#but that and the weird spaces it adds between paragraphs will be the death of me some day

[icespur]

Resurrected Akeshu Daughter Third Semester AU

Warning: Angst, and discussion of premature infant death. 

Extremely pissed Goro Akechi 

Please pray for Maruki's safety, because god, does he need it. 

Warning for graphic descriptions of murder and maiming.

I’m going to describe some of the brutal things Akechi might do to Maruki as an example of how furious and scary Akechi is here. But please don't take it as me attacking or disrespecting Maruki’s late English Voice Actor, Billy Kametz. This is in no way related to him and was never intended to. He's a wonderful man who got taken away too soon, cancer sucks. 

I enjoyed you, Anai, Rui, White Blood Cell. As of writing this I have not played Persona 5 Royal myself, but I can't wait to experience you as Maruki.(Wait, are those really all the anime voices I've heard him as? I thought there were more, bummer guess that's it) 

Rest well ❤️ 😇

………………………

4/27/24: Edited to in an attempt to make it read better, spaced out paragraphs towards the end, slight rewording, and replaced commas with periods at certain point

The timeline I have for Akeshu daughter wouldn't work normally with this scenario, unless we—-say, move the third semester to take place a full year later (so like, way after Strikers, December 25th 2017 - February 3rd 2018) 

So we are entertaining the concept that the Third Semester takes place a year after Strikers instead of right after Base Game Yaldabaoth fight going into a new year; for the sake of Goro and Akiren's daughter being born by then. 

Now remember in my past, very long sloppy “Panicked ParentGoro” post I said their daughter would be born 27 weeks premature and would have to be in an incubator for a while? 

Well, in this scenario, what if she sadly—didn't pull through and died. 

Goro's death and resurrection by Maruki would be a bit weird here. Logically in this scenario Goro would have to have really died in Shido's palace and so never got to reunite with Akiren and learn about the baby and stay, but for the rest of my idea to work, Goro would have to be alive and reunited with Akiren to witness their daughter’s birth and short moments of life for this to fully hit hard. 

So in that sense, the rest of this post won't make much sense logically with the timeline, but try not to think about the logistics too much from here, okay? 

Goro would witness the birth, follow the doctors to the NICU out of overprotective parental panic and stay by his daughter's side. But---between her early emergency birth, and her underdeveloped organs and frail body, it proves to be too much and she flatlines—-----in front of Goro. 

Akiren and Goro are both heartbroken but Goro is especially fucked up because he witnessed her death, so that just adds a whole other layer of guilt and grief to him. 

And then—-Maruki starts to change reality, not only is Akechi resurrected, but—---their daughter is too. Not only is she resurrected but she's full term and healthy. 

Now, this would make refusing Maruki's reality choice a lot harder for Akiren. It was already a conflict in normal canon Third Semester with Maruki bringing Akechi back to life for him, and it was “Accept false reality and live brainwashed in a happy world with an alive happy Akechi” or “Refuse false reality and join Akechi to defeat Maruki, take his treasure and bring back original reality even at the risk of Akechi going back to being dead.” 

In here it's: “Accept a false reality and live brainwashed in a happy world with Akechi and your baby girl that got taken away too soon, so the both of you can spend this reality living life as new parents.” 

Or: “Refuse false reality and join Akechi to defeat Maruki, take his treasure and bring back original reality even at the risk of Akechi going back to being dead again, and your daughter back to being a necklace of cremated ashes.” 

Now, I don't think the add-in of their daughter being alive would make Akechi struggle with wanting to stay, like Akiren would. He saw himself being resurrected as a leverage for Maruki and saw the perfect reality as enslavement and no better than being a puppet to someone else's desire. 

No, Akechi would still firmly want to return to the original reality. If anything he'd be even more dead set on returning because—--

You use his life as a bargaining chip in an attempt to convince his boyfriend of your view? Shame on you. 

You use not only his life, but the life of his deceased baby girl as a bargaining chip in an attempt to convince his boyfriend of your view? 

Oh—--

Oh—--- 

You must have a fucking deathwish, Doctor. 

You think “Newly nonconsensually resurrected” Akechi was unhinged and scary? 

Try: “Newly nonconsensually resurrected and still internally grieving and guilt ridden from seeing his infant daughter die only to see her alive, full term and healthy all for the price of your boyfriend accepting a false reality and stripping away yours and your daughter’s freedom” Third Semester Akechi. 

Akechi is LIVID. 

Takuto Maruki resurrected the wrong former Metaverse assassin and premature infant. Akechi doesn't give a fuck about how good of intentions this pacifistic bitch thinks he has. The man just unknowingly signed away his rights to a heartbeat and open casket funeral of old age. If Maruki wants to be in one piece and values having all his limbs attached and organs in working order, he better pray that he never ends up in a room alone with Akechi, because it will not end pretty. 

Akechi straight up tells Akiren, in a calm voice that you can hear struggling to not commit to manic and rage filled, but is somehow still just as startling at how calm it is; that if Joker wants to only injure Maruki and take his treasure to return to reality--- he better pry Akechi's phone out of his hands to make sure he can't access the Metaverse or Maruki's palace because:

“If I go with you, and I lay eyes on that bastard, I can't be held responsible for what I'll do next.

A mental shutdown is too good for that man----

I am going to take up sculpting and tear his face to shreds to recreate a mental shutdown with my own bare hands by gouging his eyes back into his skull until he bleeds tears.

I am going to shove my sword so far down his throat it will come out his ass---

I will borrow your dagger to manually castrate him--

I will tear his chest cavity open to rip his beating heart from his body and replace it with his cognitive treasure...

I will unleash every Almighty attack in my arsenal until I either pass out from exhaustion or until he finally collapses to the ground, where I will then empty all my bullets into him--

and for good measure to make sure there is nothing left for someone to even attempt to bury, I will tear him limb from limb, chop those limbs into tiny bite sized particles, and eat them along with the rest of his minced corpse.

Then, you and Mona are going to drive us down to the depths of Mementos, where we will seek out the biggest. Bottomless. Black. Pit. So I can proceed to shit his remains into.” 

Do not mess with Resurrected angry parent Akechi. 

Joker is also angry at Maruki, but not on the same level as Akechi is. Even he’s like “Akechi, I completely understand your anger but I don’t think Maruki Sensei had completely malicious intentions of bringing our daughter back to life, he thought he was helping us. I mean, I agree, it’s still not worth giving up our free will in the name of an ideal reality, but you’re at a thousand right now, and you need to take it down to at least 50.” 

#persona 5 royal #akiren #ren amamiya #akira kurusu #persona 5 joker #goro akechi #persona 5 crow #p5r spoilers #p5r third semester #RIP Billy Kametz #takuto maruki #akeshu parents #akeshu child #shuake #ren x akechi

[theoldlesbianwithcats]

nanshe fest anon here, haha let me invent a callsign .... how about Rio :)

i totally relate to what you mean when you said you are not able to distinguish between the "lesbian" and bisexual experience shared in that interview. things like this hindered my ability to understand what my sexuality even was, since i cant relate to either of them. then i read "lesbian books" and dont understand how they can have sex with men without a mental breakdown. i had a mental breakdown about my sexuality when i was pressured to marry, tried DIY conversion therapy on myself but when i faced with the option of even touching a man sexually, death seemed better because how could i live like that? theres no way. of course this made my mental health worse but not to trauma dump - i am ok now, so dont worry.

the anon who talked about strap ons was also very insightful. the focus on strap-on contributed to me developing a severe sense of dysphoria around my genitalia with this depression that i would never be able to have a "real" sex life.

this is why it is so important for lesbian experiences to be heard, i think the queer spaces are making things worse for us, particularly when we are young and vulnerable. also i am from a non-english speaking country, where homosexuality is still criminal so i could only turn to these spaces for support. i think even in countries such as the US, its the same for a lot of lesbian girls in rural towns... they turn to these spaces for help online since its so scary to be a child in a violent homophobic family. maybe they get helped because its worse than nothing. but also it can screw with ur mind a lot. my dream lesbian event would be to hear from more lesbians of color who grew up outside west europe/us/canada... i had to leave my birth country to be able to have a future. but i feel so awkward to be the only lesbian of color in the room 99% of the time. its not that the white women are cruel, dont misunderstand me, they can be lovely and supportive. but it adds an extra level of alienation, because so many times in my country people would call homosexuality as a white persons invention. of course i know that lesbians exist elsewhere but it would be nice to see that in person at these events!

-rio

Hi again, Rio! :D

Yeah it's messed up that even in the "lesbian community" we think we're freaks so we don't even dare talking about our experience! I grew up in a small town and I remember discreetly reading sex ed books for teens at the bookshop for any info or positivity about lesbians, instead I would only find a paragraph telling me it's a phase. So tumblr was my lesbian safe space back in 2010, for example the "it gets better" campaign really helped me when I was bullied in high-school (unfortunately now that charity pretends they have no idea what a lesbian is...) Now the lesbian content is awful and lesbophobic everywhere, offline and online.

And I feel you about lesbian books, I finally got around to reading one I bought years ago because it was recommended to me and it was about two "lesbians" leaving their husbands for each other... We need book lists with actual lesbian rep!

All the strap-on stuff invading lesbian spaces is so weird yeah... A few minutes ago I clicked on a blog because she was talking about wanting to finger a woman while having acrylic nails, which made me go 🤨 and while she called herself a lesbian, it was obvious she wasn't, it was all talk about c*ckwarming and deepthr*ating ("but it's only for strap and girlc*ck, if you're a man do not interact!!!!" 🤪) I don't know if you had sex already but let me tell you that you are not lacking anything and no real lesbian will think you need a sex toy to be a complete partner and have real sex, she will only want you as you are. I mean, my ex-gf and I never even considered trying a strap-on and we definitely thought the sex we were having was real and amazing haha

About meeting lesbians of color, maybe you can find events on Instagram? I wondered why I never saw many women of color at lesbian events in Paris until I learned that black women preferred creating their own events and advertising them on Insta! Maybe you can also find an organization for LGBT refugees? Hopefully you can meet lesbians there :)

[organicbabybattles]

Round 1, Side A, Poll 8

Rebekah Jakobs-Hammerlock ( @wainwrightjakobshammerlock ) VS. Sawyer Hale ( @thewikiplayer )

-------

( art by wainwrightjakobshammerlock )

What is your baby's name? Pronouns?: Rebekah Jakobs-Hammerlock, she/her

Is your baby from a fandom or original?: Fandom - the Borderlands game series

How old is your baby?: 5 in my post canon alternate universe (7-8 years after Borderlands 3)

Tell us about your baby!: She's the testtube biological baby of Sir Hammerlock & Wainwright Jakobs (which basically means she could aim and shoot a pistol at the age of 4) and has 4 siblings (one of which is also an oc, but is an adoptive kid, and the rest are canon characters who got adopted). She has a big plushie collection (some knitted or sewn by Wainwright, some crocheted by Hammerlock, some being gifts from extended family or the Crimson raiders) and also fucked up eldritch powers beyond human comprehension bc her parents are abominations from beyond the veil (my Borderlands rewrite AU is a mess haha) which she primarily uses to teleport all over the house, causing an understandable amount of problems. Clay is her weird uncle and she loves him. She's kinda based off Wednesday Addams because autism. Also she is autistic, the nicest weirdgirl on Eden-6, swears an unusual amount for a 5 year old (being around Wainwright del Frisco Jakobs-Hammerlock will do that to you) and often swaps between her Edenian (space southern) and her Hermesian (space british) accents bc yknow. Just listen to her dads speak and you'll see.

Anything else you want to add?: (1) Most people call her Reb for short but Wainwright calls her Rebby because yes. (2) She eventually grows to inherit the Jakobs corporation and generally sorta girlbossify but that's extreme future timeskip stuff I don't talk abt often because I feel cringe about it. (3) Her name continues on the general theme of Jakobs related things having biblical symbolism - Rebekah is Jacob's mother in the book of Genesis (if i remember correctly). (3) Her voiceclaim is Lili Zanotto from Psychonauts :D (4) She calls Hammerlock "Papa" and Wainwright "Daddy"

----

( art by thewikiplayer )

What is your baby's name? Pronouns?: sawyer hale, he/they/xe

Is your baby from a fandom or original?: completely original!! the universe name is "turnabout tech"

How old is your baby?: 16!!

Tell us about your baby!: [MOD NOTE: TW for father death]

sawyer hale is a kid who had a pretty hard knock life in a cyberpunk dystopia city. after deciding his dad kinda sucked, sawyer ran away and emancipated himself at 16 and moved into a different, nicer city and became a hermit for a while. afterwards, he proceeded to save the world twice; once he saved a cyberworld from the big bad capitalists and second he saved the universe from collapsing via terrible creature. as he goes through these adventures he learns how to be comfortable and happy with himself again.

also he destroyed his dad when he possessed a robot body. go kid!!

sawyer super loves tech but he gave it up for a while because Shitty Dad Ruining It For Him, but he eventually finds his passion again and makes phenomenal inventions. also he is the embodiment of Baby because all the adults around him want to scoop him up and carry him around for being a little issues boy with issues. they love singing and the arts in general, and they're very open-minded, which makes them a pretty good friend.

oh yeah all his adventures kinda messed up his biology so he's partially made of code now. and also has wings made of code. he can design them however he wants like retexturing game assets. YIPPIE!

Anything else you want to add?: I'M SO SORRY FOR THE PARAGRAPH. GODSPEED

#thewikiplayer #wainwritejakobshammerlock #round 1 #side a #organicbabybattles

[pepperf]

for the writing asks: 1, 32, and 38 if you want!

1. What font do you write in? Do you actually care or is that just the default setting?

Oh, hah - I carefully DON'T pick a font, because I have been down that procrastination rabbit hole once too often. It's now as bland and unexciting as possible, so that it doesn't grab my attention. I write in Arial (the beige of fonts) 11pt, auto-spaced after the paragraph, because that way I can move seamlessly between Word and Google Docs, and I don't have to add or remove paragraph breaks when I paste into AO3.

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

I immediately got myself sidetracked looking up lines from books, lol - I am very bad at remembering the exact words (and very nitpicky about it being the EXACT words), so I’m just going to go with the first one that came to mind: “There’s no justice. There’s just us.”

It’s said by Death in Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett, one of my all-time favourite Pratchett books, and I think it encapsulates a lot of what I love about his writing. It’s about the reality, the here-and-now of it all - great, abstract concepts like Truth and Justice are all very jolly to talk about over a glass of wine, but you can’t rely on them, or pin them down - and there may be no afterlife, no underlying system of reward and punishment, so all you can do is work with who you are and what you’ve got. That’s what matters.

38. What is something about your writing process YOU think is Really Weird? If you are comfortable, please share. If you’re not comfortable, what do you think cats say about us?

I wouldn't mind sharing, but I'm not sure I have anything about the process that's Really Weird, tbh. I find cutting my nails very effective when I want to get myself going (my process is all about removing distractions). I like to lie on the bed in the sunshine and let my brain drift, because boredom/inactivity is critical to creativity. idk. Some years I've written nothing at all, and this year I've already hit 100k - that I find weird. And I get depressed if I don't write. Even though I'm not a big believer in writer's block as, like, a thing in and of itself (I think it's more lack of time/inspiration/energy), I do have periods where it's just impossible, and some times when I can't stop, but it's the lack of writing itself that I find impacts my mental health, and not necessarily the other way around. I find that fascinating.

Thank you! Post is here, if anyone else wants to ask one.

