#i hate that actors et all are so accessible | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thisdancingheart · 3 years

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Remember YFIP?

My Year of Grief and Cancellation

What was I trying to accomplish with my anonymous Tumblr?

By Liat Kaplan Feb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/style/your-fave-is-problematic-tumblr.html

If you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, you may remember a blog called Your Fave Is Problematic. If not, its content should still sound familiar to you. The posts contained long lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so on) statements and actions — the stuff that gets people canceled these days.

That blog was my blog. I spent hours researching each post; as you can probably imagine, my search history was pretty ugly.

Your Fave Is Problematic had around 50,000 followers at its peak, in 2014, when I was a high school senior, but its influence was outsized. I got in a feud with a prominent young adult fiction author over his inclusion. One actor submitted himself, perhaps as a dare (or a plea) to dig up his worst. “Problematic fave” became a well-worn meme; even after I stopped posting, my blog was cited in books, articles, podcasts and think pieces. Through it all, my identity stayed private.

The blog started, as so many anonymous online projects do, as vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism. I was fine-tuning my moral compass and coming into my own as a feminist. So when I noticed classmates making sexist jokes on Facebook, including some about me, I started taking screenshots to post on a Tumblr called Calling Out Sexists. My policy was that I would take down a post only if its author publicly apologized.

A group of students brought the blog to the attention of our school’s administrators, who threatened to take legal action if I continued to write about them. Meanwhile, other Tumblr users had begun submitting screenshots featuring statements from minor celebrities. With graduation hanging in the balance, I shifted my focus away from my peers and toward public figures. I rebranded. Money and fame had protected them since time immemorial. What harm could my little blog do?

So I posted photos of Lady Gaga in V magazine with her skin bronzed to an unnatural brown. I pulled out troubling quotes from an essay Lena Dunham had written about a trip to Japan. I noted Taylor Swift’s since-changed homophobic lyric in “Picture to Burn.” My most popular posts tended to be about women — which makes sense, because the celebrity press tends to be more critical of them.

As it turned out, I had bigger things to worry about than dissecting the careers of celebrities I’d never met. On a winter morning, I woke up to the news that my older sister, Tamar, who was studying in Bolivia, had been in a bus crash, and the outlook was not good. I pored over research to escape from what felt like an impossible situation: my sister slowly dying of treatable injuries in a rural area thousands of miles away.

We held a public memorial service for Tamar in our hometown. Some of my classmates showed up, including a few who had written nasty things about me online. I found their shows of kindness insulting now, during what was quickly becoming the worst year of my life.

I tried going back to school after a few weeks, but I found myself picking frequent arguments with classmates and teachers. The school made an arrangement with my parents: I would be placed on “medical leave” for the remainder of the semester. I would graduate on time, but I wouldn’t return to campus.

Stuck at home, I devoted myself to Tumblr. What was I trying to accomplish? Mostly, I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals. I also enjoyed being popular, controversial, discussed. When a comedian I had posted about name-checked my blog on Twitter, I was giddy.

Then I started receiving threats. Someone sent me a screenshot of a house from Google Maps, claiming to have found my IP address. It wasn’t my house, but still. I realized that for every person on Tumblr who looked up to my blog, there were many more, online and offline, who hated it — and me. I started posting less and, eventually, stopped posting at all.

In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.

There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. Meanwhile, other movements — local, global, unified in their purposes and rooted in progressive philosophies — were organizing for actual justice. Looking back, I was more of a cop than a social justice warrior, as people on Tumblr had come to think of me.

These days, there’s no shortage of online accountability efforts, the large part of them anonymously run. Some accounts post typically anodyne but occasionally explosive celebrity gossip. Others are explicitly aimed at naming, shaming and punishing people for all kinds of actions and missteps. My own work fell somewhere in the middle, I think; the information I posted was out in the open, but I was cataloging it to make a case against the veneration of the rich and famous.

As many have noted, the coronavirus pandemic has pronounced the distance between celebrities and the rest of us. And their actions have been subject to greater scrutiny — the vacations they’ve gone on, the parties they’ve held, the access they’ve had to testing and care during a health crisis that has taken millions of lives.

But celebrity culture began to crumble long before Covid-19. Mounting accusations of many kinds, whispered between industry professionals, had become too loud to ignore. Social media, which gave celebrities more control over their images and influence over their fans, also opened them up to new kinds of criticism. People have lost jobs and entire careers because of the kinds of errors my blog cited. Others have apologized for work and behavior that, re-examined in a contemporary context, just doesn’t hold up.

For years, I’ve regretted the spotlight I put on other people’s mistakes, as if one day I wouldn’t make plenty of my own. There can be an unsparing purity to growing into one’s social conscience that is often overbroad.

My brain wasn’t ready for nuance. I was angered by hypocrisy and cruelty; what I did about it was apply a level of scrutiny that left no room for error. I’m not saying that I should be canceled for my teenage blog. (Please don't!) I just know what we all should know by now: that no one who has lived publicly, online or off, has a spotless record.

