogs <3

(i also have some ranya companion bits & other cute shit in my head from this. hit me up in the asks or message me if you wanna know anything.)

(Part 1 / 2)

Blue + Yellow

Part 2 / 2

Once you’re old enough to be trusted on a computer, your parents let you use your dad’s old laptop (with safety settings programmed in, courtesy of your dad being a computer engineer and generally a protective father). You spend hours reading stories online about people seeing color. The romantics talk about how life burst into color as soon as they set eyes on their soulmates. The realists are more prevalent, like you, and they tell of their search for their soulmate, having seen color gradually after a few days. Some even reject the idea of soulmates completely, finding different kinds of love with other like-minded people.

Your heart breaks when you read about the people who never see their soulmates again—whether a war-torn nation dividing them, or travelers who board a plane back home only to start seeing color as they leave, or sometimes death. But you feel reassured when you read about those who have lost a soulmate and find love again with someone else. Still, your heart aches at the idea of giving up on finding Lexa, even more when you wonder if she’s given up on you.

Your parents did all they could when you told them about Lexa those years ago, a few days after coloring with Lexa in the park, but they couldn’t get much information because of child protection and privacy reasons, especially because Lexa had been in foster care with her half-sister before moving. With a different last name in a city of millions, you know you’ll never be able to find Lexa, but that doesn’t stop you from searching Facebook and social media most nights.

Once puberty hits, everyone talks about seeing in color. You never hide the fact that you have been able to see colors since you were five, but you don’t like talking about it much. It’s often something you keep to yourself and your paints. Most kids in your small town know it’s unlikely and often hope they don’t meet their soulmate here, but that doesn’t prevent their hormones from kicking into full gear.

When a new student arrives in the spring of seventh grade, you’re not surprised when you hear Octavia (amongst several others) has a crush. You’re also not shocked to hear that Bellamy confronts him after baseball try-outs that same day, telling the new kid, Lincoln, to stay away from his sister. You decide you like Lincoln when you hear he dodged Bellamy’s first swing and in turn gave the Blake boy a bloody nose. Neither of them get into trouble since it happened far enough from school grounds, but Octavia does get in trouble for giving her brother a fat lip as soon as he gets home for starting a fight with Lincoln.

After punching Bellamy, Octavia calls you.

“I can see colors like you now,” Octavia says excitedly. “Just... wow, Clarke. You never told me how beautiful it is.”

She ends up rushing off the phone when her mom gets home and sees a beat up Bellamy holding bags of frozen corn to his nose and mouth.

Although Octavia is grounded for the first month of their relationship, there isn’t anything or anyone who can stop Lincoln and Octavia from falling in love because both puberty-stricken thirteen and twelve-year-olds knew as soon as they saw each other in fourth period English. It really is beautiful, seeing the world in color, but you don’t have the heart to tell Octavia that the colors you see haven’t been as bright since you were just a kid in a park.

Your mom never asks, but you know she’s thinking it when you tell her your top choices for college—Columbia, New School, NYU, Fordham, CUNY. You don’t talk to your mother often, not since your dad died two years ago, so you think she might not want to scare you away from opening up by asking questions.

“I like the idea of being somewhere I don’t have to drive to get to the best art in the city... or the world for that matter,” you say one night over dinner.

She nods in understanding. It is true that the city has that benefit, but you’re not sure if you’re rationalizing it more to yourself or your mother.

You drove enough to get your license, but you hate it. You’ve grown more comfortable riding in passenger seats because Octavia luckily loves to drive, and she talks and plays music loud enough to stop you from thinking too much. But it’s still too easy to get in your head when you drive on your own. You still tremble in your seat at large intersections, and your hands sweat as they hold the wheel because you don’t think you’ll ever forget the sound of metal being crushed and the silence that comes after.

“So wait,” your roommate slurs with a chuckle, “you’re telling me... you decided to come here... because you think your soulmate might still be here?”

“Way to make me sound like a total sucker, but yeah, pretty much,” you confess before downing another shot.

You just had the entire art department rip into your sophomore year portfolio, so you decided to put some distance between you and the art world and get drunk with Raven—a computer engineering student who transferred from UMass back to her home, New York City born and bred.

“You’re not like a sucker. Pretty sure you just are one, but I’m a bitter asshole,” Raven says with a smirk.

You smile and clink your beer bottle with hers before taking a sip.

Raven has good reason and you’re sure you would be much angrier with the world if in her shoes. She met her soulmate when she was fourteen, and they fixed cars and built things with their hands together. Then they were sixteen, riding on a motorcycle they had fixed up together, a car didn’t see them, and Raven just remembers waking up in the hospital with a shattered leg. “I can still see colors,” she said that night the whole story spilled out of her, “but it’s all... faded, I guess. Colors are pretty dull in my eyes.”