#writing #mememe

[fangirlinglikeabus]

every target novelisation....2!

planet of giants by terrance dicks ok so i think that the reason that this is...good, and an unearthly child was...not good, is because this was written 9 years later when like. other, non-terrance dicks people were also novelising stories and he wasn’t just grinding them out on an industrial level. planet of giants isn’t one of the greats of doctor who but this is a competent adaptation - it doesn’t add much but it does flesh out what’s already there, giving us some backstory elements and making the appearance of giant insects and bodies seem a bit more dramatic than they could manage in 1964. unfortunately it also alters my favourite line from the story (‘i don't know how you know, you're supposed to know!’) and the doctor is weirdly hostile at the beginning (he’s looking forward to ditching ian and barbara, he responds to barbara’s observation ‘drily’ like he’s being a bit sarcastic over her, um, *checks notes* noticing important details). also, dicks describes this in the opening as ‘the doctor’s most grotesque and terrifying adventure’ and i’m like...planet of giants? really??

doctor who and the dalek invasion of earth by terrance dicks ok this one legitimately doesn’t change much at all. it cuts down on some things (including the doctor’s end speech being shorter - i’m assuming that’s a space thing), fleshes out on pov bits as you can in prose, gets rid of the smacked bottom line. bizarrely there are a few times that susan calls her grandfather the doctor which...i’m pretty sure wasn’t there originally. aside from all those small details, yeah it’s basically the same, but it’s well adapted for prose (i genuinely think it stands as a novel in its own right), and depending on your reading speed it might actually be a nice, shorter alternative to the television version - it was around 45 minutes less time for me. some general things i wanted to comment on: the resistance is explicitly shown as kinda gender segregated (exclusively women are preparing food when we first see it) which irritated me; the description of parliament as a symbol of ‘human progress and tradition’ reminded me of blood harvest having the lords/commons system as the Ideal Form Of Government, in terms of how terrance dicks thinks (this may only interest me? idk i very probably spend too much time thinking about the political views of this particular dead dr who script editor); there’s a use of holocaust here that’s technically accurate to what the word literally means but it felt weird to me to use it.

the rescue by ian marter oh man i’ve been busy and this took me aages to read. it kinda...diverges increasingly from the original story as it goes on. we’ve got some scenes with the seeker crew (incidentally one of them says ‘ass’ and i was like???hello???you’re allowed to do that in a dr who book from 1987???), and then most of the expanded stuff is in the climax. dr who and bennett have a full on brawl! ian, barbara and vicki visit a destroyed didoi city on their way back to the tardis! mysterious silver figures! a giant worm encounter! incidentally, this does have way more of a downer ending than the original because it’s strongly implied that the last two of the didoi were killed by seeker crewmembers who fired in a panic, after which the report that forms the epilogue ends with “goodwill to all persons” to give us a taste of bitter irony. so that’s kinda grim. um...there’s actually a lot of little changes and minor expansions to this one as well so off the top of my head: we learn more about why vicki left earth (global warming :/), sandy is a lot more threatening-looking than on screen, the crashed ship gets its name changed to astra-nine, ian and barbara hold hands briefly, barbara’s fall really leaves her beaten up. i like the seeker crew comparing the tardis briefly passing them to various non-police box objects from the future (although the link to china is a bit eastern world=alien association for my tastes), dr who telling vicki ‘give that pretty face a wipe’ is clearly him attempting to cheer her up and it’s not meant to be weird but i found it weird. finally, i’ve gotta say i appreciate ian marter’s commitment to ‘mildly unsettling’ in his descriptions of tardis materialisations. this was the last novelisation he wrote before his death (the book’s dedicated to him) and mild criticisms aside, i do think he’s a good writer and he brings an interestingly different angle to the series. 

the romans by donald cotton oh my god. how do i even start this. i’m not even going to try cataloguing all the changes because this isn’t even close to a straight adaptation. it’s told in the form of various documents collected by tacitus - the doctor’s diary, ian’s journal that he keeps to prove to the headmaster at coal hill that he and barbara haven’t just eloped (i’m not joking, this is the textual reason for it), an assassin’s letters home to his mum, nero’s scribblings, and various other little details. vicki and barbara get less attention than on screen because we don’t see much from their perspective (vicki unfortunately doesn’t even get to chase the assassin out, she just screams in this), and the nero assassination plot is exclusively confined to being mentioned in the epilogue. it’s also a lot broader, or at least consistently broader, which means that ian’s side of things is treated a lot more lightly (which i was personally fine with) but also that we still get nero’s predatory behaviour being played for laughs. there’s also a few comments about women early on that i was unhappy with, and use of fat as an insult. generally, though, i thought this was great! there were a lot of things that i don’t have space or time to include here but i really liked. i guess i’d consider this as a companion piece to the tv version rather than a replacement, which some of these do basically serve as. they tell the same basic story, but they’re so different in a lot of ways that i think it’s worth looking at both. i just checked my notes and remembered this so content warning: poppea sabina’s first section references suicide.

doctor who and the zarbi by bill strutton ok so i think the web planet is boring. i don’t know completely why, i don’t think it’s any one thing, it has some interesting ideas, but it is! it’s fucking boring! anyway, we have a bit more casual sexism in the novel, we’re missing that fun convo about aspirin between vicki and barbara, but really i don’t think it adds or changes much - like even the chapters correspond pretty much exactly to the tv cliffhangers. i guess it’s competently written prose-wise, but i genuinely can’t get over my conviction that this story is boring. am i being unfair? maybe! i like some of the early atmosphere, though, and i appreciate a book which refers to ‘the ship tardis’ (lowercase) and ‘doctor who’ throughout the entire thing. oh yeah, and i encourage you all to look up the illustrations for this. i don’t know who that woman is but she’s definitely not vicki.

doctor who and the crusaders by david whitaker ah yes, the infamous ‘susan married david cameron’ novelisation. tbh i don’t like the crusades and this has the same problems - i don’t care about the english, el akir is every orientalist stereotype whitaker could possibly cram into one man, and That’s Not How A Harem Works. do i think it’s the most egregiously racist doctor who story of all time? probably not! it certainly has sympathetic arabic characters too. but i prefer most other historicals, at least. however, if that isn’t you, i’m sure you’ll get something out of this. there aren’t any particularly extreme changes to the plot structure, although it’s missing some later scenes at the english court, but it’s well written and probably if you like the original you’ll enjoy it more than i did. there’s some dated language surrounding black characters, though, i’m not a fan of the whole ‘we aren’t so different’ speech ian has (because it rests on ‘we all believe in a higher power’ which uh. i don’t. guess that means i’m not ‘civilised’. also generally i don’t like the argument that we should respect each other because of what we have in common - you should respect other people whatever!), and the prologue at the beginning where they muse on history and destiny assumes that the english invaders and the arabs are both equally right in their own ways (the doctor outright says this!)

the space museum by glyn jones so, i really like the space museum. mainly for vicki’s revolutionary fervour, but there are other reasons too. however, i don’t think that this really adds enough to be of interest - although we do get some information about the two alien species’ biology, and a bonus explanation of why everyone speaks english (the moroks briefly considered invading earth so programmed some earth languages into their translation system). there’s a bit more wandering around the museum, some minor tweaks and expansions in other areas, an underground tunnel scene where we learn a bit of the planet’s backstory...ian and the doctor are very snippy to each other in this, which i find funny. oh yeah, and there’s a bizarrely meta bit where ian comments on poor dialogue? basically, this is a book i enjoyed, but really it just makes me want to watch the space museum instead of reading it. just a heads up, there’s a character who briefly considers suicide to get out of his bosses being angry with him. 

the chase by john peel ok before i get started i need to establish that the cover for this one slaps. anyway, i don’t respect john peel at all but this was...alright? doesn’t expand much plotwise (although i suspect both the sand monsters at the beginning and the plants at the end have slightly more to do) but we get a fair bit of pov stuff. unfortunately lacking ian’s dad dancing and hi-fi the panda, the marie celeste bit is no longer played for comedy (barbara angsts over it) and even though the two paragraphs dragging morton dill are kinda funny i’m not sure how i feel about him being committed for claiming he saw daleks. ian and barbara’s departure plays out a little differently. steven is blond for some reason. we learn as well that daleks are charged by solar panels (at least they’re pro-green energy??)

the time meddler by nigel robinson pretty competent, straight down the middle novelisation, although that is tempered by inserting some weird sexist bits for steven and also lowkey being nostalgic for 11th century england at a few points? it’s also a bit more violent than we see on tv, and if anything the rape is more loudly implied, so heads up. other than that, there are a few minor embellishments (we’re explicitly told the dr and monk recognise each other, vicki tells steven that the tardis is important to her because it’s her home, a few differences between the monk’s tardis and the doctor’s are described, vicki views steven following her as a triumphant victory in their power struggle which i personally find funny), and there’s a prologue (recapping steven’s arrival in the tardis) and an epilogue (which delays the monk’s discovery of the broken tardis because he walks to hastings first to try and get involved there). i had fun, but it’s not a must read. 

#doctor who #classic who #first doctor #susan foreman #ian chesterton #barbara wright #vicki pallister #steven taylor #laura reads dw books #target marathon #this took me aaages and i don't even have an excuse lol i finished uni weeks ago #anyway sorry if this is a bit rushed i'm literally leaving for somewhere in five minutes and i wanted to get this out first

[autorepliicant]

get  to  know  the  mun!             repost,  don’t  reblog.

———  BASICS  !  ♡

(PEN)NAME  :  Desi

PRONOUNS  :  she  /  her

ZODIAC  SIGN  :  Libra

TAKEN  OR  SINGLE  :  *Cries in alone*

———  THREE  FACTS  ! ♡

I’m active on Tumblr since I was around 13 or 14 years old. Back then I was roleplaying as a somewhat self insert / persona OC of mine; A blonde angel! I don’t know what was with me and angels back then, plus my horrible, HORRIBLE English back then that people had to endure! And I had some RP partners back then so it’s a miracle they didn’t complain about my grammar xD Then everything got to a weird turn when I was into the Creepypasta fandom and my weird obsession about Jeff the Killer still makes me cringe so hard QwQ 2012 I got into Marvel / the Loki Fandom and still roleplay as him on my other account and I still love this mischiefmaker to death! 

I’m a metalhead and I annoy every new person I meet with his very fact and I have a weird preference of creating goth/dark supernatural OC’s for some fandoms, but I try to get away from this concept on Tumblr because I know not everyone likes dark looking characters or the overall goth aesthetic, so I try my best being as neutral as possible when it comes to faceclaims and choosing singers or actors I like or having a pretty face in general, hehe. Though I have two goth OC’s I might give them their own blog. Let’s see

And for a rather shorter fact: I love the concept of the future technology and I’m a lot into space! Like the space we’re floating in, with planets and stuff, it’s scary but fascinating at the same time! ;D

———  EXPERIENCE  !  ♡

The DBH fandom in general is a bit odd, but in my one and a half years I never really met an intense asshole. I don’t like the shipping atmosphere mostly but I just avoid that and stay focused to my own ideas. I met a lot of wonderful people in the fandom who I had really awesome RP’s with, It’s kinda sad to see that the fandom is getting a little quit, so I hope there might be a similar game in the future or DBH 2 so we can get lit again xD I revived my blog for my android boys and i’m happy I can write with them again (Even if my friend is the only one interacting with them right now xD LOOKING AT YOU THEA I LOVE YOU! ) I still try to look for similar muses or direct DBH muses. As things for Marvel, I have seen worse days honestly. It’s mostly all about canceling people for their ships or not agreeing to the canon character in general, which kinda made it diificult for me / Loki to find someone for close interaction, as I have to mention I’m picky when it comes to writing style and portrayal. I had a share of bad experience myself, obsessive fans that forgot reality and believed my Loki being kinda real? But this was a long time ago but it kinda still is burned in my brain. There are still a handful of people I follow but I still need to talk to them more often ^^; 

———  MUSE  PREFERENCE  !  ♡

I prefer writing male characters and mostly prefer interacting with male muses, mostly, not ALWAYS with males I sure do like writing with females too. I don’t know why but writing a female kinda is a hard thing for me to do, even if I’m a female???? It kinda is complicated being in a female mindset and it’s much easier to be a man and analyze his psyche and behavior and probably making a version of a man I’d like to REALLY talk with? Though the behavior of my muses vary, one is a very kind, caring and gentle person who never gets angry, the other is a cynical misunderstood little shit who just wants to try to be a better person but has a hard time doing so, I love creating characters with different basic emotions and characteristic so I don’t write the ever same thing.  I add a lot of verses for this purpose too as I like to change the muse’s personality a little bit when they change into a new AU so I can experiment with alternative emotions and behavior too ;D  I have no issue of what kind of species my RP partner muse is or what species I will do mine, it’s always a mix of supernatural/fantasy, Cyberpunk or basic human muses.

———  FLUFF  /  ANGST  /  SMUT  !  ♡    

FLUFF  :  It’s basically the thing I prefer. I love building a mutual bond with my muse to my RP partner’s muse, to see what kind of path they will enter, platonic, romatic etc. I’m a hopeless romantic and find little gestures of attention to my muses absolutely adorable! But this doesn’t mean I will automatically ship with anyone, unless you’re a friend of mine. I like to keep things spontanous and if the chemistry feel right to me, I will approach you to ask if they want to have a potential ship as well or not ;D But Fluff and romance are topics I really ADORE to write, I kinda get into that emotionally as well when there is a romatic thread going on it’s incredible xD 

ANGST  :Angst needs to happen for me sometimes when things mix up with the romantic path, I don’t know why, I love writing or interacting with dramatical muses with a hard backstory and as soon as they find someone they trust and love, they will reveal any little detail of events they regret and can’t make right again, to finally be free of things they kept inside for so long, knowing they will expose everything to a person they love with tears in their eyes and hardly sobbing - while I might cry as well when I write or read angst xD 

SMUT  : It isn’t THAT necessary for me, but when Smut happens, I will always try my best not to make it sound nasty. I will avoid dirty words like Cock or Pussy because they don’t sound aesthecially pleasing to me when you write a scenario between two lovers. I sure get into details of the level of lust but that’s about it, I write a story between people that (might) love each other and MAKE LOVE with each other, not starring in some random porn video using naughty words xD But yeah, I like writing smut but it’s the least thing I care about during a ship honestly, but when it happens, I’m fully into it :D 

PLOT  /  MEMES  :Looking at things, I’m more a writer that prefers semi plotted things like, characters, setting etc. Mostly it’s enough for to get information and write a scenario, but sometimes Memes make it easier or harder when you can’t get an instant idea, but that’s a challenge I like being a hobby writer, to let your imagination grow ;D People I don’t interact with always have permission to send me an ask I happily answer or write small RP’s with, but I prefer multi paragraphs with a setting we both agreed with and the rest of the RP plotting is kept spontanous mostly, but I will always come to help when a partner struggles with a certain scene and decide to make a little skip perhaps :D So I don’t mind both honestly but my preference surely goes to Plots Tagged by: @undeadunalive​ ILU You know that? <33 Thanky you so much!  Tagging: @oblivionlotus​ and other people on my Loki blog when I reblogged this one over

#;mun stuff #;ooc #;tag game #DBH #marvel #detroit become human

[scriptstructure]

I always imagine my stories like a movie but I realise that writing down scenes makes the pacing way different. I mean in a movie I can imagine a scene that's mostly showing characters entering and being awed at a spectacular location for a full minute.. but if I wrote it all out yet it's boring to spend a full minute reading a description of the same thing. How do I work out such pacing differences?

Sorry an add on to the pacing act I just sent. Pacing in a movie is fixed. But readers read at their own speed and can slow down or speed up as they please. How do I deal with pacing with this in mind?

Well, first off, who says pacing in a movie is fixed? If readers reading faster or slower changes things, what about folks who watch stuff at x1.25 speed? What about me, who can’t watch a whole movie or show without pausing it fifty times to get up and do or get something? What about also me who pauses a show whenever something embarrassing happens so that I can get up and do a stress lap of the living room? 

It doesn’t matter what the reader or viewer does during their consumption of the text, that’s their business. All you’ve got to do is write the story as well as you can.

As well, I think that you’re vastly overestimating the length of time that movies can focus on a single establishing shot/ reaction shot. Unless the shot is playing over the opening credits, as in the credits are rolling over the screen while the camera moves over a large area, establishing shots are going to be like 10-15 seconds, max. Any longer and it starts putting off the structure of the film, making it feel weird and laggy.

Of course this has shifted over time as editing methods have changed in filmmaking, and you’ll find that older movies have longer shots, and feel much slower. Modern films tend to have much snappier editing, and want to pack in a lot more action-per-minute.

An interesting example of a film which I think deliberately uses extra long establishing shots to create an eerie, and unsettling effect, is Death in Venice (1971 dir. Luchino Visconti) which has multiple extra long establishing shots at many points through the movie. It’s unsettling, because it builds so much tension in shots of 20-30 seconds that it makes the following scenes of ostensibly lighthearted, drama-free interaction between the characters feel brooding and sinister, which very well suits the arc that the protagonist goes through. Good film, weird. I enjoyed it.

So, while sure, it can seem like establishing and reaction shots in film take up a lot of time, I tend to think that what’s really happening is that you’re getting a lot of memorable imagery and information presented very clearly for a longer period than most shots allow.

But how is this done in prose writing? We don’t have control over how long it takes the reader to absorb a page of the story. And we don’t have to. That’s not something that you need to be thinking about. Instead, what we think about is how much space on the page it takes to conclude this bit of description.