For these reasons, I’ve thought about deleting my Tumblr. But doing that would mean erasing my own errors of judgment. I almost feel like I need to leave it up to punish myself for having made it in the first place. That, and I know someone could (and probably would) just pull it up on Wayback Machine. The internet, after all, never forgets.

~~~~~~~

#YFIP #fuck her and her lack of real remorse #25Feb2021 #NYT

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creepykingdom · 5 years

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Halloween Horror Nights Orlando 2019 Review

By Grant Duval

Every year, and fortunately for us horror fans, earlier every year, Orlando is treated to Universal's Halloween Horror Nights. Every year it seems to outdo itself, and this year was no exception. This is a welcome change of pace from other Halloween celebrations in the area which seem to be the same thing every year. Every house this year was different and exciting from previous years. Even the one haunt that had been done last year was a complete change. Also, this whole event was themed to the 1980's, which I absolutely love as a child of the 80's. Unfortunately, these haunts don't allow photography, so I wasn't able to get nearly as many photos as I would have liked, but trust me, these houses are all intricately decorated and most are worth your time.

I'd like to preface this with the fact that I bought the front of line pass for an additional $80. This allows front of the line access to all mazes, but there is a line for front of the line, and you can expect to wait at least 10 minutes with the front of the line versus the hour plus waits that were occurring. You also get front of the line access to many rides. There are also 2 shows. With this pass we were able to get to one show, two rides, and all 10 mazes with only 30 minutes less. This is a testament to how invaluable this pass is, as I would have never made my way to all the mazes had I not bought this. I suppose the easiest way for me to do this is to go through each item one by one and give my thoughts.

Stranger Things was the most popular haunt of the night, and for good reason. This maze went through each season and brought to life the greatest moments of the whole series. The set design, especially in the upside-down, was top notch. This also felt like the longest of all the mazes. The characters were all cast well and it was great seeing them all battle the forces of darkness. Side note, at Voodoo Donuts you can purchase a delicious Stranger Things donut before entering the park to really set the mood. Also, there is an extremely large animatronic you must walk under to escape which is very convincing. The scare level was a medium or so, but the set design was amazing. 9 out of 10.

Us was the next maze of the night. I was never a fan of the movie as I felt that the trailers gave away everything. My mom, who was my traveling companion, had never seen it. This was one of her favorite mazes of the night. Entering through the funhouse in the movie sets everyone up for being chased by the doppelgängers and their scissors from the Jordan Peele movie. The lab scene with all of the rabbits was neat, and the exit which involved going through a bunch of mannequins mixed with scare actors was a great touch. The big problem though is that you really have to be acquainted with the movie in order to fully understand what was going on. My mom had lots of questions, and as I only saw the movie once when it came out, I didn't remember everything. Scares are high in this one. 7 out of 10.

Universal Monsters exists almost as preparation for the highly rumored land in Universal's Epic Universe park which is being built. Characters from classic horror movies, such as Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, Bride of Frankenstein, and the Mummy reside here. Strangely there was a part with Quasimodo, and that felt unnecessary as the whole point of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was not to be scared of him (actually, that was the point of Frankenstein as well). The sets were nice, but it felt kind of disjointed as we went from one character to another with no real transition. This maze also felt short. Scares were medium level but the high quality of the sets made up for it. 6 out of 10.

Ghostbusters was easily the most hyped of all of the mazes. This maze featured all of your favorite characters from the original Ghostbusters movie, and the sets were so realistic it felt like we were in the middle of it. The haunt follows the same path as the movie, from the library to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man battle. The character actors looked just like the original actors. Every last detail was perfect. The Slimer puppet that came out in a few scenes was a nice touch, as were the Zool puppets that stalked us. Overall, I wanted to remain inside as long as possible but was disappointed that Ghostbusters 2 was ignored as I do love Viggo the Carpathian. The scare factor is low, in fact this would be a great first haunt for those who are unsure if they would like this. This one gets a 10 out of 10 though from scratching my nostalgia itch.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space was hands down the most fun maze. This movie was a staple of my childhood as I used to watch it weekly. This is another maze that moved scene by scene and took us into the alien Klown world. All of my favorite Klowns from the movie were in there, as were the characters. The soundtrack of the movie, which by the way is KILLER, blasts through the whole maze. This was my absolute favorite haunt and I may return just to do this one a few more times. The scare factor is medium, but this is more of a funny house than scary house. 10 out of 10.

House of 1000 corpses was my most hated house of the night. I could never get into the movie series, and I understand that there are many people who absolutely love it. The maze felt short, the set design felt the weakest, and strangely, it was in the same spot as my most hated house 2 years ago, which was the Horrors of Blumhouse maze. Maybe the spot is cursed. It had that awful haunted house smoke smell. Also the characters weren't really too scary and the spots where they were coming to scare us at were obvious. I didn't jump once. Granted, as a person who is not a fan of the movie, I am likely not the best one to review this one. Scare factor was low (but the gross out factor was high). 3 out of 10 (but likely someone who was a fan will love this).

Depths of Fear is another original house. I find that Universal does great things with original houses and this one is no exception. The gimmick of this one is that we are on a submarine about to detonate with creatures inside and we have to find our way out. This one has a constant loud beeping which gradually gets faster and faster adding to the tension. This reminded me of the movie Leviathan. The set design was purposefully claustrophobic and the fear level was intense. The only problem was that the creatures themselves weren't too scary. The scare factor would be a medium. 7 out of 10 for great set design, but way too short.

Graveyard Games wins the award for most boring idea. Teens enter a graveyard and vandalize it causing the spirits and zombies to rise to wreak havoc upon the vandals. There was a social media aspect as the teenagers have been sending videos of this to their friends. The sets were amazing which made up for the pretty played out idea of zombies. The scares were good and the effects were good, which elevated this maze beyond what I thought would be the worst maze of the night. This maze is intense and is a joy to walk around. The biggest problem is that the maze was really short. 8 out of 10.

Nightingales Blood Pit was the most original idea. I didn't know how a gladiator themed haunt would work, and boy does it ever. Dismembered limbs, animatronic lions, and buckets of blood make this one of the true masterpieces of the whole event. This felt like I was walking in an actual gladiator coliseum and couldn't get enough of it. This is a bloody good time and the scare factor is huge. 10 out of 10.

Yeti: Terror of the Yukon, is by far the best themed and scariest house of the entire event. You enter through a snowstorm and enter a very realistic cabin. You wind your way in and out of it and the temperature is kept at a very cold level to really sell the idea. The yeti itself is absolutely terrifying. My mom claims to have never screamed so much in her life. Exiting the cabin you enter a forest and it felt like I was walking through the ET adventure queue. The scares come from above as well which really intensified the whole experience. Hands down my mom's favorite as well as my second favorite maze (but likely my favorite if I removed my nostalgia). Yeti is long, intense, and takes no prisoners. Scare level extremely high, set design extremely high. 10 out of 10.

Completing the mazes I need to talk about the scare zones. The scare zones were the weakest aspect of the whole event and they felt shorter than prior years. The Vikings Undead area had some cool costuming and viking tools. The only problem was that it was too foggy to really see anything. Zombieland Double Tap didn't connect with me at all. I loved the first movie, but the scares were not there and it seemed like they went a little light on the theming. Rob Zombie's Hellbilly deluxe is one of the two strongest scare zones, but definitely not the one to take kids to, as there are several dancing girls in underwear high above everyone dancing with fire. This is also a very loud area as Rob's music is blasting. The scare actors were also some of the best in park. The Anarch-ade, themed to 1980's arcades, was the weakest of all scare zones. The arcade machines themselves were nicely done, but the area was so small that it was hard to get a feel for it. This is also the scare zone you first enter into, which sets everyone up for the 80's theme. The best one though was the Vanity Ball area, which also happened to be the longest of all the scare zones. This area was themed to fashion shows with a ghoulish twist. The scare actors were incredibly disturbing looking, and the fashion show was fun to watch. I could have spent an hour here.

I sadly didn't have time to see the Academy of Villains: Altered States Show, which is dance and fire based from what I understand. What I did see was the Marathon of Mayhem show, which is a water projection show with projection mapping on the buildings behind it. This is much better than their normal night show, and hearing all of the songs such as Killer Klowns and Ghostbuster blasted loudly was incredible. I cannot explain how amazing this show is. The fountains shoot very high, the lasers are neat, and the scenes on multiple screens gave us so much to look at I'm sure I missed a lot. This show is one of the must dos. 10 out of 10.

Overall, the 2019 edition of Halloween Horror Nights is a marvel. I loved it so much I intend on returning! From scary houses, rides with shorter lines, fun drinks, and a killer fountain show, this is truly the best version I've been to.

Creepy factor- 10 out of 10. Come on, did you really think Halloween HORROR Nights would get a lower score than that?

#blogposts #halloween horror nights

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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It’s not just the Russians anymore as Iranians and others turn up disinformation efforts ahead of 2020 vote

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/25/its-not-just-russians-anymore-iranians-others-turn-up-disinformation-efforts-ahead-vote/

It’s not just the Russians anymore as Iranians and others turn up disinformation efforts ahead of 2020 vote

(Of course it's not just the Russians!! Other countries see how successful the Russian government was in their disinformation campaign so why wouldn't other countries try it.)

By Craig Timberg and Tony Romm | Published July 25 at 5:29 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted July 26, 2019

A recent tweet from Alicia Hernan — whose Twitter account described her as a wife, mother and lover of peace — did not mince words about her feelings for President Trump: “That stupid moron doesn’t get that that by creating bad guys, spewing hate filled words and creating fear of ‘others’, his message is spreading to fanatics around the world. Or maybe he does.”

That March 16 tweet, directed to a Hawaii congressman, was not the work of an American voter venting her frustration. The account, “@AliciaHernan3,” was what disinformation researchers call a “sock puppet” — a type of fictitious online persona used by Russians when they were seeking to influence the 2016 presidential election.

But it was Iranians, not Russians, who created @AliciaHernan3, complete with a picture of a blonde woman with large, round-framed glasses and a turtleneck sweater. It was one of more than 7,000 phony accounts from Iran that Twitter has shut down this year alone.

And Iran is far from the only nation that has, within its borders, substantial capacity to wage Russian-style influence operations in the United States ahead of next year’s election. That means American voters are likely to be targeted in the coming campaign season by more foreign disinformation than ever before, say those studying such operations.

Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III echoed the consensus of independent researchers in his congressional testimony Wednesday, saying of Russian online political interference: “It wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it the next campaign.” He added that “many more countries” had developed similar capabilities, based in part on the Russian playbook. A new Senate Intelligence Committee report released Thursday found that Russia began targeting the U.S. election system in 2014 and concluded that the attacks had continued into 2017.

A short list of countries that host online influence operations with a history of interfering across borders includes Saudi Arabia, Israel, China, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, researchers say.

They say it’s often not clear exactly who runs these operations — whether it’s the governments themselves or other actors — but that they typically echo the talking points of the ruling powers and back their geopolitical goals through tweets, posts and online videos. Operations in all of these countries, meanwhile, have the means and potentially the motives to seek to influence a U.S. election shaping up as among the most hotly contested in decades.

The influence operations in these countries, however, do not all share Russia’s demonstrated preference for Trump and other Republicans. The Iranians, for example, typically oppose Trump in their disinformation messaging, criticizing his decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and administration policy on other issues, including Israel and the civil wars in Yemen and Syria, research shows.

“Multiple foreign actors have demonstrated an ability and willingness to leverage these kinds of influence operations in pursuit of their geopolitical goals,” said Lee Foster, head of the intelligence team investigating information operations for FireEye, a cybersecurity firm based in California. “We risk the U.S. information space becoming a free-for-all for foreign interference if, as a society, we fail to get an effective grasp on this problem.”

Researchers for FireEye and other firms have reported suspected Iranian disinformation on most major social media platform — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+ and others — and on stand-alone websites, as well. In May, FireEye also alleged that U.S. news sites may have been tricked into publishing letters to the editor penned by Iranian operatives.

The firm’s analysis spotted a number of instances where letters in newspapers in Virginia and Texas appeared to share similar characteristics to accounts on Twitter believed to be part of an Iran-based disinformation network. FireEye also catalogued fictitious Twitter personas used by Iranians that included a Harvard University student, a Michigan bodybuilder and an Iranian American woman from Seattle.

Some Iranian Twitter accounts, FireEye found, even sought to impersonate U.S. political candidates, including a California Republican who ultimately lost the general election for Congress. That account tweeted about the confirmation hearing for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and a British royal wedding before beginning to promote Iranian interests, including tweets condemning the Saudis’ killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Some Iranian disinformation accounts, some of which were affiliated with state-controlled news operations, date back several years, but they have grown steadily more sophisticated. Twitter, Facebook and Google all have identified and taken offline accounts from Iran over the past year for engaging in coordinated, deceptive behavior.

“As part of our public archive of information operations, we have disclosed thousands of accounts and millions of Tweets originating in Iran that we have proactively removed,” said Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity. “Every year is an election year on Twitter, and we will be applying all of our global learnings to protect and enhance conversations around the 2020 election.”

