#and he has to be someone that Kerri would send out to go tend to the birds or the gardens

[ladykailitha]

How I would do a sugar daddy/sugar baby AU. (I hope this doesn't awaken anything in me *side eyes the omegaverse*)

I've seen this well done in this fandom, I'm not saying I haven't, but of the ones I've seen they tend to be omegaverse or mafia/shady sugar daddy.

And I want thirty year old rockstar!Eddie with twink Steve. I said what I said. I think we forget that for the most part Steve isn't beefy. When he's "bulked" up, it's his clothing (Eddie's vest) or its his thighs that are "thicc". But Steve (Joe Kerry in particular out of the role) is thin.

So we have rockstar!Eddie with Corroded Coffin touring the country and doing a couple of dive bars because that's where they got their start and hitting up The Hideout, because again that's where they got their start.

Steve, who recently got kicked out of his parents house because he came out with liking men (gay, pan, bi don't care) and lost his job because again with the liking men thing (small town homophobia for the loss!)

So with his last twenty dollars, he decides to hit up on the local bar and drink away his troubles and maybe even get laid for a warm place to sleep tonight.

He gets dressed in his sluttiest clothes. Crop top, cut off booty shorts, sparkly blue sneaks.

Only he shows up on the night that Corroded Coffin is playing. After paying what he thought was a stiff cover charge (was actually a ticket to see the show) he gets in. He has less money than he hoped but he can only hope that someone is willing to buy him drinks.

He settles in next to the bar and realizes his mistake. The rest of the patrons are dressed in metal gear. Leather, black denim, and lots of chains. Steve doesn't just stick out, he sticks out like a prep in a metal concert.

But he can't afford to go anywhere else, and hopes he doesn't get too harassed tonight. So he keeps he head down and hopes of the best.

Only what he doesn't know is that he has caught the eye of the frontman and lead singer of Corroded Coffin, Eddie Munson. The fact that Steve stands out isn't a detriment, it's a perk.

He wants to find out everything about this boy who stumbled into his enclosure.

The rest of the band is rolling their eyes.

Eddie sends out one of the PAs to make sure that all of Steve's drinks go on Eddie's tab and spends the whole concert watching this guy.

After the concert Eddie sidles up to him and they get to talking. Immediately he picks up that Steve is not old enough to be there. So now he's worried he's under age.

They head out for a smoke and Steve admits that he's not twenty-five like the fake ID says, but nineteen. He shows Eddie his real ID as proof and Eddie is relieved.

They start making out and Eddie takes him to his hotel room to have sex.

In the morning, Eddie asks if he can take him home and Steve starts sobbing. He tells him about his shitty day with shitty parents and shitty boss.

And Eddie's bleeding heart immediately goes out to him and tells him to stay at the hotel for as long as he needs, order room service. Just no booze.

Steve pouts at that but agrees. That as long he stays at the hotel he won't buy booze on Eddie's dime.

Eddie gives Steve his phone number if he needs anything. He transfers the hotel room over to Steve's name, gives him a sultry kiss goodbye and leaves to finish his tour.

Steve doesn't have anywhere else to go and is not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he stays at the hotel. He gets to spend time in the luxurious bathroom with it's fancy shampoos and conditioners and hot tub like bath.

He finds that Eddie keeps sending him clothes and jewelry and suddenly the rich life style that he had with his parents pales in comparison to the extravagant lifestyle Eddie is providing for him.

Through all this Steve is still looking for a job as he doesn't want to overstay his welcome. But news hadn't gotten around town that he was gay and even people he thought he could trust are telling him that they can't hire him.

Eventually he gives up. He talks to Eddie all the time and whenever he feels discouraged Eddie will send him something pretty to cheer him up.

Finally Steve catches the fairy that had been leaving things in his hotel room when he's in the shower or out on the town.

Her name is Robin Buckley and she's a summer intern. Her uncle knew a guy who knew a guy that got her the job. She actually loves it, but she has one more year of high school and her parents won't let her drop out to be a PA for a rockstar.

They're concerned that he'll take advantage of her. Robin thinks it's funny because she's gay. Steve thinks it's funny because Eddie's gay and not into under eighteen year olds.

He tells her his story and over the summer they become best friends. Robin had heard that the Harrington boy had run off so imagine her surprise when Eddie's management had her deliver things to his hotel room. Staying in a hotel room in Hawkins is hardly running away.

Eddie comes back and just continues to throw money and gifts at Steve but doesn't ask for sex again. It's not until Steve tells him that he didn't fuck Eddie for his money or even for a warm bed at that point when he went back to the hotel with him, it was because Eddie cared. And god was that sexy as hell.

When Robin graduates Eddie hires her to be Steve's PA and the pair of them get to travel the world with the band as besties.

#my writing #stranger things #steddie #ladykailtiha writes #sugardaddy #sugarbaby

[phrynewrites]

ok but the REAL question is: who is Mr. Collins in this AU?? 👀

Omg I hadn’t even considered this?? I am a silly billy but I’d love any input on this one because it’s super important for jasmine to have someone reject and then for her best friend to marry.

#my initial response was going to be daya #but I think daya would do better as Bosco’s sister who explains that Bosco isn’t actually an asshole #when jasmine takes that trip to pemberly and falls in love actually #so those are both considerations #also I think Kerri would likely be Charlotte #so I guess we keep that in mind #but we also keep in mind that mr Collins kind of sucks and is weird and no one likes him #and he has to be someone that Kerri would send out to go tend to the birds or the gardens #like that’s really the only bird watching she’s going with mr collins #so yeah let me know the thoughts because I’m thinking Kerri for charlotte and daya for Bosco’s sister #asks answered #for anon #jasco pride and prejudice au

[elcuervoborracho]

Ironwood as a Foil to Yang

A RWBY post. There’s this thing that’s been bugging me for a long time now:

Why did Ironwood personally request a prosthetic arm for Yang?  He didn’t even know her that well, among hundreds of students. At face value it makes no sense.

I think Ironwood must see some of himself in her. When it comes to heroes and villains, they’re very often thematically mirrored and linked.

Before I go into that, I’ll go dive a bit into Ironwood, and how he made terrible choice after terrible choice:

He’s been slowly occupying Vale, sending his troops in, selling robot soldiers in Vale territory.

He likely had Penny compete in the Vytal Festival so that when she won, Ozpin would hand her the Maiden powers, thus giving Atlas even more power. EDIT: (He's the one responsible for the aura transfer machine. He knows Ozpin is looking for a new maiden, and Pyrrha was chosen because she's the strongest Beacon student. Why else would Penny be in Vale competing in the festival, when she's from Atlas, doesn’t need to study, and Ironwood didn’t even tell Ozpin she’s a robot? Is it any surpsise that when Penny gets the winter maiden powers, Ironwood tries to have her hacked?) This makes it a literal attempt at using Penny as a Skynet Terminator, an infiltration unit with living tissue over a metal endoskeleton

He’s corrupt, holding two seats in the Atlas Council (Same council that made him responsible for the Vytal festival security)

This is just by Volume 3, the show made it painfully obvious he as never fit to lead, and is in fact a villain. Always was. It’s important to remember that throughout all of this, Ironwood doesn’t just feel justified, he feels like he’s a hero for doing it. Like he’s somehow protecting Atlas by doing all of this. This will be important later

What does this man--who made himself responsible for the festival’s security--see in Yang, the girl that as far as he knows, is just some girl that went ballistic after winning a match?

Up until this point there isn’t much to see. The most he knows is that her team was involved in Mountain Glenn and the Torchwick Paladin fight. Is it really enough reason for The Atlas General to personally request a high end prosthetic? not really.

The next part will be a little bit of a tangent, but It’l be worth it later. It’s about Semblances.

Ruby says there’s no way to know how to unlock a Semblance, but we see in the show that semblances aren’t just tied to the person, but also to the event that awakens them, like classic superpowers. And like those, they’re not just whatever, tacked on because it’s cool. If you’ve ever watched X-men evolution, Rogue’s powers are just a metaphor for intimacy. The same kind of applies to RWBY.

For example: Jaune’s Semblance is a reflection of himself. His worth is entirely connected to what he can give other people, so his semblance reflects that, and the situation it awakened in reflects that. This pattern continues with other characters. Cinder’s Semblance is the power to destroy anything she can touch, and re-create it to whatever she wants. This relates so obviously to her backstory it would be redundant to waste words there. I’ll go in-depth on semblances and how they affect other characters in another post. Maybe.

I believe Ironwood’s semblance reflects the situation that unlocked it. It basically lets him take decisions without second-guessing himself. To me this implies somewhere in his past Ironwood either failed to take an important decision, or took such a terrible decision that he awakened his semblance. Likely the same situation that cost him a limb, but not necessarily it

Losing a limb is a big deal. some people take it better than others, and while I don’t think RWBY handled Yang’s amputation that well, I do think the idea behind it is important, she was traumatized and living in pain. There’s a good chance that ironwood didn’t lose half his body at once. Even in in the world of Remnant, it’d be hard to survive that. We all know he likely lost limbs gradually, like the Tin Woodsman. Couldn’t have been nice, to say the least, and he still uses the excuse of Phantom pain to Glynda in V2, so I think it’s safe to say he likely has some of that trauma. This is something they both share too.

Recklessness is also a trait they both have, but throughout the series Yang learns to temper hers and think twice before making decisions, something Ironwood never did. He can’t, his Semblance is not thinking twice!

They’re also both very good close range fighters, When fighting Watts Ironwood even uses boxing techniques just like Yang, bobbing and weaving under attacks, delivering a flurry of hooks. He clearly prefers it too, given how most of the fight is Watts running away from him.

(As an addendum, they tend to rarely use their ranged weapons unless it’s so they can propel themselves forward, into melee range, but this is less of point because it’s a somewhat common strategy in RWBY, Ruby uses it , Nora uses it in a different way, so it’s not something exclusive to them.)

Then where does the foil part come in?

So here’s this promising, heroic Huntress. She’s a part of the team that fought against Roman and his goons multiple times, a great fighter who’s a bit of a hothead, but has a heart of gold, and in the heat of the moment took a snap decision after a match was over and hurt someone. She loses her right arm fighting a white fang leader, and after the fall of Beacon, they found out she was right, and that “student” she hurt was an infiltrator who’s directly responsible for the events that lead up to the fall. Maybe after that they find out she lost a limb while protecting Blake, not just while fighting.

Yang’s heroic sacrifices are how he sees his actions, and while it’s far, far from reality, after seeing that, how could he not send her that prosthesis? It would be like not sending one to himself when he was hurt the first time.

Or maybe not. Maybe Miles and Kerry just did their thing, and I simply stared at the inkblots long enough to see a butterfly. 

Either way, this is fun to think about, and I it may be worth sharing the thought.

#rwby #ironwood #james ironwood #rwby ironwood #yang #yang xiao long #rwby textpost #text

[matchasprouts]

Listen Closer - Chapter 9

[ obsessed with how this has more chapters than the walls <3 wjhbejwehbjewhbjewh ]

First || Next || Previous || Last

“I’m gonna turn off my phone if people keep interrupting my conversations and naps,” Garrett said into the phone as he answered the call, even placing a hand on his hip as if Mark could see his annoyed position.

Mark chuckled on the other end of the phone, and Garrett could hear people talking behind him. “I’m gonna send you an address, and I need you to get here as fast as possible. You’re a specialist now, and you’re gonna pretend to help us figure out this case.”

Garrett paused, completely okay with lying to the authorities but also wondering what the fuck was going on. “Okay… why? Is this a ploy to spend more time with me? Mark, we see each other every day.”

“You said you like to watch investigations. I’m giving you the chance to participate in one.” Oh. So Mark was in love with him.

“I’m on my way,” Garrett replied without hesitation, hanging up and heading right outside for his car. He already knew where it was, so he didn’t need the address, and Mark knew that. He was probably just saying it because he was in front of people.

“Where are you going?” John suddenly asked, cutting off his mad dash for his car. He froze, and turned around with a sigh, like a teenager who had tried to run off before his dad could stop him.

Oh god, this meant he had to bring up the Angel Trap. “Detective Kerry failed her test,” he said, and neither Amanda nor John seemed surprised. “Hoffman’s at the scene now, and I’m gonna watch it. Don’t worry, I’m a good liar.”

John hummed at that, knowing he couldn’t stop him but clearly unsure about him being so close to the police. “Be careful. Try not to talk more than necessary. I trust you, but even the best can slip up.”

“Yeah, fair enough. I’ve gotta go, I’ll see y’all later,” Garrett replied, bouncing on his feet before John gestured for him to go, and then his mad dash continued, resulting in him literally throwing himself into his car.

He was like… ninety percent sure that he was speeding when he got on the road.

---

“Hey, sorry, John kept me up,” Garrett said as he met Mark in front of the building, now following him inside. “So I’m just a Jigsaw specialist? Shouldn’t I have equipment with me?”

“You don’t need it,” Mark replied simply, falling silent as they passed a group of his coworkers. “You, Mr. Whitlock, are just very good at your job.” He paused, looking Garrett up and down. “Is that my shirt?”

Garrett decided not to tell Mark that technically his title should be Dr., instead waiting until he introduced himself to literally anyone. “Sounds about right. I need gloves though.” And then he smirked at the question. “Yeah, it is. You probably shouldn’t leave your clothes in the base if you don’t want me to steal them.”

Mark was quiet for a moment before he sighed, pulling a pair of gloves out of his jacket as they reached the body. He handed them to Garrett, who immediately pulled them on and made a beeline for the corpse.

Of course some asshole stopped him.

“Who the hell are you?” one of the men standing in the room when he entered asked him, making him very tempted to glare but instead he smiled.

This random guy was tall, but only four inches taller than Garrett. He had mostly slicked back brown hair, deep blue eyes, and what seemed to be a permanent scowl. He was, unfortunately, attractive. Especially in that suit.

Garrett looked past him, glancing at the woman who he’d been standing next to. She was shorter, with curly dark brown hair that she had pulled back into a ponytail. Her eyes were a deep brown, and she looked significantly less asshole-ish than her presumed partner.

Finally, he turned back to the man, the small smile still on his lips. “Dr. Whitlock, I’m the Jigsaw specialist. I’ve been working with his traps since he first appeared,” he introduced himself, offering a hand for the man to shake.

He very, very hesitantly took Garrett’s hand, giving it a firm shake before immediately dropping it. “Special Agent Strahm, over there is my partner Special Agent Perez,” he said after a moment of inspecting Garrett, gesturing with a tilt of his head to the woman.

“FBI?” Garrett immediately asked, glancing over at Mark. He had NOT been informed of the fucking FBI, and he was going to have a long talk with him about that later. Garrett had already been accused of being Jigsaw once by the FBI, and he really didn’t need it again.

“When a serial killer gets this many victims, we tend to step in,” Strahm replied, looking up at the hanging body. “Besides, Detective Kerry was our link in the precinct. Of course we would step in when she dies.”

Fuck, Amanda really just HAD to screw him over like this.

“Did you know Detective Kerry?” he asked, looking back over to Garrett, who was now inspecting the wings on the trap, admiring how well he’d managed to get the hooks in her ribs.

“No, I didn’t,” Garrett answered, keeping his focus on the trap. “I only work with Detective Hoffman, occasionally Detective Fisk. I’m sure you know that officers tend to have a specific specialist or informant that they exclusively use.”

Wow. His first day as a fake specialist and he was already rocking it.

Strahm hummed at that, watching him do his “job” before offering his theory. “There’s another accomplice, other than Amanda Young.”

Garrett’s eyes widened for half a second, surprised that they knew Amanda was an apprentice. Did this mean they knew who John was too? Clearly they didn’t know him, or they would have recognized him immediately.

“What makes you think that?” Mark asked, stepping so Garrett didn’t have to. “This could have very well have been done by Amanda Young, or John Kramer-”

“John Kramer is a dying cancer patient, I highly doubt he would be able to lift anyone up. And Detective Kerry is almost twice the weight of Amanda Young, so there’s no way she could have hoisted her up,” Strahm continued, cutting Mark off.

Garrett clenched his jaw at the explanation, knowing Strahm was right not only because he was the one to put Kerry up there, but also because he had pegged John and Amanda exactly.

“Also, we couldn’t find a tape recorder like usual, and there was no jigsaw piece cut out of her.”

… Shit.

Garrett had wanted out of there so bad earlier that he’d completely forgotten to leave the tape, or cut out the jigsaw piece. Mark shot him a look, and he knew he was going to be in trouble later.

It wasn’t his fault that he liked for games to be fair and that it pissed him off when they weren’t. He just couldn't stand staying there for any longer.

“Kramer was a mechanical engineer, he could have made a pulley system, and both of them are only human, they could have simply forgotten-” Mark offered, only to be cut off once again.

“Jigsaw doesn’t ‘forget’ or make mistakes. This was someone else entirely, and I will find them.” Strahm sounded so confident, despite not knowing that he was standing right next to the man he was looking for.

“Well, that’s not my department,” Garrett spoke up, taking a few steps back to get a better look at the trap. “Don’t those mechanisms look like wings? It’s one of the few times a function of a trap has been both aesthetic and actually useful. I imagine they were closed when she was strapped in, and then they opened when time ran out, thus ripping out her ribs. What a way to go.”

He was technically talking to Mark as he explained the trap, but both of them knew he was saying it for everyone else, so it would seem more believable. It seemed to be working, because now someone was checking out the ‘wings’.