I have a post [HERE] about how paragraph length can affect pacing, mood, and flow of scenes.

I know I tend to hammer on about the necessity of including descriptive elements in with the action so that we don’t end up with bogs of exposition slowing things down. But if you do want to slow things down, using a bit of dense description to emphasise the importance of a certain thing can be done. Lets call it the Castle on the Hill.

Look, our characters have been travelling through the magical forest for a long time, fighting gnomes and eating bread and cheese and falling into enchanted rivers. When they emerge from the forest, crest a rise and see the shining Castle on the Hill before them, of course they’ll take a moment to enjoy it and drink in all that highfalutin atmosphere.

So slow it down, think about how your focalising character’s/ narrative voice’s attention is going to process the scene–this can tell us about a character’s priorities, too. Are they looking at the pretty flags flying from the tops of the towers? Or are they considering how difficult it will be to swim across the moat if they have to make a quick getaway?–and think about crafting elements that tell the reader what exactly makes this place special.

Now, I do want to point out that it can be a tough balancing act to prevent your Castle on the Hill from sliding into a Bog of Exposition. Remember above where I was talking about the deceptive brevity of establishing shots? Here’s where that applies to prose. You probably don’t want to take more than half a page to describe this amazing, pivotal vista.

If you’re really going to stretch it, or if there’s something interesting happening while the scene is being set, you might push it to a page, but much more than that and it starts to feel distinctly marshy underfoot.

Another thing to consider is that in movies, they can just put a brief shot of an army on horseback thundering across the field toward a line of soldiers, and you’ve got that information in your head. When we’re writing, we’ve got to do it like I did in that previous sentence there, building all of the elements in the scene so that the reader has the material needed to imagine it fully.

When you’ve got a big scene to set up, think about all of the material elements that you want to convey, the sensory information that will help to make it seem real, and then think about the emotion that you want to evoke, and finally how it’s going to lead into the action of the scene that follows on from it.

I hope this helps!

#writing #pacing #bog of exposition #worldbuilding #Anonymous

[laughingpinecone]

Yuletide letter!

I am laughingpineapple on AO3 

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (doubly so if the event the fic focuses on is made up but canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and similar formats, bonding and emotional support/intimacy, physical intimacy, lingering touches, loyalty, casefic, surrealism, magical realism, established relationships, future fic, hurt/comfort or just comfort from the ample canon hurt, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic, dreams and memories and identities, outsider POV, UST, exploration of secondary bits of canon, leaning on the uniqueness of the canon setting/mood, found families, characters reuniting after a long and/or harrowing time, friends-to-lovers, road trips, maps, mutual pining, cuddling, wintry moods, the feeling of flannel and other fabrics, ridiculous concepts played straight, sensory details, places being haunted, people being haunted, the mystery of the woods, small hopes in bleak worlds, electricity, places that don’t quite add up, mismatched memories, caves and deep places, distant city lights at night

Any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, canon divergences, non-mundane AUs (space opera! high fantasy! new weird also), deep lore, unrequested characters popping up - please do go wild with the & combos!

Blanket crossover prompt with Untitled Goose Game: set that goose loose anywhere and ruin anyone’s day. Tariq and select Twin Peaks characters who are not Albert (Margaret, Laura...) may hope to tame and befriend the goose; anyone else better get wrecked. Capitalism may also get wrecked while Kentucky Route Zero characters popcorn.gif nearby

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, canon retellings, unrequested ships (I listed all the ships I like for each fandom. Outside of those, I’d prefer if other canon characters weren’t shipped, unless they’re like, canon engaged/married)

Dark Souls 1: Solaire of Astora

I’m only familiar with the first game! It’s probably relevant to mention that I think that linking the fire is kind of a dumbass move, Gwyn is a jerk, Kaathe has his own agenda and there’s no winning move in this world, or at least no obvious one. And amidst all this nonsense, Solaire just shines, pure of heart and dumb of ass like the best of ‘em. I love his kindness in this cruelest of worlds and I love the sad edge he’s got even earlier on when he admits to being seen as weird.

I would enjoy a bittersweet ending for him but I realize both of his endings are deeply entrenched in his themes so it’s hard to make him steer clear of either of those. If you can figure out how to make him not link the Flame or survive the ordeal, I’m all ears! I like a sense of purpose being the thing that can stave off hollowing, and I like characters helping other characters finding that sense of purpose within themselves. Focus on scenery always welcome, and if you want to make up a location, that’s great too!

I’d be super happy with a story set during Solaire’s time in Lordran that simply doesn’t mention his endings, anyway. Maybe he’s the one who helps someone else while his own tragedy keeps looming on the horizon. Striking up friendships in the face of a crapsack world! Meeting people through Lordran’s temporal/dimensional fuckery, where it’s possible to cross the path of warriors who have been gone for ages… could Solaire meet either or both Catarina knights (there’s so much great art about sun bro and onion bro but where’s the fic?), or do the grumpy grump&ray of sunshine routine with Logan, or meet Artorias or even Gwyn before he linked the Flame - or himself? What if he met Kaathe?

Ships: none really? Solaire/Chosen Undead but I don’t really like to read about customizable protagonists in fic so I’d rather not get fic featuring the CU. I’m all about the & character combos here.

Ghost Trick: Cabanela, Jowd

I love Cabanela being fierce and dazzling bright and determined and loyal to the very end, dancing to his own rhythm, so sure of himself and of his ideas that he doesn’t even need to prove to anyone that he’s right. Too sure of the wrong idea, once, and everything crashed and burned. And I love Jowd being the immovable object to Cabanela’s unstoppable force, a suicidal trainwreck of guilt with the gallows humor to show for it, and also incredibly smart (both jerks figured out Sissel’s powers better than Sissel did, that’s... something) and athletic and with an unsuspected talent for stealth.

I am very interested in various characters finding about the erased timeline, but not getting their memories back, and having to live with being told about what they did but never remembering it. Touch-starved Jowd in the new timeline is a surefire hit (or maybe Cabanela if he’s the one who came back and kept the memories of the old timeline). Touchy-feely Cabanela as kind of his baseline with the people he likes.  All what-ifs welcome:what if they managed an acceptable happy ending but didn’t reset the timeline, what if Alma’s ghost stuck around… I’m also wondering about either of them ending up undead via Temsik shard - how would they take these developments (I’m assuming better than Yomiel did but the bar is admittedly low), did Cabanela do it on purpose for whatever sensible-if-you-are-Cabanela reason, what does it change in their relationship, what are the practical pros and cons of the situation here. UFO adventures with Pigeon Man! Lynne teaming up with either of them against the other! Sissel death-averting action if either/both of them die or just regular cat action! Spy stuff! Daring rescues! My forever prompt of Jowd being the one who gets a chance to prove his loyalty to Cabanela for once. Dancing.

Please no Yomiel. Nothing against the guy I’m just getting an overdose of him through RPing.

Ships: Alma/Cabanela/Jowd and all sides thereof, but when it splits the canon couple I only like it when the missing spouse is dead or otherwise unavailable, hopefully with a reset on the horizon. If you want to go for a Cabanela&Alma or Cabanela/Alma who are strongly motivated by a dead or jailed Jowd, I’m good with him not actively appearing in the fic. Alma/Jowd & Cabanela is excellent in all scenarios. I’m good with explicitly non-romantic takes on Jowd&Cabs but please keep their bond strong, and please no conflicting ship for Cabanela. Lynne/Memry!

Kentucky Route Zero: Any (Lula Chamberlain, Joseph Wheattree, Donald kentuckyroutezero, Weaver Màrquez)

(if enough of us request it, will some Murphy corollary guarantee that Act V will come out between now and reveals just to mess with the Yuletide schedule? If it does, I’ll be playing it immediately and probably add a few thoughts and prompts here for kicks, at the end of this section, after a spoiler warning. Obviously feel free to stick to canon up to Un Pueblo De Nada)

I’m all for exploration of any of the game’s themes and for including any staples from adjacent genres - wanna go full-on American Gothic? Dip into surrealism? Take a leaf from Twin Peaks with tulpa / split narratives to explore the characters’ issues? I can’t think of any specific AUs for the disaster trio + disaster soloist here, but I generally love AUs so if you want to sidestep the inconvenience of an incomplete canon that way, be my guest! Or of course there’s Xanadu at the height of its glory, an infinite what-ifs generator. Was Weaver ever part of it, what was this digital Weaver up to? A Xanadu narrative would be great! A good fit for IF, too? I’d love to hear about any new spot along the Zero or the Echo river, or an expansion of some place that’s only mentioned by Will in HATATE or only gets a few paragraphs of text. Lula getting ideas for a new installation, or an article talking about her work? Donald listening to Static between stations somehow (Donald being constantly high as a kite as per this)? Joseph who went back to the surface finds himself near an entrance to the Zero somewhere? A collection of Weaver-isms? Feel free to bring in anyone else from any part of canon.

Ships: “Flipping through the pages, Conway is able to gather that it's a story about three characters: Joseph, Donald, and Lula. It's something like a tragic love triangle, but much more complex. Some kind of tangled, painfully concave love polygon.” 😬 that one, as a full triad, regrettably since they don’t seem too inclined to get reunited and stay that way. If you can nudge them, good. But I’m very open to non-romantic resolutions as well, going past their messy feelings to find each other as friends after so many years maybe. For Weaver, I’m interested in all her & relationships (seriously. Weaver & Cate. Weaver & EmilyBen&Bob. Weaver & Slow Moe Crow.) but nothing shippy. Conway/Lysette, Junebug/Johnny(/Shannon?).

The Last Remnant: David Nassau, Pagus

I’m very interested in post-game exploration, and getting a clearer feeling of any of the cities and assorted places that populate this fascinating world. I like the whole party with their characterization based on battle quotes, red bubble dialogues, and even their unique stat (‘authority’ is a natural fit for David but ‘romance’ tells me something new about Sibal!) Character interaction. Bit of worldbuilding. What’s another festival they celebrate? Do they erect something else instead of the Valeria Heart? Any fun discoveries down in Siebenbur? Where the hell IS Veyriel, anyway, do they go look for it and if so what do they find out? End of an age. Old bonds.

I ache for David who fought so valiantly as a warrior and as a politician only to be slapped in the face with the unexpected loss Emma first and then Rush, right as they were ready to claim their victory and as he would have to start coming to terms with the idea that maybe without the Gae Bolg he wouldn’t die young. At least his Generals are still with him - out of them, all of whom I adore, I picked Pagus because Qsiti are cool. And Pagus in particular is the coolest (”I know that fine qsiti... That large, reticent mouth, the laugh lines around the eyes...“ he’s FINE it’s CANON!). So I’d like to see how David bounces off Pagus in particular, what their bond is like, what he thinks of whatever aspect of Qsiti culture.

Ships: postcanon David/Rush, possibly with an emphasis on Rush’s nature as a remnant? I am also fond of Pagus/Sibal/Maddox, there are more prompts for them in my #letters tag!

Pyre: Volfred Sandalwood, Tariq The Lone Minstrel

Oh the burning found family feelings, the revolutionary passion, the tension between topside social constraints (moreso for liberated exiles, thrust into heroic roles after the revolution) and the kind of freedom allowed by the Downside! I love all the themes, the solemnity, the heart of this game. I’ve been waiting for a character like Tariq all my life, a minstrel who’s otherworldly soft and just a lil bit eldritch. Volfred as well, he just hits my perfect ratio of “noble intentions” to “scheming to a fault”. Like, the percentages in his planner are pointless for gameplay since the ending just depends on the number of Nightwings sent topside at the end - so it’s just there for his characterization, he’s the sort of person who assigns percentages to people, nbd. ...for a good cause! That said, I would die for anyone in that Blackwagon+Dalbert+Celeste, so if you want to write in someone else as well, please do! (otoh if you maybe want to dunk on Brighton or Manley, I don’t like bashing but canon levels of love-to-hate-them would be fun)

Thoughts about finding oneself at the end of an age, as everything crumbles down to form something new. The titan stars. History nerd Volfred, “aye sir, I was there” Tariq. Conversations with Dalbert. Or with Sandra? Any postcanon very welcome with any combination of endings as long as the revolution was peaceful. Please do lean into the xeno headcanons if you enjoy them! Even for gen, I like to read what it’s like to be something other than human and these two are very much not human in different and intriguing ways. Or, Volfred’s zodiac sign is Cancer and Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so there’s that. I also love how they both hold the other in the highest esteem, especially on Tariq’s part since he’s the immortal Herald of the Scribes and Volfred is, all in all, a history teacher, but listen to him and you’d think the roles were inverted. I love my nonviolent canon but could anything happen to either of them that may require a rescue, and/or some good old-fashioned h/c? What’s something that could make Tariq of all people lose it? How’s life 100 years on?

For a funnier mood, picture Volfred trying to figure out how to flirt with Tariq with percentages, planners and all. He could just ask him but no, it’s convoluted plan or bust. Or, conversely, Tariq’s increasingly direct hints that he’s interested, but they’re still ‘increasingly direct’ for Tariq standards, so, not at all, undetectable even by Volfred who can get pretty damningly indirect himself.

Ships: Volfred/Tariq, Volfred/Oralech, some form of Oralech/Volfred/Tariq (more of a Volfred-centric V but I would like to be convinced of the Oralech/Tariq side of things), Celeste/Jodariel, Hedwyn/Fikani and Pamitha/Bertrude.

Twin Peaks: Albert Rosenfield

Case fic but they don’t find out jack shit, someone disappears, David Bowie was there, it’s complicated. Fragmented, shifted, mirrored identities. New Lodge spaces. The risks of staring into the void for too long. Gentle illusions. Transcendence. The moon. Static buzzing. Any title from the s3 ethereal whooshing compilation used as a prompt, actually. Twin Peaks is all about the mystery to me, the awe of mystery and unknowability and the human drive to look beyond and the risks of getting a peek, and about shared consciousness and trauma taking physical form and about the warmth of human connections in an uncaring world. Go wild with the ethereal whooshing!

I love Albert and he breaks my heart, a pacifist who ends his arc shooting his oldest remaining friend after life sucked all the passion and most of the idealism out of him. Is shooting Diane just to see Cooper come back, get her back and disappear with her again trauma enough to make him split? I’d be interested in reading about it, or any other take on his unwavering loyalty to Gordon which should maybe waver after Gordon’s admission that he’s lied to him for 25 years and the aforementioned unmitigated disaster of an ending. But I’m also very interested in his life apart from the disaster that is Blue Rose and his heartbreaking search for Cooper: did he keep in touch with Harry throughout the years, what did they talk about? Was he ever dragged along for a hike in the woods and did something weird happen there? We know he kept in touch with Diane, what did THEY talk about? Does he go on a journey of his own to find her after the ending? Does Tammy come along, do they see each other as friends other than mentor and protégé? What was Phil like as a co-boss back in the day? Did he get a small victory over Windom at some point (maybe even in the present day, given Kenneth Welsh’s recent wonderful interview where he’s adamant that Windom lives)? Does Laura ever visit him in some ghostly manner? He and Denise look like a great duo for a case and/or office shenanigans. We know from TFD that he’s a big jazz enthusiast, something about that? When does he cave in and just accept some aspects of Coop’s investigative method? Just set him loose on another unsuspecting character and I’ll be happy.

If Coop comes back (and I’d love for Coop to come back), I would like it if he came back on his own thanks to having sorted out his crap. After s3, I am not interested in stories about any other character saving Cooper. Albert’s got his wounds to lick dangit. And he’s got friends who can be by his side! ...I do love his dynamic with Coop so much, though. Sigh. I do miss that bastard. Anyway.

Ships: Albert/Coop/Harry and sides thereof, Tammy/Cynthia, Gordon/Phil, Diane/Constance, Lucy/Andy, Chet/Sam.

Canon-specific DNWs: any singular Dreamer being the ‘source’ of canon, BOB (let alone Judy) being forever defeated in the finale, Judy being an active malevolent presence in the characters’ lives, clear explanations for canonical ambiguities, ‘Odessaverse’ being the reality layer, the Fireman’s House by the Sea being the White Lodge, anything that 4 hours video says is the explanation of Twin Peaks

#letter #yuletide 2019

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Meta Monday

You’ve probably seen the posts going around AO3, both the warnings of people posing as AO3 volunteers to harass authors here on Tumblr and the reminders to update your account email and back-up your work.