The Iranian tactics differ somewhat from those of the Russians, who through the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg infiltrated the online conversations of a wide range of U.S. political groupings — immigration hard-liners, African Americans, veterans, evangelical Christians, environmentalists — with messages attuned to the way those communities already were speaking among themselves on major online platforms.

The Iranian operations detected so far tend to lack that complexity, with messaging typically on a single side of an issue in line with government policy goals — countering Israel, for example — as opposed to multiple ones.

But there are clear signs of shifting tactics in the accounts identified by Twitter, Facebook and other companies so far. What’s known, researchers say, may be only small parts of much larger operations that remain undetected.

“The Iranian operations were a wake-up call to remind us that the Russians were not the only ones doing information operations,” said Camille François, chief innovation officer for Graphika, a network analysis firm based in New York that studies online disinformation.

Graphika found that among one set of 1,666 Iranian accounts taken down by Twitter in June, about 1 in 4 tweets were in English. Trump was mentioned more than 1,400 times — almost always in critical ways — with this anti-Trump tweeting peaking in early 2017, in the months around when he took office.

Researchers say that both the U.S. government and social media companies have grown more aggressive in battling online disinformation since the 2016 presidential election.

Cooperation between the FBI and Silicon Valley has improved markedly. U.S. Cyber Command blocked Internet access to Russian disinformation teams during the congressional midterm vote in November 2018, scrambling operations. Some researchers express hope that this rising aggressiveness may thwart — or at least deter — some foreign-based influence operations from interfering in future U.S. elections.

All of the major social media companies also have established teams devoted to combating disinformation, typically by identifying and shutting down networks of fictitious foreign-based accounts on an increasingly large scale.

This shift has been dramatic since 2016, when the companies saw foreign threats mainly in terms of traditional cybersecurity — hacks and bugs — as opposed to influence operations conducted by foreign adversaries with substantial resources. The Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 spent more than $1 million a month, Mueller reported in an indictment last year against the Internet Research Agency.

As social media companies crack down, the tactics of disinformation teams rapidly shift to improve operational security and more effectively evade detection. FireEye, for example, was able to identify some apparently fake Iranian accounts last year because contact numbers for supposed American Twitter users had the +98 country code from Iran, a tactical mistake operatives are unlikely to make again.

But among independent researchers and some lawmakers, significant skepticism remains on whether enough has been done to prepare for the threat in 2020.

“In 2016, Russia used bots and fake accounts to launch an unprecedented social media campaign designed to influence the results of our presidential election,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “That playbook is out in the open now, and you can bet that unless the platform companies get their acts together, we’re going to see more and more foreign-based actors using it to wreak havoc in our democratic process.”

The nations hosting significant disinformation capabilities typically first saw them active in seeking to manipulate domestic audiences, shaping public perceptions in line with regime propaganda. The next step often was working regionally, by infiltrating online conversations in neighboring countries, as Russia did in Ukraine in 2014 as it annexed Crimea and fomented unrest elsewhere in the country.

Disinformation teams in Iran initially developed their tactics while manipulating domestic political conversation before gradually expanding operations to include more languages, more themes and foreign targets.

Human rights lawyer Simin Kargar, of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, said Iran for years has harassed journalists, political dissidents and artists in its internal disinformation campaigns. She has watched as Iran increasingly deployed such tactics against foreign targets.

“I would be surprised if the Iranians weren’t trying to expand their operations for the coming election, especially with the rising tensions between Iran and the United States,” Kargar said. “They would be far more savvy by 2020.”

Disinformation teams in Saudi Arabia have worked both internally and to manipulate other Gulf states, including in the nation’s struggle with rival Qatar, said researcher Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, the capital of Qatar. He said tactics in Saudi Arabia typically involve both sock puppets and automated accounts, called “bots,” echoing official government propaganda, including things said or tweeted by Trump.

Jones recently detailed in a series of tweets an apparent information operation emanating from Saudi Arabia following a visit to the White House this month by Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. Jones found a single tweet, “The Prince of Qatar a supporter of terrorism, should not be in the White House but be at Guantanamo,” had been posted up to 800 times an hour over several days, from 2,582 unique accounts. The tweets mostly were directed at U.S.-based targets, including Trump, the CIA and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and at several news organizations, including Fox News, Reuters and The Washington Post.

“There’s still this pro-Trump message coming from Saudi Twitter, and I don’t think that’s likely to change,” Jones said. “They view Trump’s reelection as key to their own survival.”

A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fahad Nazer, said, “Saudi Arabia does not interfere in anyway in the domestic affairs of other countries. It considers this noninterference principle to be a pillar of the rules-based international order. Just as importantly, Saudi Arabia does not engage in the dissemination of “disinformation” of any sort. Any allegations to the contrary are baseless.”

This trajectory from nationally focused to internationally focused disinformation campaigns raises longer-term worries about what other nations might have disinformation teams sharpening their chops on domestic audiences with an eye toward eventual use against foreign targets, including in the United States. In addition to those with known foreign disinformation capabilities, there are numerous nations — Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines, Qatar, Mexico and others — that now use such tactics mainly to influence domestic politics but could turn their attention to foreign targets.

In a related trend, online mercenaries have begun offering information operations as a commercial service. Facebook shut down 265 accounts from an Israeli company, Archimedes Group, in May for seeking to manipulate elections through social media targeting voters in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. The company said on its website that it would “use every tool and take every advantage available in order to change reality according to our client’s wishes.”

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floatingpetals · 6 years

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Smudged Lipstick

Pairings: Chris Evans x Reader

Warnings: A little NSFW, Dom/sub-references(ish), pretty tame really

Word Count: 1000+

Request: “Hi lovely! Hope you're doing well 😊. Congrats on your blog birthday and hitting such a huge milestone with your followers. I was wondering if I could request something with Chris and the prompt: 191. "Behave" (smut). Thank you so much.” - @carolina-thiell

A/N: I know this one was a smut request, but for some reason, couldn’t do the smut outright, even though this was a perfect request for that (also it doesn't help that I’m kind of a tease) I hope you enjoy though! Reblog and like to let me know what you think! Enjjoyy!!

The gifs, not mine. Credit to the wonderful owner.

A warm hand settled on the inside of her thigh, Chris giving her a reassuring squeeze through the fabric of her dress. Y/N ripped her gaze away from the window, where she was watching the scenery pass by with budding anxiety, and hesitantly smiled in response. She hated how nervous she was about this and hated how transparent she was about that fear. She wasn’t the actor, after all, Chris had that taken care of. Yet she couldn’t help the butterflies exploding in her stomach every time she thought about stepping on the carpet in front of all those cameras.

“Hey, you good?” Chris leaned over the space between them, running the pad of his finger down her cheek. Numbly, Y/N nodded and turned back to the window.

“Yeah. Just a little on edge is all.” She mumbled, taking a deep calming breath. Slowly she turned back to Chris, who hadn’t turned his eyes from her. Y/N tried her best to smile and reach up to scratch the scruff on his chin. He hummed in appreciation, pulling a giggle from Y/N. “I’m sorry. I’m already ruining your big night.”

“You haven’t ruined anything, babe.” Chris chuckled, the corner of his lips turning up in a crooked grin. “You just being here has made this even better than it could have been.”

Y/N let out a soft laugh, kissing his cheek. Her nose scrunched up at the lingering stain from her lips. Chris swatted her hands away while she tried to wipe off the color. Both laughed as they all but wrestled in the SUVs back seats, Y/N trying in vain to rub off the lipstick while Chris whined loudly.

“Chris. N-stop it!” Y/N giggled, making a show of licking her thumb before gripping his chin to hold him in place. “You can’t walk out on the carpet with my lipstick all over your face!”

“Maybe I want to!” He protested with another loud whine, akin to a whine of an overgrown three-year-old, pouting when she was successful at rubbing her thumb against his cheek. Y/N let out a cry of triumph and sat back with a cheeky grin, smoothing her dress out.

Chris exhaled, narrowing his eyes at her. He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand, making a noise of mock disgust. “Gross. Now I have your spit all over my face.”

Y/N snorted and rolled her eyes once again at his childishness. Mouth faster than her brain could process things, she replied easily.

“Oh please. You wish it was more than just my spit on your face.”

She didn’t even mean to let the words slip from her mouth. It just happened, like a bad train wreck, she couldn’t look away from. Mortified, Y/N dared a glance over to Chris, who had become suddenly still in the seat next to her. His eyes were wide, mouth falling open in shock. It was like his brain shut down and had to reboot, completely taken off guard by the words that came out of her mouth. A slow grin spread on his face, and he slid up next to her.

“You’re not wrong.” He leaned in to whisper hotly in her ear. “But don’t you think we should wait until we get home? And not in the back seat of an SUV with an audience? Huh, baby girl?”

A shiver went up Y/N’s spine, her body instantly reacting to the low timbre of his voice and the warmth of his breath. He smirked, watching her pupils dilate when she tilted her head towards him. He hooked an around her shoulders, tucking her securely against his side. She squirmed in her seat, chewing on her lower lip. Chris’s eyes narrowed. He swooped down and took hold of her earlobe between his teeth, dragging his teeth down her skin. Y/N shuddered, rolling her head to the side to give him more access despite it being a punishment.

“I asked you a question.” He growled low. Y/N bit down on her lip, holding back from letting out a low whimper in response at his husky tone.

“Yes.” She whispered, not trusting her voice. Chris brought a hand up to her neck, wrapping his long fingers loosely around her neck. He gave a tight second long squeeze, letting out a sigh of disappointment. She didn’t need him to say a word to correct herself. “Yes, sir.”

Chris leaned back with a satisfied smirk, his eyes never leaving her. He chuckled and adjusted his bow tie with the one free hand.

“Good. Now, behave and I might just reward you later.” He said, his voice promising that if she did, it would be well worth it. It was always worth following his orders, he was never one to disappoint.

Y/N let out a shuddering breath, squirming in her seat again. Chris had dropped his hand from her neck and had taken up rubbing small circles on her bare shoulder. Heat pooled in her stomach at the touch, and it took everything in her not to moan softly at the innocent touch. Hell, it took her full willpower to not jump his bones right now.

Silence filled the small SUV as the driver, who was expertly ignoring the exchange behind him, pulled up to the venue. The air was still thick when he climbed out to open Chris’s door. Before the driver could open his door, Chris swiftly turned and pressed a searing kiss to her lips. Caught off guard, Y/N was left blinking hazily in her seat while Chris climbed out. Another usher walked to Y/N’s side and open the door, the cool breeze of the late California air hit her skin and brought her back to the present.

She could easily say the goosebumps were because she was cold, her off the shoulder dress did little to cover her. She could easily say her hammering heart was because of nerves. But when she stepped around the car to Chris’s waiting arm, she knew she couldn’t blame anything but Chris and his stupid ability to flip her world upside down with a simple look. It didn’t help that he looked drop dead gorgeous in that black suit she so loved. She shivered when his fingers rested possessively on her hip, tightening to remind her of his effect on her. He smirked and leaned down to whisper once again in her ear.

“Don’t forget. Behave, baby girl.”

Perma Tag: (CLOSED)

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elizascharlesdanceblog · 5 years

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Savage Kingdom‘s Charles Dance

With a 128-year history of presenting the remote corners of the globe to inspire, illuminate and teach, National Geographic is slated to push the boundaries in Nat Geo Wild’s anticipated global miniseries event Savage Kingdom.

Filmed in 4K and produced by Icon Films and Natural History Film Unit Botswana, the three-part special will look to examine warring animal tribes battling for survival during a deadly drought in remote Savute, Botswana, part of Chobe National Park. Narrated by Emmy-nominated actor Charles Dance (pictured, below) – better known as Tywin Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones– each episode of the series event is told from a predator’s perspective, and explores the daily struggle to survive and dominate: the births, deaths, hunts and rivalries of two lion prides, leopards, wild dogs and hyenas.

The miniseries marks the first steps forward in wildlife filmmaking by having each 120-minute episode play out more like a scripted drama rather than a natural history documentary.

In the early stages of development, all three organizations latched onto the idea of pushing the boundaries on what has traditionally been perceived as the natural history genre. The aim was to create an emotional story that traded on the production values, storytelling and narrative arching seen in the best of scripted dramas, but in a way that could breathe new life into the genre for a much broader audience.

“We wanted to make something that was more accessible and more dramatic, something that an audience could associate with that would pull people (who) don’t traditionally watch wildlife to the genre,” Brad Bestelink, producer and director of Natural History Film Unit Botswana, tells realscreen.

Six cameramen and field producers spent approximately 15 months filming the royal families of Botswana where they quickly began drawing comparisons to George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. Crews spent a total of 20,000 hours watching daily battles of dominance, the rite to turf and bloodline, capturing various conflicts between species, including hyenas attacking elephants, lions battling leopards, wild dogs fighting hyenas and leopards catching enormous fish from watering holes.

“At first it was sort of funny that we were going to parallel this Game of Thrones world,” explains Geoff Daniels, GM and executive VP of Nat Geo Wild, “but the more we immersed ourselves as storytellers into this world, the more we began to realize that this wasn’t just some contrived marketing stunt. We began to see the personality of these animals, the rivalries, grudges and motivations that they had really paralleled the brutality and breathtaking decisions that the characters in Game of Thrones universe exercise every single day. We realized we didn’t have to force anything – that those storylines really began to emerge.”

While there isn’t an infamous Game of Thrones ‘Red Wedding,’ in which a handful of characters are ambushed and killed one after another, there are moments throughout the entire series “where we’re just absolutely stunned” by the interactions, the stakes and consequences in the decisions each character undertakes.