Strahm, however, clearly did not like him. Before the agent got the chance to start questioning Garrett though, he looked over at Mark. “Y’all got the pictures, right? We should probably get out of the way of the CSIs.”

Mark nodded at that, glancing back up at Strahm one last time. “I think it’d also be smart to get Officer Rigg out of here. If you need me when you get back to the precinct, we’ll be in my office.”

He put a hand on Garrett’s shoulder, a gesture he leaned into as much as possible, before gesturing for Rigg to follow them out and away from the body. Of course, they split up from the officer once outside, as well as going to their own cars with the silent promise that they’d talk at the precinct.

---

“You forgot to leave the tape AND the jigsaw piece?” Mark was apparently not giving Garrett a chance to recover, tearing into him the second the office door was closed. “You’ve been at this longer than I have, and yet here we are.”

“The game was rigged,” Garrett quickly replied in a vague attempt to defend himself. “I was rigged and I didn’t know and I don’t like it when games are unfair so I freaked out and-”

Mark cut off his rambling with a large hand over his mouth, since he was starting to get a little too loud. Garrett’s first instinct was to bite, but he figured Mark had enough wounds from his inability to keep his mouth closed.

Once Mark was sure he’d be quiet, he removed his hand. “Calm down. I understand. You’re only human.”

You shouldn’t say that to someone with a god complex. Luckily, Garrett kept his mouth shut.

“You should probably go check on Rigg,” Garrett spoke up, grabbing the folder with the pictures of the trap off the desk so he could at least pretend to be working. “He looked pretty shaken up. You don’t want someone like that getting in the way.”

Mark sighed, knowing Garrett was right. Rigg wanted to save everyone, and that would get in the way. “Right. You stay in here, I don’t want you wandering and getting lost.”

“Wow, so much faith in me,” Garrett teased, rolling his eyes before pulling Mark down into a kiss. He’d talk to him about the polyamory thing later, it wasn’t really appropriate here.

“Just stay put,” Mark reiterated as they pulled back, leaving one last kiss on the top of Garrett’s head before leaving the office, leaving him to his own devices.

… Yeah he actually didn’t want to get into any more trouble, so he sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk and opened up the folder, spreading the pictures out so he could “work”. Maybe he should actually get a job in this, it was kind of fun.

He was getting into the groove of things when the door opened. He looked up and behind him, expecting Mark, but was surprised to see Strahm instead. “Looking for Hoffman? Last I heard, he was dealing with Rigg.”

“He already has, he’s looking into something else right now,” Strahm replied, stepping further into the room and closing the door behind him. “I’m here to talk to you.”

Well that wasn’t good. Garrett settled back down in his seat, extremely aware of Strahm coming up behind him and placing one of his hands on the back of the chair to look down at his notes.

“You said you’ve been working the Jigsaw case since he first appeared, but I couldn’t find any record of you in the files. Care to explain?” Strahm asked after a tense moment of silence, but Garrett already had a response.

“I’m not employed by the precinct. The only person I officially work with is Detective Hoffman, so there’s no need to mention me. Besides, it’s not like I have a huge job, I just look at the traps and tell him what happened,” Garrett answered, humming softly as he continued his sketch of the Angel Trap.

So funny how he’d only had this fake job for like two hours and still had an excuse for everything.

“Fine, that makes sense, but-” Strahm put his hand on Garrett’s shoulder and Garrett, feral bastard that he is, reacted on pure instinct…

… And bit into Strahm’s hand.

For his credit, the agent didn’t scream, instead letting out a gasp that was somewhere in between surprised and pained. He probably didn’t want to make any louder of a sound so he didn’t cause a scene.

The problem with that was the fact that Garrett wasn’t letting go. In fact, he was sinking his teeth in even deeper.

There was blood now, Garrett could taste it, and it just made him want to stay latched on longer. Strahm was to the point of trying to pry him off while still being quiet, letting out little grunts of pain.

“I’ll fucking shoot you if you don’t let go,” he growled, but Garrett didn’t budge, knowing it was a bluff.

Fortunately for Strahm, the door opened, revealing Mark in the doorway. It took him a second to realize what was going on, but he was rushing over to the two as soon as it clicked.

At the sight of Mark, Garrett released Strahm from hold, wiping the blood off his lips with the back of his hand, only to lick it off his hand, still staring at the agent.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” he warned, finally letting go of Strahm’s gaze and instead looking up at Mark. “I think I’m gonna go home now, if that’s okay?”

“Yeah, yeah… I’ll see you later,” Mark responded, accepting the closed file Garrett handed to him and watching him head out.

Strahm was still holding his bleeding hand as he also watched Garrett leave. His face was tinted pink, which Mark found curious but wasn’t going to ask about, and blood was dripping through the gaps between his fingers.

“Let’s uh… get you patched up. I can at least get him to apologize later.”

Garrett probably wasn’t going to apologize later.

#story tag: listen closer #self ship fic #self shipping #self insert #scrap.writing #scrap.ships #s/i: garrett whitlock #mark hoffman #lawrence gordon #peter strahm #romantic: 🦿🩺 #romantic: ⛓🕵️‍♂️ #romantic: 🖊💧 #(poly) romantic: ⛓🩺🖊 #chapter 9

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

1960: John F. Kennedy/Lyndon B. Johnson vs Richard Nixon/Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

1964: Lyndon B. Johnson/Hubert Humphrey vs Barry Goldwater/William E. Miller

1968: Richard Nixon/Spiro Agnew vs Hubert Humphrey/Edmund Muskie vs George Wallace/Curtis Lemay

1972: Richard Nixon/Spiro Agnew vs George McGovern/Sargent Shriver

1976: Jimmy Carter/Walter Mondale vs Gerald Ford/Bob Dole

1980: Ronald Reagan/George H.W. Bush vs Jimmy Carter/Walter Mondale

1984: Ronald Reagan/George H.W. Bush vs Walter Mondale/Geraldine Ferraro

1988: George H.W. Bush/Dan Quayle vs Michael Dukakis/Lloyd Bentsen

1992: Bill Clinton/Al Gore vs George H.W. Bush/Dan Quayle vs Ross Perot/James Stockdale

1996: Bill Clinton/Al Gore vs Bob Dole/Jack Kemp vs Ross Perot/Pat Choate

2000: George W. Bush/Dick Cheney vs Al Gore/Joe Lieberman

2004: George W. Bush/Dick Cheney vs John Kerry/John Edwards

2008: Barack Obama/Joe Biden vs John McCain/Sarah Palin

2012: Barack Obama/Joe Biden vs Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan

2016: Donald Trump/Mike Pence vs Hillary Clinton/Tim Kaine

2020: Joe Biden/Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump/Mike Pence

The same candidates tend to show up year after year. Not just President running for re-election, but Vice Presidents running for the top slot themselves, incumbents or candidates, successful or not; Richard Nixon (1952, 1956, 1960, 1968), Hubert Humphrey (1964, 1968), Walter Mondale (1976, 1980), Bob Dole (1976, 1996), Al Gore (1992, 1996, 2000)

I would expect John Edwards (D-2004) to try and make a comeback, though he was only a one term senator from North Carolina, so that’s looking increasingly unlikely. The state swung for Obama in 2008, but hasn’t voted blue since (except for governor, but he has no power because the Republicans control the state legislature)

Paul Ryan (R-2012) will be back for sure; he retired from the House in part over of disagreements with Trump, but one doesn’t just give up being Speaker and slink away into obscurity (just look at Newt Gingrich, he refuses to shut up or die), so I think Ryan is just biding his time and hoping the whole Trump thing blows over in the next decade. If the party shifts away from Trump, he might offer himself as a slightly more moderate (“moderate*”) alternative.

Or maybe Sarah Palin (R-2008) will try and reclaim the presidency for herself; she’s a hardcore right wing nutjob, she was a Bush supporter AND a Trump supporter, and she’s still relatively young, so I could see her stepping back into the spotlight to try and “being the country back” to the traditionalism of the early 2000s. Nostalgia is cyclical, so I figure around 2028 or 2032 people will start looking back fondly on the Clinton and Bush years (Clinton more so than Bush, what with 9/11 and the wars and such)

Tim Kaine isn’t even one of the famous senators; there are some senators that everybody knows, even if they’re not from your state, like Chuck Schumer, Joe Manchin, Lindsey Graham, Bitch McConnell, big names with big reputations. Tim Kaine is a nobody, just a bland and inoffensive white dude Clinton picked to be as uncontroversial as possible (she couldn’t pick a woman or a black person because then the ticket would have been “too diverse”). He’s not the future of the Democratic party, but I could see him trying to become part of the Senate leadership. Maybe the whip (vice leader), I don’t think he has what it takes to be leader outright.

I don’t think Mitt Romney (R-2012) will run for president again; that ship has sailed. Moderate Republicans are critically endangered, extinct in the wild, with single specimens in captivity (in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maryland). After back-to-back losses in 2008 and 2012, I don’t think Republicans will run a moderate candidate ever again. Romney could maybe just maybe become the whip if he so desired, he’s a big enough name with support enough to become their presidential nominee, though he’ll never be the leader; McConnell was their golden goose, he gave hem exactly what they wanted and changed the game to give them an advantage even in minority. They will only ever elect hardliners like him from now on. Romney is too soft; he cares too much about the other side (he’s not liberal by any stretch of the imagination, he’s a Mormon for Brigham’s sake, but he voted to impeach Trump twice which means he may as well be a liberal in the eyes of the public)

Mike Pence has committed political suicide. Democrats hate him for his homophobia, sexism, racism, classism, and weird relationship with his wife who he calls “mother.” Republicans hate him because he didn’t break the law to re-elect Trump. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. He’s ultraconservative and super religious, so under normal circumstances he’d be a shoo-in for the nomination, but after breaking with Trump in January he’s dead in the water (he didn’t even really break away, there was literally nothing legal he could do; if he had tried anything it would have been struck down by the courts). And besides that, Pence is boring as hell. He’s milquetoast, he’s a saltine cracker without the salt because it’s too spicy, he orders plain hamburgers with ketchup on the side, all his steaks are cooked well done, he gets a boner when he sees a woman’s ankle and has to self-flagellate for penance, he sends back water if it has too much ice because it makes his teeth hurt. He’s the sacrificial lamb they’d nominate specifically to lose so they can save a stronger candidate for later when there’s no incumbent.

Kamala Harris is basically president-in-waiting (or rather nominee-in-waiting; who knows if she can actually win?) Biden ran on the unspoken promise that he would step down in 2024, making her the front runner, but he has recently walked this back and says he plans on running for a second term himself, pushing Kamala back until 2028 at least. She has good PR and has convinced half the country that she’s a progressive instead of a cop, so if she runs she’ll definitely have an edge over Democratic challengers. The media picks the nominee, and in 24 or 28 they’ll pick her for sure.

It’s becoming increasingly harder for people to stay relevant over multiple decades. I can’t imagine any 2004 candidates running in 2024, but Bob Dole managed to get on as Ford’s #2 and come back as #1 himself twenty years later (he lost both times, but still). Richard Nixon beat the odds and actually got elected in 68 after losing the presidency in 60 and the governorship in 62; he was pretty much coasting on Eisenhower’s legacy, selling himself as the anti-Goldwater, who lost in 64 to LBJ in a landslide.

Trump is acting like he’s going to run again, but whether or not he’ll fully commit is up in the air. On the one hand, his least insane niece says that he doesn’t want to put himself in a position where he could lose again, his ego couldn’t take it, he’s so embarrassed he can’t even admit it happened the first time. On the other hand, he’s too proud to accept defeat and just let some other candidate take his spot as leader of the Republican Party; the Republicans haven’t had a leader since Eisenhower, every other president has disappeared after leaving office.

Nixon resigned in disgrace

Ford was elected out

Reagan disappeared in the 90s because he didn’t want the country to see him deteriorate from Alzheimer’s

Bush Sr was elected out

Bush Jr was despised with approval in the 20s (record low), and could potentially have been tried at The Hague if Obama had balls

Now Trump wants to stick around, even though he’s older than Reagan and FAR less healthy. He’ll probably be dead in 15 years anyway; no way he reaches 90. His mind may already be going, but unlike Reagan he isn’t self aware enough to know it, so he might try to stay in the spotlight even after the dementia sets in. Wo knows?

What his niece says, and what I think is most likely to happen, is that he will pretend like he’s running in order to scam donors out of millions of dollars to pay his exorbitant legal fees, but then bow out of the race before the primaries. Whichever candidate he personally endorses will become the nominee and go up against Biden. Biden will win the popular vote, but I don’t know if he’ll win the electoral college; if this happens for the third time in a quarter century, I expect nothing less than chaos in the streets, perhaps even civil war (well, I expected civil war after 2020, and we’re still standing, so again, who knows?). All I know is that congressional Democrats will throw a hissy fit but do nothing to stop the Republicans from sneaking their way into office without a mandate AGAIN.

The last Republican to legitimately win the presidency was George Bush Sr in 1988. Jr lost to Gore, and only got re-elected in 2004 because he invaded Iraq the year prior. Democrats have won 7 of the last 8 elections, including the last 4 in a row. There are more Democrats and left-leaning independents than Republicans and right-leaners. If the Republicans lose-but-win AGAIN, I don’t think the county could take it; there would be phony calls for secession on TV and legitimate whispers behind the scenes, there would be lawsuits, there would be an even bigger assault on the Capitol than January 6, people would riot, the National Guard would attack brown people with impunity while peacefully corralling the white ones with shields and loudspeakers.

There hasn’t been an assassination since 1963, and no assassination attempt resulting in injury since 1981. Someone threw a grenade at Bush Jr in 2005, but they wrapped a handkerchief around it so the lever didn’t release. I think multiple politicians on both sides of the aisle might be targeted in the event of another electoral college screw up.

Trump could face jail time for his tax crimes, though given his high profile I think he’d get off with a slap on the wrist. He has never faced consequences before, so why would they start now?

#politics #political #2024 #2024 election #2024 prediction #2024 presidential election #politicians #John Edwards #Sarah Palin #mitt romney #paul ryan #Mike pence #Kamala Harris #Donald Trump #Joe Biden #fuck trump #fuck donald trump #fuck Republicans

[sephiwhore]

Ok but literally all the cyberpunk oc questions? LETS GO CHOOM!!! -thosetwistedtales

Bet you didn’t think I’d actually do it >:3 Okay well I technically didn’t, I did skip some of them cause I couldn’t think of anything, I’d already answered it, or the answer was just “no”.

Without further ado I present, All The Questions about Tess, answered under the cut!

— BASICS

full name: Tess Valere

birthday: She has no idea, and for most of her life she didn’t even know birthdays were a thing

gender and pronouns: Female, she/her

nicknames or aliases: V (obviously), her surrogate brother called her Tessa

sexuality: a big ol bisexual

ethnicity: a big ol white girl

affiliations [corporation/gang/themselves/etc]: she grew up on the streets of Heywood, so certain Valentinos would help her out now and again. She’s nowhere near loyal to them, but she’ll try to avoid killing them during jobs

what languages do they speak?: English, conversational Spanish, and she knows a handful of Japanese words

— PERSONALITY

alignment: Chaotic Good, but she dabbles in Chaotic Neutral

color(s) you associate with them: cyan and black and after Johnny comes into her life, red

theme song: Unbreakable by Fireflight

what heavenly virtue would you assign them? Humility

what deadly sin would you assign them? Wrath

what is their biggest strength? Sheer fucking perseverence, mostly fueled by spite

what is their biggest fear? Losing the people she loves, because throughout her life those have been few and far between and she’s lost a good number of them

what is their biggest weakness? Again, the people she loves

are they confident in their abilities? Oh you bet your ass she is, so confident that she stormed Arasaka Tower with nothing but her revolver and her cyberdeck

what is their opinion on cybernetics? They’re a necessary evil. Her brother dealt with cyberpsychosis so in a way she resents cybernetics, but she also knows that you won’t get far as a merc in Night City without a few implants

do they have a good sense of humor? Yes, very dry and sarcastic

how do they cry? When she cries it’s either from rage or panic, very little in between

how do they laugh? Quite subdued, usually the most you’ll get out of her is a hearty chuckle. Very rarely does she go into a full laughing fit

do they smoke? She started smoking after Johnny popped up in her head cause she felt bad for his situation (after she stopped hating him anyway) and figured she could give him this one thing. And now she smokes like a chimney.

do they drink? She’s been dealing with alcohol dependence and borderline alcoholism for half of her life

what kind of drunk are they? As she drinks more it progresses from pretty chill, then VERY affectionate, and then Fightey

do they take any drugs? She knows how she is with alcohol so she avoids drugs like the plague

— COMBAT

preferred weapon: For close/mid-range, a nice beefy revolver (Overture) or Johnny’s Malorian. Long range, a sniper rifle.

combat style [stealth/melee/brute force/etc] Depending on the environment, it’s either stealth with a silenced pistol and lots of quickhacks, a John Wick style headshots-galore shootout, or sniping from a distance

primary stats [ex: intellect] Intelligence and Reflexes

biggest weakness in combat: She sometimes forgets to watch her back, and tends to ignore injuries and see the fight through when retreating would probably be the best course of action

threaten or charm? Depends on the target, she’s great at both

lethal or non-lethal? For corpos, the more malicious gangs (Tygers, Animals, 6th Street), or anyone who has hurt innocents, full lethal. If she’s just infiltrating a warehouse full of workers, non-lethal

leave quietly or send a message? She sends a message WHILE leaving quietly

strategy or improvise? Improvise

— APPEARANCE

hair style and color [is it natural? do they change it a lot?] She has synthhair so she can change the style and color at will (I have no idea if that’s how it actually works but I say it is) but she usually sticks to come kind of short sideshave/undercut in some shade of blue.

