#listen this franchise consumed me for at least 5 years

[incomescrane]

extremely happy to have Professor part-time-archeologist-part-time-babysitter-full-time-puzzle-enthusiast Layton back.

#professor layton #hershel layton #profesor layton and the new world of steam #listen this franchise consumed me for at least 5 years #you have no idea #he lived bitch #crane does art

[rebeccalouisaferguson]

"I always just rode the waves,” Rebecca Ferguson says with a shrug. The comment hangs in the air, as if the Anglo-Swedish 37-year-old is only now processing that a combination of currents and tides has led her not just to an acting career but to the brink of big-screen stardom.

“I’ve never been ambitious,” she says. “I’ve always thought that that was a bad thing.” She’s seen others in the industry consumed by constant striving and asked herself why she hasn’t hungered for fame since childhood, slept in cars outside castings, barged into directors’ offices or thrown herself in the path of a producer. “But should I not be burning for this? Out meeting people and networking for the next job?” says Ferguson, who has chosen the sort of quiet, private life outside the big city that so many actors claim to crave. “My life just took another turn. But I’ve always thought: Am I where I should be?”

At the moment, on this late July day, Ferguson is slumped in the backseat of a Mercedes-Benz sedan, crawling through rush-hour traffic on the M4 out of London. She is capping off a hectic week during a particularly busy period. Most immediately, she’s coming from a table read for Wool, the Apple TV+ adaptation of Hugh Howey’s bestselling postapocalyptic trilogy. Ferguson is both the star and, for the first time, an executive producer. “I’m sitting in all the different rooms, listening and learning like the students,” she says. She’s filming Mission: Impossible 7, her third tour of duty in the long-running series that first brought her widespread recognition. She’s also promoting the film Reminiscence, the sci-fi noir written and directed by Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy in which Ferguson stars opposite Hugh Jackman. And now she is starting a press push and festival prep for her role as Lady Jessica ahead of the much-delayed release of Dune (in theaters October 22), director Denis Villeneuve’s reimagining of Frank Herbert’s novel. “After this film, I think everyone will see what I see in her,” the filmmaker says. “She has a beautiful, regal, aristocratic presence, elegance. But that was not the main thing: The most important thing for me was that depth.”

After tracing a long, meandering path, Ferguson has landed in a rare and rarified position: ascendant in her late 30s (still an anomaly for women in the film industry) and sought after by some of the biggest names in the business. “When you meet Rebecca, you just see it. She’s very open, candid, collaborative, hardworking, funny—and not pretentious,” says Tom Cruise, who handpicked Ferguson to star opposite him in the Mission: Impossiblefilms, which are known for their demanding shoots. “She just rose to the occasion every single time.”

In February 2020, when the pandemic began, Ferguson left Venice, where she’d been shooting Mission: Impossible 7, and hunkered down with her husband, their 3-year-old daughter and Ferguson’s 14-year-old son from a previous relationship at their farm in Sweden. After four months, Ferguson returned to the M:I set and basically hasn’t stopped working since.

Dune has sat idle for far longer. By the time the movie premieres, more than two years will have passed since it wrapped. Ferguson recently asked to screen the film again: “I miss it,” she says. She ended up bringing along her Mission: Impossible co-star Simon Pegg. After the credits rolled, Pegg broke into a smile and wrapped her in a congratulatory bear hug. “That’s all I needed,” she says.

Despite being a sci-fi epic based on a novel from 1965, Dune feels “very timely,” Ferguson says, pointing to its handling of environmental issues, religious zealotry, colonialism and Indigenous rights. The plot of the film, which cost an estimated $165 million, centers on occupying powers battling for the right to exploit a people and their planet, named Arrakis, for melange (or spice)—the most valuable commodity in Herbert’s fictional universe, a substance that provides transcendental thought, extends life and enables instantaneous interstellar travel. “Spice,” Ferguson says, “is equally about the poppy and oil fields.”

Ferguson’s Lady Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a powerful secretive sisterhood with superhuman mental abilities. She defies her order by giving birth to a son, Paul (played by Timothée Chalamet), who may be a messianic figure. “She basically just f—s up the entire universe by having a son out of love,” says Ferguson. In her hands, Jessica is equal parts caring parent, protector and pedagogue. Among the skills she wields and teaches Paul is “the Voice”—a modulated tone that allows the speaker to control others.

The movie was shot in Norway, Hungary, Jordan and Abu Dhabi, whose desert landscape stood in for Arrakis. Filming there was particularly arduous, as temperatures exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit, limiting the shoot window to only an hour and a half each day at 5 a.m. and again at dusk. “We were running across the sand in our steel suits being chased by nonexistent but humongous worms,” Ferguson recalls, referring to the sand-beasts later rendered in CGI. “To be honest, it was one of the best moments ever. It was the most beautiful location I’ve ever seen.”

Back in London, Ferguson is approaching home. She leaves the following day for a small town on the coast of England, where she plans to spend her first vacation in two years and to do some surfing. “Let’s hope it’s good weather,” she says. “If not, I’ll surf in the rain.” Not that she’s the sort to paddle out into storm swells. “I think I’ve managed to stand on a board once in my entire life,” she says. “But it was quite a high. Complete surrender to the waves and total control all at once.”