It sucks, of course, that anyone would do that to my favorite thing on earth, so it seemed like a good time to share something a little more positive. So, here are all the various tips, tricks, and tools I’ve been collecting for my fellow Archive users, readers and authors alike--even total newbies.  

I always feel like I should apologize for my “not actually meta” meta posts, but I’ll be back with a more traditional rec list next time!

Archive of Our Own - Tips for Readers

AO3 searches, ship tags on AO3, and rare pairs by @destinationtoast​​, If you are interested in rare pairs, this post is especially for you.  I’ll be talking about Sherlock specifically, but you can generalize this to any fandom.This post addresses two questions:  What tag should I use for a ship? How do I find more fics that are primarily about my ship? (Mirror Link)

AO3 Work Search Tips: Archive Warnings by @snowgall​, If you’re like me, you use the AO3 Work Search form all the time to help zero in on the fics you want to read. But this form has some weird quirks. What do I do if I want to search for fics that don’t include Major Character Death? (Mirror Link)

AO3 Work Search Tips: Multiple Ratings by @snowgall​, I tend to look for fics which are likely to include sexytimes, and these are almost always rated either E or M. (That’s in AO3 parlance. In American movie ratings terms, these correspond roughly to NC-17 and R). (Mirror Link)

How do I find/gather data about the ships in my fandom on AO3? by @destinationtoast​​, Lots of fans have been writing to me to ask for help gathering data for their own fandom stats projects, and I thought rather than answering them each individually, I’d start trying to share some of my answers more broadly. (Mirror Link)

how to ao3 savior, an updated tutorial by @quietgames​​, Frustrated or triggered because of that one tag/ship/fic/author that keeps showing up while you browse ao3?  Here’s step-by-step guide to blacklisting à la tumblr savior on Archive of our Own. (Mirror Link)

How To: A Guide to AO3 Accounts by @fuckyeahererifanfic​​​, If you’ve ever been confused on how to utilise AO3 to the best of your ability - from profiles, to the search function, to filters - then check out FYEF’s [AO3 GUIDE] tag. I’m about to give you the best guide to AO3 you’ll ever see. This guide has been created to assist you all in making the most of your account, and has been HIGHLY requested by our followers, and even people from other fandoms. (Mirror Link)

The “Search Within Results” Field and You (Three Parts) by @ao3org​​​​, [...] There are some “secret” search options that are already built into the filtering and search code, but aren’t necessarily reflected in the interface (because ticky box overkill). Here’s an overview of neat things you can put into any of the following places to narrow down (and sort!) your results. (Mirror Link)

Archive of Our Own - Tips for Writers

How to add images to AO3 (the right way) by @flootzavut​​ et al, [...] This is where the width=“100%” code can really come into its own. Put that into your image coding, and voila, the image is scaled to the width of the screen it’s being displayed on, rather than the generic width of the original image or the width of the screen the author was looking at it on. (Mirror Link)

google docs/ao3 writing tip by @deluxekyluxtrashcan​​, If you, like me, have had trouble when copying from Google Docs into AO3 and hate seeing the line spacing getting fried, try this. (Mirror Link)

microsoft word/ao3 writing tip by @deluxekyluxtrashcan​​, This will help avoid the paragraph spacing becoming messed up when you copy from Microsoft Word (2007 and later) to AO3′s Rich Text editor box. (Mirror Link)

Post to AO3 from Google Docs by @petals42, [...] This is the best document in all of history. Basically, it has a script in it that has a “post to AO3″ option and it will go in and fill in all the html you need - italics, bold, paragraph breaks, you name it! (Mirror Link)

What’s the difference between Mature and Explicit? by @tinsnip​, Mature is ‘and then they made love.’ Explicit is 'and here’s how they did it exactly.’ (Mirror Link)

#fanfiction #ao3 #archive of our own #writing tips #ao3 tips #meta monday #fangirlrecs #mm31

[dropsofletters]

beyond your imagination

Title: beyond your imagination Pairing: EXO/Reader (ft NCT/Reader in future chapters) Genre: Fantasy!AU Summary: In a land where humans do not exist, there are creatures completely different who seek for help. It’s at that moment when nine males accidentally enter said place, the myth that no one knew about –Mirabili, a land for those who were odd. Would those creatures be able to accept the destiny that was written a lot of centuries before? Note: This is a collaboration fic with @byunists and we will be working in both our blogs, so the second part will be up on hers. Basically, we have talked about this for hours since today and we are going to add two groups that we like, but she is mainly going to write the NCT parts because she knows them better than I do. Please, look forward to this and I hope you will like it.

Part I: “The first mistake.”

“What are you doing?”

The sound of a body falling to the floor immediately has the people working around them in the farm looking towards the source of the noise. Of course, the only person they see is Kim Jongin sitting on a tree, his clothes completely disheveled and his brown hair a mess over his own head. Jongin was really loved around the small town for his body that was made for motion, it seemed like he could have people falling in love with his different talents and sweet personality, as well as the amount of times he had become the heartthrob of most girls when he was in school, completely different from the young man that was groaning on the grass, touching the small of his back to stop the pain, almost mixed with a bit of disappointment because Jongin had stopped his reading time and the page he was on was completely lost now. Kyungsoo was good friends with Jongin most of the time, but in situations like those…he wants to murder him. He sits up as he rubs his back, looking down at his book before tossing it over his thighs and looking up at Jongin, who was still holding tight to the branch of the tree and looking at his friend with fears in his eyes. There were two things that Kyungsoo hated completely: public embarrassment and people interrupting him when he was reading.

Turns out that Jongin had committed both in less than five minutes.

Kyungsoo dusts off his pants as best as he can, practically hearing his mother’s voice in the back of his mind scolding him for getting his clothes dirty with dust and turns out, Jongin didn’t give a damn about having his clothes dirty or not, he was always moving –running, walking, jumping, he doesn’t care, but Kyungsoo only finds peace when he comes to that side of the small town and he gets on that branch to read his favorite books. Nowadays, he had been interested in this old tale that he found on his grandfather’s stack of books and it spoke about a place, somewhere not too far away, but close enough to scare you, where people weren’t exactly people and creatures had immigrated there to forget that they were ever different. Human skin, bones and whatever represented them was seen as odd and it was beautiful to Kyungsoo, reading about a place where bills weren’t important and you could be as weird as you’d like. The ever so nice Kyungsoo who followed the rules all the time would love to have a place to be crazy and it sounded like Mirabili was the place that Kyungsoo dreamt of but he never knew about it.

“Oh shit,” The sound of laughter is followed next as Kyungsoo looks up at Jongdae, who was trying his hardest to cover his laugh but it was too visible as he lent a hand to the shorter male for him to take. Kyungsoo rolled his eyes at his friend as he used his hand to stand up and he sees the rest of his friends approaching him. Turns out that maybe –and just maybe- Jongin had brought all of his friends to bother him and Kyungsoo loves them, he really does…but he wanted to read his book in peace. “Jongin, we said that you should surprise him, not literally scare him to death!” Jongin gets off the tree as he rushes towards his friends and he shrugs his shoulders, picking up Kyungsoo’s book as Sehun starts speaking.

“We ran out of food and we thought you could cook something for us,” His comment made him receive a very hard slap on the head from Kyungsoo and the man with the thick eyebrows winces before he looks over at Junmyeon asking for help. As always, Junmyeon had a soft spot for him.

Junmyeon wraps an arm around Kyungsoo’s shoulder and he smiles at him, his cheeks getting fuller in the matter of seconds. “Sehun is just being a brat.  We came here because you haven’t hung out with us ever since…last week?” His words are doubtful as he checks his facts inside his head and then he nods sharply. “We thought you may have forgotten about us and we can’t have that happening.”

“Chanyeol almost cried when you didn’t go to his house on Saturday.” Baekhyun added as he popped a lollipop out of his mouth and the taller man blushes madly as he shakes his head, creating excuses from the top of his head to make himself look like he wasn’t actually missing Kyungsoo. The thing is, even when their friend was really quiet…he was like a warm breeze in the middle of a cold day, he brought peace whenever they were together and he was the perfect mixture between funny and intelligent, which was great for the pair of eight dorks that were always around town. Speaking of dorks, Jongin and Yixing were reading over the first paragraphs of the book Kyungsoo was reading and their confused faces were almost funny.

Yixing looks up with his mouth half parted as he spoke slowly. “M-Mirabili…?” The word sounds foreign on his lips and rolling off his tongue, so Kyungsoo nods his head as he takes the book from their hands, checking to see if the pages were folded or if one of them had ripped. Luckily, none of those things happened. “What is a Mirabili?”

Minseok seems to light up at the name and then he chuckles. “My mom used to read me that story when I was a kid.  Mirabili is technically a place where bad kids go to.” The misunderstanding of information had Kyungsoo raising an eyebrow and then shaking his head as the group walked towards Kyungsoo’s small house. “My mom would tell me that if I didn’t eat my vegetables, I was going to turn into some monster and go to Mirabili.”

“Did you believe her?” Baekhyun asks and Minseok licks his lips as he nods his head quickly. “Damn…you’re dumb.”

“Shut the fuck up, Baekhyun-” Minseok is cut off by his own train of thoughts when he remembers that Kyungsoo seemed to disagree with him. “But it’s a myth so…”

Kyungsoo smiles as he shakes his head, looking down at the brown book with golden handwriting that showed so many stories that he just wanted to see with his own eyes. “I don’t think Mirabili is a myth.” The always thoughtful Kyungsoo says and then he runs his fingers through his black, soft hair, looking around at his group of friends to see all eyes were on him. “It’s supposed to be under our own town, somehow there is a barrier between the human world and them…but I don’t think they are monsters, they are just weird.”

Chanyeol sparks up at that. “If they are weird, then they are not normal.”

“And monsters are not normal.” Jongin finishes. “Chanyeol is right.” Kyungsoo opens the door to his house but before letting them enter, he looks back at them, trying to get his words out of his chest because he wasn’t as talkative as he would like to, but when it came to books and opinions, he had the biggest dictionary inside his head. Turns out, Kyungsoo loved to read –obviously, but he was much more attached to books that spoke about things that felt closer to home. Surely, he had a great time with romance stories and political books, but there was nothing more beautiful than seeing outcasts, just like him, trying to make their own spaces in this world.

“Chanyeol is taller than everyone in this whole group of friends,” Kyungsoo starts as he points at his taller friend and everyone nods, agreeing with him. “That makes him different than us, but that doesn’t make him a monster or a giant.” The reason behind Kyungsoo’s words was a way with coping, of course, with knowing that there was a bigger mystery behind the human nature. Why was everything written and scripted? He doesn’t quite know and he wants to know why people have to follow certain guidelines, society created an image that everyone wanted to be and Kyungsoo didn’t agree with that. “The writer of this book visited Mirabili, they felt the same thing that these creatures did…they said many things that we don’t know about.” A shrug of his shoulders is added as he opens the door wider and guides his group of friends inside his house. Small, but homely. “They may be true, they may be lies…”

“Hello, Mrs. Do!” Jongdae greets sweetly and Kyungsoo’s mother immediately rushes towards him, hugging him tightly as always. Seems like Jongdae was really great at making people warm up to him. Once she pulls away, she looks over at her son and her smile falters as she fixes the apron around her waist.

“Do Kyungsoo, what happened to your clothes?!”

“I fell.”

“I can’t believe-”

And Jongin was more than happy that Kyungsoo didn’t tell the truth.

In between tests, work and the fact that his mother had made him do more shores around the house because he had made his clothes dirty, he barely had the time to read the book he had stolen from his grandfather –or more like he was busted doing so and his grandfather gave it to him- so he was pleased the moment his back hit the hard surface of his individual bed and he felt his muscles tightening as the soft material of his pajamas touched his skin. His rounded eyes were itchy and he rubbed at them as he stretched his limbs, his eyes falling over the brown book over his bedside table, lightly illuminated by the lamp that was placed there as well. His fingers reached for the edge of the book and he read through a few pages to see in which one he had left off, until he found out he only had fifteen more pages to go, so he kept reading as he ignored the itch of his eyes.

His mind was filled with ideas as he read the story of the author, pleasantly in love with this Mirabili place that no one could visit unless they were chosen. As it turned out, the story grew more and more exciting in those last few pages, including that the creatures were starting to become clearer on what they were and what kind of power they had over the world. But, when his eyes reached the last page, he felt his soul leave his body metaphorically speaking as his fingers trembled when they traced over the last line. As always, no one gives the complete answers to a story –people liked selling, lying, being the best in whatever they did, but they quite forgot that people needed knowledge too. Like Kyungsoo’s grandfather once said, no one gives their knowledge away because that’s what will protect them in the future.

Kyungsoo can only wonder if the author of this needed to be protected from some kind of force that was too powerful and their own craziness had brought them to write this. Maybe Minseok was right, it was only a story for kids to fear being a monster when they didn’t do things right, but the words were imprinted in his brain when he read the last phrase and he swears he might never forget it, not even in a million years.

“And when I finally reached the end of Mirabili, I noticed…that all this time I wasn’t the chosen one, it was only a confusion.”

The confusion could be that they had dreamt everything, that they thought that animals in the forest were actually the creatures he described, as it could also be that the destiny that had been proclaimed for them wasn’t actually for the person who bought that book –a mistake of life. Kyungsoo huffed and once he saw the clock hanging on the wall, he knew he had lost his precious time in a book that gave him no answers, so he simply closed it and turned off his lamp, wondering why people were always like that. Did the author lie?  Why did his grandfather think that it was a great book? It was full of lies!  It didn’t specify what happened after and Kyungsoo was bitter.

Yes, that was the word –bitter.

As he pulls the covers up his body, he lets out a loud sigh and closes his eyes tightly, curling up the slightest bit as he tries to forget about that book and actually concentrate on the test he had the other day. After all, his math test didn’t have anything to do with this Mirabili thing that he had read about…a complete lie.

Yet, the most powerful of lies could always turn into a reality.

Junmyeon had a crush.

Although, he thinks she is a foreigner, by the way she looks and how she can’t seem to be known by anyone, also because he hadn’t seen her before around the small town he lived at. He discovered earlier that month, on November to be exact, when he was getting out of school and he was waiting for Sehun to get out as well, turning to look at the woman with the flowery dress and vibrant hair. She looked dangerous, for some reason, it was like a luring mermaid that brought him closer and closer and he was more than appealed by her beauty. Her petite nose, her plump lips, the roundness of her eyes and how clear they were…almost reaching an abnormal shade of white that he thought he was beautiful. He spent a good few days looking at her as she ran towards the forest, but he didn’t see her after that, repeating the same action over and over again each day. His father would have told him to follow his dreams and said woman was haunting his dreams late at night, so he was more than pleased to follow after her one of those days, thinking of asking her what her name was, what she liked, what she was doing there.

It was a Wednesday when he got out of school and saw her there, connecting his gaze and fluttering her eyelashes in the prettiest way possible. Junmyeon smiled, the senior not caring about anything as he crossed the small road and walked up to her. Her beauty was more hypnotic from up close and she smiled at him, showing her beautiful red lips to him and he felt like his heart was about to burst out of his chest. He was always really cautious when it came to crushing on people, he wasn’t particularly the most fond of liking people out of the sudden but for some reason…he couldn’t stop himself with her and he wouldn’t like to do so if he could, she was beautiful and she was…she was…

She was nameless.

“Hello!” Junmyeon breathes out, his breathing a little quick because he had trotted over to her and she replied with the same greeting, her voice sensual and low, making him bite his bottom lip as he plays with the edge of his shirt, looking into her eyes the whole time as his cheeks reddened. “I haven’t seen you here before…what is your name?  Are you new around here?” He asks and the woman plays with her curly hair, tossing it over her shoulder before speaking.

“Temptationem,” Her name was absolutely odd but Junmyeon thought that it was beautiful when it poured from her lips. If it had a meaning, it would probably mean astonishing or it would compare her to some flower, delicate but powerful. “And I am kinda new; I have come around here before…” Her feet move towards the forest and Junmyeon surprises himself when he walks beside her as she smiles to herself. He would like to compare her to cherry blossoms, but she was more like a poisonous flower, beautiful but absolutely dangerous…it could kill you, like her smile. “But I have seen you here before, you always look at me…” She raises an eyebrow to ask his name and Junmyeon smiles widely.

“Junmyeon, Kim Junmyeon.”