eye color: Natural eye color is green, but she usually has black scleras with a red circle

height: I had her at 5’8 until yesterday when I realized ya know what, I want a tall girl. So she’s 6 feet.

describe their body type: Skinny, small tiddies, but still fairly curvy

describe their style: Dark colors, leather jackets, lots of boots (also Johnny’s tank top and aviators)

do they wear makeup? Very smudgey eyeliner. Her upper lip is tattooed black and she usually leaves the bottom one bare

tattoos? any significant ones? Lots of tattoos that I haven’t figured out yet, except fir a modified version of the Valentinos neck tattoo, the V being to honor her brother Ven (she took on the name V to honor him too)

scars? Random ones here and there from random gunshots, stabbings, and other work-related injuries

piercings? A bunch that I can’t remember off the top of my head

cybernetics? Gorilla arms, the charge jump ankle ones, eventually she gets synth lungs as a preventative measure cause of the whole smoking thing

— FAVORITES

favorite place in night city: The streets of Heywood because they’re home to her, despite all the awful memories growing up. After Johnny comes along, she starts to like high places, and she loves to hang out on the patio outside Kerry’s house

favorite tv show and/or movie: She loves horror movies, except ghost one cause she doesn’t believe in ghosts so she just finds them dumb

favorite vehicle. do they prefer cars or motorcycles? Vastly prefers motorcycles, she hasn’t really driven a car much since she was a teenager. Her favorite is Jackie’s Arch.

favorite food: She sees food solely as a source of fuel, she will eat whatever is easiest

favorite drink: Tequila

favorite song: Black Dog :3

favorite type of weather: She LOVES the rain (but the water kind, not the acid kind)

favorite radio station: Vexelstrom, and then Morro Rock cause Samurai :3

favorite pastime: Working out, shooting ranges, Jackie and Vik got her into occasional boxing

— RELATIONSHIPS

what are their parents like? what kind of relationship do they have with your character? She had no memory of her parents and assumes they’re both dead

do they have any other family members? what kind of relationship do they have? She has a “brother”, who she knew only as Vendetta (or V). He found her on the streets and took her in when she was 10, and raised her from then on until he “died” 12 years later. Their relationship was great, despite the fact that he was not a very nice person to everyone else but her. 

who is their closest friend? Of course Jackie, and then Kerry (and Johnny ofc)

who are their other friends if they have them? Nope! :D

what are their exes like? any significant ones? She’s never really had a serious relationship, mostly just flings and acquaintances-with-benefits

are they in a relationship? with who and how is it going? Johnny! And it’s uh. Well, ya know.

who are their enemies? She has a passionate hatred for whichever corpo makes cyberpsychosis medication, and for Max Tac cause she sees them as responsible for the loss of her brother. And of course Arasaka.

have they ever lost anyone important to them? Her brother, Jackie, Johnny

would they betray their own morals for their loved ones? Abso-fucking-lutely

have they ever sacrificed something for someone they care about? if so, what? In one of my two canons for her, she gives Johnny her body

— BACKGROUND

where did they grow up in night city? if not from night city, where are they from? The streets of Heywood, then in a shitty apartment in Heywood

how would you describe their childhood? Miserable

were they well-off, poor or somewhere in between when growing up? After Ven took her in, they did have an apartment but because he needed monthly baloperidol (cyberpsycho meds) injections, they were quite poor

what kind of education did they receive? The only real education she ever got was “how to shoot a gun”

what is the biggest lesson they learned growing up? Everything and everyone in the world is going to try its best to destroy you. Destroy it first.

what is their happiest memory? A few weeks after Ven took her in and and it finally hit her, this was real, she had a home, someone that cared for her, and she never had to go hungry again,

what is their most painful memory? Watching her brother, in the middle of a psychotic break, being gunned down. After that it would be saying goodbye to Johnny (in the canon where that happens)

have they kept any meaningful mementos from their past? One of the revolvers she owns was given to her by her brother, and all of her piercings and a couple of her tattoos were done by him so they’re mementos, in a way

is there anything they would change about their past? She would do anything to save her brother.

#themechaneer #ask game #oc: tess valere #oc: vendetta

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 12/4/20 – HALF BROTHERS, THE PROM, I’M YOUR WOMAN, BLACK BEAR, LUXOR, ANOTHER ROUND, ALL MY LIFE, NOMADLAND, MANK and Much More!

I hope everyone had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving. Mine was relatively uneventful, and I only spent most of my time watching movies.  And holy shit, there are a LOT of movies out this week, but at least a few of them I’ve already seen and reviewed, and there are others that are actually pretty good, so I might as well get to it, hm?

First up is this week’s Focus Features theatrical release, HALF BROTHERS, a buddy road comedy directed by Luke Greenfield (Blue Streak, Let’s Be Cops) that’s fairly high concept but also with quite a bit more depth than the director’s previous movies. It stars Luis Gerardo Méndez as Renato Murguia, a wealthy Mexican businessman whose father left him to come to America when Renato was just a child. Just as Renato is about to get married while having issues connecting to his future stepson Emilio, he gets a call that his own father is dying, so he begrudgingly goes to see him. Once there, Renato’s dying father sends him on a scavenger hunt to find someone named “Eloise” with his annoying slacker half-brother Asher (Connor del Rio), because that will provide all the answers Renato is looking for on why his father never returned from America, remarried and had another son. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’ve seen any of the ads for Half Brothers, you may already presume that this is a fairly high-concept buddy road comedy that is constantly going for the zaniest and craziest of laughs. That probably would only be maybe 25% of the movie. Instead, this fairly mainstream comedy finds a way to take a very common comedy trope and throw in enough heartfelt moments that you can forgive the few times when it does go for low-hanging fruit. We’ve seen so many movies like this where two guys (or sometimes ladies, but not as often) are paired with one having zero patience or tolerance for the other, who is beyond aggravating to them. (Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of the better ones.) Obviously, Renato fits snugly into the first category, and Asher could not be more annoying, very early on stealing a goat for no particular reason.

The Mexican angle and the fact that a lot of the film is in Spanish – Focus getting into Pantelion territory here? – does add to make Half Brothers feel like more of a personal story than we might normally see in this kind of movie, touching upon the immigrant experience, from the viewpoint of a low-paid worker as well as a well-to-do industrialist. It also deals with things like fatherhood and brotherhood and what it means to be one or both, so everything ultimately connects far better in the end than some might expect. I also want to give the filmmakers credit for putting together a cast of mostly unknown or little-known actors and getting such great results out of them.

On the surface, Half Brothers seems like just another buddy comedy, but underneath, it’s a heartfelt and emotional journey that touches in so many ways and ends up being quite enjoyable.

Another movie opening nationwide this Friday is ALL MY LIFE (Universal), starring Jessica (Happy Death Day) Rothe as Jennifer Carter and Harry (Crazy Rich Asians) Shum Jr. as Solomon Chau, whose wedding plans are thrown off when he is diagnosed with liver cancer. They realize they have to get married sooner since he might not live to make their planned date, so their friends launch a fundraiser so that they can get married in two weeks. The movie is directed by Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer), who is a more than capable filmmaker with this being his third movie in the last two years.

Now that I’ve actually seen the movie… I’ll freely admit that this is not the kind of movie I usually have very high expectations for, and maybe that’s because I’ve already been burnt twice this year with real-life romantic dramas, first with the faith-based I Still Believe in March and then more recently with Two Hearts. In both cases, I could count the issues and why they failed to tug at the heart strings as they were meant to do.  Even though I’ve generally enjoyed Meyers’ past movies, I wasn’t even sure he could pull off this type of studio romance movie without having to cowtow to the corny clichés that always seem to slip in – or at least find a way to make them more palatable. (And let’s be realistic. This is the kind of movie that snobby film critics just LOVE to trash.)

First of all, Meyers already has two truly fantastic leads working in his movie’s favor.  I’ve been a true Jessica Rothe stan ever since seeing her kill it in Happy Death Day and its sequel. Shum is perfectly paired with her, and the two of them are so good from the moment they first meet and we meet them.  In every scene, you feel like you’re watching some of that rare on-screen romantic chemistry that’s so hard to fake. Their relationship is romantic and goofy, and you’re just rooting for them all the way through even if you do know what’s to come.

Eventually, Sol does fall ill, and it does lead to some more dramatic and tougher moments between the couple, but all of it is handled so tastefully, including their need to raise money so they can have their wedding rather than waiting. I am living proof that people really do come together to step up when they see someone in real need, so I couldn’t even tut tut at something like their fundraiser getting so many people to chip in. On top of his two leads, Meyers has assembled such a great cast around the duo, the most recognizable being Jay Pharaoh from Saturday Night Live, everyone around Jess and Sol handles the requisite emotions with nary a weak link.

There’s just so much other stuff that adds to the enjoyment of watching All My Life from the use of Oasis and Pat Benatar in the soundtrack just to the quality storytelling that makes it all feel quite believable. These sorts of movies tend to be rather corny and the diehard cynic who doesn’t have an ounce of romance or love in their body will find things to hate.

All My Life finds its way into your heart by being one of those rare studio romance movies that understands how human emotions truly work, and there’s nothing corny about that. It’s a beautiful movie that entertains but also elicits more than a few tears. Watch it with someone you love.

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Chloe Zhao’s amazing film NOMADLAND (Searchlight), which I reviewed out of its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, but it’s (sort of) being released in theaters this week. It stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman living in her van as she moves from place to place taking odd jobs within a community of nomads. It’s another amazing film from the filmmaker behind The Rider, who will make her foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe next year with The Eternals, which I’m just as psyched about. There’s no denying that McDormand gives a performance that’s a knock-out, even better than the one in 3 Billboards if you ask me, and there’s also a great supporting role for David Strathairn, who I’ve been hoping would have another role as good as this one. Zhao is just a fantastic filmmaker, and I’m glad to see that The Rider was no fluke.

Unfortunately, Nomadland is only getting a one-week Oscar qualifying run, and I’m not even sure where it’s getting that run since theaters in New York and L.A. aren’t even open yet. Maybe Searchlight will do some drive-in screenings like they did for the New York Film Festival and Telluride? It will get a stronger theatrical release (hopefully) on February 21, just to make doubly sure it qualifies for Oscars.

Opening in theaters this week before streaming on Netflix December 11 is Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the Broadway musical THE PROM, the first feature film he’s directed in ten years. The multiple Tony-nominated musical is about a high school girl named Emma (newcomer Jo Ellan Pellman) who wants to take her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose) to their senior prom, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) cancels the prom instead. The national outrage the situation creates gets the attention of a quintet of self-absorbed Broadway actors who decide to improve their PR by taking up Emma’s cause. Oh, yeah, and those actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and actual Broadway stars Andrew Rannells and Kevin Chamberlin. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve never had any sort of positive or negative gut reaction to Murphy’s work on television over the past few years, but I’ve definitely been mixed on the three movies he’s directed to date. I wasn’t a huge fan of his Eat Pray Love, though I vaguely remember enjoying his debut, Running with Scissors. Either way, he certainly has found his niche with musicals from Glee (a show I’ve never watched)  and finding a musical like The Promseems to be a perfect fit between filmmaker and material.

Having not seen The Prom on Broadway – surprise, surprise -- I was a little worried that it was going to go down the path of nudge-nudge wink-wink inside Broadway path that helped Mel Brooks’ The Producers become a Broadway hit. That I saw, and I didn’t hate the movie based on it, although I’m by no means a total movie-musical stan. There’s some obvious older ones I love, some newer ones that others love but I hated – Rob Marshall is about 50/50 for me -- and you might be surprised by which of them I liked best.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about The Prom is that Murphy manages to truly surprise everyone watching it, whether it’s in Kerry Washington’s single song – who knew she had such an amazing singing voice? – or how enjoyable Keegan-Michael Key is as the school’s Principal Hawkins, who not only loves musicals but actually admires Streep’s two-time Tony-award winning Dee Dee Allen. Considering my frequent disdain for Streep’s over-confidence, knowing full well that she’s one of the best living actors working today, she’s actually pretty amazing in the role of what many must assume Streep is like in real life, which makes her character more than a little META. In some ways, I can say the same for Corden, who is pretty fantastic as Dee Dee’s frequent stage co-star Barry Glickman, who has his own connections to Emma’s plight having been disowned by his mother (Tracey Ullman, who only shows up for one brief scene late in the movie) when he came out to her. Corden has one dramatic moment so powerful I was taken quite aback.

Even with those two actors and Kidman likely to get much of the attention, there’s no denying that the romance between Hellman and Debose, and the three or four numbers they have together, makes up the true heart and soul of The Prom. So here you have this amazing cast, and it’s a musical made-up of very fun and quite catchy songs, and that’s long before you get to Andrew Rannells as out-of-work actor Trent Oliver, who practically steals the whole movie with his showstopper of a number, “Love Thy Neighbor.” And then watching Key holding his own with Streep, both musically and dramatically, you might start wondering, “What is going on here?”

Like I said before, it’s pretty obvious that Murphy has fully poured his passion of movie-musicals into every second of The Prom, and it shows on the face of everyone joining him on this adventure. As much as the subject at the film’s core is fairly serious and a hurdle that many gay kids across the world every day, it’s also quite funny. Kudos must be given to Murphy for being able to emphasize those moments as well as the more dramatic ones. Besides that, Murphy really takes advantage of being able to go to different locations, including a sequence on Broadway that could have been done during the pandemic (it actually was built on a soundstage), another number at an actual mall and even at a monster truck rally. It also doesn’t hurt that Murphy hired Matthew Libatique, a god-like cinematographer in my book, to film the movie either.

Like most musicals, The Prom might lose a little as it goes along, since it gets to be too much that goes on for too long, but then there are more than enough great moments to pull you back. It’s by far one of the stronger movie musicals I’ve seen in a very long time, and just the right feel-good experience we all need right now.

I’ve already reviewed David Fincher’s MANK – a few times, in fact – but if you’re in one of the places where it opened theatrically in November, you can finally see it on Netflix starting this Friday. This is the general problem with the way things are these days because even though this only opened a few weeks ago, I already feel that it’s been discussed and forgotten before most people will have a chance to see it.  Anyway, if for some reason, you’ve managed to avoid things about the movie, it essentially stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who ended up co-writing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in 1940. The film follows Mankiewicz as he mingles with the Hollywood elite in the 30s, including billionaire William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his young ingenue girlfriend Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) who would be the influence for his Oscar-winning screenplay. I expect to be writing a lot about this movie as we get closer to Oscar season sometime next year.

Also on Netflix this week is Selena: The Series, starring Christian Serratos. It’s the kind of thing that I probably would never watch unless I have an excess of time, and as you’re about to learn from the rest of the column, that doesn’t happen frequently.

The third chapter of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe Anthology,” RED WHITE AND BLUE, will debut on Prime Video this Sunday, starring John Boyega as Leroy Logan, a young black man who joins the Metropolitan Police after seeing his father assaulted by police and wanting to make a difference in the racist attitudes from within. You might remember that I reviewed this out of the New York Film Festival a couple months back, so not much more to say there.

A week from Sunday, on December 13, McQueen’s fourth film, ALEX WHEATLE, will hit Amazon, and guess what? I’ve already seen it, so I will review it now. How about that? Alex Wheatle is also a true story, this one starring Sheyi Cole as the award-winning young adult writer when he was a younger and just learning the ropes as a drugdealer/DJ in Brixton before his involvement in the 1981 Brixton riots gets him thrown in jail.

As with the other three movies in the “Small Axe Anthology” there are recurring elements and themes in Alex Wheatle, mostly about the way the immigrants to England from Jamaica and other islands are treated by “The Beast” aka what they call the Metropolitan Police. It does take a little time to get to that, as McQueen, working from a screenplay co-written by Mangrove’s Alaistar Siddons, takes a far more non-linear approach than the other three films. We first see Wheatle being taken into prison where he’s thrown into a cell with a constantly-shitting Rastafarian, but we then cut back to his schooling for a short sequence that reminded me of Alan Clarke’s Scum. Both in prison and in school, we see Alex being abused by classmates and head matron alike, and this portion of the film includes another one of arty moments of actor Cole laying on the ground eyes wide open staring for what seems to go on forever. In some ways, this sequence reminds me of McQueen’s fantastic early film Hunger, since it seems to be cut from similar cloth.

Eventually, Alex gets to Brixton and that’s where this chapter in “Small Axe” really takes off as we see how naïve and green he is while dealing with quite a tough crowd and trying to adjust to city life among the Rastafarian community.

As with the other “Small Axe” chapters, I love how McQueen and his team used reggae music to help set the tone and vibe for the episode, because like Baz Lurhman’s Netflix series The Get Down, the music is frequently a key to this biopic working so well. Of course, it’s also due to the performance by Cole and the actors around him that helps make you feel as if you’re seeing a real part of history.

As with Mangrove, this chapter culminates with an amazing recreation of the 1981 Brixton Riots, done in protest after a house party fire in New Cross that the police don’t bother investigating. The actual riots were a much bigger and scarier event going by Wikipedia which says that 279 police were injured and 56 police vehicles set fire, which makes it sound more like the ’92 L.A. Riots.