“We suddenly realized that there were these hero characters that you were rooting for, these underdogs and animals whose real lives are played out on this stark and breathtakingly beautiful battlefield. There is constant threat from within and constant pressure from outside,” Daniels continues. “And, yes, there are certain characters that you love to hate, and that you certainly don’t want to see succeed.”

Previous to Savage Kingdom, event level and premium programming in the natural history and wildlife spaces focused on exposing audiences to what Daniels calls “shock and awe filmmaking,” in which resources are poured into capturing extraordinary and rare animal behaviors without taking the next step; going deep instead of going broad.

Viewers, Bestelink argues, are looking for stories with heart and shorthand association between their normal lives. Wildlife programs that concentrate on such typical human constructs as power, ownership and competition will win out.

“What we’ve tried to do [with Savage Kingdom] is just to make it more accessible, make people look at animals within that context,” he states.

“The future [of natural history filmmaking] starts with finding ways of really attracting, engaging and deepening a relationship with animal-loving audiences,” adds Daniels. “Really cultivating those communities where they’ve got shows and characters that they want to engage and immerse in.”

Nat Geo Wild is not providing a ‘circle of life’ view to justify what the audience’s experience of this world is going to be. One of the things the network is proud of is that it’s leaning into the realities of these animals’ lives.

“What I want audiences to understand is that we think people will develop so much more empathy, compassion and care for these animals if they’re witnessing in the absolute purest terms how they have to get by, because in many ways a lot of the things that motivate animals to care for their young, they’re very relatable at an emotional level,” Daniels says. “That’s something that I think is very important for people to understand, that this wasn’t about shock value – it’s about trying to create empathy and engagement.”

Savage Kingdom premieres Friday, Nov. 25 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Nat Geo Wild and globally in 134 countries and 37 languages.

source: realscreen

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madameocotillo · 5 years

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Haunted house stories please?

HAHA oh man, sure!! This was not something I really expected to be asked after I tag-talked about it lol, but I have plenty to share.

A preface: I was at House of Torment in Austin, Tx for 6 years, until I moved cities, and was a floor manager for 5 of those. What this means is I was in costume every night, but instead of being in a single scene like most actors, I got to run around a huge portion of the haunt. I took care of the actors in my zone, while also checking on/fixing props, dealing with problem customers (MANY of these, but all the managers had radios w/ earpieces & were kept updated constantly by the control room staff monitoring the night vision cameras in almost every room), and scaring everyone else. Being a manager, I had a lot more......leeway in what I could do, namely dangerous stunts and shit that scene actors were not permitted to do for legal reasons.

Worth a mention as well; I have always been an athletic dumbass with a high degree of flexibility and pain tolerance, so let’s start with that as a baseline. This is long, so i’ll just start with one! I may reblog it to add more later though.

CHAINSAW TAG: An upgraded children’s game w/ 120% more terror.

Picture this: It’s 1am, and the building is closed & empty. The actors have gone home, the music is off, and the bright house lights are dark. You are alone, creeping along in the dim glow of the operating lights, using your familiarity with the terrain to keep as silent as you can, while also avoiding stumbling over the uneven floor as you strain your ears to catch any sounds not generated by you.

Over the thud of your own heartbeat, you hear something: careful steps coming up the stairs several rooms behind you; whomever is making them is obviously trying to remain as unnoticed as you are, but doesn’t know enough to skip over the top two steps, which always groaned under pressure.

There’s no way to know who is behind you, and the risk of staying to find out isn’t worth it. There are a few hiding places you know of in your vicinity, and the one that is better than all the rest is also unfortunately the most difficult to get into swiftly AND quietly. You make your choice, and straighten up to begin trying to unlatch the cabinet door that actually contains a small passage onto a metal ledge, hanging 20ft above the floor below, with a large, heavy, hinged grate that actors can push over to scare customers with its deafening crash. The cabinet hinge squeaks loudly if opened too fast, you know, so you pick the slow and stealthy option. This was a mistake; you are TOO slow.

There aren’t quiet steps behind you anymore, because now they are advancing rapidly, with heavy footfalls. The unmistakable sound of a cord being pulled several times, an engine starting, and by the time they burst into the doorway of your room, the chainsaw in their hands is revved and roaring.

Your heartbeat goes haywire, and your mouth goes dry as adrenaline kicks in like a shotgun blast. Silence be damned, you rip the cabinet door open, climb onto the counter, and hurl your body forward through the 2ft entrance as the person, still dripping with the blood they wore that night while out on the lot, terrifying customers to take their minds off the line, lunges for you with a shriek. You ARE fast enough this time, the cabinet door bangs shut and the latch re-engages behind you, but the chainsaw-wielder is just as aware as you are of the tiny ledge, with no exit but the way you came, that you are now perched on. You hear them start to fumble with the latch.

Heartbeat still thundering, you smile. You don’t expect them to know this, but this area happens to be one of your favorite spots in the building for three reasons.

1) It’s a part of your zone, you have spent hundreds of hours patrolling it over the course of the season, and you are very, very comfortable in it.

2) After the grate is pushed over by an actor, and the resulting noise causes the customers beneath to drop to the floor, hands over their ears, screaming like they think the world is ending, they always recover and look up to see what made it. Through the metal mesh of the ledge, they can see the actor that scared them, the grate, and you as well if you’re there that time. Usually one person laughs at the rest of the group, and they make to continue down the hall, content that the monsters are two stories up and cannot reach them.

3) As mentioned before, you are a gigantic dumbass with the impulse control of a particularly acrobatic toddler.

The sets in this building are movie-grade, meant to take abuse from staff and guests alike, and built to facilitate the high-intensity scares your company is known for. This means almost everything is weight-bearing, baby.

The would-be killer gets the cabinet door open just in time to see you roll off the edge of the platform, slowing your decent to the concrete below by pushing off the metal sewage pipes that jut from the wall to enhance the atmosphere. Ricocheting all the way down to the ground floor, instead of rushing forward like you normally would, at the practically incoherent group you just landed a few feet in front of, you race off at full speed down the hallway, while the thwarted maniac calls down that you’re a bag of dicks, and they’re going to go eat the half-sandwich you left in the break room.

This my friend, is Chainsaw Tag!! Only played by management & equivalent level staff, after the haunt was closed for the night, it was a dangerous, no-holds barred, showdown-survival match between a bunch of people trying to ‘survive’ as long as they could, and one with a real chainsaw (minus chain, jesus christ we weren’t trying to actually kill someone) & a desire to give their friends minor heart attacks. Haunted house employees are not known for their strong survival instincts.

People ask me a lot, “Why do you hate horror movies, if you love horror video games and work in a haunted house??” The answer to that is, IT’S A TOTALLY DIFFERENT BALLGAME IF I CAN PERSONALLY INFLUENCE THE OUTCOME OF THE SITUATION. The experience of having, as far as your brain is concerned in the moment, a real person with a chainsaw hunting you down is unlike anything I can possibly think to compare it to; you instinctively go into a genuinely terrified state, it doesn't matter how logically you know that the asshole stalking you with a chainsaw isn’t really going to kill you, you promised to buy him Wendy’s on the way home, the second you start to doubt that the sounds you are hearing are coming from a fellow ‘victim’ your brain is already off and doing its thing. When a chainsaw starts up in the dark, one room away, you run, but most importantly, YOU CAN CHOOSE EVERY DECISION YOU MAKE TO TRY TO KEEP YOURSELF ‘ALIVE’ THAT MATCH, THERE IS NO WAITING AROUND KNOWING THAT WHATEVER HAPPENS TO YOU IS GONNA HAPPEN BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY THE DIRECTOR SHOT IT.

We didn’t play every night, and sometimes games lasted until the sun rose, before we all trudged off to try to make it through classes/daytime jobs, but MAN was it worth it. I feel like i’ve actually got some honest to goodness experience surviving a slasher movie lol, and as long as I knew the terrain and was lucky, I might actually survive. The building we were in at the time was 40,000 square feet, and most of it was the extremely intricate haunted house, so there were a ton of choices players could make in how they hid, where they hid, if they took a stationary approach or a more active one, the way I did, et cetera.

The building also used to be an old warehouse, complete with steel beams criss-crossing the length of the ceiling, and if you think I didn’t hang like a bat from them, 40 ft above the ground in an open area that didn’t have any false floors, with a flashlight in hand so that as soon as I spotted the person who was ‘It’ I could switch it on and make a godawful Dracula impression at them, you would be thinking wrong.

I have thought before that if I owned/had access to some wooded land, or a building that was built up in a way to make it fun, I would love to run my own game of Chainsaw tag with friends. There really is nothing else that can come close as far as the rush you get when playing it, much less surviving till the end of the round and getting to laugh at the dumb ways your friends ‘died’. Of course people snuck off to make out, and YES they totally did get caught & killed with MUCH more frequency than those of us who knew better, that’s like one of the basic tropes of horror movies, good god.

And yes, the chainsaw wielder DID have to touch you with the chainsaw in order to tag you out, and there were no safe zones (that were respected, anyways).

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manycoloureddays · 5 years

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1, 6, 7, 9, 19, 28, 34, 35, 41, 50, 51

1. If you could reboot one TV show, which one would it be?

After much consideration I have decided that what I want most is a Grimm reboot with Trubel as the lead. Instead of the cop show element it would be more of a monster of the week vibe, maybe even a roadtrip/Supernatural-esque vibe with a female led main cast and Trubel definitely gets a girlfriend.

David Greenwalt et al. make it so!

6. Which shows do you think are underrated and need more love?

One Day at a Time!! It isn’t underrated by the people that watch it, but it clearly was by Netflix.

7. Have you ever been inspired to start a new show based on gifs or memes it has produced?

Did you mean 80% of the things I started watching since joining tumblr a million years ago? Some of the shows I never would have come across without this hellsite include Leverage, Killjoys, The Magicians, Galavant, and Sweet/Vicious.

9. What’s one show you thought you’d hate but turned out to really enjoy?

I’m pretty happy to ignore shows, or drop them after a handful of episodes these days. I honestly can’t think of any?

19. Are there any shows on your “to watch” list right now?

I have quite a few ‘to watch’ lists - for seasons of shows I need to catch up with, shows I have access to, and shows I need to find a way to watch. Next up are Now Apocalypse, The Umbrella Academy, Schitt’s Creek and Deadly Class (all of which I will be immediately updating @pantsaretherealheroes about, because I am so far behind her!!)

28. Who would be your dream cameo on your favourite show?

The first one that came to mind is that post about John Mulaney playing Jake’s high school boyfriend he was unaware of having. That would be pretty great!

I’m also thinking it’d be cool for Kristen Bell to show up in Brooklyn Nine Nine to complete her Schur’verse experience.

34. What are your top 5 shows right now?

In no particular order: One Day at a Time, The Good Place, The Magicians, Queer Eye, and Brooklyn Nine Nine.

35. Who are your top 5 TV characters right now?

To keep it simple I’ll just list a character from the above shows: Penelope Alvarez, Chidi Anagonye, Eliot Waugh, not a character but Tan France, and Rosa Diaz.

41. If you could change 1 detail about any show, what would you change and why?

It’s such a small thing, and I’m mostly content with it the way it is, but having watched Leverage with my mother last year I would really have liked the ot3 to be explicitly an ot3.

50. What’s one TV cliche you love?

I am really very partial to the ‘main characters split up for an interview by cops/teachers/etc and all of their answers are completely out of sync. Also when they are completely in sync. It always makes me smile.

51. What’s one TV cliche you despise?

Can we please stop with the lazy handling of actors leaving the show. Not every character has to have died a sudden violent death. I’m looking at you CW.

#that meme thing #leiaorganathegeneral

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darnellbobby · 3 years

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freifraufischer · 7 years

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hello, can I ask you who is Mikey? I see you mention him a lot, but I think I'm a little lost :D

Mikey is a particularly destructive internet troll. He is a man who lives in the Tampa area of Florida who travels from female dominated fandom to female dominated fandom supporting traditional heterosexual ships. He appears to be self inserting himself into the role of the male character and idealizing the female character. So in CS he only cares about Hook in so much as he sees himself in that role and Emma as an idealized leading woman whose true love has been won by the male character. He also seems to pick fandoms with very large femslash fanon pairings that rival his chosen ship and he seems to decide that these gay women are his “enemies” that need to be “defeated” so that he can “win”.

To do this he goes to “war” with these other fans:

He attacks them on twitter, often eliciting the support of others by claiming that these other fans are harassing the writers or actors. If he goes to far and journalist calls him out he’ll change his user name and start over. Leanne from ET who is generally pro CS called him out when he went too far once and that prompted his last twitter user name change.

He sends massive … and I do mean massive… amounts of anonymous hate on tumblr. At one point we in SQ fandom were estimating he might be personally responsible for 20-30% of all anonymous hate we were getting. Once you got used to him he was pretty easy to identify and IP tracking exposed him.

He makes very pretty gif sets on tumblr (he’s quite talented at it) and then uses the notes and followers he gets from that to validate that people support his other activities (he’s very quick to tell you his follow count largely gained by making Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars gif sets).

He would also send anonymous hate to big name fellow CSers. The case I know of involves someone who refuses to reblog from him knowing his other behavior but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s sending a lot of the hate to other CSers as false flag attacks to show how terrible SQers are. He thinks he’s at war so it’s justified. But I don’t have proof of this one because I wouldn’t have access to the IP logs of CS fans getting hate from “SQers”. If you are getting hate from Florida you probably have a Mikey problem.

He also tries to gaslight fans he doesn’t like. He’ll go on anon and pretend to be of the same fan group, tell the person how worried he is about the thing they love that he’s pretending to love as well and paint a picture of supposed spoilers that prove everything that person hates is going to happen. Usually there are fake or misleading spoilers in these stories. During season 5 I would watch him visit the spoiler summary log i kept and then show up in my friend @sgtmac7 inbox trying to play psychological war on her. He also plants fake spoilers on LChat, an anonymous lesbian chat site. His goal is to demoralize his “enemies” and make them quit watching the show and leave the fandom.