“Ah, Junmyeon.” She trails a bit and then she turns around, her cold hands interlocking with his and catching him off guard as they entered the forest. Somehow, he didn’t trust her…his mind didn’t, but his heart was completely lured by her white-ish eyes. “Junmyeon…it’s getting late and I don’t know how to go back home.  Would you like to accompany me?” His mind was screaming at him to stop but he dumbly nodded his head, feeling the coldness of her touch as she walked hand on hand with him, forward…entering the deep forest and making him gulp audibly. Once she senses his nervousness, Temptationem smiles to herself and she sighs. “Trust me; my place is really beautiful…”

Junmyeon lights up at that. “It is?” Why am I acting like this?! Junmyeon questions himself but his body doesn’t seem to listen and Temptationem nods her head quickly.

“Just like you…my dear Junmyeon.”

However, Junmyeon was always caring of a lot of people…much more when it came to Oh Sehun. Sehun had always been the shadow of his brother ever since he was a kid, he was the worst version of his brother who couldn’t do anything properly, but Junmyeon was always the one to take care of him ever since they were kids. He taught him how to sew, sing and cook, while Sehun tried to teach Junmyeon how to dance but he failed miserably. Turns out, after school was over…Junmyeon would wait for Sehun and they would go back home together because they lived fairly close and while their friendship was completely platonic, Sehun still felt the tiniest bit off when he got out of the school and waited for fifteen minutes, only to see that Junmyeon had already gone out and some people said he had followed the strange girl that was always at the wood. The tall, young man sparks up at those words and he immediately goes looking for the rest of his friends, finding Chanyeol and Baekhyun walking out of class and the rest waiting for Jongin’s father to pick them up.

Once they see Sehun’s widened gaze, their bodies had told them that something was wrong and through rushed breaths, Sehun had proclaimed that Junmyeon had gotten lost or had been kidnapped. Yixing was the first one to go forward, his innocent demeanor long gone with nervousness and anger as he tried to get the rest of the group forward. Once they entered the scary forest, the tall trees creating shadows that had Baekhyun screaming once they stepped on leafs, they started calling out Junmyeon’s name, the echo resounding against the non-existent walls of the forest before they heard Kyungsoo’s shaky voice.

“D-Do you think she might have done something to him?” His deep voice resounds against the forest and Chanyeol was biting on his nails, using his loud voice to scream Junmyeon’s name once again, but they were stopped once they heard someone yell back. The voice was shaky, not so distant and they immediately knew it could only be one person, the one they considered their leader –Kim Junmyeon.

“That’s him!” Minseok said.

“I think it comes from the left!” Jongin, the fastest runner, went ahead of them with his long legs and they followed soon after, some pricking their arms with the branches and others looking around in case some unneeded visit approached them. Just then, Jongin steps come to a halt once he looks at Junmyeon, who was being dragged inside a door with a vibrant red over it, shining brightly as it floated a little bit on the sky. The group stared back at the door and Jongin shook his head, speaking loudly. “Let go of him!” The deafening scream did nothing to the woman on the other side as Junmyeon fell to the floor to try to cling to the grass but it was useless, he was inside in the matter of seconds and Baekhyun shook his head quickly.

“We need to follow him!”

And that they did, stupidly enough. Baekhyun opened the door once again and he swallowed thickly when he saw the white light that came from inside, something that was not natural at all and scared him to death. He holds someone’s hands, he doesn’t know whose, but all their hands interlock as they step inside and if they had to describe the feeling, it would be useless. Floating in the air, although it was an unknown sentiment, would be the closest to it, as if you felt your body changing and all your memories go through your head. Once they were inside, they landed with a loud thud on the floor and they looked up, Kyungsoo’s eyes filled with knowledge once he saw the atmosphere around them and a groaning Junmyeon laying near them.

Pink trees that represented the beauty of flowers, long grass to hide the biggest of secrets from those creatures, fluttering clouds that seemed to be cheering people and everything…everything about it screamed Mirabili. Kyungsoo couldn’t believe that the place was real and he even pinched his skin to see if he was dreaming, but he wasn’t. Once he stood up, some of his friends were already on their feet and a loud sneeze was heard, absolutely coming from Chanyeol who had a flower constantly landing on his nose. That also appeared on the book, flying flowers that followed people as a way of greeting them…it seemed like Chanyeol was allergic to them, somehow.

“Fucking flower, get away from me!” The moment everyone looks at Chanyeol, a few gasps are heard because Chanyeol’s brown hair had turned a pastel shade of pink and his eyes became the color green as his body was decorated by flowery clothes. The tall man reaches for the flower and tosses it on the floor before stepping on it and then he looks over at his friends. “W-What happened?”

“Your hair is pink!” Baekhyun adds as he goes to stand in front of Chanyeol and the man squints a bit before scrunching up his nose.

“Yours is red!” The tall man adds because he wasn’t very fond of Baekhyun’s new hairstyle, but then he sees a bright metal around Baekhyun’s lips and he chuckles childishly. “You have a lip ring!”

“Is this what I think it is?” Yixing asks as he looks over at Minseok and Kyungsoo, who had also changed their appearance a little bit. Minseok kept his black hair but his clothes were completely blue, just like his eyes, and he seemed to have tattooed a butterfly on his hand –which was absolutely not there before-. Kyungsoo looked down at his white button up and black, baggy pants before seeing himself on the clear lake nearby, orange hair just like Sehun’s greeting him back. Minseok hummed lightly as he helped Junmyeon stand up, who looked a little bit beaten up and absolutely guilty.

“Yes, this is the place my mom described.”

“We’re in Mirabili.”

“Out of all the fucking places in this world!” Sehun said as he tugged on his orange strands of hair and then he scoffed. “The place with the weird creatures that will probably kill us!” Sehun’s voice was never in a high volume, but he seemed to be a little bit stressed out and Jongin winced when he saw Sehun step on another one of those flying flowers that were trying to attack Chanyeol. Attack in the cutest way possible. “We are never coming back home and it’s because Junmyeon had to follow after some stupid girl’s ass!”

“I am very deeply sorry,” Junmyeon tries to say and his voice breaks a little when he speaks, but then he hears the sound of someone clearing their throat and they turn around to look at a young man. Visibly younger than them, but not enough to be a kid, more like a teenager. A wicked smile was over the person’s face as they speak.

“I see you have gotten to know Mirabili.” The introduction seemed a little bit off and the group of humans gathered together as they saw the creature in front of them. As they got closer, they could see the threatening look in his eyes. “And you have gotten to know our personal villain, Temptationem.” At the name, Junmyeon shivers and truthfully, Temptationem always did the same…bring humans that were unwanted in Mirabili only because she wanted to make the red king mad. Oh, he would be absolutely mad. “But we don’t want any humans around here, so you’ll have to follow the long path back home.”

“Oh God, yes!” Jongdae adds in an exasperated exclamation, even when he was absolutely liking his new blonde hair. “We need to go back home.”

“Of course you do,” The person said with the same wicked smile and then he shrugged his shoulders. “If not…then off with your heads.”

“O-Off?” Baekhyun asks in a small voice and Kyungsoo sighs, closing his eyes tightly. This is what happened to the author too.

“It means they will slice off our heads if we don’t go.”

“You’re intelligent,” The young man said. “I hope you use it for good.”

But that group of nine men would do so much more than just bother them, they will change Mirabili’s whole story.

#exo scenarios #exo #kpop scenarios #d.o scenarios #baekhyun scenarios #chanyeol scenarios #xiumin scenarios #chen scenarios #sehun scenarios #suho scenarios #lay scenarios #kai scenarios #writing #exo fanfic #exo au #fantasy!exo #yes you guessed it it's slightly inspired by alice in wonderland #but by the tiniest bit #and i hope you like it #i will add a gif later because my wifi is shitty!! #but tell me what you think of it~ #who do you think this mystery man will be? #kaismol collaboration it's happening

[fictionaljournalofbbwomans-blog]

06.03.4040

DOLLAR DOLLAR BILL YO (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-LHFfFKCsY)

BB Womans wakes up; 08:45

Before opening her eyes or even feel conscious she throws a loud scream! She so angry this morning, her jaw hurts, it’s blood driping time for the month, and electro-postillions keep wetting her neck with discouragements on absolutely everything she needs to do. BW’s state is close to punch the walls, scream, jump, hurt herself but ventilates a while, opens the window, repeats a mantra, has a coffee and a cigaret and remembers how bad it was a few weeks ago, enabling pride to have gone this far and motivation to keep on. 

So she sits and types under constant pressure to stop: 

V2K: “Don’t do that BB, people are going to think you are crazy!”. This morning BB really wants to tackle the DIRTY CASH question! 

V2K: “No BB, what are people going to think about you? You don’t like money, remember?”. The question at the tip of her finger is do you dear readers? Do you like Money? 

BB: “Shut up ass-faces, let me concentrate… Mmmhhhh… Yes, how bad was it? BaaaaAAAAAd bitch baaAAAAD!… I tried to end my life for christ-sake… I had no hope to make it out of this misery… I was alone as always in my room, but loosing strength, remembering I never wished to live this life, and now that I am aware of being blood pumped, brain sucked and my limbs attempted to be controlled and automated this confirms how fucked I always thought it was and I figured dying could be my best exit plan… I might loose consciousness completely and just switch off… huh huh…?! Don’t EVEN have the right to fucking die!!! Fair? I have been lower though really... smashing dishes, cutting my hands, ripping my face, falling around, hitting myself… The G seemed so much more of a smoother idea… Wait that’s right, I am fucking Jesus and I don’t want to hurt or sadden anyone! Queen get the money!” 

The only contact BB had with the world was her phone, emails and social media… She attempted to message some people to hint at the fact that she was going to end her days, but without being too clear, saying she wants to die is a reason to lock her up in hospital for a days and harass her to cease to resist to her robotic fate as well as use real sick patients to participate. A few mails here and there, Polo, her dad, her mother… How did this guy made it to her VIP list for suicidal notes? Not sure who else but turning around all the options for perpetrators that are given by the evil orchestrators. The messages were accusatory, sad and menacing but with a romantic rave infused twist because she always has to tell stories or write poems to get her ass out of trouble. “The truth! I want to say the truth!… Pfffff… Let me write! What are you trying to achieve? You know harassing me now is only powering me through writing more! You think I write well?! Cool for you! I am not trying to show skills, play a character, I am trying to save my ass from your puppet show! Do me a favour and go fuck yourselves!” A few breaths in and out and, another cigaret she should not smoke! 

V2K: “C’est bien, C’est bien… On a compris… On va te libérer!”

BW: “I do not give a fuck what you do, nothing will stop me from expressing myself and exposing your despicable enterprise!”

It was day or night in a time and space that felt like in between life and death, she missed her friends nights and hang outs, because she did not want to impose her sorrow or provoke the Masters instructions for actions and loud laughter shooting orders. She was shaking and could not stand up anymore, had thrown her phone somewhere in her messy flat, but needed to find it now, she crawls around, thinking she heard it calling, and maybe that means someone wants her to live. Every time she fills up with another dose, neighbours are banging on her floor from under! 

BB: “Pffffff, leave me aloooOOOOne!”

Some miracle lets her access her phone and dive in a long scroll down facebook and Instagram. She is looking for signs, and isn’t disappointed; Posts are mostly about her, what she said, what she likes… etc… Let us explain that more in depth a bit further. These posts have for aim to keep on inducing schizophrenia but the psychosis social media circus has a saving effect strangely, she is not crazy, what she knows is real and there is a reason to keep standing, at least for a little while, at least to try and make a change before departing from this sick sick SICK world.

BB: “LOVE is SICK!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXdWxFj0y3s)

 BB: “Anyway, let’s look forward now that we have made so much efforts to stay alive and healthy, let’s write a fucking budget with that pitiful amount of cash that is left for the whole month… Mmmmhhh… food… mmmmhhhh… fuck, I’ll never be able to repair my gear! And huuuuhhhh, people aren’t going to hire me with the rumours they spread… Are they? And I am fucking working all of the fucking time… and I need a flat… and I want a dog… and… wait a second… how much are people making for digging my brain, recording it’s waves and traumatising me? WAIT! First the V2K staff… Huh, how much are you making an hour to harass and rape me? I do more than half of your job! Care to share your salary hyenas?… What about the others? What could push someone to take action towards hurting someone else or induce their paranoid state?… Again I am wondering? Are they intimidated? Or are they being my datas to make some dirty cash? Make music? Produce series, films, advertisements? Code new websites and algorithms? Write thought reading studies and experimentation reports? Print billboards?… Again… wawaiwaiwaiWAIIIIIIT! Question is not only how much do they get for it but most importantly how much do they fucking MAKE from it…?”

Now we could write our beloved reader a poetic little paragraph to expose all the details BB backed up from what and how it is all organised around her, what acts are performed and capitalism produced, but BB has nothing to prove and certainly not that she can write, so here is a vulgar run down; 

Instagram + Facebook 

Instructed posts about: making sushi, nobody loves her, she likes to have brunch, she often hides under table, her sexual persona is named Mood, cuuuute, she wanna fuck, who are they? Dogs, rats, horses, Unicorns, pink, red… Yak, yak yaaaak. She has precise theories on how instructions present, here is the most likely; Members of her social media entourage probably receive a series of options to choose from and can fashion their stories or posts as wished. Instagram also provides animation to add on their images like the Rat or the Horse one, maybe the fire was a thing too?

Videos made by different video channels, an obvious one is “THE VIEW” on facebook with pop stars and actors; Woopy Goldberg, Alicia Keys (On Instagram: “You at the back, listen and shut up…”; referring to her joke about being a teacher and V2K bad actors being her pupils), Scarlet Johanson and questions about her underwear and body size!!!? What the fuck? Sometimes actuall speaking live of celebrities sometimes just picture montages with written quotes. On suicidal season, some of these videos were called: “If you are about to give up, watch this!”, people said things like, “It’s a story of numbers”… Bla blablablabla   

Tracks under- and over- different scenes 

Describing her actions, loneliness, her writing poems, being ridiculous, liking to walk in Paris, her fears, Her horoscopes, her obsessions…  

Actions 

As mentioned before people crossing her in the street reiterating what she has done the day before, where do they receive these? From whom? Whats app? 

scripts

With subjects to talk about, words to mention, things to remind her, ways of acting or falling down miming her… when to laugh and as loudly as possible please. Often these recent days, she can identify the speeches directed to her because it is performed obviously loud, making her feel like a theatre spectator, she guesses it is to make sure she does hear it over her repetitive thinking mantra loops she has developed and self defence and tactics to avoid repeating offensive and self incriminating sentences like: “I am a pedophile”, or “Black person... hhhmmm nooooo, Big dick” or getting blocked on a genital drumming thought session or “I find her ugly...” Etc EEETTTTCCCC...!

Adds

Relating to her teeth, selling fairy lights for your room, denouncing capitalistic routine, Job offers… this list is endless and could spiral towards unrealistic revelations.   

Audio announcements in Public spaces or billboards 

Radio 

Programme relating to her struggles, comments and jokes making fun of her 

Tape recording sold in shops she regularly visit

Talking about her refusal to work… “Warum Nicht?”, Her Birthday… 

Without counting weird emails

From company she uses telling her they like their customer well caffeinated, people advertising their music to be featured on her radio…

And we could keep that up for a while, but our tired anti-hero has it up up UP over her head to try and prove she really does know about it all while getting harassed with contents making her feel bad for placing herself in the middle of it all: “The world is not turning around you BB” Friends would say some years back. 

Now lets point out all the money she has had and still have to spend to survive, no wait, another waste of time? It is utterly obvious; medicines too calm down, machinery to find out more about the electro harassment, countless hard drives to save her datas, replacing her fucked up devices, or simply time spent researching and unveiling Patriarchal societies secret studies and machineries to learn and spread awareness so to build a network of allies. Then there is all the drug taking and urge to spend that is induced by the Bastards… Getting fired, not being able to find a job, what else… cream for wounds… food to eat her lack of affection… massages to undo her nerves that are conducting the electro current through her limbs to her brain, LUNCHES, BRUNCHES!

Do you believe BB deserves to get reimbursed? Do you believe she deserves to get paid even? How much could they have generate from their tests, products, results and new high tech machine building, or add placing on social medias, or could we go down in this darker deeper hole of wondering if they make money from the audience avid to follow the thinking series of her intimidation? She thinks 50/50 sounds right, but as it is a story of numbers, and hers is 33! 

BB: “Soooo Double that... Mmmhhh... What about 66% of your studies earnings nasty rat-bags? If you want to share your illegal cash born out of my fucking brain waves, do that! send me a fucking email or transfer direct into my bank account you know the passwords and details from by heart, I might be able to get on writing my book, make art, music, get onto my project to empower womxn to speak without fear, now that I am an expert at it!