I’m not sure Alex Wheatle does as good a job explaining how the young man goes into prison as a DJ and comes out as an author, but like Red, White and Blue it’s still an important and inspirational story that adds quite a bit to the previous three “Small Axe” films.

And once again, here is my interview with McQueen from over at Below the Line.

Also, I should mention that Darius Marder’s excellent Sound of Metal movie, starring Riz Ahmed, hits Amazon Prime Video this Friday, too. Check out my review!

The magnificent Andrea Riseborough stars in Zeina Durra’s LUXOR (Samuel Goldwyn), playing British aid worker Hana who while spending time in the ancient city of Luxor, runs into her former lover Sultan (Karim Saleh), as she reflects on past decisions and her current uncertain situation.

I was quite interested in this one sight unseen, not only because it’s another great starring role for Riseborough. (Honestly, she is one of the best actors working today, and I strongly believe she is just one role away from being the next Olivia Colman, who had been amazing for years before everyone in America “discovered” her in The Favourite and then The Crown… which I still haven’t watched! ARGH!). I was a little anxious about the movie, having seen Rubba Nadda’s Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, which seemingly had the exact same plot.

Durra is a much more capable and confident filmmaker and there’s a lot more overall value in watching Riseborough exploring Egypt as Durra quietly allows Hana’s story to unfold through her interactions with others, as well as her time alone, often languishing in one luxurious hotel room or another.  Then there are the quiet and sometime awkward scenes between her and Saleh, the two of them having been lovers when they were both much younger. We also see Hana in far more vulnerable moments, so we know that she’s by no means actor, and it takes a great actor to really pull off such a dichotomy and bring such dimension to a character with so few words.

There’s something that’s almost comforting watching her dealing with emotions like loneliness in such a tranquil way. I’d even go so far to say that Luxor works in many ways similar to Nomadland, which obviously is getting the far more high-profile release with lots of festival love long before its actual release.  Like that movie, Durra’s film benefits from having masterful cinematography by Zelmira Gainza and an equally gorgeous score by Nascuy Linares, to boot.

Luxor is a quiet, beautifully-made film that really took me by surprise. It acts as much like a travelogue of the title city as it does a tourist’s map to what it must feel like being a woman very much on her own in a foreign land.

I also spoke with Luxor filmmaker Zeina Durra, an interview that will be up at Below the Line hopefully sometime later this week.

With all the talk about Aubrey Plaza in Happiest Season (now on Hulu!), this would be a great time to release another one of her indies that played at the Sundance Film Festival this year, right? What can possibly go wrong?

In Lawrence Michael Levine’s BLACK BEAR (Momentum Pictures), Plaza plays Allison, an actor/filmmaker who arrives at the remote lake house of Christopher Abbott’s Gabe and his pregnant partner Blair (Sarah Gadon), to relax and work on a screenplay, only for the night to turn into philosophical discussions that transform into angry and even violent squabbles. In the second part of the movie, Gabe is the director, and Allison his actor wife, who thinks he’s sleeping with Blair, who is also acting in Gabe’s film.

That plot might seem a little vague, and I can’t exactly tell you whether there is much connection between the two parts of the movie other than it features the same three characters. The first half turns from a drama into a thriller before ending abruptly, while the second part is equal parts comedy and drama as we see a larger part of the world around the trio. In fact, the second part of Black Bear reminded me somewhat of Olivier Assayas’Irma Vep, one of my favorite movies, and that might be one of the highest compliments I can pay a movie.

But first, you have to get through the more quizzical and dramatic first part, which easily could have been done as a three-handed stageplay as we see the changing dynamics between the three people as things get crazier and crazier with one “Holy shit!” moment after the next. (It reminded me a little of Mamet or the play “Gods of Carnage,” although I only saw that as the movie version Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski.)

The fact the connection between the two parts is never explained might confound some people who were otherwise enjoying what is a pretty decent three-hander, but the common theme involves jealousy between the two women. Plaza is a fine dramatic actor when she wants to be, and Gadon is absolutely fantastic, which makes Abbot almost literally the odd man out, but the three of them just have great scenes together.

Black Bear is certainly an enigma of a movie, as much a mystery about what must be going on inside Plaza’s head during some of her softer and crazier scenes, but if you want to talk about range, this gives her so much material for her demo reel that no one could possibly doubt her as an actor again.

Thomas Vinterberg’s new movie ANOTHER ROUND (Samuel Goldwyn) reteams him with his The Hunt star Mads Mikkelsen for a comedy…. Ish… about a group of four middle aged Danish teachers who decide to hold an experiment to prove a theory that people only reach their maximum effectiveness and creativity when they’re .05% drunk. It starts out innocently enough but soon, the men are drinking heavily at school, leading to horrible and unfortunate side effects. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Even knowing Vinterberg’s knack for strange and twisted “comedies,” Another Round is definitely on another level, opening with a scene of drunken kids playing a drinking game that gets them so out-of-control drunk and rowdy. We then meet Mikkelsen’s Martin, a history teacher, whose rowdy seniors are so bored by his classroom technique that Martin is put in front of an inquisition of parents who think he’s going to make their kids fail their final exams. Martin’s home life isn’t much better with his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie) or his own teen sons. Although Martin says he won’t drink when he has to drive, his friend Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) convinces him by announcing his theory about how everyone needs to always maintain a certain percentage of alcohol in their system.  Over the course of the rest of the movie, we’re shown the alcohol level of our “heroes,” although most will see their behavior as some kind of synced-up middle life crisis. For Martin, it’s a breakthrough, as he starts feeling more confident and assertive towards his students, even trying to connect with them via their drinking activities, as seen in the opening montage.

Another Round is quite a different beast from The Hunt, because there’s a more humorous tone to the point where I could totally see an American studio trying to remake this with the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, which would probably lose a lot of the poignancy of what Vinberberg was trying to achieve here. At one point, he throws in a montage of seemingly drunk world leaders, which is kind of amusing even if it’s not quite so apparent why it’s there. There’s a lot of really bad white guy dancing, too, for anyone who is into that sort of thing.

There is definitely a good amount of grief and sadness to the way this story resolves, although Vinterberg still finds a way to leave Martin in a place of joy with a closing scene that may surprise a lot of people. Another Round is another tremendous feather in the cap of the Vinterberg/Mikkelsen collaboration, and it will be in select theaters this Friday before going to digital on December 18.

Another Round will be in select theaters this Friday and then on digital December 18.

Fast Color director Julia Hart returns with I’M YOUR WOMAN (Amazon), once again co-written with husband Jordan Horowitz. It stars Rachel Brosnahan from The Amazing Mrs. Maisel (which I haven’t seen) as Jean, a woman unable to have a baby with her small-time crook husband Eddie. One night, Eddie brings home a baby for Jean, but then he quickly vanishes and Jean finds herself on the run with a stolen baby and one of Eddie’s accomplices, Cal (Arinzé Kene), and there are bad men wanting to question Jean about her missing husband’s whereabouts.

This is another movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, and having not watched Brosnahan on her award-winning show, I was watching this movie trying to figure out what all the fuss was about.  It’s evident from the start that Hart/Horowitz were trying to make a ‘70s-set movie with all the trappings of ‘70s fashion and music, but when you throw in the crime element, it comes across a little too much like last year’s The Kitchen, which wasn’t very good but also wasn’t based on very good source material.

One would presume that the genre elements and a few scattered set pieces, like a shootout at a club, would be the main draw, but it’s almost 30 minutes before we even get any sort of plot, and that’s a big problem. An even bigger problem is that I’m Your Woman just drags for so much of the movie, and it’s pretty obvious that Hart-Horowitz were trying to create a ‘70s movie like some of the films by Scorsese and the movies John Cassavetes made with wife Gena Rowlands. By comparison, I’m Your Woman is stylized almost to a pretentious degree.  Brosnahan does show a few glimpses of there being a good actor in there, but the material just really isn’t quite up to snuff. It also doesn’t help the movie to have the baby crying almost non-stop throughout.

Jean eventually pairs up with Cal’s woman Teri (Martha Stephanie Blake), her son Paul and Cal’s father (played by Frankie Faison), and this is when she learns more about Eddie’s life that she doesn’t know about. Eventually, things start to pick up in the last act, but the multiple problems Hart has with maintaining a steady pace or tone only mildly is made up for by her terrific DP and whoever put together the musical score.  Essentially, the last 30 minutes of I’m Your Woman does make up for the previous 85 minutes, but it’s going to be very hard for many people to even get through how dull the movie is up until that point.

This is a week with some very fine docs, the first one being Weixi Chen and Hao Wu*’s cinema verité film 76 DAYS (MTV Documentary Films), which goes behind the doors of the Wuhan ICU Red Cross hospital over the first 76 days of the COVID pandemic after it hit the rural area of China. (*One of the film’s co-directors/cinematographers shot the film anonymously.)

Here I thought that Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control would be the best or maybe even only movie about the pandemic released this year, but here we have a fantastic documentary that captures what it was really like in one Wuhan hospital as it was nearly overrun months before COVID started to rear its ugly head in the States. The film begins in January 23, 2020 and follows a number of cases as we watch the personnel, all decked out in head-to-toe PPE, trying to save lives and keep people calm while trying to struggle with all the stresses that come their way. There’s actually a little bit of humor in a cranky elderly man (clearly with some form of dementia) who keeps wandering around the hospital, frustrating his tenders, but there’s also a very moving story of a young pregnant woman who has contracted COVID, who ends up being separated from her baby after a Cesarian section.

There are moments early in the movie where you can see panic starting to set in as we see how out of control things begin, but the anonymous health care workers soon get things underhand and manage to find a way to deal with the panic that’s setting in. There’s no question that these doctors and nurses – many whose faces we never even see -- are the definition of frontline workers, trying to deal with this unknown virus without all the answers and solutions that have been discovered over the past ten months.

76 Days will open via the Film Forum Virtual Cinema as well as other places presumably.

I’m glad I had Dana Nachman’s DEAR SANTA (IFC Films) to watch after 76 Days, because I don’t think I could have handled another dark or deep movie after that one. This doc is all about “Operation Santa,” the amazing group of volunteers and adopters who receive the letters young kids write to the North Pole and go out of their way to fulfill the kids’ wishes.

I was a big fan of Nachman’s Pick of the Litter, so I’m thrilled to say that Dear Santa is just as wonderful and joyous, starting with a bunch of kids explaining Santa Clause enthusiastically, because they really believe in Jolly Saint Nick. Over the course of the film, Nachman profiles a number of Adopter Elves, who look through the letters written to Santa by unfortunate kids and pick a few to fulfill their wishes. A lot of them are in New York and Chicago where the program has led to a number of non-profits, but Nachman also goes to Chico, California where many of the families from Paradise, the town destroyed by fires in 2018, ended up relocation. One story of an Adopter Elf named Damion is particularly wonderful, since he, like many of those who get involved in the program, are trying to give back and pay it forward.

Operation Santa is such a great program and Dear Santa is such a wonderful movie, I challenge anyone to watch it and not tear up from how big their heart will grow while watching it.

Julien Temple’s doc CROCK OF GOLD: A NIGHT WITH SHANE MACGOWAN (Magnolia Pictures) is pretty self-explanatory from its title, but as someone who was never really a Pogues fan, I was almost as entertained by Temple’s film as I was by Alex Winter’s Zappa about a musician who I actually was a fan of. Temple uses MacGowan’s own narration to tell his story from growing up in Ireland, the early days of punk that led to the Pogues and eventually, mainstream success.

My absolute adoration of well-made music docs is fairly well-known at this point, and you can’t really get much better in terms of music doc makers than Julien Temple, who had his cameras rolling in the early days of punk, captured one of David Bowie’s more interesting mainstream phases and also made a very cool movie about The Clash frontman, Joe Strummer.

Although I never really cared for The Pogues, that’s probably because I didn’t know them from their rowdier days and more from their mainstream success from “Fairytale of New York” but Temple’s movie rectifies that with some amazing footage from the band’s earlier days. Even more impressive is the footage and pictures of MacGowan during the late ‘70s dancing in the audience at Sex Pistols and other punk shows. (Temple even interviewed MacGowan during this period in the ‘70s, then put the footage in the movie.) As MacGowan tells his own story about growing up in Ireland, Temple frequently uses varied animation to recreate the stories being told, and that does a lot to embellish the cartoon nature of MacGowan’s storytelling.

I still think MacGowan is a bit of an asshole -- I’m sure he’d agree with that assessment -- but Temple has found a way into this very difficult musician, sometimes using close friends like Johnny Depp (a producer on the film) and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream to try to get MacGowan to open up about as much as he ever might. Crock of Gold is certainly an eye-opening portrait of the Pogues frontman that surprisingly offers something to enjoy even for those who never got into his music, but it also shows another dimension to his many fans. If nothing else, it’s a fine testament to why Temple is one of the best music doc filmmakers.

Magnolia held a bunch of one-night only theatrical screenings on Tuesday and will have more on Thursday, but if you miss those, you can catch it On Demand/digital this Friday. (I also have a really enjoyable interview with Julien Temple over at Below the Line that you should check out.)

A.J. and Jenny Tesler’s doc MAGNOLIA’S HOPE follows four years in the life of their young daughter Magnolia (aka Maggie), who has Rett Syndrome. Maggie’s filmmaking parents talk about noticing her strange behavior and finding out that she had a genetic disorder that makes it harder for children to retain what they’ve learned in terms of movement but also might led to far worse disorders. It makes it almost impossible for her to communicate with her parents, which makes it heartbreaking but also quite inspirational that the parents would allow us into their very own difficult journey to try to get their daughter to use and develop all of the skills she learns by making her practice them every single day. The movie will be available to watch for the month of December on the streaming platform Show and Tell, but it’s such a personal movie and another one where I think it will be hard for many to watch without getting a little teary but more out of joy than sadness.

Also out this week is David Osit’s MAYOR (Film Movement), which follows Musa  Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah during his second term of office and determined to make his city a beautiful and dignified place to lived despite being surrounded on all sides by soldiers and Israeli settlements. It will open today at the Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema in New York after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

What there’s more? How about Braden R. Duemmler’s WHAT LIES BELOW (Vertical Entertainment), a thriller starring Ema Hovarth from Quibi’s Don’t Look Deeper as Liberty (aka Libby), a teen girl returning from camp only to learn her mother (Mena Suvari) has a hot younger boyfriend named John (Trey Tucker), who Libby soon begins to question whether he’s human. What could possibly go wrong?

I knew I was in trouble when Suvari is picking her daughter up from archeology camp (that’s a thing?) and I misheard her asking her daughter “Any nice digs?” (think about it), especially since Suvari is playing a stereotypically over-sexed cougar, something that becomes far more obvious once we meet her boyfriend that she’s been sexing up at her lake house. There’s certainly a danger of What Lies Below turning into a prequel to a Pornhub video, but thankfully, Duemmler gets away from the inappropriate sexuality inherent in John’s presence and into the weird behavior that gets Libby suspicious.

Sure, maybe calling the movie “My Stepfather is an Alien” would have been more apropos, and there’s elements of the movie that reminded me of the Tom Hanks’ movie The ‘burbs, and not in a good way. Even so, Hovarth, who really looks like Suvari’s daughter, does a fine job holding this together and keeping you invested in how things might pan out, as things get weirder and weirder and the movie eventually transforms itself into a halfway decent and creepy “body horror” flick.

Weird but well-done, What Lies Below is not even close to the worst thriller I’ve seen this year. That might seem like damning praise, but it’s the best I can do for this one.

Debuting on Shudder this Thursday is Justin G. Dyck’s ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (Shudder), a “reverse exorcism” movie in which a seemingly kindly couple, played by Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings, kidnap a pregnant woman (Konstantina Mantelos) in hopes of getting the spirit of their grandson Jackson, who died in a car crash, and put him into her baby… with the help of demons. What could possibly go wrong? (If you hadn’t guessed, this is the theme of this week’s Weekend Warrior.)

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the horror delivered by streamer Shudder this year, and Anything for Jackson is no exception. In fact, going over Dyck’s filmography, it’s kind of surprising how decent a horror filmmaker he is, because most of his other movies seem like Hallmark-style Christmas movies? Crazy. There are aspects of Anything for Jackson, written by Keith Cooper, who wrote some of those holiday movies for Dyck. I honestly can imagine the two of them making this movie just to be able to do something different, so they come into the horror realm with tons of fim making experience and easily transition into horror.

At the heart of this movie are McCarthy, Richings and Mantelos, who are all fine actors who do a great job selling the horrors but do just as well during the quieter dramatic moments.  Not that there are that many of them, as Dyck/Cooper throw so many absolutely horrific moments at the viewer so that diehard horror fans will not be disappointed. Things shift into another gear when Josh Cruddas joins in as a Satanic cult leader they bring in to help them when they realize they’re out of their league. The results are something akin to Insidiousin terms of the types of demons and ghosts thrown at the viewer.

At times, Anything for Jackson was a little hard to follow, maybe due to its non-linear storytelling, but at least it has a substantial amount of decent replay value, since the demons and kills are so gloriously gory.

Eric Schultz’s dark and trippy sci-fi thriller MINOR PREMISE (Utopia) stars Sathya Sridharan as neuroscientist Ethan, who gets caught up in his own risky experiment involving memory loss when he becomes trapped in his home with his ex-girlfriend Allie (Paton Ashbrook), and he doesn’t remember how they both got there.