“Do you think it’s stupid?” you ask Raven. “That I thought I could find her again?”

Raven shrugs. “Don’t put your life on hold for someone who isn’t here right now,” she says. “If you really are soulmates, things will work themselves out. Until then, have fun, make art like you weird liberal arts kids do. Do whatever. Doesn’t mean you have to fall in love.”

“Makes sense,” you agree as Raven pours you both a shot and opens a couple more beers.

“Of course. I know what I’m talking about; I’m in the sciences.”

You kiss a boy who also sees color, but nothing about him feels special or makes your heart race. You both know you’re welcome distractions for each other, but he knows his soulmate is never coming back and you might always be looking for yours.

You kiss a lot of people and sleep with a few others too. Some can see color, some can’t, and some you don’t bother asking. It’s fun and nothing close to love, so it fills the gaps between those times you think about a little girl who brought green into your life and then everything else. You wonder what she looks like now, if she’s cut her hair, or if she’s somewhere thinking about you.

You fall for a girl with long, light brown hair. She has the opposite curse—born colorblind like everyone else but informed by doctors that she will never see colors. She has to learn to love the hard way—heart first. When you’re lying next to her in bed, and she hums as you trace her jawline, you wish you could love her the way she deserves.

You think she’s always known and that’s why she never said “I love you” because the response would be a lie or an apology.

She’s standing in front of you now, smiling that sad, knowing smile. “You showed me color in a different way,” she says before kissing you softly for the last time. She leaves you in your studio with your hands covered in verdigris.

You don’t know if it’s the lack of sleep or your eyes playing tricks on you again, but you swear you see a flash of green eyes and dark hair on your morning commute. You don’t know if it’s because you’ve been busy and single for the past couple of months, but you feel your heart swell, your blood flowing through your veins to your fingertips. You just know that when you get to your studio, your paintings look a little brighter and your hands find the paint on their own, blending the perfect shades for your last piece of your senior presentation.

Your advisor introduces you to more of her curator friends and they praise your work as you stand in the gallery beside one of your paintings of an eclipse, half the canvas is a haunting cerulean, the other half painted bright shades of yellow.

“I assume you gave Ms. Griffin the A she deserves?” jokes one of her colleagues.

Dr. Miles grins and hugs your shoulders. “I wouldn’t dream of giving her anything lower than that,” she says with pride.

Dr. Miles had been so impressed by your senior project, she invited some friends from MoMA to your show at the campus art center. You were already elated to have your work being viewed by such important people, but when Dr. Miles called you during senior week to ask if you’d like to feature your work at a gallery in affiliation with PS1, you almost burst. You could hardly process what you were hearing and when you did, after hanging up your phone, you screamed and jumped around your apartment, much to Raven’s hungover chagrin.

Since it was rather last minute, Dr. Miles managed to sort out most of the details while you prepared for graduation. Still in your apartment until the end of May, you were able to help move your work to the small gallery space in the Lower East Side on Rivington with some help from Raven. It didn’t feel real until you saw your name in the brochure for New York City Museums’ Summer Tour.

You excuse yourself to greet your mother and her boyfriend, Marcus Kane. They’re beaming as they look at all your work on display, but mostly they look happy together. You smile because your mother’s found a kind of happiness you haven’t seen since your father passed away. Of all people, you’re glad the first person to put paint in your hands is now the person adding color to your mother’s life again.

You give them both a hug and kiss on the cheek, asking how they like the city since they stuck around after your graduation. Someone offers them wine, and Marcus happily takes a glass and mouths to you, “Fancy,” and wiggles his eyebrows, making you laugh.

“Wow, your work is selling quick,” Marcus notes, sipping from his wine.

You’re surprised when you take in how many red dots are stickered next to several of your paintings.

“You’re taking us out to dinner when you visit,” your mom teases.

“I like lobster,” Marcus adds before wandering off to look at more of your work.

You find him a bit later in front of your favorite piece. It’s mixed media, with various New York debris scattered around the edges with the blur of a subway train speeding through the center, featuring green eyes that stand out from the grey. You didn’t put a price on it; you want to hold onto this one.

You’re taking inventory of all the sold pieces and confirming contact information with buyers as Raven continues texting you from across the street as she waits for you to wrap up. She keeps sending you ridiculous ideas of how to spend your newfound relative wealth.

You’re in the back office when you hear the door open.

“Raven, I gave you the passcode to help me move my stuff here, not so you can treat it like an extension of our apartment,” you say as you round the corner, flipping through the contact paperwork. “I’ll just be ten more min—”

You forget how to speak as you blindly set down the stack of paper on the desk, unable to look away from the figure in front of the door.

“Sorry. Your friend told me the passcode... I’d have come earlier, but I had to take the train in from Connecticut.”