He’s also made a habit of attacking Lana Parrilla (including @ ing her on twitter) for failing to support CS (a story her character was not involved in) and supporting fans he doesn’t like. He famously said that she should be “muzzled” and has repeatedly tried to tattle on her to her boss for her supposed failure to support the show as he understands it.

More disturbingly, if this is possible, he’s also threatened to hack and delete people’s social media and a few years ago followed SQ fans around at a con taking their picture without their consent.

In short he’s a real piece of work who has materially caused a lot of pain, hurt, and bad feelings across OUAT fandom.

And yesterday he had a glorious hours long childish melt down on twitter with the show runner.

#mikey #Anonymous

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stormhavenmedia · 4 years

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In Mid December 2018 the Untied We Roll Convoy was first publicly announced. This was a protest in the form of a convoy that would leave Alberta and travel to Ottawa picking up people along the way until finally reaching Ottawa with many cars and a bus full of supporters, along with and a convoy of over 200 trucks and even tractors. Participating in this was the grassroots Yellow Vest Canada movement that had sprung up after the one in France. First on social media but quickly moving to the real world with small but persistent demonstrations across Canada that continue to this day.

The issues the convoy wished to bring to Ottawa were as varied as the participants. Many Oil and Gas workers were protesting what they saw as the Liberal governments attempt to cripple the Canadian energy sector in favor of Saudi oil while Alberta faced huge layoffs and skyrocketing suicide rates. Many others while not opposing Immigration were deeply concerned with the uncontrolled mass migration called for by the United Nations migrant compact. Thousands were and continue to pour across our border in violation of our Laws somehow claiming to be “refugees” from upstate new York and Minneapolis. Many were appalled by the ceaseless attacks on Canadian identity and culture being pushed constantly by Educators and media. Many objected to the obvious , if yet unpublished corruption, the is the lifeblood of the Trudeau Liberal Party. They were Canadians from every walk of life who used their own resources and crowdfunding. Some brought their families while they ate in cheap truck-stops and slept in their cars driven by their desire to save their country from corruption and ruin.

On December 30th a workshop going by the name of Powershift: Young and Rising/Jeunes en action was posted to Facebook by the parent group identity Powershift. Powershifts Facebook page lists it as being founded in 2009 although as of publication no corporate info seems to exist for it as a Non Profit. This event, and the actions that proceeded from it were labelled by the controlled press as a grassroots Indigenous Youth and allies responding to the racist, colonial, environmentally destructive issues being advocated by the Convoy. It was anything but.

This event was organized by massively powerful international actors who operate from the shadows of corporate shells. These same actors have now completely decimated Canada’s economy, just as the Yellow vest and United Canada convoy said they would. It was done in collusion with the Canada’s eastern political/cultural elites in response to a group of Canadian citizens gathering in an actual grassroots movement out of desperation over the deterioration of their country and the future of their children. The brave and hardy Canadians of the Yellow vest and the United We Roll for Canada convoy were right again to fear for their very future. The goals of the million dollar workshop put on in response to them, is no less than the complete disintegration of Canada.

For anyone who thinks this is some sort of conspiracy listen to the last 50 seconds of this. I will introduce you more fully to who Alex is and who he represents later.

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The movement United We Roll was brutally vilified by the Liberal/UNIFOR controlled Canadian Media from the second of its conception. They were labelled Racists and Nazi’s in a constant stream of woke Op eds or “investigative” features built from trolling their social media for off color jokes. They were in targeted by taxpayer funded thought police like the jokingly named anti-hate network and subjecting to doxxing and a constant stream of insult and propaganda.

These hard working deeply motivated and brave Canadians trying to exercise their democratic rights were literally shut down using their own Tax-dollars, Union dues, and the funds of massive oligarchical controlled Foundations most of which receive tax relief and direct funding valued in the millions from the citizens they are working to disinherit. The “conference held on University of Ottawa was an integral part of this campaign and I believe shows the generalized co-ordination between the Liberal Junta and the so called “civil society” that is evident in the contrived blockade “crisis” that have allowed a few hundred to shut down a country of millions.

The initial call-out for PowerShift was done by FB livestream. December 30 2019, two weeks after the convoy and its schedule was announced. It was designed to partly be a narrative response to United We Roll and its schedule was carefully co-ordinated to the convoys so they could act against it in a concerted way while preparing their larger plan.

So as scheduled, and despite massive scorn and abuse by the media pundits and elite Chattering classes, the United We Roll for Canada convoy made its hopeful departure on the 14th of February 2019. The participants were literally your neighbors, with no “media training” or even an organized media team.

That same day as planned in Ottawa the Powershift Conference collected, and transported to their paid billets, the young people it had flown in from all over Canada. they were greeted with a 48 page glossy conference schedule along with their individual “radical swag” bags. See the full version online below by following the link.

https://issuu.com/jacquibush/docs/print_full_program_en/30

The Conference was paid for by these organizations all of which receive millions in Taxpayer funding and foreign Foundation money

The Conference utilized many facilities across campus and had access to huge media resources. It had the full support and backing of this massive publicly funded institution and access to millions of dollars of taxpayer and Soros Foundation money.

Training “workshops” organized by the Powershift Conference, held on the grounds of a publicly funded University with its full facilitation. One of the major topics of the four days, seemingly an area of special concentration, should be chilling and instructive to every Canadian as we watch these “blockades” strangle our country.

The “networks” this event boasted of creating are the ones now directing the “blockades”. The training was a full 9 hours on the Saturday the 16th and the full 4 hour morning on the Sunday Feb 17th. A significant portion of the three 8 hour training days, seems they thought it important.

In the words of one of the main “facilitators” of the event the plan is laid out.

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As well as hundreds of youth Powershift also flew in and paid accommodations, meals, et al for 95 different presenters from all over Canada and the world. Lets have a look at our instructor list and some of what they had to offer beyond shutting down Canada’s rail communications.

Some Keynote speakers included;

Clayton Thomas_Muller the Soros funded 350.org senior campaign specialist who in concert with their partners at Tides who have used the mask of indigenous rights have all but shut down Canada’s economy. Notice the fascination with “population control” of some of 350.orgs funders. This is actually quite natural given the Eugenic roots of the modern environmental movement.

Harsha Walia founder of No One is Illegal the organization working tirelessly to destroy our borders and flood Canada with millions of “migrants” who will destroy workers rights, economic security and as we saw in the last election, Democracy itself. She is one of the organizers of the vast Soros backed web that has flooded the western world with “migrants” as detailed in Michelle Malkins excellent work “Open Borders Inc”

Sean Devlin; When not filling his pockets with our tax dollar via CBC and various federal artist grants Sean likes to discuss what a shithole Canada is. Sean was one of the architects of the Foreign funded anti Harper campaign. Sean used to run a Tides/Rockerfeller funded media group called “Shit Harper Did” with a girl named Brigette, you remember Brigette don’t you?

Manon Massé authoritarian leader of Quebec hard left political Party Quebèc Solidaire and longtime collaborator with ? Canada’s draconian new Minister of Culture. Her political party also backs zero emissions and open borders. In case you were wondering she would absolutely love to see the rest of Canada disintegrate

Romeo Saganash Sitting NDP member of Parliament for Abitibi–Baie-James–Nunavik–Eeyou (Québec) where strangely a 4.7 billion dollar deal was just signed by Quebec, “The project will help to unlock the wealth of the region’s varied natural resources and create jobs and business opportunities,” said Quebec Premier François Legault.”. i guess this resource development is powered by pixie dust.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/cree-development-quebec-abel-bosum-fran%C3%A7ois-legault-grande-alliance-1.5466612

Everyone on this list makes way north of six figures, most of it originating in our pockets.

But this highly funded conference was not about simply motivational speeches. It was a venue for very intensive and focused training. Lets see what our happy campers were learning

For lectures on how to use the Law to actually sue for climate change, a tactic that would start to be employed a year later we have some heavy hitters indeed.

January 2020

To oversee the hours of high end media training Media they had seasoned CBC veteran, founder of the Leap manifesto, and son of longtime Liberal partisan and permanent state bureaucrat, and UN promoter Stephan Lewis, husband of Naomi Klein and multi millionaire

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Lessons on how to interfere in the upcoming 2019 federal election were given out by one of the political operatives of the corrupt US Democratic Party. It was a group of these high end political operatives that help put the Trudeau Liberals in power in 2015,

The rest of the crowd was very diverse for a “climate conference”

Meet Shady, perhaps the only “Syrian Algonquin” on earth

Our intrepid Instructors had many varied lessons to impart, including fun subjects like resisting arrest and BLOCKADE organizing and employment

Don’t worry about our campers being all work no fun, becuase what revolutionary sleepover would be complete without some socialist Islamic rap music

And of course what Marxist day camp would be complete without arts and crafts, take note of the banners they are silk-screening.

As The United We Roll for Canada convoy was making its way across the country and despite the massive disinformation campaign was receiving growing support. Average Canadians were hanging off overpasses to cheer them on, towns greeted them as they entered. As they crossed our happy campers were busy putting out a wave of disinformation as part of their social media training.

When our scrappy convoy reached Parliament hill on February 18 as planned they were met with what the corrupt media reported as being a grassroots Indigenous led protest. Notice the signs and banners they may look familiar.

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The aggressive tactics used to try and intimidate the peaceful grassroots Canadian rally had been worked out over the preceding four days, between taxpayer funded lunch breaks and Hip Hop Marxism. The instructors were not picked because of their deep understanding of climate modeling or alternative energy production. They are picked because of their fanatical advancement of a corporate sponsored Neo-Marxism that uses Identity Politics and the guise of “climate emergency” to advance a dystopian vision of a technocracy driven, highly controlled society.

They’re specialty is whole of society operations to disrupt our community and national cohesion, cause division, manufacture “crisis” events. All the while working to enable some critical mass so that a population can be herded unwittingly into destroying itself. If you think this is some sort of tinfoil hat fever dream. I would invite you to look at conditions in Egypt, Syria, Libya.

It should be obvious this was far far more than a “climate change” event. This was a regime change seminar. This was training for a the Color revolution being unleashed upon us with the consent and collusion of the Liberal Party. This isn’t odd some of the same political operatives and Foreign Foundations paying the bills and providing the training put Trudeau in power. This same program was used successfully in Ukraine to provoke the “Maidan” color revolution and install a Fascist regime in Kiev in 2014.

Looks like the same network may have helped pull off pulled off the same feat in 2015 and 2019 in Canada. This event provides a clear example of the collusion between the Liberal Party and its paramour Unifor, and their Foreign Foundation masters. It also shows how highly financed groups are gathering young people from across Canada to propagandize them and use them as the zombie soldiers in their attempt to take down Canada’s Democracy and Society. In this moment the Nexus of the forces working to destroy us held a gathering to plan out there next moves.

Lets talk about “Color Revolutions”

So if you think this term denotes some sort of tinfoil fever dream then listen to the words of one of its architects. Alec Ross is a shadowy corporate player who was hired by the Obama State department to facilitate the Arab Spring and the “Maidan” uprising in Ukraine .

So if your still reading the base idea is terrifyingly simple. You can go into any society and find some division. You find what they refer to in their literature as “Indigenous movements”. You send in trainers and operatives to radicalize these groups. One of the other keys is co-opting the Education system. using it to radicalize youth against their own society. They are far more open to ideological indoctrination and lack real world experience. they are perfect for the “good vs evil” narrative that underlies the dogma. they can then be used as a weapon against their own societies. The outcomes for whatever “Indigenous political movements” and their members are irrelevant. A good basic pop culture reference would be the Hunger Games. The technocracy keeps control by forcing the to fight each other for scarce resources all directed by the elites of the capital.

The Powershift Conference seems to be a recycling of an identity deployed in the USby the same groups in 2011.

Power Shift 2011 was organized by the Energy Action Coalition, a coalition of 50 youth lead environmental and social justice organizations. Tides funded of course. Their website is no longer functioning.

The base idea of this sort of “virtual leaderless action network” being used against us came out of a conference in New York 2008. The conference put the largest corporate entities on earth and the most powerful of their network of foundations the Council on Foreign Relations in a room with Academia, the bureaucrat elites of the permanent states buried in the western democracies, and the corporate media. The “Arab Spring”, that would result in open slave markets in Libya and the brutal Syrian civil war that also helped produce the weaponized migrant crisis. Other “grassroots” uprisings were planned with the participation of the biggest corporate players on earth like Google and the Obama state department. One of the targets was doubtless Canada

We need to thoroughly understand the highly organized and co-ordinated nature of this attack and disrupt it. We need to build data bases of these players and understand their relationship to each other and the Liberal Junta. These individuals and organizations need to be confronted. Their offices occupied, their staff outed completely. The network of Public Interest Research Groups need to be dismantled by pressuring the Universities that fund and abet them. My fellow Canadians we simply need to co-ordinate our millions to defeat their thousands.

William Ray

For more suggestions on how you can act

“Identify, Confront and Disrupt, Disrupt, Disrupt, the activities of these foreign funded or affiliated groups. Many of these names are already known to us. We need to start collecting and correlating the hundreds of these sock puppet advocacy groups. We need to physically Occupy their offices, Identify their Canadian staff, expose and confront them. Disrupt any fundraising or workshop activities. If you see someone collecting for these groups make sure no one gives them a dime, you can do this quite legally. Disrupt their social media and any events they might hold. Again you can do this while breaking no Law. Check to see if these groups receive tax payer money from any level of government. It requires some sleuthing even though the records are public shells and deceptive program names are used to hide the money trail. But hey what Canadian doesn’t like a good mystery on a snowy night. Many do receive public funds put massive public pressure to stop all public funds flowing to these advocacy groups. Find the corporate sponsors and begin boycott movements.” Read More….