#whistleblower #bbwomans #mind control activism #individual control #exploitation #theft

[themediareviewer]

Pan (2015)

Directed by Joe Wright. Family/fantasy movie.

Okay, so this is the type of movie that I feel I will come to disagree with my own opinion in a few years. I’ll explain why. I think I speak for all of us when I say that nowadays it’s quite hard to watch a movie without having ANY preconceived ideas of it. Either we’ve watched the trailer (one of those here-is-the-whole-plot-of-the-movie-except-for-maybe-the-last-two-minutes kind of trailers), or perhaps one of our friends has watched it and talked about it heatedly, or  maybe we’ve gotten 5,839,286 GIFs of the movie on our feed and already know most of the whole plot. 

My point is that, by the point when we sit down to watch a movie, many times, we have already formed an opinion about it. Sometimes, the movie has been so hyped up by our friends that when we watch it, our expectations are not met and we end up not like the movie, period. Or, on the contrary, the media has been so harsh with the movie, that when it’s anything more than a catastrophe, you actually end up enjoying it. 

When I walked into Pan, I did NOT have a good image of the movie. I had read somewhere (and this is a bit of information that I have NOT managed to confirm since then), that although the story of Peter Pan has become public domain, people who use the story still pay the copyrights to the owner. Why, you ask? Because the actual “owner” of the story, writer J.M. Barrie transferred the copyright to the Great Ormond Street Hospital , which is a children’s hospital in London. In fact, in the strongly-worded article I had read at the time, the article’s writer had specified how important that source of income was for the hospital, and how it helped a lot of children (a good writer always appeals to the heart of its readers, right?). Now, it was said (and this is the part I have failed to confirm, please let me know if you find an article about it) that this iteration of Peter Pan chose NOT to pay the copyrights. I mean, no one is actually obliged to do it… but it does seem like the right thing to do, particularly when you think of today’s movie stars’ salaries (which can go up to millions of dollars), donating part of the revenue of your million-dollar movie to a hospital of children, doesn’t seem like such a hard thing to do.

In other words, this movie was already not looking good to me as a person (I am the type of person who can’t fully separate the artist from the art, and although I won’t go on about it here, I will say that I preferred not to buy this movie, and only watched it when it came to Netflix). In addition to that whole internal debate about watching the movie or not, I also found a lot of reviews about this movie when I was trying to confirm the information in the paragraph above. And they were all extremely negative, with scores going from 0 stars out of 5, to 23%, to “YOU SHOULD JUST NOT WATCH THIS” kind of reviews. 

So, when I sat down to watch this movie and I first met the main character, I was astounded to realize that I quite liked him. Played by Levi Miller, he was easily one of the best parts of the movie. But even more surprisingly, I was FLOORED when I noticed I was actually enjoying myself! I almost felt ashamed by that point. “How can you like a movie that might be STEALING money from sick CHILDREN????” my heart would scream. But then my eyes and my ears and my love for art started to speak louder and I realized that some aspects of this movie were truly worth talking about.

I’ll start by the easy one: the soundtrack by John Powell. If the first thought in your head after reading those words is, “Who the hell is John Powell?”, don’t worry, that’s normal. I do have a very soft spot for soundtracks and one of my favourite of all times is from How to Train Your Dragon (2010) by (you guessed it!) John Powell. The way he layers different instruments together is breathtaking and clearly resembles the rush of feelings you might get when you’re flying — a theme that is very relevant to both movies might I add. I listened to this soundtrack after having watched the movie, and even individually, these songs are wonderfully crafted. The first few chords of the “Opening Overture” pulled at my heartstrings, and “Kidnapped/Galleon Dog Fight” had me excited for everything this movie promised. Even the song, “Smells like Teen Spirit” (or how I call it, “Hello, Hello, How Low”) is so wonderfully dark, I had chills at the power of hundreds of voices singing it together; and then Hugh Jackman’s evil voice joins in and the all is deliciously creepy. Unfortunately, it was intercut with unnecessary jokes and the movie’s tone doesn’t live up to the song. Nevertheless, if anything positive should be coming out of the movie, the soundtrack is definitely the one.

Now, if you’ll allow me a second positive element to take out of this movie, I’d say that the circus elements were visually stunning. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that all of the art directing was brilliant, because the indigenous section of the movie was very weak on that front. (In almost all fronts really, but I’ll get to that later.) However, the circus-themed aspects of the movie were pretty enticing -- and had this style been consistent throughout the movie, it could have been one of my favourite art directing in a while. However, it wasn’t. We only had a few glimpses of it, such as when we first see the pirates of Neverland: in an otherwise dark room, one yellow spotlight lit up, a pirate dropped from the ceiling, with an elastic clearly wrapped around his waist, snatched something up, and slipped back up out of view. The snappy timing of the situation, the comically elaborate costumes and the whole theatricality of the sequence made it all very surreal and visually intriguing. Again, I wish this circus theme had stayed throughout the movie, because the rest of it simply did not live up to it.

This leads me to the next point which is where I will shift into negative gear. Now, from the beginning of this review, you probably thought I was going to say this movie was genius, but fear not; those reviews online had good reason to criticize this movie. And my reason for joining them is because the aspects that this movie gets wrong, it gets really wrong. 

The first aspect that bothered me was the inconsistency in tone. The beginning of this movie is quite delightful in my opinion -- a sort of “Home Alone” vibe, as my friend called it. Adults are quite simply caricatures of adults, and the children are the real heroes of the story. That in itself was a tiny movie that begins with (**tiny spoiler**) Peter at the orphanage and ends with him and Nibs finding something they were not looking for (**end of spoiler**). Then, the second movie begins: an action movie where Peter is forced into a dark, adult world where death, slavery and capitalism are ever present; this, by far is the strongest part of the movie in my opinion. The conversation between Peter and Blackbeard in the Captain’s Cabin is one of the most chilling sequences I have ever seen. Their age difference is so obvious displayed, thanks to the difference in the complexity of their dialogue and interests. I was very positively impressed by the scene’s depth, and particularly by Hugh Jackman’s acting. 

From then on, the movie goes downhill. It becomes your usual very-bad-adaptation of a story, with corny costumes, weird character development and quite frankly, racism left to right. I’m not one to hammer on socially inadequate problems, because I’m afraid of joining in today’s abuse of the term “politically correct”.  However, this movie really did some very poor decisions on that front. I mean, the most violent character is the only prominent dark-skinned character; the only traitor is the Indian-looking character; the only character that can barely speak English is Asian; and the only strong indigenous character is played by a white actress. I mean. It’s hard to defend casting decisions like that.

Apart from that, although the special effects were pretty good, the integration between them and the characters was a bit… jarring. By that, I mean that sometimes we would see an extreme long shot (shot from very far) of a CGI battle taking place, then suddenly cut to a close-up of the character’s reaction to the battle... and not for one second did I believe that those two shots were taking place at the same at the same time and space. My movie-geek mind could just see the actors standing in front of a green screen and some director yelling at them “PRETEND TO REACT TO THIS!! REMEMBER THIS IS ALL VEEEERY SCARY!!” The soundtrack and quality of the actors themselves almost fixed this feeling, but I couldn’t quite shake it off. This CG oddness got considerably more relevant whenever flying characters were involved; it was very difficult for me to believe that they were part of the same world as the non-flying characters, which took me away from the story in numerous occasions.

Finally, one of my biggest problems was the character of Hook. I won’t say much about him in respect for those who want to watch the movie spoiler free, but let’s just say that as an origin story, it felt quite thrown together and poorly developed. His motivations were nebulous to say to least and it’s difficult to see how he and the Captain Hook we know turn out to be the same person. And if they truly do, then I would love to see that happening, because what I saw so far did not sell me on that story point. 

Not only that, but it felt like a wasted opportunity to make something incredible. Imagine if (** Spoilers ahead till the end of this paragraph**) after Peter gets taken to Neverland, Peter’s best friend, Nibs actually grows up and becomes bitter. And suppose, that when Peter does come back for him, Nibs has become a self-reliant old man, whose life was so sad and lonely, that his only drive to live was to hate that “blasted Peter Pan” who left him rotting in that orphanage. Now suppose that at some point in the movie, you find out that Nibs’ last name is actually Hook. I mean, wouldn’t you have lost your mind a tiny little bit? Wouldn’t it have been superb if Peter turned out to be the originator of his own nemesis? Wouldn’t it be tragic if, child-minded Peter doesn’t see the bitterness in Nibs-turned-Hook, and continues to play hero-versus-villain with his best friend for the rest of his days? Meanwhile, Nibs-Hook is actually trying to get to Peter, but can’t quite bring himself to kill him because they were best friends once? (**End of Spoiler**) Now that would have been true to the creepy, deep tone that the movie had established in the beginning, and could have actually done justice to the great character of Captain Hook.

In fact, as ridiculous as this might sound, I believe that the lack of time was part of this movie’s problem. “Wait, you’re saying you wanted more of this??” I hear you rage. Well, sort of, yes. I think this movie had a lot of rich material they could have explored, particularly in the dark aspects, like the slavery and war. The contrast between innocent children and truly infamous world is a hard sell, but a very possible one, if Stranger Things (2016) has taught me anything. 

The indigenous people also felt thrown into the story for me, and even seemed unnecessary the way they were presented. Their fighting style didn’t seem particularly unique (or effective), their costumes were not particularly rich, and their intentions seemed to come from a glorified past we didn’t get to see. I feel like they had to be there because they were in the original story, but their necessity in this movie was questionable. 

Now, if the movie had had more time, say, (**Spoilers ahead**) if the first movie had focused simply on Blackbeard’s exploitation of pixum and Peter’s escape from the compound, then the second one could have been about Peter discovering Neverland and its inhabitants (the tribe, the fairies, the mermaids), and the third movie could be the climax where Peter rises up against Blackbeard and the Pirates (**end of spoilers**). 

Again, I know this would all never happen, because producers don’t like investing in something they’re not sure will sell. They would hardly invest in three Peter Pan origin movies, particularly if the first one did as badly as Pan did. But as usual, I am speaking from a story standpoint. And although I understand that people claim that the world has simply “moved on” from the notion of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, I think that if we had had the time to explore a new, original Neverland, we could have been sold into loving Peter again. This movie could have reawaken the joys of being a child into many viewers’ hearts. But instead, it settled for being a rushed movie, with clashing themes, and brilliant aspects just begging to be explored. Now, it’s true that, as I said in the beginning, my expectations for this movie might have been so low, I ended up finding too many redeeming points about it, and maybe one day I’ll come to disagree with myself about all this. But for now, I honestly feel that this is one of the only bad movies I wish they had done more of.

#movies #review #mediareviewer #pan #joe wright #levi miller #hugh jackman #adaptation #frustration #j m barrie #john powell

[thesffcorner]

The Chalk Man

The Chalk Man is a mystery thriller written by C J Tudor. Set in a small English town, we follow Eddie, both in 1986 and 2016. In 1986, Eddie was part of a friend group that happened to have a habit of drawing chalk men as a secret language between them. Those same chalk men then point Eddie and his friends to a dismembered body in the woods; 30 years later Eddie might possibly have an answer to who killed her. 

I had no idea this book existed until I heard it recommended. The way it was pitched was that it has similar vibes to Stranger Things or It, because this too is set in a small town and follows a group of kid misfits. I’d say the comparison to It is closer; this is not a happy novel, and nearly nothing happy or lighthearted happens in the whole 300 pages. All of the characters are horrible, both as kids and as adults, and there is a gloomy, oppressive atmosphere throughout the whole book. 

The main thing I didn’t like about the book, was oddly enough the characters. None of them are likable, not even as kids, which was really strange to me. Even It, which is a horribly depressing book, with lots of scary and awful things happening, still had, at the core a solid friend group where you liked the kids and you cared about them. I understood why they were friends; I wanted them to be safe and stay together as a group. Here, I genuinely didn’t get the impression any of these people were friends; every time the group is together, the kids are arguing, bickering, insulting each other, or competing. I never once got a sense of camaraderie between the kids, and especially the way they all treat Nicky was downright awful (not that they treat each other any better). The problem is, that we get the story through Eddie, who isn’t exactly a reliable narrator, and he isn’t particularly likable either. So I have to wonder if the kids were just that rest of the friends were just that awful to him or he is purposely ‘misremembering’ things to appear better. He didn’t, but it also didn’t make the reading experience any more enjoyable. Eddie is probably one of the most unappealing characters I have ever read from (and I’ve read Neuromancer). I was actually shocked that this is written by a woman, considering how many times Eddie talks about wanking, boobs, hard ons and is just generally kind of disgusting towards women. He’s not outright abusive or hostile, but it’s a lot of small things, like being immediately attracted to his much younger housemate, ogling much younger girls on the street, and obviously some spoilery things I can’t talk about. To add onto that, Eddie is gullible, annoying, self-obsessed, cowardly and just generally a really unappealing man. In addition to making decisions that range from the questionable, to the downright horrible, every time we were in his head in the 86 sections he was embarrassed, or ashamed, or afraid of his friends, or trying to please them. Look, I get that being a teenager was hard, and a lot of teens really want to impress their friends. But he was an especially obnoxious child, who was at once constantly embarrassed of his family (though his parents were by all accounts pretty good and cool people, though they were poor), envious of his friends (who even though were mean to him, were still his friends), saw his only female friends as just a pair of legs, and most importantly was so ignorant and dumb about simple things that I genuinely wondered if there was something wrong with him, or he just had the most sheltered life ever. He is completely spineless; the several times he does get spurred into action it’s because he’s trying to impress Nicky. I would like to say this changes in the 2016 sections but it doesn’t; he is still tactless, more than a little spineless, and weird around women, but to top it off, now he’s also a functioning alcoholic. Don’t get me wrong, he is written very well, as in a way a parody of the typical male protagonist, who was a nerd in school, was bullied, doesn’t respect or understand women, is now a professor or writer and stumbles onto a mystery from his past. But it’s just not a fun or good head-space to be struck in, and even at the end, when we find out what really happened, I didn’t feel vindicated for disliking him so immediately from the start; I was just deflated that I had guessed one of the twists. The writing was good, though there were a few moments where Eddie says certain things that were just ignorant or biased, and I wondered how much of that was Eddie as a character, and how much he was a stand it for Tudor. The bit about how online friends aren’t real, felt especially hypocritical, because this entire novel is about how real friends aren’t really real either; people do nothing but back-stab each other this entire novel, so how is them being physically present in the same space making them any realer as friends if they secretly hate each other? That’s kind of the thing with this book; it excels a bit too well in crafting this story about a small town that’s so messed up, and everyone in it is such a bad human, that I wasn’t enjoying it. Everyone in this book sucks; even the characters who aren’t outright murderers are at the very least extortionists, sadists, thieves or perverts of some variety. In a way that’s kind of the point; no one is good and there’s no such thing as black and white morality, but I’d wager that most people, when they say they are not ‘good’ they mean they went over the speed limit, or cheated on a test, or lied on a job application. They don’t mean they had an affair with a minor, they stole evidence from a crime scene, or inadvertently caused the death of someone by stealing. The plot itself was interesting; I found the pacing was well done, and I did care to find out who was leaving the drawings and who the killer was. We don’t get all the answers, but that’s also kind of the point; some questions you don’t want the answers to. Now, I want to talk some SPOILERS, so if you just cared about my thoughts, they are that this is an average, if a bit more atmospheric thriller, and if you like thrillers you will probably like this one. Don’t go into it expecting a dynamic like that of It or Stranger Things, because you won’t get it; but if you like unreliable, unlikable narrators and really gruesome crimes, you will probably enjoy this. If you don’t want SPOILERS, skip to the last paragraph. In the end we find out that truly all of the friend group were really bad people: Gavin stole Sean’s bike and caused his death; Mickey did in fact crash the car with Gavin and also sent them the letters and was trying to capitalize on their pain; Hoppo spiked Mickey’s drink and pushed him into the pond, because Mickey threatened to tell Gavin about the accident. And Eddie… dear Eddie. He stole Elise’s head and kept it all those years, not to mention he essentially framed Mr. Halloran for murder. Even Nicky kills her own father at the end. What I want to know is who put up the drawings in the church? Was it Eddie? Because it wasn’t Hannah’s dad, and Eddie says in the end he did the chalk man drawings himself to fool everyone that he hadn’t been the one to find Elise’ body. The ending too was a bit.. Odd? Is the implication that Eddie’s punishment is having Alzheimer's, like his dad? That’s a very strange implication. Overall did I like this book? No. Do I own up that it’s a good book, but not for me? Sure. Can’t say I’m glad I read it, but I can’t say I didn’t want to know how it ended either.

goodreads

#the chalk man #the chalk man review #moni talks #book review

[lanasitra]

tswtms is over (and here’s why)

Did I get you with the clickbait title? I did? Damn right. Bangarang.