Born Rebecca Louisa Ferguson Sundström to an English mother and Swedish father, Ferguson grew up bilingual in Stockholm. She immersed herself in dance from a young age, enjoying ballet, jazz, street funk and tango. Despite being shy and prone to blushing and breaking out when forced to speak publicly, Ferguson found she was at ease in front of the camera. She dabbled in modeling and then, at 15, attended a TV casting call at her mother’s urging. Ferguson ended up getting the lead role in Nya Tider (New Times), a soap opera that became wildly popular, splashing Ferguson’s face into Swedish homes five times a week.

When her role ended about two years later, Ferguson was adrift. She had no formal acting training to fall back on, no clear sense of how to steer a career and no major connections to the industry. She had a short run on another soap and appeared in a slasher flick and a couple of independent shorts, then…nothing. “I was famous in Sweden, but I didn’t really have an income anymore,” she says. “So I went and I worked in whatever job I could get.” That meant stints at a daycare center and as a nanny, in a jewelry shop and a shoe store, as well as teaching tango, cleaning hotel rooms and waitressing at a Korean restaurant. She eventually landed in a small coastal town named Simrishamn, where she lived with her then-partner and their toddler son, content to be a where-are-they-now celebrity.

When fame again came calling, Ferguson ran away. She was at the flea market when she recognized the acclaimed Swedish director Richard Hobert, and he saw her. As he shouted her name, Ferguson grabbed her son, who lost his shoes and sausage, and fled. “I panicked,” she says. “I don’t know why.” When Hobert eventually caught up to her, Ferguson tried to act nonchalant as he proceeded to tell her he’d admired her work and pitched her on the lead role in his next movie: “I’ve written this role, and I think I have written it for you. Do you want to read the script?”

Her work in Hobert’s A One-Way Trip to Antibes earned her a Rising Star nomination at the Stockholm International Film Festival. She quickly got an agent in Scandinavia, then one in Britain. On her first trip to take meetings in London, she read for the lead in The White Queen, the BBC adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s historical novels about the women behind the Wars of the Roses. Ferguson got the part, and her portrayal of Elizabeth Woodville, queen consort of England, earned her a Golden Globe nomination and the admiration of at least one Hollywood heavyweight.

Ferguson was in the Moroccan desert filming the Lifetime biblical miniseries The Red Tentwhen the assistant director whisked her off her camel. “We’re going to have to pause shooting,” he said as he asked her to dismount. “Tom Cruise wants to meet you for Mission: Impossible. We’re going to fly you off today.”

Cruise had seen Ferguson’s work in The White Queen and her audition tape and couldn’t believe she wasn’t already a major star. “What? Where has this woman been?” Cruise recalls exclaiming to his new Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie. “She’s incredibly skilled,” Cruise says, “very charismatic, very expressive. As you can tell, the camera loves her.” Ferguson landed a multi-picture deal to star opposite Cruise in the multibillion-dollar franchise. He and McQuarrie built out the role of Ilsa Faust for Ferguson, creating the anti-Bond girl, an equal to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. “We could just see the impact she could have,” he says. “She’s a dancer. She has great control of her body, of her movements. She has the same ability to move through emotions effortlessly.”

Ferguson threw herself into the films and quickly found a shorthand with the cast and crew. “There was a dynamic that worked very well with all of us,” she says. “One of the things I absolutely love is doing all the stunts.” That physicality has given her a reputation as an action-minded actor. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve done 20 other films where I don’t kick ass,” Ferguson says. “Mission comes with such an enormous following. That was what made my career.”

Ferguson’s M: I movies bracket a number of films in which she played opposite marquee names: Florence Foster Jenkins, with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant; The Girl on the Train, with Emily Blunt; The Greatest Showman, with Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams; Life, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds; Men in Black: International, with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson; The Snowman, with Michael Fassbender; Doctor Sleep, with Ewan McGregor. And now Dune, opposite Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem, Zendaya and Chalamet, whom she calls “one of the best actors, if not the best actor of his generation—of this time.” She was similarly impressed by Zendaya, who plays the native Fremen warrior Chani. “She’s quite raw and naughty and fun,” says Ferguson. “She has an enormous f— off attitude.”

When Ferguson first spoke to Villeneuve about appearing in the movie, “he started telling me about this woman who was a protector, and a mother, and a lover, and a concubine,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I’m sorry. You want me to play a queen and a bodyguard? And you want me to kick ass and walk regally?’ I was like, ‘Denis, why would I want to do that? That’s the last thing I want to do.’ ”

After the call, Ferguson says, “I went downstairs to my hubby and said, Oh, my God, he’s amazing, but I’m not going to get the job. I just criticized the character.” Ferguson worried she was being cast as a stereotypical “strong female character,” where “it’s constantly, ‘She looks good, and she can kick.’ That is not what I want to portray.”