The Training for the “Rail Blockades” was done at Carleton U. Feb.14-18 2019, Paid for by Canadians In Mid December 2018 the Untied We Roll Convoy was first publicly announced. This was a protest in the form of a convoy that would leave Alberta and travel to Ottawa picking up people along the way until finally reaching Ottawa with many cars and a bus full of supporters, along with and a convoy of over 200 trucks and even tractors.

#TakebackCanada #Canada #Canadian Politics #Liberal curruption #power shift canada #Powershift #Sierraclub #Soros #Tides #United we roll #youth rising

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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TikTok emerges as Silicon Valley's scapegoat in Washington

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/tiktok-emerges-as-silicon-valleys-scapegoat-in-washington/

TikTok emerges as Silicon Valley's scapegoat in Washington

The newfound focus on TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance most notably includes a national security review being conducted by the Trump administration. And, though TikTok declined to appear, scrutiny of the company proved the main theme of a highly critical, if sparsely attended, hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday.

Here are some of the tech policy debates where the rise ofTikTok is proving timely:

Stifling speech

Critics accuse Facebook, Google and Twitter of failing to appropriatelymoderate content on their platforms, particularly controversial political speech. Democrats say they’re too permissive of lies, hate speech and harassment, especially from President Donald Trump and his supporters, while Trump and other Republicans say they’re too eager to censor conservatives.

Now the companies can point to TikTok as an example of how not to handle online speech, as lawmakers like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — who chairs the panel that held Tuesday’s hearing — raise fears the company is bowing to censorship pressure from Beijing.

“I would bet that Facebook is having a field day with this,” said Samm Sacks, a cybersecurity policy and China digital economy fellow at New America. “At the very moment when Mark Zuckerberg and the company has been under immense scrutiny here at home, we now have a perfect foil. You don’t trust Facebook? Well, just look at TikTok. It’s brilliant.”

Zuckerberg has already spent weeks warning that free speech is in danger if China sets the terms of online expression.

“China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries,” he said during a speech at Georgetown University last month, throwing a red flag to critics clamoring for U.S. regulators to hobble Facebook’s power and influence. “Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There’s no guarantee these values will win out.”

While dissidents around the globe use Facebook’s messaging service WhatsApp to communicate, TikTok has faced accusations that it censors mentions of the anti-government protests roiling Hong Kong, Zuckerberg noted. “Is that the internet we want?” he asked.

TikTok disputes such accusations. Before Wednesday’s hearing, its U.S. general manager, Vanessa Pappas, sent a letter to committee members asserting the platform’s independence from the Chinese government, writing that the company does not “remove content based on sensitivities related to China (or other countries).”

“We [have] never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content, and we would not do so if asked,” she wrote.

A TikTok spokesperson added: “The more Mark Zuckerberg has come under scrutiny, the more TikTok has shown up in his speeches, interviews and op-eds. You would have to ask him if this is pure coincidence.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, Hawley proved skeptical of that claim, calling on TikTok to “now appear under oath to tell the truth about their company.”

Still, the lawmaker told reporters after the hearing that he’s not inclined to give Facebook and other tech heavyweights a pass in the face of Chinese competitors.

“Thankfully, they’re not the Communist Chinese government, but I don’t know that they’re exactly good actors, either,” Hawley said of U.S. tech platforms.

Mishandling sensitive user data

TikTok’s Washington woes are not limited to Capitol Hill. The Trump administration is reported to be probing potential national security risks stemming from ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of the app Musical.ly, a deal that helped create TikTok in its current form and precipitated its surge of popularity in the U.S.

It’s part of broader criticism of Chinese technology behemoths that has festered in Washington for years and is now exploding amid Trump’s trade war with Beijing. Citing national security concerns, the Trump administration has slapped Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei with trade sanctions.

The anxiety around TikTok centers in part on fears that the data it collects on its U.S. user base could make its way to the Chinese government. “When aggregated, the data could be useful in improving Chinese machine learning tools to help China better understand, predict and manipulate the behavior of Americans,” said Jim Baker, a former FBI general counsel who is now director of national security and cybersecurity at the R Street Institute.

Facebook and other tech giants havefaced criticism for obscuring their own uses of consumer data and failing to handle it securely. The leak of Facebook data to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica before the 2016 election yielded a record $5 billion Federal Trade Commission fine and helped inspire national calls for data privacy legislation.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley may now find itself positioned as the transparent alternative to China.

“Instead of importing the values of censorship and control to the U.S., we should be exporting our values of openness and transparency to them,” Kara Frederick, a fellow at the Center for New American Security who previously worked at Facebook, said at the hearing.

TikTok says it stores data from its American users only in the U.S. and Singapore and doesn’t even have data centers in China. But that doesn’t satisfy critics like Hawley, who maintain it would be a trivial matter for Beijing to demand the company hand over data anyway.

All the same, questions about TikTok’s data privacy practices are a reminder that China does not adhere to existing global privacy standards and that its own data governance rules are “very much a work in progress,” said Paul Triolo, who heads the geo-technology practice at political consulting firm Eurasia Group.

“If China remains outside of these regimes, Chinese firms, not just ByteDance/TikTok, but bigger players like Alibaba, will indeed be used increasingly as foils around D.C. debates on data privacy,” Triolo said.

Upending big tech’s market dominance

When Facebook was called to testify in July before a House antitrust subcommittee on the state of internet competition, then-public policy director Matt Perault identified TikTok among the rivals nipping at its heels. The fast-growing social network is already proving to be a primary exhibit as Facebook makes a case for why it doesn’t have a monopoly on social media.

“It plays on their side politically because it does show, again, competition is real,” said Atkinson at ITIF. “It can happen very quickly and it can certainly be Chinese competition, which we’re going to have to grapple with.”

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg made similar points in media interviews earlier this year, arguing that dismantling Facebook, as some Democrats want to do, could leave a vacuum for Chinese counterparts to enter. Already, Chinese firms like Alibaba, JD.com, Tencent and Baidu rank among the world’s largest internet companies.

Since then, federal and state antitrust enforcers have nevertheless launched investigations into both Facebook and Google.

“On the one hand, I think it’s absolutely a legitimate concern that if you don’t have U.S. companies playing a big role, if you were to break them up, et cetera, you could have voids which could well be filled by Chinese companies, which could create serious problems,” said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google, Facebook and Amazon.

“Having said that, it shouldn’t be a basis to excuse legitimate inquiry and scrutiny of companies,” he added.

Silicon Valley’s own China ambitions

The debate around TikTok may also renew gripes about American internet firms largely being excluded from the lucrative Chinese market, even as Chinese rivals gain a foothold in the United States.American firms have been eager to expand into China but have stayed out — or been kept out — due to censorship concerns and other barriers to entry.

“This is a very salient issue and will become even more so as other Chinese social media and e-commerce platforms expand outside of China, even as …. most regulators assume the Chinese government will have some access to data collected by Chinese companies,” Triolo said.

Heritage Foundation tech policy lead Klon Kitchen noted at Tuesday’s hearing that under a Chinese law that takes effect in the new year, foreign firms doing business in the country will also have to comply with government data demands.

Google already sustained sharp criticism from lawmakers this year after reports surfaced that it had worked to build a censored search engine, dubbed Dragonfly, to comply with the Chinese government’s demands. Google’s vice president of public policy, Karan Bhatia, told a Senate Judiciary panel in July that project had been terminated.

The rise of TikTok and the reported national security investigation are bound to draw more attention to what it takes to do business as a tech company in China. And on that front, Silicon Valley may struggle to use the upstart social media firm as a scapegoat.

“The TikTok investigation will undoubtedly spark new debate about how and whether Google could reenter the China market,” Triolo said.

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

#Foreign #Politics #scapegoat #Washington

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manwithasociologyblog · 6 years

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Lesson 15, Task 2: What has influenced me?

Culture is the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviours, and material objects that are passed on to future generations of society; while material culture, specifically consists of items within a culture that you can taste, touch, and feel. In a generation infused by mass and social media and at the height of globalization, it’s not hard to understand why a person would be influenced by cultures from around the world. Especially, in the form of material culture as it seems to be the most accessible and appealing to our sensory overstimulated society. It is well known that through processes like socialization our own personal cultures shape and influence us as people. But how often do we consider the impact other cultures around us have, particularly in a country like Canada that defines itself as a cultural mosaic and which in 1988 passed the Canadian Multicultural Act; the first national multiculturalism law in the world? I will be discussing just that in this essay and looking at how cultural aspects such as entertainment, fashion, food, architecture, and leisure activities outside of my own culture influence me.

Entertainment

Whether it's by watching Senegalese movies, listening to Balkan music, playing Japanese video games, gazing at Incan sculptures, or reading Soviet novels and multicultural Sufi poetry; entertainment makes a large part of the “foreign” cultures I consume thanks to the extent of mass and social media. Given my own diverse ethnic and cultural background, I have always been interested in different cultures. One of the most influential sources of my interest came in the form of Mexican and Hispanophone-South American telenovelas. Given that my parents come from Cuba and Brazil, respectfully, to someone looking from an outsider prospective it may be confusing how i.e. Mexican, Peruvian, or Argentinean cultures are that different from mine. However, Latin America is neither a cultural nor a racial monolith, and despite countries like Cuba and Mexico speaking the same language on a national level, they are as different from each other as Canada and Jamaica. Although, both Mexico and Cuba were colonized by the same European colonizers, the Spaniards; their colonial and post-colonial histories evolved uniquely (Collier, Simon, Thomas Skidmore, Harold Blakemore, 1992, pg. 25). Watching Mexican telenovelas as a child introduced me to these differences, especially on a racial and cultural level. In Cuba the majority of the population descends from Europe, Africa, and to a lesser extend China; thus most Cubans are either white, black, black-white biracials (most often multigenerational), or Asian (McAuslan, 2010, pg. 523). Cuba and Mexico, as the rest of the Americas were first both inhabited by Native Americans before the Spaniards came. However, in Cuba diseases and slavery of the Indigenous population almost entirely wiped them out in the first couple decades of the Spaniards arrival (McAuslan, 2010, pg. 408). Mexico on the other hand had one of the largest Native American populations in the entire Americas, and to this day they and their descendants still make a large part of Mexico’s demographics (Clarke, 2018, pg. 22-24). Cuba and Mexico both share a unique history in that the Spaniards, as the French and Portuguese, were more open to mixing with the non-white populations in their colonies, and both countries have large mixed-race populations. Nevertheless, unlike in Mexico where the mixture was largely between Europeans and Native Americans, in Cuba it was largely between Europeans and Africans who were brought to the island as slaves (Clarke, 2018, 22-24; see also Collier et al., 1992; McAuslan, 2010, pg. 408). Also, because of racist policies that encouraged post-colonial Spanish and other European immigrants to the country, Cuba’s white population was much larger than that of Mexico, where the white population is largely concentrated in the upper-class (McAuslan, 2010, pg. 409-413). Cuba, however, gone through a communist revolution largely over-threw and exiled the upper- and middle-class white population, and so growing up in the country I was used to being around poor white, black, Asian, and mixed people. This was unlike what I saw in Mexican telenovelas, whereas the main cast was largely white, often portraying the upper-class, many of the minor characters and extras would be people of visible Native ancestry (Moreno, 2017, March 13). At first it influenced my curiosity, as I was used to seeing white people speaking Spanish, but I was not used to seeing people with such prominent Indigenous American features speaking the language. However, later on I continued to see a trend: the maids, butlers, and poorest characters in these telenovelas would often be the ones who looked to be entirely Native in ancestry. Watching Venezuelan telenovelas I started to see this pattern too, however unlike Mexico, with black characters playing the poorest and least significant roles, and once again white people and predominately white mixed-race people playing the leads and recurring characters, typically those in the middle and upper class. Contemplating on this led me to have a deeper interest in both sociology and history. It had a massive impact on me, because I began to see the patterns in my own culture’s media. This is especially true in Brazilian tv which follows a similar pattern, and where white Brazilians make up the majority of the cast and most important characters, while black Brazilians play less significant and often negatively stereotyped roles. It pushed me to learn about the colonial history of Latin America and how the Spaniards, Portuguese, and French all created caste systems which placed European/white descendants at the top of the pyramid, mixed people in the middle, and Black & Indigenous people at the bottom. (Collier et al., 1992, pg. 22). It taught me that in much of Latin America, things had changed very little since the colonial era and that socio-economic status was heavily influenced by race (Collier et al., 1992, pg. 23-26). This is the antithesis of what many Latin American countries claim, describing their nations as multiracial and multicultural paradises, absent of the racism found in the United States (Collier et al., 1992, pg. 34). Although these polarizations were always present in Brazilian and even Cuban television shows, the larger amount of white and black people in Cuba and Brazil overall interacting positively daily, and the slightly large presence of non-white people in the media of both of these countries, had always given me the impression that what I was taught about racial harmony was true. It was not until seeing these striking racial/social contrasts in Mexican telenovelas that I began to look into the problems of my own culture and beginning my journey into sociology.