In short, I made a mistake.

I goofed.

I made a miscalculation.

I did not make a good prediction.

I anticipated something that did not happen.

I made an error in judgment.

I screwed the pooch.

I shamed the cat.

I faked my death but returned just after the halizah was carried out and now it’s super awkward between me, my ex-wife and my brother.

 I fucked up.

 (This essay will sometimes sound high-and-mighty, sometimes accusatory, sometimes selfish, and sometimes all-business-no-pleasure. In previous essays, I’ve detailed that my passion for music is not driven by money or fame, BUT I have also argued that I can want those things without undercutting my true passion. For that reason, I will not apologize, but I will acknowledge in advance that I may come off as slightly salty and overly businesslike over the next few paragraphs)

For all intent and purpose, tswtms has proven to be a failure. Since Honeymoon became available on major digital platforms in July 2016, I’ve only sold two copies (I’m just now seeing that I got 226 streams on Spotify, etc., which I am pleasantly surprised by and grateful for, but, in the scheme of things, that’s nothing – and only equates to 97 cents in my pocket, might I add). While it hasn’t been long enough for me to get a sales report back for In Between, I have a feeling it will have done marginally better, but still won’t be the kind of break I’m looking for.

There are three potential reasons why I believe tswtms has had a sub-par performance, and I’d like to go through all of them here and now (there is purpose to this, and I imagine the smartest of you cookies will have probably already guessed what it is):

-       The music is bad

-       The advertising is bad

-       The name is bad

(The Music) 

I will concede that tswtms is not everyone’s cup of tea. I am exceptionally proud of every piece I’ve written, but, of the ones I currently have on offer: “Canadian Summer” is six minutes long and meanders during the intro and outro, “Honeymoon” lacks a chorus, “Hate” lacks a chorus, “The North Wood” lacks a chorus, “I Am Not Afraid” lacks a chorus, “SRND” has a meandering intro and lacks a chorus, and all my interludes, intros and outros are “weird” and “artsy” in some way or another. In brief, I have tended so far to not write “accessible” pop songs. “Dreams,” “What’s It Like” and “For You” are what I consider to be my three most accessible, “poppy” songs that are currently available (there’s also “Heavy Crush,” available on my SoundCloud, which I rank among the most “accessible,” but it currently only exists in a place that is not really on anyone’s radar). Having my oeuvre be only ~16% accessible, singalong-able music is perhaps a worry, but, considering how many times someone ensures themselves a comfortable life and diehard audience as a one- or two-hit wonder, I’m not really concerned in that regard.

Such talk of “accessibility,” musical forms and choruses drives me nuts. I enjoy the music I make, and I think that serves as a good enough indication that other people would like it if given the right listening context. Though I go through peaks and valleys of enjoyment with my catalogue, I go through similar phases with any music, regardless of the writer or performer (even Ariana Grande! F***ing crazy, right?). I sometimes get hung up and blame my every failure on the vocal tuning in my pieces, but I realize that I’m only so critical because it’s my own stuff; I listen to other artists’ songs that have some vocal imperfections, and these imperfections rarely diminish my enjoyment of a piece. I like to think that an imperfection here or there on my part will fly similarly under the radar for audience members.

All this has been to say that the music is not the problem. I write a variety of things that appeal to me, and I believe that, while it won’t all appeal to everyone all the time, there is, indeed, something for everyone with tswtms.

 (The Advertising)

With In Between, I attempted to do some online promotion leading up to the album’s release. I feel the campaign (if you can even call it that, given its size) did well to get the word out in my close circles. On release day, I got critique back from people I had never even dreamed would be listening. On top of that, I am very proud of the visual media I created.

However, after observing my local contemporaries, I’m aware of better ways to advertise my music, including buying plays (which, at the time of writing, I think is a pretty slimy thing to do, but I can understand why it would be a necessary evil). I have friends who boast about how many Spotify plays they have, but, when comparing their day-to-day / week-to-week growth on Spotify vs Youtube vs Facebook vs Soundcloud, I can plainly see that they are buying listens. It’s pedantic and petty of me to go about comparing all this data, and I will admit this little search was initially born out of bitterness concerning my contemporaries’ seemingly inexplicable, magnificent successes. I have learned, though, that buying plays is just another way to make your product seem enticing. I hate to imagine that a prospective audience member or booking agent would think differently of my music or my project because it wasn’t “popular,” but I guess that must be the case if buying listens is actually proven to help a startup artist. For the sake of my integrity and transparency (which I like to think I hold above all else), I will make it public knowledge if I ever buy views, listens, followers, etc., and I will include where I got them, the number I bought, and for how much money.

If we’re thinking about an album as a product, let’s think about live performances as advertising that product (though, ideally, I would like to be at a spot where the album is being pirated and people are just paying to come to the shows, but that’s not how it is for me just yet). I haven’t performed live in about a year, and I believe I have a good reason for this: in my opinion, I don’t have a satisfactory live set worth paying any amount of cover charge or ticket price for. As a precursor to the next section, I’ll also point out that, with a name like tswtms or The Sunlit Woods, the Moonlit Sea, open mics are a bit of a difficult beast to grapple with, as it’s likely that people in attendance are just interested enough to go looking for you online, but not interested enough to ask you for your name if they don’t catch it during your performance (as you might expect, people do not catch my name during performances). In short, I don’t believe the returns would yet justify the work required to put on a live show.

Again, all this is to say that I don’t think advertising is the problem. I recognize that I could advertise better, but I don’t even think that’s a relevant conversation yet. My Soundcloud only has 51 followers after having it since high school, and the tswtms Facebook page only has 57 likes after 4 years. For comparison, my friends just started a Facebook page for their new Harry Potter podcast, Flipendo, and amassed more than 100 likes in less than 24 hours (yes, both pages invited people, but I will concede that Flipendo has the benefit of pooling three admins’ social circles). I was in a f***ing high school rock band that DIDN’T DO ANYTHING, and we were still sittin’ pretty above 300 likes when we deleted the page (pour one out for My Autumn Distraction, y’all). Before I even consider buying more ad space or any listens, I need a project that can organically grow in a satisfactory manner.

(BONUS POTENTIAL REASON: People hate me because I was a piece of shit in high school / early university who was annoying on social media and not a very good musician, and these people are deliberately ignoring and avoiding everything I do)

Maybe? Probably a little bit. This is a real insecurity of mine, but I think any effect this deliberate ignorance may be having is inconsequential.

(The Name Is S***)

Surprise, y’all.

It’s the name.

Of course it’s the name.

It was never not the name.

I’m finally changing the name.

No matter which way you say it – The Sunlit Woods, the Moonlit Sea, tswtms (tee ess doube-u tee em ess), tuhswuhtuhmuss –, the name does not roll off the tongue, nor does it stick in the mind. I wanted to take a few moments, though, to explain why I’ve stubbornly gone along with this dumpster fire of a name for four years and two albums:

There are already George Deans making music. George Dean and the Gospel Four. George Dean from the UK (We’rebothfromtheUKbutwhateverweallknowbynowthatIhaveaUSpassportandwishIwasCanadian).

I wanted a name that captured a dichotomy. For the better part of two hours, I brainstormed names that would capture the geographic dichotomy I see in Vancouver. We have mountains and lush forests, but we also have the sea. We can go on brightly lit, magnificent hikes during the day, but stare up at the stars as their lights dance across the waters of the Georgia Strait. For anyone who has listened to my piece “Tarot,” you know that there’s a metaphysical dichotomy that can be gleaned from this as well. As it happens, it proved quite hard to capture that imagery in anything less than “The Sunlit Woods, the Moonlit Sea.”

I wanted to take myself out of it. You’ll notice I tend not to post any performance photos on social media, and that my physical appearance is not part of any tswtms promotion. Other than in the music videos I’m planning, I want to remain ethereal and mysterious; I don’t want to be George Dean, but a purer distillation of my mind. I hate that One Direction’s and similar artists’ successes are so inextricably linked to the audience’s physical attraction to the performing artists, and I want so badly to be an artist that minimizes that as much as possible (short of wearing a mask to perform). Maybe, one day, if I’m ripped af – not if I keep living the way I am, I’ll tell ya! – and Vogue wants to do a shoot with me, I’ll bare all for the world, but I need that s*** to not be the reason I’m selling albums or concert tickets; the music comes first and foremost, and I will fiercely argue against the modern assumption that image is as important as the art itself.

I wanted to leave room for a band. Even on my FIRST album, I already had help from my friends: Janine on trombone, Jaelem on drums, Sean on lead guitar, and Are Been on piano. This continues on In Between, where Sean’s playing guitar on “For You.” This project clearly isn’t just George Dean, and it would be a disservice to my fellow musicians and artists if I called it George Dean. Sure, I write the music and lyrics, and I make almost all creative decisions, but, whenever another musician gets involved, they’re going to give their two cents and reshape a piece (no matter how minutely). Furthermore, I’m rarely going to give a solo performance of most of these songs, because they deserve to be played by a full band. I don’t want to go on stage with my friends and essentially say “Hey! I’m the guy you all came for and these five dunces can all f*** off!” Consequently, I have struggled with choosing any derivative of “George Dean and the ________” because, in my head, it may as well be the same thing in terms of dictating superiority. In live performance, I don’t want the audience to see me in front of a backing band – I want the audience to see tswtms.

SBTRKT, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance all exist. All three of these projects exist and have achieved a level of success that I’d be happy with. Despite it being pronounced “Subrtract,” I definitely had an acquaintance in high school who liked SBTRKT enough to go to their concert, but still called them “ess bee tee are kay tee.” Long names clearly work for some people, but I suppose mine was just too out there (and I am aware that Odd Future’s name has been organically shortened over time by the audience and the artists, and I was hoping that would happen eventually for tswtms).

I arrogantly wanted to create a barrier to entry concerning intelligence. In my mind, neither The Sunlit Woods, the Moonlit Sea nor tswtms are hard to remember, and I have always assumed that this feat of memory was a mark of intelligence. I realize now that the names aren’t hard to remember for anyone else either; it’s just that other people have other s*** going on that’s filling their heads, and I should be respectful of that. tswtms has been the primary thing on my mind for four years now, so no s*** I’d be well acquainted with the names. Even as I type this, I’m supposed to be working on projects for other people, but there’s so much on my mind that the minutia (or what I consider to be the minutia) is falling out. It would be hypocritical of me to expect someone to memorize cumbersome sets of words or letters that aren’t of the utmost importance to them if I’m not willing to do the same. Furthermore, I shouldn’t get salty about people choosing not to fill their mental hard drives with such nonsense.

Something I’ve often thought in the past – especially when I’m feeling bitter – is that, if someone couldn’t remember the name or wasn’t willing to put in a little bit of legwork to memorize it, then I wouldn’t want them listening to my music anyway. That’s a really arrogant, elitist, hurtful, b***s*** and insensitive way of thinking, and I apologize that I ever felt that way. As my buddy Sean Dales said to me, “You don’t choose your audience, your audience chooses you.”

I thought I was centuries ahead of the curve with the name tswtms. It’s arrogant to say, but I do actually believe this still. For the most part, you’ve got artists going by their actual names, but, when that’s not available, people are using whatever’s left to allow them to stand out against the incessant din of the modern world. Broadly speaking, you have artists throwing darts at walls, you have snappy mononyms, you have some variation on “X and the Y,” you’ve got “The ______,” you definitely have “______ the ______,” and NOW, with the rise of Chvrches, you’ve got people taking a snappy mononym and replacing letters with other letters. If this trend continues (and I’m sure it will as the digitally available library of art grows and grows with – hopefully – very little of it ever being deleted), I think it’s within reason to predict that, in 200 years’ time, people will be listening to popular bands whose names are just random assortments of letters. For the time being, though, I don’t think society is ready for this jelly. 

The iconography is gorgeous. The thing that really sold me on going with the acronym tswtms as opposed to The Sunlit Woods, the Moonlit Sea (other than Soundcloud not allowing a name that long -.-) was the iconography I developed. In fact, the iconography for tswtms is impacting what the new name will be, because I want to keep the new iconography as similar to the old as possible.

I maintained a monopoly on search results. Google “George Dean” and tell me how many results pertain to me (you can get closer by searching “George TB Dean,” but NOT CLOSE ENOUGH). Google “Sean Dales” and tell me how many are related to either his music or his blog. Do the same with Kyle Cardigan. Now google “tswtms,” and you can bet your neck, back, p**** and crack that every result on the first page has something to do with me.

 Banga-f***ing-rang.

It’s a little thing, but it was nice knowing that I wasn’t competing with anyone else.

I think that’s it for why I chose and stuck with tswtms. I felt that, if I pushed it for long enough, the music would persevere and people would come around to understanding and accepting the name. An anecdote that I believe accurately suggests how badly the name has failed is this: when explaining to a co-worker that I had “come up with a bad band name,” I opted to write down “tswtms” and “The Sunlit Woods, the Moonlit Sea” on a piece of paper and show it to them rather than just say the names, because I have not once said either name out loud and had it be understood without eventually writing it down.

I believe I’ve found a name that is more manageable, yet still allows me to remove my physical self, retain some air of mystery and avoid direct competition with similarly titled projects. Maybe I’ll use this name; maybe I’ll change my mind within minutes of posting this essay to Tumblr. Only time will tell. Anyway, I’ll soon be pulling the tswtms stuff off of iTunes and Spotify in order to re-upload it all under a new name, so, if you want that OG kush, get it while you can. The Tumblr, Facebook, Soundcloud and (hopefully) YouTube page will all just be swapped over to the new name when the time comes, but I’ll be sure to update you all with the social media links when they’re ready.

Namaste

t s w t m s

[2016-05-16 Edit: As of right now, the tswtms catalogue is no longer available on iTunes or Spotify]

#tswtms #The Sunlit Woods the Moonlit Sea

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW:) Meadows and Lemons: Ecological Enmeshment in Timothy Berrigan’s ‘By Letting Rooms’ (Really System)

Still from Life More Abundant, 98 - Marc Johansen (animation with sound)

I’d imagine that if a lemon were a season this would be it.

-- Timothy Berrigan

‘>Things,’ Timothy Morton says rather cheerfully, in his new book Being Ecological, ‘are much more mashed together than we like to think, and also much more distinct. The biosphere is made of its parts. But it’s distinct from its parts’. It’s a simple but astounding observation. You can take a lemon. You know that the lemon is part of the biosphere, the food-chains of various species; you know that lemon is also a quality of something, one link in a chain of synecdoche—intimations of azure afternoons on the Amalfi coast, an abstraction to pastel, the hints of the sour beneath every sweetness, a tree with vaguely religious significance. When life gives you lemons. If lemon were a season, would the season be pale but surprisingly juicy, or would it be tart and unhappy? Difficult to stomach? A trouble for the nerves? Medicinal? Here in this medicinal season.

>Yet the lemon in question—what is meant by the lemon as much as the lemon itself—always eludes. We get one side but there is always another side in shadow. We have the lemon’s notes: its yellowness, its waxy aromatic peel, its heft in your palm, its scent of sugar and summer promise. But we don’t have the lemon. We don’t know what a lemon feels like, and even if we did, we’d never quite feel it all because the lemon itself is never simply just a lemon. It’s everything else that’s in a lemon: the bacteria, the water, the tiny flecks of earth on its surface. There’s a delicious mystery there, the object-oriented admission of a thing’s ontological withdrawal. What can you do next? How do you probe the life of the thing, while keeping conscious of its enmeshment with other things?

>Timothy Berrigan’s ‘By Letting Rooms’ is a poem that refracts things through things. Scale and distance and metaphysical categories play into one another across the speaker’s prismatic vision of cause and effect—of memory and speculation triggered through fact, impression and reflection. One thing is another and another; Berrigan reels through Steinian chains of ontological unfolding. Being is being different things at once. The title itself suggests a kind of adjacency, to be alongside elsewhere. These letting rooms, with their implication of temporariness, hospitality. A placement of the self in locations estranged; a placement subject to certain conditions. A placement deferred and delayed. A placement to be in the future replaced. Perspectives shift.