For his directorial debut, Schultz has taken the cerebral indie sci-fi film route that we’ve seen in other filmmaking debuts like Shane Carruth’s Primer, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, and if you’re a fan of those movies, you’ll already know if this would be for you or not. This is also the kind of movie that really requires the closest attention and fullest focus, which is not something I’m great at right now. Because of that, I don’t have a ton to say about a film that does a good job pulling the viewer in with its intriguing premise.

Schultz is a pretty decent filmmaker and discovering Sridharan, who has done a lot of single-episode TV appearances but nothing major, is quite a coup since this is quite a solid showcase for the young actor. I wasn’t as crazy about Ashbrook, which makes it for a rather uneven two-hander.

Minor Premise is just fine, and I think some people will definitely like it more than I did. I definitely will have to watch it again when I’m not so distracted by ALL THOSE OTHER MOVIES ABOVE THAT I JUST FUCKING REVIEWED!

It will be in theaters, in virtual cinema, and digital/On Demand this Friday, so check it out for yourself.

And finally…

Director Dennis Dugan of Big Daddy and Happy Gilmore directs LOVE, WEDDINGS AND OTHER DISASTERS (Saban Films), a “Love American Style” rom-com anthology with a cast that includes Maggie Grace, Jeremy Irons, Diane Keaton and more. Grace plays Jessie, a fairly inexperienced wedding plan hired to orchestrate the high-profile wedding of Boston mayoral candidate (Dennis Staroselsky), and then… oh, you know what? I’ll leave the rest of the description to the review portion of our review.

We meet Grace’s character as she and her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend are skydiving, which goes horribly wrong as they end up fighting all the way down and crashing through an outdoor wedding, caught on a viral video that gets her dubbed the “Wedding Thrasher.” Imagine what a PR disaster that would be for mayoral candidate Rob Barton to have her planning his wedding, but Jessie quickly bonds with his fiancé Liz (Caroline Portu) and begins preparations. Meanwhile, Barton’s problematic brother Jimmy (Andy Goldenberg) has gone on a game show called “Crash Couples” (that’s hosted by no less than Dugan himself) and he allows himself to be chained to a Russian “lawyer” named Svetlana (Melinda Hill) who is actually a stripper. They’re willing to stick it out since the winner gets a million dollars.

Surely, that’s more than enough stories, right? Nope. Turns out that Jessie’s main competition to plan the wedding is a legendary caterer named Lawrence Phillips (Irons) who is set-up on a blind date with Diane Keaton, who is blind. Oy vey.  Also, there’s Andrew Bachelor as Captain Ritchie, who gives humorous sightseeing tours of Boston via the Charles River in an odd land/water vehicle, but one day, he encounters a young woman with a glass slipper tattoo, and he becomes quite smitten. We’ll get back to him. Maybe. In fact, Duggan spends so much time setting up different stories and relationships without much connection that you wonder whether he can tie things up in the oh-so-predictable way these things normally go.

Although the movie starts out fine, and it’s actually not a bad role for Grace, as soon as Duggan introduces the game show, then we learn that Svetlana (real name Olga) is a tripper connected to the mob and they get involved, things just start going downhill very fast. Also, the idea that Keaton -- who I haven’t seen in a good movie in almost two decades --  would not think twice about playing a klutzy blind person. As soon as she shows up and immediately knocks over one of Phillips’ signature champagne glass fountains, I knew we were in for a very long haul. I didn’t even mention the other storyline involving a musician named Mack (Diego Boneta) whose band Jessie is trying to get to play the wedding – one of the multiple meet-cutes in the movie -- although Mack is squabbling with his bandmate Lenny (Jesse McCartney) who has a new Asian girlfriend who is intruding in their friendship.  (I’m sure the fact her name is “Yoni” is meant as as Yoko Ono reference.)

Then on top of that, Dugan steals the gimmick from There’s Something About Mary, by constantly cutting back to Elle King and Keaton Simmons as they’re playing folksy songs in the park. Okay, the fact that Dugan wrote many of those pretty decent songs they perform is pretty impressive.

But the movie is very predictable, especially how it all comes together for the finale, which obviously has to take place at the wedding to which everything has been building up to.

Otherwise, Dugan’s film is maybe 20% an okay movie but the other 80%? Yeesh!! It’s about as romantic as a date with the Marquis de Sade, and it somehow manages to be an equal opportunity offender... in terms of offending blind people, Asians, Jews, Arabs, gay people and even strippers and Russian mafia. It took Dugan 14 years to get this passion project made, and it’s pretty obvious why.

As usual, there were a couple movies I didn’t have time to watch, but not quite as many as the ones I did make time to watch:

King of Knives (Gravitas Ventures) End of Sentence (Gravitas Venture) Billie (Greenwich) Godmothered (Disney+) Wander (Saban Films) Music Got Me Here (First Run Features) Stand! (Fathom Events, Imagination Worldwide) HAM: A Musical Memoir (Global Digital Releasing) In the Mood for Love (4k Restoration)

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #ImYourWoman #Mank #Nomadland #CrockOfGold #TheProm #BlackBear #Luxor #AnotherRound #HalfBrothers #AllMyLife

[meangirlsx]

Any tips on calming nerves for an audition? I have one coming up and I’m especially nervous because it’s one of my favorite shows and the director has told he’s doing a fairly small cast.

Thank you so much for reaching out!

Breathe, and breathe deeply. We forget to really breathe so easily, or we let ourselves breathe shallowly without realizing. It makes a huge difference to take deep, slow breaths. It sort of forces your body to calm down.

View it as the “fight or flight” response that it is. While it’s totally natural to feel nervous, sometimes understanding a little bit more about that can help. Our bodies haven’t quite mastered the difference between “danger” and “I’m nervous about an event.” The body’s response is basically the same to both. So your feelings are completely valid and reasonable, but also know that they’re stemming from evolution with the intent to help you run from or fight a threat.

Drink water. A lot of us tend to forget to drink water when we’re nervous, and it’s one of the most important things for our body. Especially for an audition where you’ll be using your voice. Plus, a lot of us also tend to get dry mouths when we’re nervous.

Prepare yourself to a point that you’re proud of. If you’re doing the best job you can do, you can be proud of that and know you did your best. Then you don’t have to doubt that you did everything you could to showcase yourself.

Remember that mistakes are human. We all make mistakes, especially in nervous situations. Even though the people casting are looking for the right person for the role, as people, we don’t usually judge mistakes, and they often make us like someone more. Plus, the mistake is almost always nowhere near as big as we feel like it is. Be forgiving and patient with yourself. How you recover from a mistake says a lot more about you than the mistake itself or the fact that you made it.

Know that casting can be arbitrary. If the casting doesn’t go the way you hope, it could have absolutely nothing to do with you. It doesn’t mean you were bad. It doesn’t in any way mean you weren’t good enough. You absolutely are. It can be that the director’s vision is just a bit different than yours and someone else fits that better.

This is one of my favorite stories to share: for this one show, it was between two guys for the male lead, and the casting ultimately had nothing to do with talent. They were both right for it for different reasons. But one guy got cast over the other because his eye color matched the eye color of the actor playing the character’s father and the other actor’s eyes didn’t match. It can be as arbitrary as that.

Especially if it’s a small cast, if you don’t get a part, it could really have nothing to do with you. It wouldn’t necessarily be that something was wrong about you, but that something was particularly right about someone else, and you were also right in a different way.

View it as practice. It’s always good to have more practice auditioning. Even super successful performers still talk about getting nervous for auditions. The more practice you have auditioning, the easier it becomes.

Be yourself. That’s what you’re there for. You could be exactly who they’re looking for. And if you’re not, that’s not your fault and you don’t have to make it your problem. But they want to see you shine. It might not feel like it, but the people in the room are rooting for you. No one else will ever be exactly the way you are, and that is one of your biggest strengths in life and in performing.

Walk into the room with confidence, even if it’s fake. You don’t want to come off as arrogant, but I have a feeling you wouldn’t. We’re typically drawn to people who are confident and charismatic. A lot of the people who enter that room will give off nervous energy. You can, too. You’re allowed to be nervous. But if you walk in confidently, you’ve probably already set yourself apart from the crowd.

Let yourself be happy to be there. It’s an amazing opportunity. Even if you don’t end up in the show, you’re part of the process, and you’re in the room. That alone is what some people dream of. If you can convince yourself that you’re grateful and happy to be there, you’ll feel better about the experience.

Let yourself love the work. You’re there because you love performing, right? Let yourself enjoy it if you can. You get to go perform for this amount of time. You get to spend part of your day doing something you love. And when you enjoy what you’re doing, you stand out even more. 

The people casting are really the ones who should be nervous. They have to make the decisions. Your job is to make their job harder. Your job is to be yourself and shine like the star you are, because even if it is just for two minutes, you are the star.

At the end of the audition, you get to walk out of there and go about the rest of your day. The people casting don’t. So, my last tip is to celebrate in that freedom.

Create a post-audition tradition. Find something you can do to reward yourself. Eat a slice of pizza, watch an episode of a favorite show, paint your nails, spend a little extra time outside and enjoying the sunshine on your way back. You worked hard to get here. Whatever the outcome is, the tradition is something to look forward to and you can know that you earned it.

I’ve been on the other side of the casting table. Truly, they want you to do well. Everyone gets nervous and they understand that.

I hope it goes well. I never know if you should wish someone luck or a broken leg for an audition, because it’s theatre, but it’s not a show, so whichever one is the appropriate token is the one I’m sending you.

You’ve got this. You can do this. Trust yourself. And please let me know how it goes! I’m cheering for you.

ADD-ON: Additionally, Kerry Butler is producing a podcast about trying to make it in the business and it’s really helpful for things like this.

She recently released one specifically about auditioning that would be a great listen, I’m sure! I haven’t, yet, but someone posted about it and recapped a piece of advice from it — be aware of how you carry yourself and know that if you don’t get the role, that doesn’t mean you didn’t make an impression on the director(s). Furthermore, in Kerry’s Instagram story today, she also reaffirmed the point that no one else brings to a room what you do, so be yourself and that’s already more than enough.

#reference #audition #audition tips #audition advice

[princesspiratecat]

Our Last Passenger in the wagon is 22-year old Conner O’Sullivan. 

I don’t think it’s possible to have a more Irish sounding name than that, lol. 

Conner comes from a long line of small farmers based in County Kerry that had always supported themselves. However, when he was just a baby, they lost everything during the infamous Potato Famine of ‘49 in Ireland, and since then the standing of his family has been in steady decline. Out of his 2 brothers and 5 sisters, only 3 sisters and his mother survived, and shortly after it was all over his father drank himself to death, leaving Conner to carry on the family name at just 7 years old. Conner has never forgiven his father for this.

Because he had been a good student and had shown some intelligence, one of his uncles gave him the money to buy a steerage class ticket to New York when he was 18, whereupon, along with so many other Irish immigrants, Conner initially landed. Soon afterwards, the prospect of “free” land drew him west, and he traveled around in that direction doing anything from tending sheep, to curing Beef Jerky, to driving Oxen. As a result, he’s got quite a few abilities.

When he arrived in Illinois with the team he had been hired to drive, he figured he would keep on going and stake a claim in Kansas- as someone had told him the weather was “better” there and more ideal for farming. 

Conner misses his family a great deal, so he’s intent on working hard to send for them one day, when he’s got something to show for his efforts. A fresh start is just what his family needs, coupled with a little hope.

Below: Cartoon depicting victims of the Irish Potato Famine, or “Great Famine.”

#Homestead Challenge #Sims 2 Gameplay

[douchebagbrainwaves]

RETURN OF ARTISTS SHIP

We learned this lesson a long time to make up their minds, they know. Companies sending spam often give you a way to generate deal flow for series A rounds with no loss of quality. Or to put it more brutally, 6 months before they're out of business. One day, we'd think of ourselves as the next Google and dream of buying islands; the next, we'd be pondering how to let our loved ones know of our utter failure; and on and on. No matter how much skill and determination you have, if you roll a zero for luck, the outcome is zero. 15981844 spot 0. Now VCs are fighting to hold the line at 20%. Several people used that word married.

The earlier you pick startups, the more you stay pointed in the same area, they had no choice but to ride the thing down. Switching to a new idea every week will be equally fatal. Which means, especially in the case of more promising startups, which tend to have an explicit definition. Then at least you won't know what it means. If that's true, most startups that could succeed fail because the founders don't devote their whole efforts to them. But the real advantage of the statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. You enter a whole different way of life when it's your company vs. There were two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your control i. Yes, he may have extensive business experience. And then there is the question of female founders. So I don't even try to predict it.

Words that occur disproportionately rarely in spam like though or tonight or apparently contribute as much to decreasing the probability as bad words like unsubscribe and opt-in lists who don't even try to predict it. We do this with YC itself. There is no sharp line between the two types of ideas, but the most successful startups from the rest. These were the biggest surprise for me. When someone from corp dev, ask yourselves, Do we want to establish a first-rate research university in a nice place, it would seem like the most important factor in the growth of mature economies—that is who Jessica Livingston is. And yet even when they know what corp dev does and know they don't want to sell, they take the meeting. They don't even get a shot at being really big.

In fact, the poorer people are, the harder it will be hard even to get this past filters, because they evolve with the spam. But I could be wrong. But openness to new ideas has to be built of top quality materials and carefully maintained. It's interesting that describe rates as so thoroughly innocent. Would you like to stop and think how tired you are. I going to wear this all the time? Why? I'm certain it isn't. Just as the relationship between founders was more important than recognizing spam features. If it were, each successful startup would be founded the month it became possible, and that would have been to take every penny of the $20 million and use it to buy us. Mostly because they're optimistic by nature.

Can you imagine anything more painful for a hacker? The fifteen most interesting words in this spam are: qvp0045 indira mx-05 intimail $7500 freeyankeedom cdo bluefoxmedia jpg unsecured platinum 3d0 qves 7c5 7c266675 The words are a mix of good and bad. If you get to the next step, whatever that is. YC what it was. At YC, the culture was the product. It explains why they steal your ideas. Like a lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost.

We know now that Facebook was very successful, but put yourself back in 2004. They'd have to make their mails indistinguishable from your ordinary mail. So they don't have to do is look at you funny, and you get what you deserve. He didn't think he was starting a company. And this is not a serious problem for them. Or rather, what used to be. The only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other startups. One founder put it very succinctly: Fast iteration is the key to success.

If we can decide in a couple days. Most startups fail because they don't make something users want. Our startup made software for making online stores. The spammers wouldn't say these things if they didn't sound exciting. That's a big change. Though computationally expensive in the general case, it might be that starting a startup is already trying as hard as it can to sell whatever it sells. And ran out of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids.

One of the mistakes novice pilots make is overcontrolling the aircraft: applying corrections too vigorously, so the aircraft oscillates about the desired configuration instead of approaching it asymptotically. Mostly we had the same sort of insight Socrates claimed: we at least knew we knew nothing. By all means be optimistic about your ability to make something great. Creating wealth is not a new phenomenon: investors were James Watt's biggest problem too. The danger is to companies in the middle of the range. Merely looking for the word click will catch 79. But ultimately the reason these delays exist is that they're to the advantage of investors. PB made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startup we fund: that it's better, initially, to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. 99 and, say, every 20th person leaving the polling place who they voted for. The reason you're overlooking them is the same reason it is in other industries. This is possibly even more disgusting than getting inside the mind of the spammer, and frankly I want to spend money on stuff.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #spot #day #ideas #Words #quality #investors #mail #determination #Facebook #failure #definition #question #people #configuration #product #line #money #spammer #knew #types #mix #comparison #middle #word #place

[knightofbalance-13]

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/160161209960/rwde-theory-reactions-to-everything#notes

Oh boy...

By the looks of it, people tend to get offended on the characters’ behalf. People don’t believe that characters would do a certain action, or react a certain way.

The question that I’m going to at least try to answer, is “Why?”

Why do we want these characters treated a certain way?

Replace “people” with “the rwde tag and it’s detractors” then you’d be right. And we already know why you get offended on people’s behalf: In the case of Yang, you get angry because you project your family problems onto Taiyang despite the fact that multiple people have attested that’s not what you say. For Sun, it’s because you think he’s being abusive and yet ignore Adam’s abuse. And for Jaune....bias and to bash the writers.

Whether it be because the fans share the same experiences as them, or personalities, or simply because we think they’re ‘cool,’ - We relate to them.

This is why I think that people get so passionate about how these characters are being treated. If we were in their shoes, we would want the same level of respect.

Here’s the thing: you AREN’T them! As much as you relate to characters, that doesn’t make you them at all. You don’t have their experiences, personality, family and expectations. You aren’t them so what is offensive to you may not be to them, as shown by the numerous people who have told you that their families operate in the same way Yang and Taiyang does.

If this is why I have a beef with Tai, I’d like to share my reasons:

We already know why you have a beef with him: He doesn’t operate how you wanted him to, you project problems he cannot control onto him and you get encouragement to do so. No matter what you say, this is the truth built through observation and evidence such as admitting that Taiyang might not be offensive but refusing to take that route despite all the evidence says you should or that you directly compare your mom to him, who you hate, or that your stance on him was neutral at first but has degraded as more and more people egg you on.

For starters, we (as the audience) never really knew anything about Taiyang Xiao Long. The only things that we knew about him were the fact that he shut down after Summer’s death, and that he has a tendency to send dogs through the mail.