Caption: Typical cast in Telenovelas from different Latin American countries. Most actors, especially main actors are white of European descent. Light-skinned mixed descendants are the second most prominent in certain countries, in some others even they are few. People of predominate African and Indigenous ancestry are usually secondary characters or extras, often playing negative or non-essential roles.

Caption: People of predominate African and Indigenous ancestry typically play maids, criminals, slaves, “non-acculturated” Indian roles (to stress that they’re “unlike us”), and other stereotypical roles. Or the role of the supporting friend to the white character. Black females whenever playing an important role, especially in Brazilian soap operas, are often portrayed as being “saved” from their condition once they find their white prince-charming, a narrative that has its origins in colonial literature.

Sometimes even stories focusing on slavery or colonization have non-Indigenous/Black actors playing them.

Caption: The first telenovela “White Slave” was about trans-atlantic slavery in Colombia, but the whole show was focused on a rich white girl who was sold into slavery and raised by formerly enslaved Africans who escaped to Maroon settlements. The rest of the examples are of white or light skinned-mixed-race people playing black and Indigenous characters.

Fashion

It’s not a surprise that Canada is cold, especially in the winter time, and because of this Canadians are well prepared for such a climate. The piece of fashion that I have incorporated into my own fashion while living in Canada is that of the toque (Cornell, 2012, Sept. 10). The toque is a national symbol of Canada and most Canadians wear them throughout winter. It is believed that the fashion of wearing a toque in this country started with the Bois-Doi-Couers, fur-trappers, often of Metis descent, who made up the first generation of contact between European and Indigenous people (Wikipedia contributors, 2018, June 6). This is why I think it is a quintessential item in helping me adapt both to the climate and the culture/history of this nation. The toque has had a great impact in my life by keeping me warm from the harshness of Canadian winter.

Caption: A Catalan French man wears a type of Phrygian styled hate popular in Southern France and Spain, the influence for the Canadian toque.

Food

Food? What can I tell you about my love for food and the various cuisines of the world. The GTA is one of the most multicultural regions of the world and it has one of the most diverse selections of "ethnic" restaurants, spanning from Uyghur all the way to Chifa (Chinese-Peruvian) dining establishments. Wherever I go, I can't stop myself from being influenced by ingredients and dishes from around the world, for example using loads of Angolan piri piri hot sauce in most of my meals. Toronto like my mother's native Sao Paulo share two of the largest Italian diasporas in the world, and because of this I have greatly been influenced by pasta (Veccia, 1984, pg. 4-12). Due to Italian immigration, pasta has become a staple of the cuisine of Sao Paulo, and it has impacted me greatly because it's been one of the main sources of carbohydrates in my daily life (Coughlin, 2013, Sept. 13). Interestingly enough, there are many legends and theories as to how pasta got to Italy, ranging from Marco Polo introducing it in the Middle Ages, towards the more accepted belief of early Nomadic Arabs spreading it into Europe (Avery, 2012, July 26). Which shows how vastly different cultures have been interacting with each other for hundreds to thousands of years via things like trade routes.

Caption: Brazilians of Italian descent during a folk festival. WIth them are popular dishes brought to Brazil by immigrants from Italy such as pastas, polenta, and cured meats.

Architecture

Studies show that architecture can have both an emotional and psychological impact on us, and I have personally known this to be true (Weller, 2016, Sept. 15). Growing up in Cuba I live on a block where houses were all attached to each other and the road was narrow. Whenever you would walk out of your house the whole street was socializing with each other; people played dominoes, had street parties, and regularly sat around socializing outside as fellow neighbours. This scenario gave me a sense of community, belonging, and a frequent dose of socialization as a child. Then, for some time, I moved to Miami in the United States to live with cousins. They lived in suburbs with wide streets, long back-yards, and houses that were quite a spatial distance from each other. These suburban designs made me feel very isolated and distanced from everyone living around me outside of my family. There wasn't the same feeling of community I felt in the densely populated neighbourhoods in Cuba, where although it could sometimes feel crowded when all the neighbours were out, it always gave me a sense of social belonging and a sense of knowing my neighbour on an intimate level. Later on, living in Canada and working in the construction industry, had once again given me a chance to encounter something that I saw as North American, due to the reason that such suburbs do not exist in my own country. However, this time around it was not the suburbs themselves, but the exurbs; which as we have learned in this unit are the result of greater urban sprawl, and a headache on our environment according to some environmentalists such as David Suzuki. In the exurbs, such as Milton, I discovered something else that had a negative psychological impact on me; tract housing. Although in Canada they're not as bad as some parts of the U.S. or places like China and the UK, they have left a horrid impression on me, due to the fact that most of them look the same and are designed in the same way. It gives a type of robotic, cold, homogenous, collective feel to them. Paradoxal, considering the very non-collective makeup of society in these types of environments (despite how they're portrayed in the media) (Preswitch, 2017, March 16).

Caption: Tract housing. This is depressing.

Caption: Markham, Ontario.

Caption: Most streets both in urban and rural Cuba are close together.

Caption: There are some rural areas with very isolated types of houses, called Bohios, with large plantations or fields for farming. These are usually occupied by descendants of Spaniard/other European peasants who were encouraged to settle in Cuba in rural areas in the 19th century, in order to inhabit areas that were very isolated and were often perfect environments for “Maroon/Palenque” runaway slave) settlements. Most of these farmers and their families have settled in less isolated rural areas where housing is similar to the urban areas or in proper urban areas.

Caption: Most Cubans socialize daily on their neighbourhood street or block. Since until very recently the state owned all property, many people began making businesses from their homes. So often a local business is run on the street or inside the house of a neighbour, thus the person running the business will mostly have clients who are neighbours.

Caption: Cubans hang on their street daily. Often playing card games and dominoes in front of their houses, on the street.

Caption: Community parties and Lukumi (Afro-Cuban deity) and Catholic saint processions occur frequently among neighbours/people on the same block.

Leisure

Leisure activities with origins from around the world are another way you can experience the GTA and Canada as a whole. It's difficult to not to know an urban-dweller that hasn't partook in Japanese Karate, Afro-Brazilian Capoeira, or Hindu Yoga, and I have partaken in various forms of all three activities myself. However, the most influential forms of past-time, would have to be two from my own childhood, both activities have origins in China but have had different impacts on me growing up. Cuba has a large Chinese descended population originating from indentured labourers that were brought to the island at the end of the slave trade (Lopez, 2013, June 10, pg. 50-52). Most Cubans of Chinese ancestry have assimilated into the general population, but many of their cultural traits were infused into the general culture of the nation. Growing up in Cuba, one my best-friends was a Cuban of Chinese ancestry and he and I would often play Mahjong, which is a tile-based game that was developed in China during the Qing dynasty (Lam, 2017, July 28, pg. 11). I've mentioned before Cubans love playing dominoes, and mahjong has many similarities to dominoes. This impacted me because it created a lot of fond memories, and the nostalgia of them hit me every time I play the game in the present. Another example of a Chinese leisure activity that has a lot of popularity in Cuba is that of Tai Chi, which has origins in Taoist philosophy (Wong, 1996, pg. 3). Tai Chi is an activity my grandmother often partakes in, it brings her a lot of joy and opportunity to stay healthy in her elderly age, while being able to socialize with friends and neighbours. It has impacted me because it not only has brough such joy to my grandmother's life, but also helped me bond with her while partaking in it alongside her. In my opinion, it's a great way to get the aging baby-booming population to gather together, work on their bodies, and receive pleasure and the positive psychological benefits which are said to come from partaking in the activity.

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Caption: News segment about Little China in Havana, Cuba.

Caption: Cubans of Chinese descent play mahjong

Caption: Elderly Cubans partaking in Tai Chi

Final Thoughts

In a globalized world and a multicultural region of earth that the Americas are, it's close to impossible not to partake or enjoy of a culture that is different from your own. Often, we don't realize how the socialization process might impact us. How the people and cultures we’re around could shape the way we think and behave, even if its contradictory to our own personal culture. As I have presented above, anyone living in the Americas from Canada, to Cuba, and Brazil could be influenced and impacted by the entertainment, culture, fashion, foods, architecture, and leisure activities of cultures other than their own, in the way I have been. These cultural influences on my life have made me the person that I am today, and have made me appreciate being the global citizen of the world that I am. As the world is changing and people around it open themselves up more to humanity; I hope that people are able to share their cultures more prominently. My only wish is that we go by it in another way. Because like many critics we have read about in this unit, I do unfortunately believe that when culture is globalized it can easily be warped into some type of manufactured, whitewashed, Americanized version of what it originally was. It would be unfortunate if this pattern continued. What is the solution to keep that from happening? I don't think we really have one yet..

References

Avey, Tori. (2012, July 26). Uncover The History of Pasta. Retrieved 7:26 pm., August 28, 2018. From: www.pbs.org/food/

Clarke, Colin. (2018). Mexico and the Caribbean Under Castro's Eyes: A Journal of Decolonization, State Formation and Democratization (22-24). New York City: Springer International Publishing.

Collier, Simon, Thomas Skidmore, Harold Blakemore, eds. (1992). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed (pg. 22-34). New York: Cambridge Univ Press.

Cornell, Kari. (2012, September 10). Knitting Hats & Mittens from Around the World: 34 Heirloom Patterns in a Variety of Styles and Techniques (pg. 5). Minneapolis, USA: Voyageur Press.

Coughlin, Jovina. (2013, September 13). South America’s Little Italies. Retrieved 7:19 pm., August 28, 2018. From: https://jovinacooksitalian.com

Lam, Desmond. (2014). Chopsticks and Gambling (pg. 11). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Lopez, Kathleen M. (2013, June 10). Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Envisioning Cuba) (pg. 50-52). The University of North Carolina Press.

McAuslan, Fiona. (2010). The Rough Guide to Cuba (pg. pg. 409-413 and 523). London, England: Rough Guides.

Moreno, Carolina. (2017, March 13). This Latina Is Calling Out Telenovelas For Being 'Overtly White'. Retrieved 05:19 pm., August 28, 2018. From: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/this-latina-is-calling-out-telenovelas

Preswitch, Emma. (2017, March 16). Canada's Seniors Live in Suburbs, And That's A Problem, Says New Report. Retrieved 8:01 pm., August 28, 2018. From: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/03/16/seniors-canada

Veccia, Theresa R. (1984). Families on the Move: Italian Emigration to Saõ Paulo, 1880-1914 (pg. 4-12). University of Wisconsin--Madison.

Weller, Chris. (2016, Sept. 15). There may be an evolutionary reason suburbia feels so miserable. Retrieved 7:48 pm., August 28, 2018. From: www.businessinsider.com/why-suburbs-are-bad-2016-9

Wikipedia contributors. (2018, June 6). Toque. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:19, August 29, 2018. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toque&oldid=844733269

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helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog · 6 years

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Emmys 2018: Walton Goggins, Hollywood’s Ultimate Journeyman, Is Finally a Breakout Star (Exclusive)

Walton Goggins delivered one of ET's Standout Performances of the 2017-18 season.

Walton Goggins is, perhaps, Hollywood’s ultimate journeyman.

The actor, who has bounced between film and TV for the past 29 years after first appearing in a 1989 episode of The Heat of the Night, has been this way “since I was a young man,” he tells ET by phone, acknowledging, in some way, that he’s been “that guy from that show” for most of his career. In fact, to many, he has become known for supporting roles on The Shield, Justified and Sons of Anarchy -- three shows that have earned Goggins critical praise and steady work if not “it” status or covers of magazines.

Then, in 2015, all of that changed thanks to, yes, another supporting role, but this time as Sheriff Chris Mannix in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. It was his second time working with Tarantino, after an even smaller role in Django Unchained. But this time he ran away with the entire film, stealing scenes from Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell.

While on set of The Hateful Eight, outside of Telluride, Colorado, Goggins was offered the opportunity to star opposite Danny McBride in Vice Principals, a new comedy marking the return of McBride, Jody Hill and David Gordon Green to HBO after four seasons of Eastbound and Down. “I read the first three scripts and I was just blown away by it,” Goggins says. “I was just grateful for the invitation to come play with them.”

Soon, he was playing Chris Mannix for Tarantino during the day and at night getting into the character of Lee Russell, a conniving and sociopathic vice principal vying for the top job at a South Carolina high school. “You know, you're tired when you fall asleep but it's a high-class problem, isn't it?” Goggins says of the experience.

The show, which ran for two seasons, premiered in July 2016 to rave reviews and has since earned Goggins photo spreads in high-profile magazines as well as also roles in History Channel’s Six, this year’s big-budget films Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Tomb Raiderand Ant-Man and the Wasp, and the lead in the CBS pilot for a new TV adaptation of L.A. Confidential.

In a conversation with ET, Goggins reflects on playing Lee Russell, the most diabolical character of his career, and how much of his career is instinct versus luck.

Walton Goggins and Danny McBride in a scene from 'Vice Principals.'

HBO

ET: You auditioned for Eastbound and Down and didn’t get the role. But then the opportunity to audition for Vice Principals came back around and you got that. What was it about Eastbound that wasn't a right fit, but Vice Principals worked out?

Walton Goggins: Well, that's really interesting. I think they were looking for something different for Eastbound and Down, and when I walked in, I knew that. At least, I felt in my heart that if I got into a room with Danny, there would be chemistry. Real chemistry. That's what you hope with people that you look up to and it was, there was a lot of chemistry in this reading. I think by my very nature, my take on things is pretty dark. I'm not a comedian by trade. I'm just a storyteller, and most of the actors in the room when I showed up were all people from SNL and comedians. So I didn't think I had a shot in hell of ever getting that whatsoever. It's not really ever about that for me, it's just about the opportunity to come play with someone you respect and admire. I think because of that reading, they were kind of going back and forth on whether or not they wanted to go darker with this particular role on Eastbound and Down. Then they made the right decision and they went with Jason Sudeikis. But in their mind, when it came to Lee Russell and when it came to Vice Principals,they wanted to go a different direction. They wanted to mine these characters for who they are, their tragedies as well as their comedic experiences.

You have had such a great track record with The Shield, Justified, Sons of Anarchy and now Vice Principals. When it comes to being involved in these projects and knowing they’re going to be so great, how much of it is instinct and how much of it is luck?