>Line after line in each paragraph is a statement: sometimes the speaker’s own, sometimes the echo of another’s. ‘This softness hardens into that weather. I wilt among weathers while you remain citrus spritzing. [...] Simplicity is not ease you tell me’. The indirect, swept-up quality of such perspectives adds to a sense of ambience swarming; the thingliness of everything is a case of acquiring the notes of other things. Metaphoricity and metonymy abound, leading us crisscross over the x and y axis of a Jakobsonian playing field of signification.

>If this sounds awfully complicated, don’t let it put you off. Berrigan’s piece is also a delightful, bewildering whirlwind. It makes you think of recording observations on your phone, line after line, until you realise you’ve unfolded a surprisingly accurate assemblage of everything. Like, actually everything. Except just when you know it, glimpse it, this temporary omniscience slips back into clusters, bits, fragmentary declaratives. It makes you think of a vast mycological network, coldly glowing above the surface of the ground. You know there is so much more underneath. Every line packs spores of swelling implication, threatening to later dissipate: ‘Trash day is a museum of the week’. It’s no wonder a few footnotes swish their way in. It’s up to the reader whether or not to pop the cloud, to attempt the sorting through of further meaning, those dusty motes of connotation. We might get side-lined by twists in syntax, the switch to imperatives or yearning tones of childlike hunger, frustration or curiosity: ‘There was a point in time in which I thought a potato’s inside was potato, butter and salt’. The organic object replaced by its human transformation. Materials are mixed and becoming things that replace things.

>When Kele Okereke sings ‘Things replace things / Days replace days’ in Bloc Party’s ‘Positive Tension’, he’s conjuring the double negative spark that might claw at change in a world made dull by ‘consumption’ and ‘yearning’. The commodity fetish replaces the thing with its shimmering fizz of capital aura. Where to get back to ‘authenticity’? There’s something about the way Okereke cries out ‘Play it cool boy’ that always disturbed me. How much rage stirs beneath the affectless veneer? Berrigan keeps it cool, keeps it clipped. His lines are matter of fact, but their arrangement and pairing finds space for wonder and weirdness within the banal. Tropes such as lemons and bliss are modulated and repeated, culminating in Blakean reverie or vibrant surrealist transfiguration: ‘A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took an advantage of it’. Here we are with a pared-down, quotidian sublime. You might call it a new epistemology: a flicking through glossy catalogues or reel through the ontological slot machines to find what’s good and evocative, rich.

>The lemon/grapefruit quote, according to Berrigan’s footnote, is apparently ‘Credited to Oscar Wilde’. There’s a sway and assuredness to Berrigan’s piece that stirs up our favourite Irish dandy. If things replace things, it’s with a certain decadence held in tension. I picture Oscar arranging ornamental objects on his desk, tsking his way through their relations like characters in a playful drama. I think of Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter, noting how a dead rat, bottle cap and spool of thread tell a whole new story when found alongside each other, apart from their individual narratives.

>As well as this creative, perceptual enmeshing, there’s a gesture of everything to come/apart: ‘Of all time isn’t all time or all the time. And for now a plant is an accurate unit of measurement. And for now a rain drops into debris’. Measurement of what? Emotion, time? I measure out my life in the growth/death cycle of a sunflower. There’s that stop-motion sense of recording incremental change. When a ‘plant stretches in instalments. We come and lay down beside it’. There’s the human attention to nonhuman affects and processes. The intimacy that results, its slippage between lines, the tricksiness of causality that occurs in certain playful phrases. Whose time and how? ‘[F]or now’ implies a conditional time, a time held solely in ecological process. This is organic, fluid time; time apart from modernised, synchronised, capitalist reality—the tick-tock clock-time of GMT. This is the slow, luxurious time of a corolla unfolding, of fungi expanding and merging, leaves shivering, the time of the mind enmeshed with everything.

>If the Anthropocene describes the geologic time of the human, this also necessitates a sense of a world without humans. Our damage is ultimately damage to us. The world will go on in its broken form; we are but specks upon geologic or botanical/arboreal history. As Berrigan reminds us, ‘civilisations are a homage to trees’. There’s a deprecating erasure of human exception. It is more interesting, maybe, to experience space and time as a plant might, at gradual, surprising scales: ‘We sit shimmering in instalments. An echo flutters into a plant into evening’. Objects seem to emit or ooze time, drawing us into their micro-worlds. There’s a tranquilising effect, like giving yourself up to the whims of a certain narcotic. Falling into the temporal hole that seizes your nerves and notions of time. The piece aligns its process with myriad compounds: stretching, fluttering, melting.

>What of the ecology of this form of attunement? Morton often references Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ when discussing the uncanny reality of dark ecological awareness, that epiphanic sensation that all we took to be is not quite as it seems: ‘This is not my beautiful house!’. However, there’s another Talking Heads song, ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’, that explores a more explicit pastoral fantasy, conjuring a world where the shopping malls and parking lots of late capitalism have been replaced by meadows and flowers, ‘highways and cars [...] sacrificed for agriculture’. In this world, the singer dreams of ‘Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens’, ‘cherry pies’ and ‘candy bars’; the cultural detritus of postmodernism is clung to in its bright and tacky debris, as he finds himself ‘stranded here’, alienated from the ‘lifestyle’ of this new Eden. 

>Berrigan’s speaker is petulant, ecologically-frustrated: ‘I’m sick of coke machines. I want orchards or groves’. The aluminal crunch and satisfying click of on-point brand semiology slips away. It’s intangible. Millennials, maybe, demand nostalgia for apples or green spaces, Coxes or copses. Except the desired objects are vague and nonspecific—‘orchards or groves’—maybe they are born out of virtual representations more than genuine memories. How much of my longing for farmland and rural rain and wood smoke is born out of my Ayrshire childhood, and how much from playing Harvest Moon or reading Laurie Lee?

>A meadow, for Morton, is a tricky thing. Tricky because its limits of definition are nebulous. ‘How many blades of grass do I have to remove for this meadow not to be a meadow?’, he asks. Since the question is impossible, statistically arbitrary, he concludes it is better to think of a meadow as present and absent simultaneously, violating the Law of Noncontradiction: ‘There is a meadow, but we can’t point to it directly, because it’s not constantly present’. The meadow is a meadow because it is also other things, like grass or cowslips or molehills; it is simultaneously itself and other things. We might think of the term ‘meadow’ as a letting room, rented to everything inhabiting it. There’s quite the jostling crowd in there.

>Berrigan’s metonymic and metaphoric poetics help us get a handle on this spectral ontology of lifeforms. There’s at once a playful sense of objects personified (‘The banana bread thinks of you’) alongside evocations of the aesthetic dimension oddly magnified: ‘The thunderstorm would frost and a kiss would feel it’. For Morton, the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension (see 2013’s Realist Magic). Objects interact through their qualities, or ‘notes’ as Graham Harman puts it. Berrigan unveils the beautiful implications of this, substituting objects for objects to metaphorically reveal their physical potential: ‘Glass is a paused puddle’. There is a flickering between things, like two shards of light dancing on a mirror where the sun splits the blinds.

>‘By Letting Rooms’ negotiates the difficulty of locational identification, of getting a handle on one’s place in relation to other things. There’s a crumbling of one thing into the other, of cause into effect, of memory into presentness: ‘Black and white photos are ground into dust right next to where your feet are’. Time, as the piece concludes, is externalised and loosely gauged by the actions of nonhuman objects: ‘An ice cube melts’. With references to lemons, ice cubes and glass, it’s not difficult to conjure a textual cocktail that brims with implicit metamorphosis. Alcohol transforms. Objects transform, oozing with things that are not themselves. We read our futures in the stars or seasons in the bruise of a fruit, its zest of syntax.

>In Berrigan’s poem, ‘4’ found within issue #6 of SPAM zine, repetition of a quoted line and CAConrad footnote injects the piece with a performative imperative, one that lends the rest of the lines the heft of ontological implication now connected to affect: ‘“say it with grEen paint for comfort and healing of their wounds”’. We are not sure who ‘they’ refers to. We are not sure what magical effect this green paint might have, or the exact purpose of the ritual. We know green is ecological. The statements clipped between lines (‘A sea willing to sit still / is expensive’) become less facts than transformational entities, swarming aside one another in axes sometimes vertical (metaphor) and sometimes horizontal, sequential (metonymy). Berrigan effectively thinks through the ecological mesh in both form and content, probing those junctures and connections around the sometimes uncanny contiguities of Anthropocenic time and causality at the level of daily life: the toxins and details, metabolic processes of ‘laundering bodies’; ‘a century assembled inside that colour’.

‘By Letting Rooms’ can be read here.

Text by Maria Sledmere

#review

[soulcollector0100-blog]

Taylor Swift Vs Taylor Swift

IN THE CIRCUIT COURT FOR NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Taylor Swift Address Sealed VS Taylor Swift Big Machine records 1219 16th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212 COMPLAINT PLAINTIFF, Taylor Swift, comes this day, Novemeber 3rd, pro se, and for the reasons and causes for this Complaint, states as follows:                               COUNT I, II, III IV VII VI:  Criminal Harassment, Cyber Harassment, Intentional Emotional Distress, Conspiracy, Fraud,  Cyber Crime, Information Warfare (False)                1. Plaintiff, Taylor Swift, had a temporary lag in mental state back in 2014 which lasted a very brief amount of time in which she temporarily opened a tumblr talking about celebrities. I did not  at any time  talk to a celebrity via any platform.  I merely mentioned their CELEBRITY in passing like a billion other people have done. ANY CELEBRITY that is aware of my presence should honestly kill them kill themselves. I am a nobody. People of that status should not know I exist.  And it speaks volumes of MY character that It took a health scare or something out of the ordinary to mention these celebrities at all. I respect everyone but these are two worlds that should not collide for obvious reasons.                2. To be quite honest Taylor Swift was not mentioned AT  ALL Selena Gomez was mentioned very briefly. I don’t  get into CELEBRITIES at all beyond nice song. Me being temporarily  out of character caused it to appear like I give a fuck about any of their lives. I don’t. But maybe it was retaliation on her behalf. The only reason  ANY of their names came up was because some of their songs highlights event romantic dates between me and a ex love interest during a bad time. I don’t get into celebrities life Im near thirty what do I look like?                3.  I did highlight my birthday was in MAY  and me being temporarily in a lag of mental state I attached myself to Justin Timberlake’s Mirror’s video. In which he put his hand against the glass. Something Taylor Swift has mimicked in her Ready For It Video. The mental lag was very temporary but Taylor is the only celebrity unwilling to let It go and it lasted VERY briefly and SHE WAS NOT DISCUSSED. Yet here we are Two nearly three years later and she still appropriating me into her songs. Into her celebrity. And giving a bunch of strangers the indication she knows anything of me or about me on ANY level. The information she did collect via criminal activity she has grossly exaggerated and the other half is false.              4. I was also contemplating a suit against Taylor Swift previously.  I have in my EMAIL slaughtered the whore in case any of them are criminals and its proven to be true. I thought it strange her songs were on point with events in my life.  Which it has. She has no blackmail on me But I have been taking shots because she created VIDEOS surrounding another big case in which a song of hers is mentioned. The songs correlates to the suit and while I didn’t watch her do ANYTHING BAD BLOOD BLANK SPACE WILDEST DREAMS AND NOW READY FOR IT were all made around the time the events with  the company I’m suing happened. In fact 1989 her cd was released 6 months after the events happened and started. Giving her time to write songs and create videos about my life in a harassing malicious defamatory nature.  and majority of it is slander against me. Like I like Wildest Dreams but she CREATED  A false story in the video even SWAYS MY CIVIL SUIT if I put any emphasis on the video in my OTHER suit. I’d accept a GIFT  a nice song a nice video but WHAT SHE DID WAS SLANDER MY NAME and she is attempting to turn me into a pseudo celebrity by identifying me with my birthday. I enjoy anonymity. She is trying to steal that sneakily with the hand against the glass. 5. May. It’s a fucking suit, Bitch has lost her fucking MIND, The lapse in mental state happened between middle  of 2014 through 2015 middle of 2015.  The mental state did not last a year but songs related to what happened continued to be made By Taylor Swift in a years time including and up today. The suits is just now coming to a head this year. But the suit is from events from 2014 up till now.   Blank space talks about Matts—the previous love interest email his email address is [email protected]   I have excess skin on my stomach. Slight and not a big deal. It was only in EMAILS. No one should have known that. That video skirted around it and made up a story. About my body.  There was also  Bad Blood was made may 17th 2015. This all started the first week of May.  It has Selena  dressed in a two piece out fit at a company which is  My suit against a company. I wore a two piece dress to a company function with a love interest Again NOONE should have known these things.  They were not mentioned on Tumblr or ANY public setting or communication. These things were pasted in my email. What I talked about on twitter was Beyonce and to my knowledge she has not responded.  As she shouldn’t. It was an outer space event.  Never happening again and shouldn’t have happened before.  Wildest Dream’s video was made August 31, 2015. This is literally a year AFTER the incident happened.  She is highlighting the yellow which is the theme for my suit against the company and she recreated the night on the boat with my love interest but she inserted a part in which didn’t happen or created a story which creates a story for the defendants. But the song with out the video highlights in perfect detail Matt’s and ‘Is night on the boat. The video steals her gift. It now becomes  criminal harassment defamatory and humiliating. That means Taylor was in my emails, And the whore owes me money and might even need jail time. I DON’T play those game.  I’m about to end the whore.  Just so I have everything listed BLANK SPACE WILDEST DREAMS READY FOR IT BAD BLOOD and SHAKE IT OFF. THESE ARE her popular songs off her 1989 cd. I haven’t heard the 1989 cd and don’t plan to listen. I’m requesting it be scrapped from air play and all her videos be removed from tv and youtube. And I want damages. Shake it OFF shows a black woman shaking her ass or twerking something I have never done. There was something in my search results  with another ---- with a different last name and a twerk video and Taylor created a video about shaking something off that had nothing to do with me off Bitch Lost her mind. I’m a virgin. I wouldn’t be caught dead shaking anything anywhere. Not my style. Bitch needs to shake off vagina that’s been EVERYWHERE and publicized by her. LMAO Another moraless whore without class. What is it 7 8 9. Never in this life.   Let me add here I do not KNOW this woman. I listen to some of her songs but there is no reason she should have taken interest in my life. I do not have family that are celebrities. The Bitch looks crazy. Now I would be interested to know if she has some ties to CMDI or an affiliate. The company is a republican affiliate. So that would give me proof  that  the defendants I have listed under CMDI are fit for a jail cell. The videos and or songs are favoring CMDI and their made up delusion.                 5. Im going to add here tentaviley I am agrreing right now this is just me mind reading and covering all bases. Im REACHING in this last paragraph but I will suffer for it.  But I find it weird nearly her whole cd I perused the lyrics to the other songs and they are filled with memories with Matt.  I find it extremely creepy and invasive that she she has created a romantic collection of songs but then appears like she is attacking me in songs and putting words in my mouth. If she has any personal interest Matt I’m adding jail time. I’m seriously interested to know why she created a WHOLE cd bout MY life and by extension Matt’s life. I will not here I’ve noticed that Matt tweets celebrities using his work twitter I am not sure this fixation of Taylors is Old or Whether it was new based off what happened in 2014.  Its extremely PATHETIC on ALL levels. I mean extremely pathetic. And sick.

Please note on my computer I have a different form due to copying the screen twice and getting two different pages. But it has been established this cd was released 6 months AFTER  the events with CMDI and the events being put in my email started in May 2014

Relief—I want the sum of Taylor Swift’s networth which according to google Is 280 Million.. I want ALL OF 1989 removed from airway. I want a public apology form TAYLOR swift admitting guilt and apologizing for using her celebrity and platform to interfere in an anonymous person’s life  and causing humiliation to  an already victimized victim.     I do not want to be addressed directly. I wish to keep my anonymity in tact. I want her to be humiliated like she tried to do me.   I am being punished because I am white TRASH. Etc ETC.  If it proven a romantic interest appears on ITHER end Im  asking TAYLORS Music career be wiped AWAY. Cleaned.  Broad lost her ever fucking mind. This line has been added against the suit against the company I'm suing as well but due to Taylor Swift being a celebrity and having many fans and connections this suit will be sealed. I am also stating that should I suffer death or any other bodily harm  Taylor Swift and  any other guilty party suffer the death penalty to include torture.

                                                           _____________________

                                                               Taylor Swift,Plaintiff

                                                         Address Sealed

                                                                  Respectfully submitted,