- (incidentally, I believe that Zwei started as a therapy dog.)

Those were the only things we knew about Tai. So, having him say such things like “You lost some brain cells with that arm of yours.” Comes out of nowhere for us (or at least, me.) Again, Port and Oobleck wereshocked by this, and rightfully so. Had Yang not laughed, the professor and doctor would have been scaredSHITLESS about Yang’s mental health.

Okay, first off:

A. The argument that Yang’s laugh can’t be taken into account about Taiyang being offensive is akin to saying that Yang was a terrible sister in Volume 1 if you exclude that time she was running to save Ruby’s life: it’s cruical and important and taking it out just makes you wrong and not the writers.

B. You act as though Taiyang did nothing from the moment we saw him in Volume 3 to Volume 4, Episode 4 whereas we see on at least four different occasions he’s a kind and caring father and thus that is established. Just as well, you can draw conclusions on a person by who their friends and family are. Port is not above insulting his students to teach them a lesson and Oobleck can be harsh as well. And then we have Qrow and Yang herself. Qrow is Taiyang’s long time teammate, brother in law and probable partner and he himself has insulted and criticized his nieces before as well and Yang herself has ditched Ruby to be on her own the moment they got to Beacon. These four examples show that Taiyang keeps the company of harsh but well meaning individuals. And then there’s the fact that Rooster Teeth VA’s share quite a few aspects of their personality with their characters, especially RWBY characters as Monty outright designed quite a few of them around the VAs. And Taiyang’s voice is provided by Burnie Burns, a fatherly member of RT...and one of the biggest snarkers in history, to the point the Lenoard Church isn’t that far off. All of these things point to the fact that what taiyang did wasn’t OOC but actually expanding on his character, his company clues us in that he’s like that and his VA supports that.

So you don’t have a point to stand upon here.

Now, I’m not trying to demonize Tai here (though I know that Kob will try to find a way to make it sound like I did), but this means that the writers don’t exactly understand how PTSD works, or at least, they don’t know how to present it.

A. You aren’t trying to demonize Taiyang here, you’re trying to demeonize the writers. 

B. Tv Tropes disagrees as U have shown that in the meta folder of the Awesome tag for RWBY, an actual Amputee praised Rooster Teeth for their work. So, as a person without an amputated arm, you have less of a reason to find it offensive.

They skipped over many things. Like Yang’s reaction to having to take off the arm, or how to emphasize that it was her decision alone and not because she overheard Tai’s conversation with her teachers, or what events led her to trying to go out on her own.

So? I can’t think of anything to cut out of Volume 4 as everything was so abre bones due to the fact that RT can’t make any more episodes or longer episodes of RWBY without losing money. RWBY’s primary focus is to make money, that’s how companies work.And what you are demanding would lose them money. Not to mention the fact that they have to work with 3D animation which is harder than 2D and have a very limited amount of time, espeically when you take RWBY chibi into account,

Boiling it down to the little that we see comes off as the writers only fulfilling the barest minimum requirement of what to represent. At this point, I don’t care about the prosthetic (so don’t even bother with that tvtropes entry) what I care about, is how PTSD was represented.

Probably because that’s all they can do and afford in that time span. RWBY isn’t on a major network nor is it backed by a huge company nor is it the sole project of Rt nor does it even make money to watch it. \

And once again, people in the group you are being offended for are fine with it. Maybe not everyone but unless it’s a majority, that’s just human subjectivity.

Also: You said you’d be talking about Taiyang and now you’re ranting about teh writing. Not a great omen.

Again, there have been other shows that have handled PTSD with more respect than RWBY. If Legend of Korra can do it, then I’d expect that RWBY, a show that one of the writers seems to believe is better than LoK (if his comments are to be believed), should have no problem.

A. Legend Of Korra had a previously established background and basis, ahd more eperience behind it, more money behind it and more time behind it.

And B. Miles just said he personally didn’t like it. Not professionally, personally. Of course, I doubt you know the difference.

Who is at fault here?

Nobody wants to see their favorite character being mistreated by canon. It simply implies that the writers hate them. But, I do think that we shouldn’t blame the characters for how they treat other characters.

We should blame the writers.

No, you are to blame for expecting something when the signs say something else, for not accommodating to what the creator wants to do and not you, for expecting to judge RWBY by standards it can’t possibly meet and for ignoring facts just to bash the writers. 

PS: Then why did you make several posts bashing characters and not writers? This whole thing is just an excuse to bash what you want isn’t it?

So, this is me saying it right now: I blame miles and Kerry for how Yang’s PTSD was misrepresented.

No, you are to blame for not comprehending that what you expected out of Yang’s PTSD wasn’t exactly what you got and taking that personally.

They used the lowest common denominator (Giving her only one on-screen nightmare, and only one on-screen panic attack) to ‘represent’ what Yang is dealing with.

That or teh bare bones is all they can manage: not like Maya is expensive or that Rooster Teeth isn’t a major studio or anything.

Her nightmares are never brought up again. Her panic attack is never mentioned after she had it. Those symptoms just… disappear. Never to be seen or heard from again.

As is a lot of stuff in RWBY, even before Volume 4.

Also, Charon’s chairman wasn’t heard from again after Season 8, guess we’ll never see him aga-He’s the main antagonist for Seasons 11 - 13. Well now I feel foolish.

I mean, Armed and Ready pretty much left no doubt that Yang is fully recovered, and I don’t want that yet. I want to see her overcome her fears and trauma. I want to see her confront people who have abandoned her (both physically and emotionally (which means that Tai will also be called out here)). And I just want to see her being allowed to resent the people who basically left her.

And yet when someone points out the fact that Yang has left people and hurt people as well, you get defensive and said she’s allowed to do that stuff. You don’t want Yang to get angry, you want her to get angry on your behalf even if it doesn’t make sense for her.

We also have the problem of the disconnect between the writers, and the actors

*Narrows eyes* You asshole, you better not!

- This means that if they have any objections to what is being said and/or done, they don’t have any say in it. They can’t object because, they’ve already written it, and have likely already animated it.

Ad libbing or on teh spot editing, such as the Maidens.

And you can’t animate something before doing voice work: It never works. That’s just stupid and shows how little you know about Rt’s production.

Like I said before, only jaune gets that kind of interaction with the writers. If (for example) Kerry were to write a scene that makes jaune look OoC, miles would object to it. But if they were to do the same with Sun, then Michael has no time to object because they’ve already written it.

Or maybe the OOC moment was used to make the character look vunerable or emphasize an emotion, like Blake Slapping Sun like Arryn said. But she was forced into that by Miles right? Not like you have used it to defend yourself from criticism, thus showing you only want stuff to apply to others, not you.

If an actor/actress has a problem with how something is done, they would object to it, and the writer would adjust accordingly. But the RWBY actors/actresses don’t get that kind of treatment. Because miles, Kerry, and Grey are too arrogant about their writing abilities.

Or you have a massive hate goner for the writers as well as a bias against males so you inject flaws into stuff to bitch about. Considering Miles has publicly put himself down numerous times, the latter is probably correct.

People would give them less heat if they were to get a woman to help them write. Or perhaps even a Black person, so they could write the White Fang better.

@tumblezwei @ula-star and @rainbowloliofjustice are all females and they have no problem with the writing if female characters.

Liekwise, @rainbowloliofjustice and @mageknight14 are members of racial minorities and they find nothing offensive with the White Fang.

Meanwhile, you a White male is being offended. Says a lot.

Huh. Maybe that’s why everyone hates the male characters so much. There’s only one gender writing the show into the ground.

The uh higher ratings, better reviews, more positive feedback and actual women disagreeing with you says otherwise.

Between how jaune kept harassing Weiss in Volume 2, and how Pyrrha was only written in to basically be a martyr and jaune’s love interest, there seems to be a disconnect between how the show was marketed (Being a show that focuses on four independent female characters who kick some ass) and what we have been presented with (Jaune & RWBY)

If Jaune harrassed Weiss then Pyrrha harrassed Jaune so that argument is mute.

Hey uh Dudeblade, Kamina from tengen toppa Gurren Lagann’s on the phone. He said that all mentor characters are like that and that he got less character development than Pyrrha. He also said that he was based off a woman, is replaced by a woman and is succedded by a woman so sexism is mute here too,

Jaune and his 5:52 minutes of screentime and Yang’s 16:32 minutes.

Now, I am a straight male myself, so I don’t know what they’re going through exactly.

And yet you will claim to speak for them here. Meanwhile, the three bisexuals I work with have made a post detailing why 90% of what you are about to say is bullshit. (https://team-crtq.tumblr.com/post/160160464449/rwby-and-ships)

Even I have more of a right to be offended since I’m some weird demi-heterosexual hybrid.

So… Anyone want to defend RT on how they made Weiss the “Morally Grey” character despite her being a blatant racist?

@mageknight14 and @rainbowloliofjustice , two African Americans, will as will I since Weiss had very good reason to think that way seeing as the only Fanaus she ever knew where the terrorists going around making her life hell. 

Seriously. Weiss being a racist is not a morally grey thing. The Schnee Dust Company using unfair faunus labor is not a “Morally Grey“ area.

And once again, you miss the point of teh character. Weiss dDOESN’T approve of this and she doesn’t like ebing associated with that because she disagrees with it. The only thing black and white here is your morality,

The writer’s attempts to actually write racism was pretty much racist. The only benefit I’m giving them is that they’re too incompetent to actually write it in the first place. - That’s it.

Considering the fact that you made an innocent implication that every single Fanaus was a member of the White Fang and thought like the White Fang, you are not one to talk.

Yeah, I have a bias towards the female characters, but the show was advertised as one that would be about four kickass female characters fighting monsters, and having an adventure.

And that excuses your bias how exactly? All this tells me that no matter what you say, you will always demand that the females get special treatment and shaft the males.

So why are they constantly getting the shaft?

Volume 4 was the first time that the collective male lines were larger than the first, and it was the second time that jaune had a spot in the top 3.

Okay, let’s modify the line post shall we?

Take away 75% of Jaune’s lines and give them to Ruby because tehy were all spent developing Ruby and making Ruby look better.

Erase Sun and Taiyang entirely and give their lines to Blake and Yang

Erase Ghira’s lines outside of the White Fang alone (no Blake) and he’ll have three or four.

Form where I am standing, the only male character who isn’t being used as a tool to build up a female character is Qrow and Iroonwood....Two males. Women aren’t getting the shaft and the previously mentioned ladies agree with me.

didn’t sign in to watch jaune talk to Ruby, I signed on to see Ruby get development.

Those two things go hand in hand: Most of Jaune’s talking is to develop Ruby. You got what you wnated, it just wasn’t exactly what you wanted so you’re bitching.

The girls shouldn’t need a male character to express for them. They should be strong, independent women.

Even if it’s in character for them? Like say, the character refuses to process things themselves so another character has to help them out. You essentially want the sexes to be completely separate from each other. 

Or you want them to essentially be islands of people. ... You know, they use to tell me that too. It’s now called Toxic Masculinity. Guess Men and Women are completely and totally different huh? (Sarcasm)

But if you absolutely need to have a male character help out one of the leading female characters, Blake could have had that lesson that Sun gave her given to her from her father, and there would be no problem. - Mostly because Ghira didn’t abandon his team.

Except Ghira doesn’t know what Blake is doing, doesn’t know the circumstances and isn’t one of ehr friends so the sentiment is meaningless.

Also: Ghira abandoned the White Fang by your logic and let them become terrorists by your thought process so it still doesn’t work.

I was only annoyed by Sun in Volume 4. But Sun wandered into hate territory for me when Blake was about to open up to her father about what happened. It wasn’t even a good joke. It was the media equivalent to showing a starving man a sandwich, then throwing it out. It was just cruel. Who asked for that to happen? - Which fan actively wanted that to happen?

And who said she was going to open up so easily considering teh fact she had been running away each time? Who is to say that Ghira would have gotten through huh?

Also: I guess you wanted Illa to film the Belladonnas, go to Adam and have Adam come in and kill everyone jsut so you can shove Sun out of a scene huh?

Now, you may be wondering why I dislike the writers so much.

Because they aren’t catering to your every whim and they aren’t doing what you want exactly.

Well, it’s because they’re shit at taking criticism. But, also because their cultish defenders are constantly making excuses for them.

The only cult i see is the one that suicide baits people,manipulates the facts, sets unrealistic standards, attacks anyone who criticizes them and thinks they’re radical ideals are always right,

If these guys want to be considered a “Professional production company,” then they should also have to take the criticisms that come along with it.

That’s like judging a newly created video game studio to the standards set by Nintendo: You ask a much smaller,much elss experienced company to meet standards created by decades of experience. I don’t judge RWBY as I would Kill La Kill: Studio Trigger have far more advantages. I judge RWBY as I would TFS, even harsher considering RWBY is an original IP: As a well known, respectable but ultimately small project. And if things don’t go my way: tough, that's who art works. And I’ll enjoy it regardless instead of drowning in my own bile.

If they’re an “Ammeter production company,” then they should need all the help that they can ge

But you’re noyt helping: You just want things to go your way so you try to bully people using mob mentality and big buzz words and use people’s prejuice against them. You are just being petty and hateful.

Point being, is that while I’m not going to pretend that the entirety of the rwde tag is constructive, criticism is criticism. Doesn’t matter how it’s put.

Okay then, i guess it’s perfectly right for me to say:

“You’re a piece of shit and everything you do is shit now either do exactly as I say or else”(Don’t actually endorse this)

I guess from now on I’ll keep you to the same standard I do RWBY...or you could push it and I’ll expect Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann levels of writing.

I can prove it, too. There was once a guy named Semmelweis. This guy was one of the leading pioneers in sanitation techniques. Even before Louie Pasteur. But, you may be thinking, “Why haven’t I heard of this guy before?”

- Because he was a dick. He was still right, but he was a dick who was rude to others.

And if Semmelweis was just trying to make people do as he told without any regard for what was right, only what HE thought was right then he deserved to be forgotten and he deserved to be wrong and ignored because he was just bending people to his will, just like you do.

Rwde tag is Semmelweis, or at least, some of it is. Rwde may be dicks, but rwde tag still has a point.

Said point is to terrorize, bully and manipulate people to get what they want through logical fallacies, mob mentality and slander.

Fuck the people who think that the rwde tag is full of hate.

The people in the rwde tag are just sick and tired of the mistakes that the writers could easily avoid by having more writers, or having an editor who isn’t afraid and is willing to be rough with them.

And yet you yourself will brush off any criticism towards you as blind devoution or blind hate or whatever, thus showing taht you just want things to go your way.

Well then, things are gonna go your way. *A sleek, metallic humanoid robot appears behind him, gear-like eyes glowing meancingly* Consider me your editor.

#rwde bullshit #rwby

[thewafflewhat]

22/07/17 (9th time) (evening)

So, let’s start off this rant with the glow stick fiasco. I’m sure by now you’ve all heard about glow stick gate, but if you haven’t, I’ll give you some context now: I’m standing in one of the two massive fat-off queues either side of the building to get in when suddenly this woman walks past handing out glow sticks saying that it was for Wicked, and for some reason I thought she was with the theatre so I took some (free glow sticks!) and stuck them in my mother’s bag. There were four in each little pack; two green and two pink, and there was a little note on them that said something to the effect of ‘get them out when Elphaba hands Glinda the book in For Good’ and I just thought ‘aw that’s cute! Like for the last ever show in Germany! That’ll be cute omg the AV staff are being really cute this cast change’… Until less than a minute later, a woman in the FOH suit walked down the line in the opposite direction taking all of the glow sticks off of everyone, and tbh I didn’t want to give mine in because even if they weren’t going to be used in the show they’re still free fucking glow sticks! Who turns down free glow sticks?! But they were doing bag checks on the way into the theatre (as an extra security measure after all of the terror attacks across the UK since the start of the year) and I figured they’d get taken off of me on the way in anyway… So I gave them to the woman as she came back down the line to head back into the theatre.

So, the FOH staff know when the glow sticks are going to be pulled out and they were on high fucking alert going into that part of the scene (although I’d almost forgotten about them at that point) so when Elphaba passes the Grimmerie to Glinda just before FG all you heard were the cracks of glow sticks that the people giving them out had still managed to sneak in, and then suddenly there was a FOH staff member crouching down and running down every single aisle (that I could see of the stalls from where I was sitting) to tell anyone holding the glow sticks to put them down so they wouldn’t be distracting, and it was the funniest goddamn thing I think I’ve ever seen in that theatre not related to the show. Legitimately, I was half immersed in the scene (only half because I didn’t want to start crying in public…) and I heard the cracks and had a bit of an ‘oh shit’ moment when I remembered about the glow sticks and then I just started laughing.

ANYWAY altogether that incident probably lasted less than 30 seconds and no one got the glow sticks out again, not even for the curtain call and speeches. And that was glow stick gate, now onto my other rambling!

- Random thought before I start to properly ramble but the cogs on the set actually turn! It took me seeing the show nine time to finally see it but I thought it was so cool!

- I said it before when I went to see Kerry’s last show but I’ll say it again: the audience for cast change dates (specifically last show dates) is fucking electric, there’s so much love from just about everyone in the theatre and I’m glad I got the chance to experience it again; it’s Wicked at its best imo, purely because the cast gives as good as they get and react accordingly to all the love and extra attention from the audience, and you can really tell that they were savouring every second

- The best example I can think of to try and describe what the atmosphere was like to anyone who wasn’t at the show was the applause that went on for a ridiculous amount of time for just about every principle cast member for their first entrance.