Oh, God, The Shield was luck. For sure. [Creator] Shawn Ryan had been around a little bit, but it was really his first time manning the wheel, so no one knew. But it was on the page. The same with Justified. It's Elmore Leonard [who authored the short story on which the series is based], so we had that going with us, and the great Tim Olyphant. With all of these things, it is luck. I suppose the instinct or the gut feeling is the other part of that. I read Boyd Crowder and I just saw him immediately. I saw Shane McDonnell instantly. I saw Venus Van Dam immediately and I saw Lee Russell immediately. So I think it's a combination of luck and just knowing when I can really add something to this or that I can help this storyteller share their story.

So in most cases, if you can see the character then you know you're for it, versus walking away when you don’t?

Yeah, at this point in my career. If you’d asked me that 10 or 12 years ago, it would have been a different answer: “Well, I don't see it but I'm gonna try and figure it out.” And that's a struggle. It isn't the lack of trying. That's not it at all. I try to challenge myself anyway. But when it comes to choosing something I think is for me, I know pretty quickly, even if it's something that scares the shit out of me. I feel like I understand I have something to offer my director or my writer -- something worthy of their time. That is a big consideration for me at this point in my career.

Lee Russell is such a specific and unique character. Obviously you must have seen yourself in him and known this was something you could play. What went into creating him?

You know, I have to go back to a part of your statement. I felt like I could play him, but I didn't really know what that was going to be. I just knew it would be there if you put in the work, and I was so unbelievably intimidated by the prospect of playing with Danny in that kind of way because he's so good at improvising and he's so good at his own material. I desperately didn't want to let him down; when you're playing with a giant in that way, you want to put the ball back over the net consistently. So for me, it really kind of goes into reading the script. I read them over and over an over and over and over again -- all of which is like 200, 250 times and, you know, around the sixtieth time you're not really kind of reading it for the words anymore. It's just an opportunity to access your imagination. That coupled with the great work done by our wardrobe designer Sarah Trost on Vice Principals, who just help me find the look. Immediately, as soon as we put on the bow, it all made sense. What I didn't know was how emotionally difficult Lee Russell was going to be in this comedy, and I think Danny will say the same thing about Neal Gamby. These are bucking broncos, man. They are heightened but grounded; they're both deeply flawed human beings.

Lee is pretty dark and twisted in some ways. Do you ever get lost in the psyche of a character like this? Do you go down that road, or are you able to kind of remove yourself from that?

I do. I go down that road as long as I come back out for my 7-year-old, who’ll say, “Dad, you're talking to yourself. Stop talking to yourself right now and get over here and play Magna-Tiles with me.” But I enjoy that process. I enjoy going down those holes, and that's hopefully why people do this for a living. It's not for a free T-shirt or dinner reservations at a particular restaurant. I've never really had those things anyway. For me, it’s really just that I enjoy the process of discovering who these guys are and kind of living in their heads. I don't take it home the way that I used to because I just don't have the time. But I do quite enjoy occupying their headspace when I'm at work.

When you signed on to Vice Principals, was there anything you wanted to achieve career-wise?

I don't look at things in a Machiavellian way, even as benign as what you're suggesting. I don't look at things as a stepping stone to something else or how this may open up an opportunity for me. I've always been happy with the opportunities that I've been given, and I've tried to make the most of them. This wasn't a gateway to do romantic comedies for me. It was an opportunity to work with people I deeply respect and admire. On the other side of this great journey, I'm really proud to say that Danny McBride is not only my friend, he's a very good friend, and so is David and so is Jody. We're like family. It's really the most rewarding thing to come out of this entire experience.

What about in terms of acting itself? Was there anything you got to do while playing Lee that you hadn't been able to do before?

I mean, I've done some pretty terrible things in my career, you know, the nefarious people that I've been given the opportunity to play. But I've never played someone that was so physically powerless and yet intellectually powerful. What I mean is his conniving nature versus his brute strength. His insecurities were so deep. They were so unbelievably ingrained into him. I think Danny is so good at playing that -- he has developed this genre of very deeply insecure men. I've never been given an opportunity to play that on that level, and it was really interesting to walk around with that, because when this show turns in an episode -- at the beginning of the season, the middle of the season or at the end of the season or the end of the entire experience -- he falls hard. When Lee Russell’s wife leaves him, he's looking to God for answers and incapable of seeing the reason as to why he arrived at this place that he's in -- that's fucking difficult. But it's so rewarding simultaneously.

When Vice Principals first premiered, it followed shortly after The Hateful Eight and it kind of felt like suddenly you were part of the zeitgeist in a way that you hadn’t been before. How does it feel at this point in the career to have people in the industry or fans to know you as Walton instead of “that guy from that show”?

I suppose it means a lot of different things, doesn't it? I suppose, for survival, for being a parent who needs to take care of his child, it means I'll get another job. But I suppose, moreover, I'm a journeyman. It's not just action or storytelling or making movies that I'm curious about. I've been a journeyman since I was a young man, and to arrive at a place I never anticipated and experience the kind of gratitude that I have for these opportunities, it feels really good, man.

This year alone, you're in several major blockbusters, from Tomb Raider to Ant-Man. Is that a result of that zeitgeist moment and the attention surrounding Hateful Eight and Vice Principals?

I think so. I think that it was a combination of Justified, Sons of Anarchy, The Hateful Eight and Vice Principals. I've been given opportunities in a number of different arenas, you know, including the one that we just grabbed, L.A. Confidential. I am grateful for all of them. I'm just trying to keep myself on my toes and flow seamlessly between doing these two mediums. After doing these big-budget movies this year, I desperately wanted to do a low-budget independent movie and just to get back to that. So I did in this move, Them That Follow, that will hopefully come out this year about a snake-handling community in southern Appalachia, and that was extraordinary. There's no great plan that I have except what is unfolding right in front of me. You get great joy out of it if you approach it that way.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

MORE STANDOUT PERFORMANCES OF THE SEASON:

Emmys 2018: How ‘GLOW’ Became a Life-Changing Experience for Alison Brie (Exclusive)

Emmys 2018: ‘Schitt’s Creek’ Star Dan Levy on Creating TV’s Best Kept Secret (Exclusive)

Emmys 2018: For Justin Hartley, Patience Is Paying Off on ‘This Is Us’ (Exclusive)

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dorkaholics · 6 years

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Synopsis:

“The Only Light In the Darkness” – With their world turned upside down, Coulson races to save the life of his one true love as the mystery of “The Cellist,” which began in Marvel’s The Avengers, is finally reveals on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,TUESDAY, April 22 (8:00-9:01 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.

It’s been a long time in the making but we finally get to see the type of woman that catches Coulson’s eyes–Audrey Nathan aka The Cellist. Marvel’s serious about the little things, hence the show’s recent attempts to push the hashtag “#ItsAllConnected.”

Right from the get go the audience is introduced to Blackout, a villain that seems to have the power to suck energy away from technology and people. Right away, we know he’s creepy, mysterious and most importantly, has POWERS. Finally! It only took them about 19 episodes to show a character with superpowers (minus the time Lorelei and Lady Sif showed up).

Ward lies to the entire team while he’s being stitched up by Simmons. He tells them that HYDRA overran the Fridge while he was there, stole everything and freed the prisoners. He then tells them that before he escaped he killed Garrett.

“Yeah, we’re safe here but what about everyone else? People that don’t happen to have access to a top secret underground shelter. What about them? I don’t know if it’s wise, but it’s right.” – Agent Phil Coulson

Coulson gets worried as soon as Ward tells them about the free inmates. He immediately gets Skye to do a threat assessment of the situation. But has her specifically check for a man named Marcus Daniels. Coulson discovers that Daniels is free and immediately decides he’s going after them.

Koenig, on the other hand, isn’t so keen on the agents leaving his secret base until they all go through “orientation,” the ultimate lie detector. Koenig explains that “Nick Fury designed the machine himself because he wanted a lie detector that even Romanov couldn’t beat.” Welp, there goes your cover Ward. I’m honestly expecting him to just jump out of the chair screaming “HAIL HYDRA.” The team undergoes a series of questions to which we find out the following about the agents:

Agent Triplett is a legacy. His grandfather was a Howling Commando, one of the men that fought alongside Captain America in the war.

Skye’s real name is Mary Sue Poots. (I can see why she decided to rename herself Skye”

May was once MARRIED. To who? Who would be good enough for this hard boiled woman? My guess would have to be he was once a SHIELD agent that died in the line of duty.

Koenig asks each of the agents if they knew Alexander Piece and about Project Insight (references to Captain America: The Winter Soldier). But most interesting of all, Koenig asks them all about what they’re doing here now that the agency is gone.

Everyone passes and gets their lanyard but it’s finally Ward’s turn. Ward has some shaky answers to which Koening almost catches him but ultimately fails. Ward has some of the most cheesiest answers I’ve ever heard. This scene was easily one of the most cringe worthy scenes of the entire season. Did the writers just establish that Ward is on the same level as Natasha Romanov in terms of espionage/secrecy? Seems like Fury didn’t account for his machine to fail due to human error because Koenig has to be the worse interrogator I’ve ever seen. After receiving his lanyard, Ward walks out of the interrogation room and immediately takes out a nail? needle? out of his thumb–a technique he used to somewhat control his heart beat.

Leaving Ward behind, the team immediately heads out to find Ms. Audrey Nathan, who Coulson explains is the key to finding Marcus Daniels. The agents find Nathan and stops Daniels through the use of Fitz’s robots that shines immense beams of light, but Daniels escapes into the darkness after blowing them away.

Back in the underground base, Skye figures out that Koening is using the lanyards as a way to track Coulson’s team. After calling him out on it, she gets the idea to obtain footage of the HYDRA raid on the Fridge. She convinces Koenig to allow her to hack into the NSA in order to get the footage from the Fridge breakout. Ward takes her side and makes an attempt to get her to access the hard drive. Unfortunately for Ward, Skye informs him that the encryption is location based. They’ll have to take a field trip just to unlock the drive.

Simmons and Triplett are tasked with protecting Nathan while Fitz and Coulson watch from another undisclosed location. Nathan reveals that in the past, Daniels stalked her, calling her his “light.” She goes on to recall the agent of SHIELD that protected her before–Agent Phil Coulson. The two of them were intimately close and were in the middle of planning a trip together when Nathan received the call about Coulson’s death. Acker’s an amazing actor and delivers the exposition between her character and Coulson’s past with the highest believability and emotion.

Back in Providence, May decides to leave on her own. She figures she has no reason to stay anymore since Coulson no longer trusts her. As she looks back towards the base before ultimately leaving, the audience is immediately hit with a sense of ominousity and danger. Ward’s free to roam with no one able to match him. Ward goes to Koenig and slowly closes the door to Koenig’s office. RIP Agent Koenig. You were an interesting addition while you lasted.

Skye goes to Koenig’s office after she finishes hacking into the NSA but she finds it empty. Ward shows up in the most murder-villainous way behind her, but keeps his cover. He tells her that Koenig went to send the video she recovered over to a couple of other government branches, an obvious lie! WHAT DID YOU DO WITH PATTON OSWALT?!

Ward and Skye take a moment to chat and have a drink–that must be nice. He opens up to Skye about his feelings for her and tip toes around his secret. The two end up making out but stop when Skye finds blood on Ward’s body. Again, I say RIP Agent Koenig. Ward excuses himself, claiming the blood must’ve come from one of his open wounds. Now alone, Skye finds Agent Koenig’s tablet which just so happens to show Koenig’s location due to his lanyard. She goes off to look for him.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team use Nathan as bait to draw out Blackout. They set up a trap for him while Nathan sits on stage in a theatre playing her cello. The team shoot immense beams of light, courtesy of Banner tech, at Blackout before he can reach Nathan, but are blown away by Blackout’s powers. Coulson grabs one of the weapons and shoots Blackout before he can reach Nathan. How convenient that this weapon is a beam of light because this stops Nathan from discovering that Coulson is alive. In the end, Coulson preserves his secret but not before establishing himself as the humble hero we all know and love about him.

“He’s HYDRA!” – Skye

Back in Providence (so much for that name), things aren’t so lucky for Skye. She follows the tracker to find Koenig only to discover that he’s been killed. She immediately comes to the conclusion that the culprit must be Ward. The show instantly turns into a horror film as Skye locks herself in the bathroom and hides. She laments and realizes that Ward has been HYDRA all along. On the brink of breaking down, Skye pulls herself together and knows her only way to survive is to play along with his charade. Her plan backfires when, while still keeping up the charade, Ward insists that she get on the Bus with him and leave. She tries to make up excuses in order to get away from Ward but is ultimately SCREWED. Ward grabs her by the arm which pretty much tells her that she doesn’t really have a choice.

Hopefully in the time it took Ward to find her, Skye left some kind of message for the team, maybe a message in lipstick on the bathroom wall perhaps? On the other hand, Ward is becoming more and more my favorite villain. He’s the bad guy that everyone wants to love AND hate! I mean he’s no Loki but still. He has a menacing look about him and is seriously giving me the chills. It’s especially creepy when he reaches in to hold Skye’s hands as they walk towards the Bus.

“You’re not going to take her out are you?…Good. I’ve always liked Maria.” – May’s Mother

The rest of the team return to find Providence empty, the Bus gone and Koenig missing. The episode then ends with May as she walks alongside the road and is picked up by an older, Asian woman (Tsai Chin!) This must mean she’s May’s mother right? (sarcasm, but probably true). Fun fact: Ming-Na Wen (Melinda May) and Tsai Chin (May’s Supposed Mother) were in The Joy Luck Club together! A film and book that I happen to hold dear! The woman hands May a file and reveals that the information is on a person named Maria–Maria Hill.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will return on April 29 with the episode “Nothing Personal.”

RECAP: MARVEL’S ‘AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.’ S1E19 “The Only Light in the Darkness” Synopsis: “The Only Light In the Darkness” – With their world turned upside down, Coulson races to save the life of his one true love as the mystery of “The Cellist,” which began in Marvel’s The Avengers, is finally reveals on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,TUESDAY, April 22 (8:00-9:01 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.

#Agent Koenig #Agent Maria Hill #Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.#Agents of Shield #Audrey Nathan #Coulson #Marvel&039;s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.#Marvel&039;s Agents of Shield #Phil Coulson

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