You remember everything: the laughing leaves, the charcoal skirt, her brown hair, and those eyes.

“My sister only told me a couple of hours ago there was this art gallery I had to see,” she says, offering a small smile as she takes a couple tentative steps toward you. She picks up one of the small pamphlets about yourself and the exhibit. “Blue + Yellow,” she reads, “Still your favorite color?”

You nod, still struggling to find the right words to say. Maybe it’s because you never let yourself plan this part out; all your energy went solely into making her appear again. Now she’s here, right in front of you.

“Clarke Griffin,” Lexa says like she’s trying it out, putting the pamphlet in her pocket. “Clarke, with an e, Griffin...” She lets out a small laugh. “That would have made things easier.”

You let out a laugh of your own. “And you’re Lexa...”

“Woods. Well, now anyway, once my parents adopted me,” she explains.

"Woods,” you repeat. “Suits you. Woods, forests... like pines.”

Lexa’s smile broadens at that and you wonder if she’s played your last conversation as children over and over in her head like you have, as if sifting through memories for clues to find each other again.

“Is it stupid of me to have dreamed of meeting you again here?” you ask.

Lexa shakes her head. “Only if it’s stupid of me to have read every art section of every New York magazine for the past five years,” she admits, blushing lightly and looking away from Clarke. She notices your unsold mixed media piece and stands in front of it. “It must have been you,” she says, almost to herself as she deciphers the subway and her own eyes gazing out, “but I also thought I saw you walk by me or waiting on the opposite subway platform for years.”

“If it’s any consolation,” you say, standing beside her, looking at it as if from her perspective, “I thought that too. I painted this after I thought I saw you in March. Everything was grey in the rain, but then I saw you... Or thought I did.”

You watch her take in the painting, a look of awe. “Yeah, it must have been you then,” she says, lifting her hand to her chest as if she felt you too. Her eyes trace the grey-blue edges filled with bits of New York—a MetroCard, a crushed coffee cup, a newspaper, and a faded piece of paper with a simple cartoon boat with half the sky colored blue. “It’s always been you,” she says, reaching out as if to touch it but stopping herself.

She turns toward you. “Sorry, this is... a lot.”

You nod dumbly. Lexa smiles and takes your hands in hers. Your artwork breathes with you, seemingly radiating colors off the canvases. They’re singing as they all come back to you in full.

“I spent all my time hoping to find you again... I didn’t put much thought into what I’d say,” Lexa admits with an embarrassed half-smile.

“We have time,” you give her hand a squeeze. “You being here is... We don’t need to talk at all.”

Lexa closes the small distance between you and presses her lips to yours. Every stroke of your paintbrush for seventeen years has been a wish for this moment, and if magic exists, you’re sure it’s in art because Lexa is wrapping her arms around you, holding you, and you’re kissing her back. Like neon buzzing butterflies in your stomach, all the light and color makes its home in you and you’re in love exactly as it was supposed to be.

When you part, you’re looking into those green eyes and you don’t want to look away or wake up if this is all a dream. Lexa blushes under your gaze and you let out a laugh like a breath you’ve been holding in. “Hi,” you sigh.

“Hi,” she says quietly in return, her eyes shimmering like those leaves in the wind. “Would you like to get dinner with me?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Right now.”

“I’d like that. I just, uh,” you keep Lexa’s hand in yours, pulling her with you to grab your phone and keys from the back office, unwilling to let her go now that she’s here. You laugh when you see Raven texted you about a dozen messages, concluding with, you’re welcome. have fun. i’m going to meet with octavia and lincoln to help those poor souls around the city. you owe me several rounds. xox.

You walk out of the building hand-in-hand, and the city’s fast pace and noise welcomes you back to reality. It doesn’t feel jarring with Lexa still beside you, and you sigh contentedly. The city doesn’t feel lonely, seeing it the way you do now.

“I painted a sunset for you... well, several, actually,” you tell her as you walk down the street toward one of the restaurants Lexa likes nearby.

“Any paintings of your hair and eyes?” she asks, smiling at you and almost walking herself into the streetlight pole because she can’t take her eyes off you.

You laugh and kiss her cheek as you wait for the crosswalk sign. “I’m not a fan of self-portraits,” you say, “but you don’t need a painting of me now; you have me right here.”

“You’re right,” Lexa says, and that same look of awe washes over her again because she touches your hair, tucks it behind your ear, and leans down to kiss the corner of your lips. “I’ve missed you... That’s what it feels like.”

Like coming home, you think.

“I’ve missed you too.”

So you ignore the walk sign and kiss her again, under the golden glow of the streetlight to start making up for all that that time spent apart.

fin.

#clexa fic #clexa #clexa au #ccf fic #ccf drabble #fic: blue plus yellow #fic: bpy #closetcasefabray #ccf #clexafic #soulmates au

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