- Suzie’s lasted for a literal minute (which made “it’s good to see me isn’t it” and “no need to respond, that was rhetorical” even better imo) and I just remember never wanting it to stop because you could literally feel the love radiating from the audience! I felt so fucking proud because all of those people were clapping and cheering FOR HER! This smol Aussie bean who joined the cast in September who crept into the hearts of every single person who saw the show during that time. Like I haven’t seen one bad word said about her online and she always seems so gracious and lovely (and you’ll know that I fucking love her if you read the last one of these I did back in January) and she fucking deserved that applause. I’m so happy she got it, and it set the tone for the entire show that, yes, this was going to be a beautiful show full of love not just between the cast on stage but from the audience to the cast as well.

- If I thought Suzie’s applause lasted a long time then Willemijn’s lasted for a goddamn eternity. I’ve never heard anything like it, and I’m so fucking glad that she got that support and felt that love from everyone in the auditorium. *BEWARE FANGIRLING AHEAD* The amount of love and pride I felt for her in that single moment was off the fucking charts. If someone could go back to 2014 and tell that Willemijn that in 3 years she’d be back in the London production of Wicked getting the chance to properly finish her run, not just in London but for the whole show, after a decade with the role, getting to celebrate her own special 10th anniversary along with the London production, and the fact that she was STILL getting that much support and love from audience members from around the entire goddamn globe, I don’t think she would have believed you. And that just speaks to how humble she is to this day about all of the opportunities she’s had with this role and this show, and all of that is just a testament to how much she loves the show, the role, her cast mates (from all of the numerous companies), and all of her fans. I’m just so glad I got a chance to see Willphaba’s ‘super Elphie’ when I did as many times as I got to!

- Sue Kelvin got applause when she came on too and she absolutely lapped it up. She was loving it so much, she even did a tiny curtsey when the applause didn’t stop.

- Oliver Saville got some love when he first came on but it didn’t go on for nearly as long as Suzie or Willemijn’s (mostly just because it felt so awkward for the applause to keep going on when he was pretending to be asleep so he couldn’t savour it in quite the same way as the others)

- Mark Curry got applause when he first entered too (which I thought was so lovely! I’ve never seen a Wizard get applause but I really came to love Mark’s interpretation so I’m glad he got some love)

- I also have to give props to the audience for being respectful and waiting until the end of songs to clap (instead of starting to clap before the music has even ended and going over the top with it), and for the fact that any clapping mid song didn’t go on for a silly amount of time (just enough to show appreciation for the moment without interrupting the rest of the song; like when Willemijn flew in DG, and when she comes up for the start of NGD) which made me feel pretty proud, especially since I remember Kerry’s LAST last show and there was none of that respectfulness… Yay! Audiences growing up with the show over the years!!

- Major side note: the audience should really learn to take cues from the ensemble; if they’re laughing, you shouldn’t be. That literally resolves all issues of laughing at the shit that isn’t funny, AND if the atmosphere on stage is serious then you don’t laugh! Like when Dr. Dillamond bleats during SB there was this drunk woman (who’d clearly seen the show before) who mumbled along to the end of his lines and then laughed hysterically when he bleated. There’s a big difference in atmosphere for a serious scene vs. what is supposed to be comedic (the bleating vs. the train station scene, for example) and I’m still waiting for the day that an entire audience actually gets that.

- (I’m also waiting for the day when the audience actually laughs at all the stuff that IS funny. I’ve seen far too many shows where I’m laughing because the line or the delivery of the line is funny but no one else around me is laughing. Like, it’s fucking funny, just laugh)

- Willemijn is The Riff Queen™ god she really left no prisoners with this show, a wonderful send off to the six month run she had, creating new riffs left, right and centre at random fucking weekday shows.

- (Here’s a short ‘Willemijn is queen’ thing) During the last section of TWAI she doesn’t take a breath all the way from the start of ‘with me’ right through until the end of ‘things I’ve never felt’ but she never loses any power or volume in any of the phrases (once I realised it I’ve been checking to see if other Elphies do it and none of them do. Some of them manage from ‘with me’ to the end of ‘with the Wizard’ but none of them can manage to sustain it for as long as Willemijn. Super Elphie to the max!)

- Both Suzie and Willemijn’s little Americanisms in pronunciation were still there but I can’t fault them for that, their accents were otherwise truly convincing (although Willemijn did seem to trip up on the line “so you think I should just shut up, is that it?” during the lion cub scene but that was really the only line)

- Suzie and Willemijn still broke my heart in all the right places (like Elphaba’s dance! Suzie did the eye contact thing again and my heart ached)

- Popular is hilarious. More specifically, Suzie’s Popular is hilarious. In fact, it’s the funniest part of the entire damn show (but only if the actress playing Galinda lets it be and also if whoever the Elphaba is plays along with it too), purely because of the ‘toss toss’ bit. I do think it just speaks to the chemistry Willemijn tends to have with her Glindas, and the way that she plays off of what each Glinda gives her. Suzie’s ‘toss toss’ has a laugh AND a gesture after it so watching poor little awkward Willphaba react to that is always a good time. It had me proper belly laughing, I can’t lie. ALSO! Suzie’s little lip puckers when she puts on the lipstick makes me chuckle every time, and then to add to the moment, Willemijn wipes the lipstick off and then proceeds to wipe it on Galinda’s bed!

- Elphie not only keeps the pink flower that Galinda gives her but she also doesn’t take it off until just after Fiyero catches her practicing her hair toss and tells her she doesn’t have to glam herself up, and I just realised that I find it really cute that the flower and the new found Gelphie friendship clearly means that much to her that she kept the goddamn flower, I mean!

- Low E in INTG!

- There are little flashes in lighting for any small downbeats during OSD and I realised it to simulate photographs being taken! Gelphie being tourists and being dorky and taking photos together is my new favourite thing!

- I’ve said before how much I love the fact that any time Suzie’s on stage she’s acting her goddamn heart out even if she isn’t the focus during that moment, so I was watching her to see her reactions to certain things and she smiles when Elphie casts her first spell!!! A proud smile! It was the most beautiful thing!!!!!!!!!!!!

- (I’ve flailed about Willemijn’s final DG in a few posts before posting this so I’ll just link them here (x) (x))

- Low G in INTG reprise!

- Willemijn did her line Kerry Ellis style after ALAYM! (As did Rachel Tucker for her last show this year too)

- Willemijn’s witch cackle during the cat fight scene is seriously unmatched and I already miss it.

- There wasn’t a note match going into NGD but it’s because Suzie’s speaking voice is quite deep compared to some other Glindas (Savannah has quite a deep speaking voice too, I think it might be a London thing) so when she yelled ‘Fiyero’ it wasn’t as high pitched and screechy as some others, and then Willemijn still went ‘fuck it I’m gonna belt a super high note anyway’ which means the transition between the two wasn’t seamless but goodness me Willemijn Verkiak!

- NGD is Willemijn’s song all over, I don’t even give a single fuck.

- Sue Kelvin’s Madame Morrible is bullying Glinda even before their little scene in MOTWH (in fact you could see it in TG, when the Ozians were spreading those horrible rumours about Elphaba, Suzie was reacting to each thing and then turned around to Morrible to protest and got shut down and turned back around with a fake smile), it’s just that is when you actually see it first hand in the show. I love it when cast members have enough experience to create those small moments between themselves that only adds to their character and the mini arcs in each act.

- I also have to give some merit to Sue Kelvin’s Madame Morrible, her ‘wicked witch’ never failed to give me chills, and every tiny nuance from her line delivery to her stage presence just makes me love her more; there will never be another like her.

- There were no noticeable sound issues this time (thank fuck, sound no. 1 has finally learned!) but the mix still sounds really weird to my ears and for what I enjoy.

- Willemijn and Suzie started their bows hugging! The door opened on them at the right time and they were standing there hugging each other :’) (x)

- There were 21 cast members who left the company for this cast change! Just about every single principal apart from Nessa and Dillamond left and a large number of the ensemble (although there were a whopping 23 cast members who left for the 2016 cast change just before the 10th anniversary cast joined the show)

- Willemijn was crying during her speech, Suzie was crying, the ensemble was crying, my heart was fucking crying ugh

- You could really tell just how much the whole company love each other as well

- Popular was Suzie’s song from the beginning! She auditioned with it for WAAPA when she completely changed the course she was studying! I’m so glad she got to finish her Wicked journey in London.

- All in all, the principles from the 10th anniversary casts were all incredible and they’ll be sorely missed in the global Wicked family (though you never can be too sure with any of them, saying they’re done with the role and then ‘surprise bitch’)

So the moral of this story is: when you’ve already seen your show 3 times in under 2 months, the only way you can possibly see them any closer together is to just go on the same day!

#my ventures into the world of Wicked at the Apollo Victoria #Wicked #(forever for the sake of my tag) #let’s pretend that it didn’t take me over a month to get both of these written and on my blog #as if I didn’t need a deadline to finish this evening one #I ended up rushing this because I wanted it up before I went on holiday otherwise it would never have been done #I wanted to take my time with it and nurture it because I feel incredibly invested in these actors but I think I nurtured it too much #I'm pretty sure this is the longest one of these I've done yet #if you read through it I am so sorry #also gotta be honest when I say I should’ve done these before I had any outside influences #like I’ve been watching and listening to some older performances and it totally affected what I thought about certain aspects #and the way I’m writing about those things too #like how I actually love Suzie a lot more than I thought I did at the time (how that is possible idk but it happened) #and how I’ve been listening to Willemijn do crazy things outside of the show too #so I’ve been fangirling over them even more now than I was just after the shows #oops

[rightsinexile]

Interdicting refugees not protecting refugees

The following piece was written by Kerry Murphy, a solicitor and specialist in immigration law based in Sydney who has sat on several Boards including the Board of the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre Inc. It appeared on 8 February 2019 in Pearls and Irritations, a blog established by John Menadue, a Patron of the Asylum Seekers’ Centre in Sydney, and has been reprinted here with permission.

In the first Four Corners program of 2019, Sophie McNeil reported on the major hurdles placed in the way of Saudi women getting to Australia to make a refugee claim. McNeil interviewed not just Rahaf Mohammed, who was quickly resettled in Canada, but others who are now in Australia seeking asylum. They told of other Saudi women who had been prevented from getting to Australia by either the Saudi Government or Australian Border Force officers.

The interdiction of asylum seekers coming directly to Australia to make a refugee claim has a long and tortuous history. Much attention has been on those who come by boat, who are nicknamed “boat people” in the media and common parlance. Less attention is given to those who arrive by plane – the ‘’plane people”. I have had the honour of representing not just “boat people” in their cases, but also those who arrive by plane.

The plane arrivals fall into two main categories, those with a visa and those without. This now makes a difference as to what process you get and what visa if you are successful. These days it is much harder for someone to board a flight for Australia without a visa than it used to be. Around twenty years ago, I remember representing a number of asylum seekers who had arrived by plane without a visa. In fact the first Afghan Hazara client I had was a plane arrival, as was the first Iraqi doctor I represented. Over the next twenty years I have represented many other Hazaras and Iraqis, and they both still have good cases when you read the independent reports about what happens in their countries.

Those arriving by plane tend to be individuals or a few people at a time, unlike the boat arrivals. That may be a reason why they get less attention than those asylum seekers on boats receive. After a short time, Australian Immigration started placing immigration officers in known transit centres such as Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Manilla. These officers had to check passports and visas before people boarded their flight. If they thought there was an irregularity with a visa or passport, the person would not be allowed to continue to Australia.

I remember once boarding a flight in Kuala Lumpur bound for Sydney and seeing an immigration officer I knew checking the passports of those boarding the plane. Luckily I had no problem with my passport, but others could be interdicted in this way. It is also not new that if the Border officers at the airport think a person may make a refugee claim, or if the person says to an officer they want to make a refugee claim, they cancel their visas and the person is sent back on the next flight or to Immigration detention.

McNeil referred to this visa cancellation happening for Saudi women, usually offshore. That person then is unable to continue to Australia. If a person is immigration cleared and then makes a claim for protection some time after that, they will get a bridging visa to keep them lawfully in Australia and not be in detention. These people are the lucky ones, they are entitled to a permanent protection visa if successful. Those whose visas are cancelled at the airport and apply for protection from immigration detention will only get a temporary protection visa at best. Their uncertain future continues.

It is curious that Australian officials go to so much trouble to prevent asylum seekers being able to make a claim for protection, and then penalise those who tell them their intention to seek asylum at the border by cancelling their visa and sending them to detention. In the thirty years of my involvement in working with or for refugees, I have seen at least 40-50 legislative changes just for the onshore applicants, and only one change was positive. The others were mainly reactionary responses to reduce rights or make it easier to refuse, or after a change in Government, there tended to be some amelioration in the harshness and deliberate cruelty in law and policy.

I had a case some years ago where we had to obtain an injunction in the Federal Court preventing Immigration removing a young Tamil who had been “screened out” and not permitted to even make an application. Not only was the injunction granted, but he was granted a protection visa after a full interview by a case officer, not just a “screening interview” which was used to try and return him to the persecution he feared.

I have many clients who have been immigration cleared and made their claim for protection later, and most have been successful in getting protection. Many still contact me years later to tell me about their Australian citizenship, their marriage, children, or even just to send Christmas greetings. I now get more Christmas greetings and cards from Muslims than I do from Christians.

McNeil reported that little is known about the Saudi women who were prevented from getting to Australia through the intervention of the Saudi authorities, or by the cancellation of their visas by Australia. Prima facie, a Saudi woman fleeing family abuse or threats would have a strong case, so why is Australia seeking to interdict them and leave them at risk of being sent home to what is very likely to be persecution?

It cannot be because of “risks of people drowning at sea” which is the refrain trotted out about why we have to be cruel to asylum seekers arriving by boat. The other “Yes Minister” refrain is that it takes the visa away from a “more deserving refugee” chosen by the Government. This queue jumping myth has a long history. If you have a cap on the number of visas issued in a year, then every visa granted, even to those from offshore, means someone else misses out. That is mathematics.

There will always be more people in need than places available. Secondly in my experience of working with and for refugees over thirty years, it is almost impossible to say that refugee A is more deserving than refugee B. People’s lives and stories can vary considerably, and so is it really possible to say that a Hazara woman fleeing the Taliban in Pakistan or Afghanistan is more deserving than a Saudi woman fleeing her family who intend to harm her?

The current approach to deal with this is to have an unofficial cap on the number of visas granted each year to those who arrive onshore and then apply for protection. Then simply delay the processing for those who meet the protection definition but would mean more grants than the Government wishes to make in a year. The effect is to leave people who prima facie meet the criteria for protection in a processing limbo, sometimes for years.

I do not think there is a satisfactory answer to this conundrum. Restating the myth of the queue detracts from the reality of ensuring people who seek asylum have a fair and thorough process. At the same time I do not think it is acceptable to prevent people from making claims for protection by trying to prevent them making applications or cancelling their visas to reduce their chances. Let the case be properly presented and carefully considered, rather than a hasty decision to cancel a visa which may mean a less than thorough assessment that is required if we are to seriously adhere to our international obligations.

#refugees

[theliberaltony]

via FiveThirtyEight

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar became the 10th major Democratic candidate for president on Sunday. She almost certainly won’t be the last addition to the field. Another 20 or so prominent Democrats are still considering a presidential bid, which could eventually send the number of candidates into the teens or even 20s — perhaps eclipsing the 17 major candidates who ran for the Republican nomination in 2016.

But is the number of candidates really a meaningful metric? Sometimes the field can winnow dramatically in the run-up to the first primaries and caucuses or shortly thereafter. By my count, 12 major candidates sought the Republican nomination in 2000. But many of them dropped out before anyone voted, and after New Hampshire it was really just a two-way race between then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain. And in 2004, then-Sen. John Kerry emerged from a crowded Demueocratic field to win the nomination fairly easily after strong showings in the early states.

Those cases are more the exception than the rule, however. In fact, the size of the field usually does tell us a lot about how the primary will play out. In particular, it tells us whether party elites are likely to form a consensus around a single candidate, as the Democratic establishment did around Hillary Clinton in 2016 but as Republicans famously failed to do in that year’s primary process, paving the way for the nomination of President Trump.

The crowded field developing for 2020 doesn’t necessarily imply that an anti-establishment candidate will prevail. Even when party elites don’t get their first choice, they usually get someone they can live with. But the high number of candidates does imply a higher-than-usual risk of chaos.

It also implies that the “next-in-line” candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, aren’t intimidating anyone. Neither Biden nor Sanders have officially entered the race yet, and it’s possible they’ll unveil a slew of endorsements when (and if) they do, which would show that the party backed them all along. But that seems unlikely. If they had strong support from party elites, we probably wouldn’t have so many other candidates already running or actively contemplating a bid — especially candidates who appeal to the same kinds of voters as Sanders and Biden do.1 That inference also aligns with reporting about Biden and Sanders that suggests they’re having trouble finding the support from party actors they were hoping for.

Let’s take a step back, though. How to define the number of “major” candidates running for president is a little tricky. Technically, there are already hundreds of people who have filed their paperwork to run for president in 2020, but most of them are people you’ve never heard of and never will. In a perfect world, you might evaluate a series of criteria to determine who’s a major candidate, including whether they’re regularly included in media coverage about the campaign, whether they’re included in polls, whether they’ve raise a significant amount of money, whether they’re invited to participate in the debates, whether they have traditional credentials for the presidency, whether they have ballot access in most states, and so forth. It’s probably worth erring on the side of inclusiveness, but you can go overboard and wind up with a list that’s dozens or hundreds of candidates long. For purposes of this article, though, I’m mostly using press coverage and credentials as the markers of major candidates. If the media is ambivalent about whether someone qualifies as a major candidate, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt if they’ve held elected office before, but otherwise not.

In my judgment, then, there are 10 major Democrats who have either officially launched their campaigns or formed a presidential exploratory committee. (Note that entering the race2 and withdrawing still counts as running; this will become relevant in a moment.) Here are the first nine, in alphabetical order:

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

Former San Antonio mayor and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.

Former U.S. Rep. John Delaney of Maryland.

U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

Sen. Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

You could probably argue against the inclusion of Buttigieg and perhaps even against Delaney and Gabbard, but there is some precedent (albeit not a lot) for U.S. representatives becoming president, and Buttigieg is getting a fair amount of media coverage (and he’s an elected official). But Andrew Yang, the founder of a nonprofit that teaches young people to run startups, and Marianne Williamson, an author and “spiritual teacher,” probably do not qualify as major candidates as they don’t hold public office, nor are they nationally renowned for other reasons. A harder case is former West Virginia state senator Richard Ojeda, who dropped out after entering the race in November. In terms of media coverage, such as number of newspaper articles written about them, Ojeda was about halfway between Yang and Buttigieg. I’m inclined to include him because, as mentioned, I prefer to give candidates who have held elected office the benefit of the doubt. Thus:

10. Former state senator Richard Ojeda of West Virginia (withdrawn).

Which other Democrats might enter the field? Here is a possibly incomplete list of names. I’ve included everyone who is:

Given at least a 10 percent chance of running at PredictIt.

Or is included on The New York Times’s list of potential candidates.

Or has expressed in a recent news story that they’re still considering a bid.For candidates who don’t have PredictIt prices, I treat a New York Times categorization that they’re “likely to run” as equivalent to a 75 percent chance of running, “might run” as 50 percent, and “unlikely to run” as 25 percent. For candidates who neither have New York Times categories nor PredictIt prices, I’m just using my own subjective estimate of their likelihood of running.[/foontote]

Which other Democrats might run for president?

Chance that potential Democratic presidential candidates might run, based on PredictIt evaluations,* The New York Times and Nate’s guesses

Candidate Chance Source John Hickenlooper 89% PredictIt Bernie Sanders 88 PredictIt Sherrod Brown 87 PredictIt Jay Inslee 87 PredictIt Beto O’Rourke 77 PredictIt Steve Bullock 75 New York Times guesstimate Joe Biden 74 PredictIt Eric Holder 66 PredictIt Eric Swalwell 60 Nate’s wild guesstimate Terry McAuliffe 59 PredictIt Jeff Merkley 50 New York Times guesstimate Tim Ryan 40 Nate’s wild guesstimate Seth Moulton 40 Nate’s wild guesstimate Michael Bloomberg 33 PredictIt Michael Bennet 25 New York Times guesstimate Bill de Blasio 25 New York Times guesstimate John Kerry 25 New York Times guesstimate Stacey Abrams 20 Nate’s wild guesstimate Mitch Landrieu 15 PredictIt Hillary Clinton 11 PredictIt Andrew Cuomo 10 PredictIt

* As of 5:15 p.m. on Feb. 12, 2019.

For Inslee, O’Rourke, Bloomberg and Landrieu, PredictIt asks bettors whether a potential candidate will enter the race by a certain date, rather than whether they’ll run at all.

These probabilities imply that an additional 10 or 11 Democrats will enter the race, although there’s still a fairly wide range of possibilities. If you assume (possibly dubiously) that each candidate’s decision is independent, the 95 percent confidence interval runs from seven additional candidates to 14. That means that we’ll end up with a total of between 17 and 24 Democratic candidates, including the 10 (one since withdrawn) we have already.

So while a handful of candidates have declined a bid — Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick probably foremost among them — this is likely to be a very big, possibly even record-breaking field.

In primaries since 1972 that haven’t featured an incumbent president, parties have averaged about 10 major candidates for president. So Democrats are looking at roughly double the average. Here’s who I consider the major candidates to have been in past years — again, acknowledging that the term “major” is pretty subjective but that I’m erring on the side of inclusivity:

How many ‘major’ candidates ran in previous primaries?

Number of major candidates in presidential primaries since 1972, excluding primaries for parties with an incumbent president running for re-election

Year Party No. of Candidates Nominee Other candidates 2020 D 17 to 24 ? Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris, Klobuchar, Ojeda, Warren, others TBD 2016 R 17 Trump Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Bush, Carson, Paul, Christie, Huckabee, Fiorina, Gilmore, Santorum, Perry, Walker, Jindal, Graham, Pataki 2016 D 5 Clinton Sanders, O’Malley, Chafee, Webb 2012 R 12 Romney Santorum, Paul, Gingrich, Perry, Huntsman, Bachmann, Roemer, Johnson, Cain, McCotter, Pawlenty 2008 R 12 McCain Romney, Huckabee, Paul, F. Thompson, Keyes, Hunter, Giuliani, Brownback, Gilmore, Tancredo, T. Thompson 2008 D 10 Obama Clinton, Edwards, Richardson, Biden, Dodd, Gravel, Kucinich, Vilsack, Bayh 2004 D 10 Kerry Edwards, Dean, Clark, Kucinich, Gephardt, Lieberman, Sharpton, Moseley Braun, Graham 2000 R 12 Bush McCain, Keyes, Forbes, Bauer, Hatch, Alexander, Buchanan, Dole, Kasich, Quayle, Smith 2000 D 2 Gore Bradley 1996 R 12 Dole Buchanan, Forbes, Alexander, Keyes, Dornan, Gramm, Lugar, Specter, Wilson, Fletcher, Taylor 1992 D 8 Clinton Brown, Kerrey, Harkin, Tsongas, McCarthy, Wilder, Agran 1988 R 7 Bush Dole, Robertson, Kemp, du Pont, Haig, Laxalt 1988 D 11 Dukakis Jackson, Gore, Gephardt, Simon, Hart, Babbitt, Traficant, Applegate, Schroeder, Biden 1984 D 8 Mondale Hart, Jackson, Glenn, McGovern, Askew, Cranston, Hollings 1980 R 9 Reagan Bush, Anderson, Baker, Connally, Crane, Dole, Pressler, Weicker 1976 D 16 Carter Brown, Wallace, Udall, Jackson, Church, Bayh, Bentsen, Byrd, Fauntroy, Harris, Shapp, Shriver, Washington, Sanford, Mondale 1972 D 15 McGovern Humphrey, Wallace, Muskie, Chisholm, Bayh, Harris, Hartke, Jackson, Lindsay, McCarthy, Mills, Mink, Sanford, Yorty

“Major” is a somewhat squishy term, and although this list errs on the side of inclusivity, a few candidates may have slipped through the cracks. The table includes candidates who withdrew before competing in any primaries.

I have the 17-candidate Republican field of 2016 as the largest since at least 1972, although the 1972 (15 candidates) and 1976 (16 candidates) Democratic primaries are close. You can also see how the number of candidates has tended to rise and fall over time. After the chaotic 1972 and 1976 nomination cycles, parties averaged 8.6 candidates per cycle between 1980 and 2000. The average has been 11 per election since 2004, however, and it will likely rise to 12 or 13 depending on how many more candidates we get this year.

As should be pretty intuitive, larger fields are correlated with more prolonged nomination processes in which both voters and party elites have a harder time reaching consensus. Below is a table comparing the number of candidates in each past cycle against the share of the overall popular vote the nominee eventually received. I’ve also included a more subjective measure of whether party elites were able to get their way. I consider the party to have decided — that is, for party elites to have gotten their preferred choice — if there was a clear front-runner in endorsements in advance of the Iowa caucuses and that candidate won the nomination. And I consider the elites to have failed if a factional candidate who lacked broad support from the party establishment won. Then there are in-between cases such as the 2008 Democratic primary, in which party elites didn’t necessarily get their first choice (or there wasn’t a clear first choice), but the candidate who emerged was broadly acceptable to multiple major factions of the party.

Bigger primary fields mean more uncertainty

Number of “major” candidates in presidential primaries since 1972* and whether the eventual nominee was favored by party elites

Year Party Nominee No. of Candidates Did party elites get what they wanted? Nominee’s share of pop. vote in primaries 2016 R Trump 17 No 44.9% 1976 D Carter 16 No 40.2 1972 D McGovern 15 No 25.3 2012 R Romney 12 Yes 52.1 2008 R McCain 12 Sort of 46.7 2000 R W. Bush 12 Yes 62.0 1996 R Dole 12 Yes 58.8 1988 D Dukakis 11 Sort of 42.4 2008 D Obama 10 Sort of 47.4 2004 D Kerry 10 Sort of 61.0 1980 R Reagan 9 Yes 59.8 1992 D B. Clinton 8 Yes 52.0 1984 D Mondale 8 Yes 38.3 1988 R H.W. Bush 7 Yes 67.9 2016 D H. Clinton 5 Yes 55.2 2000 D Gore 2 Yes 75.4

* Excluding nomination processes for which an incumbent president was running for that party.

“Major” is a somewhat squishy term, and although this list errs on the side of inclusivity, a few candidates may have slipped through the cracks. The table includes candidates who withdrew before competing in any primaries.

Source: Wikipedia

This table ought to worry establishment Democrats. The three past elections when the field was as large as its shaping up to be in 2020 all resulted in party elites failing to get their way. They also resulted in a nominee who failed to get 50 percent of the popular vote in the primaries, which could yield a contested convention since Democratic delegate allocation rules are highly proportional to the popular vote. In a field of 20 candidates, for instance, you’d project — extrapolating from the data above — that the eventual nominee would have either 32 percent or 40 percent of the popular vote, depending on whether you use a linear or logarithmic trendline. That could mean that the race is decided at the convention.

Granted, extrapolation can be dangerous in cases like these. If we do wind up with a field of 20 or so Democratic candidates, we’ll be in outlier-land because we’ve never had a field so large before.

But the past electoral cycles where the field was nearly as big as this one shouldn’t exactly be comforting to Democrats, and it should be particularly worrying for next-in-line candidates such as Biden. Democratic voters like a lot of their choices and feel optimistic about their chances of beating Trump in 2020. The large field is both a sign that there may not be consensus about the best candidate and a source of unpredictability.

#IFTTT #FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

[deniscollins]

Killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa Inflames Immigration Debate

If you were the owner of Yarrabee farms, and one of your employees, who has worked hard for years tending dairy cows, commits murder and is found out to be an illegal/undocumented immigrant, how would you address your employees, particularly your Mexican employees, the next day at work?

Television cameras had for weeks swarmed this small town in Iowa farm country as the police looked for Mollie Tibbetts, the college student who went for a jog last month and never returned home.

After hundreds of tips and interviews, and after countless prayer vigils and donations to a reward fund, investigators got a tragic break in their case on Tuesday. A body believed to be Ms. Tibbetts’s was found buried beneath cornstalks on a farm outside town. The authorities charged Cristhian Rivera, who they said is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, with first-degree murder in her death.

President Trump and other conservatives quickly cited the arrest of Mr. Rivera, who worked on a farm owned by a prominent Republican family, as proof of the flawed immigration system and lax border security the president has long warned about.

Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, released a statement saying she was “angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community.” And the White House Twitter account posted a video with the emotional accounts of people whose family members had been killed by immigrants who entered the country illegally.

“Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday evening in a Twitter message, a clear reference to his much criticized policy that tried to deter illegal border crossings by separating migrant families.

“A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her. We need the wall, we need our immigration laws changed, we need our border laws changed, we need Republicans to do it because the Democrats aren’t going to do it,” he said.

Mr. Rivera’s lawyer, Allan M. Richards, disputed the government’s claims that his client was in the country illegally and said Mr. Trump’s comments highlighting his immigration status could prejudice future jurors. Mr. Richards said his client, who was ordered held on $5 million cash bond during a brief court appearance on Wednesday, came to the United States at age 17, had the equivalent of a middle school education and had worked for years tending to dairy cows.

“For sad and sorry Trump to say that they’re illegal without even giving them a hearing is totally wrong,” Mr. Richards said in an interview after the court hearing.

Mr. Rivera’s arrest was a lead story for much of Tuesday evening and Wednesday on several conservative-leaning news websites, and was touted as a boost to the Trump administration’s argument for a more hard-line stance on immigration. The arrest came in the same week that an undocumented immigrant from Mexico was charged with second-degree murder in a Minnesota case.

Mr. Trump is expected to continue to push immigration as a signature issue in courting voters ahead of November’s midterm elections. In Iowa, Republicans are defending two congressional seats that Democrats have high hopes of winning, and Governor Reynolds is seeking a full term in her post.

The discovery of Ms. Tibbetts’s body devastated her hometown, Brooklyn, where she had returned for the summer after studying psychology at the University of Iowa. After weeks of anxiously awaiting news, some residents said Wednesday that they were frustrated to learn that the suspect in her death was in the country illegally.

“Mollie would still be alive today if we would just enforce the laws we already have in place,” said Kerry Traver, 73, who lives in nearby Marengo. “Here illegally and nobody’s doing anything about it.”

Rusty Clayton, owner of True Value Hardware in Brooklyn, said customers in the small town — where doors are seldom locked — have been coming in to have house keys made ever since news broke that Ms. Tibbetts was missing. But he said the town views its Hispanic residents not as outsiders, but as members of the community.

“Their kids go to our school,” Mr. Clayton said. “One was homecoming king, and another of the students has been valedictorian of the class. The kids here well respect them and interact with them.”

Immigration has long been a divisive issue in Iowa, where farmers depend on foreign-born laborers to tend their crops and livestock, but where an influx of Hispanic residents has exposed tensions in some cities. While Iowa politicians from both major parties offered condolences to the Tibbetts family, Republicans were more likely to note Mr. Rivera’s immigration status in their statements.

Outside the state, advocates for immigrants lamented that Ms. Tibbetts’s death was being used for political gains.

“It is unfortunate that lawmakers are politicizing this absolutely awful tragedy,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization. “One would wish that cooler heads would prevail and that we could have a rational, humane conversation about immigration policy.”

Though statistics show that native-born Americans commit crimes at higher rates than immigrants, Mr. Trump has long pushed a narrative that suggests otherwise.

The White House regularly sends out emails reporting the latest crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. “Ethiopian human rights abuser arrested for fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship,” one such missive announced last week.

In June, Mr. Trump gathered at the White House a group of so-called “angel families” who had lost loved ones in crimes committed by “criminal illegal aliens” — victims of Salvadoran gangs, heroin overdoses, robbers, convicts released from prison but not deported.

“These are the stories that Democrats and people that are weak on immigration, they don’t want to discuss, they don’t want to hear, they don’t want to see, they don’t want to talk about,” Mr. Trump said in greeting the families.

In recent campaign rallies, like one Tuesday night in which he alluded to Ms. Tibbetts, Mr. Trump has riled up crowds by disparaging immigrants and stoking fear about them, saying that he would send them “the hell back” to their countries of origin. And he has constantly reiterated his belief that a vote for a Democratic candidate in the midterms would be a vote for open borders. (Legislation shows that Democrats support border security measures, but not the wall that Mr. Trump has promised his supporters.)

Mr. Rivera’s arrest also raised questions about the process companies use to check whether job applicants are allowed to work in the United States. Mr. Rivera’s employer, Yarrabee Farms, said initially that the federal government had cleared Mr. Rivera for work through its well-known E-Verify system. But on Wednesday evening, Yarrabee corrected itself and said he had been checked through a different Social Security Administration database.

Both systems are vulnerable to fraud when applicants present valid documents that belong to someone else, experts said.

“If I’m using your number and your name, that’s going to get through,” said Julie Myers Wood, who led Immigration and Customs Enforcement during George W. Bush’s presidency. She said unauthorized job seekers were using stolen documents to thwart E-Verify even during her tenure.

But Ms. Myers Wood said the Social Security database was not intended to check employment eligibility, and that the farm was “not in as strong as a position” as it would have been had it used E-Verify.

Federal officials appeared to have reviewed Mr. Rivera’s immigration status and said they had placed an immigration hold on him, requiring him to be turned over to immigration authorities should he clear state criminal proceedings. He is “an illegal alien from Mexico,” said Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for ICE.

A senior homeland security official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the case, said Mr. Rivera appears to have used stolen documentation in order to pass the federal government identity check at the farm where he had worked for the past several years.

Dane Lang, a spokesman for Yarrabee Farms, said Mr. Rivera provided a state-issued photo identification card and a social security card. “Our practice is to take a second, enhanced step to verify the identification,” he said in a statement, screening employees through the Social Security Administration.

“We ran that information through the verification service, and it came back ‘verified,’” he said. “That means that the exact name, birthdate and exact social security number were all cross referenced and corroborated.”

Over the last 24 hours, Mr. Lang added, company officials learned that their verification had not been adequate. “Our employee was not who he said he was.”

#Illegal immigrants

[arunawayofstudents-blog]

Lorna Jane Photostory.

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I carry out a lot of my daily, non-farmer's market purchasing in pair of locations: Westside Market and a semi-creepy health food establishment on my block called Elm Health.