Ferguson hasn’t always been able to work with collaborators who’ve given her the space to question or opine. “I’ve been bashed down. I’ve been bullied,” she says, though she opts not to say by whom. That was never a concern with Villeneuve, who welcomed her critique. He and his co-writers had already decided from the start to make women the focus of their screenplay adaptation, and he promptly offered her the part.

“I want Lady Jessica to be at the center, the forefront. For me, she’s the architect of the story,” Villeneuve says. “I needed someone who will convey the mystery and the dark side of the film in a very elegant and profound way. Rebecca was everything I was hoping for. She’s so precise. She brought a beautiful, controlled vulnerability—it becomes very visceral on-screen.”

Ferguson vaguely recalls trying to watch the 1984 version of Dune, directed by David Lynch, in her youth, but she fell asleep. And she had never opened Herbert’s novel until being offered the part in the new adaptation. As she dug into the book, she says, she learned that her character was subservient and far more like a concubine, forced to eat alone in her bedroom, not spoken to and not allowed to speak. Ferguson ended up relying primarily on Villeneuve for her research and prep—his notes and comments, his references and the pages in the book he suggested she focus on. “I would feel ignorant not to have read Frank’s book at all,” Ferguson says, though she admits there are parts of the sprawling novel (which Villeneuve is splitting into two films) she’s only skimmed. “I have to finish it.” That will not happen on her upcoming vacation, however. “Absolutely not,” she says “I am surfing.”

By the way, if you saw, I am snaking on the ground, snaking around my room to get good Wi-Fi—it’s not some dance or yoga thing,” Ferguson says. “You have to do that in this old house.” It’s a week and a half after our first meeting, and Ferguson is at her new home, a more than 500-year-old property southwest of London that has, over the years, been home to numerous English Royals. It’s more spartan than stately now. “Empty except for a rock star,” she says, turning her phone’s camera to reveal a framed duotone poster of Mick Jagger that’s leaning against the wall. “We haven’t even started renovating.

Ferguson has returned from her holiday fortified and with renewed confidence, thanks in part to her success on the surfboard. “I went up nearly every time,” she says cheerfully, “but the waves weren’t very high.” She shrugs. “I was proud. I was up. I rode them, not the other way around.”

After years of going with the flow, Ferguson is eager to replicate that sense of control in her career. She values her role as an executive producer on Wool, she says, “because I am, for the first time, a part of it from the beginning.” She relishes weighing in on every aspect, from casting (the show recently added Tim Robbins) to cinematography to her character—which has not always been easy for her. “Why do I feel it’s difficult to speak up? I still battle with these things,” she says. Alluding to those times she was pushed around in the past, Ferguson says, “I was angry, but it was more me getting off at ‘How can I let that happen? Why am I letting myself react this way?’ And I take it with me to the next thing where I go, ‘OK, how do I stop that from happening?’ ”

She is learning that she can ride on top of waves without giving up her agency or maybe just let them break against her. “I want to feel I can go home and think, That was a hard day or that pissed me off—and that’s OK,” Ferguson says, with a nod and tight smile. “Because I still stood there as Rebecca. I didn’t shift.”

#rebecca ferguson #interview #dune interview #mi7 interview #wool interview #tom cruise #denis villeneuve #mission impossible #dune 2021

[roninreverie]

5 Things I didn’t expect to happen after watching TOA Wizards last year.

1. That I would re-watch the entire trilogy.

Don't get me wrong, I loved watching the other shows, but I never really re-watched them until after finishing Wizards. In fact, I knew vaguely that Wizards was coming thanks to an old post, and I saw the preview of them all fighting in the floating Camelot castle, but the whole thing was distant enough in the back of my mind that it appeared without me having to wait for it. When it did, I was just like, “oh cool!” and started playing episodes, completely unaware of what was to come. 

2. That I would become obsessed with Hisirdoux Casperan.

Again, saw him in Trollhunters and 3Below, but it never really clicked until after seeing him in Wizards. Now his little cameos are like my favorite things!  I even watched all of Once Upon a Time afterwards just to hear a bit more of Colin (something I had previously left unfinished since 2013!!) I even started wearing my punk bracelets again from my old retail days.😅

3. That I would become obsessed with Zoe.

This is 100% Tenyai’s fault! I saw Zoe in 3Below, I saw Zoe in Wizards... I liked her, but again… it didn’t click until after I discovered Douxie fanart, then Zoe fanart, then Tenyai’s entire blog site, and now it consumes my everyday life! She might be my favorite character of the entire franchise-- which (as you know) is difficult  because she only has like 2 minutes of screen time and an entire void’s worth of unused potential. This obsession brought fanfictions, it brought fanart, I even did my first two prompt weeks ever, going on three now thanks to Zoe Week! (NGL, I’m a little scared at how hard I deep dived into Zoe fandom, and I wonder if the movie is going to help with this at all.) 😱

4. That I would get so into History and Music.

Coming with the territory of obsessing over Douxie and Zoe, and what they might’ve been up to for nearly 900 years, I got really interested in hearing stories about History, or listening to bands I’d either not really heard of before, or who knew of, but didn’t obsess over like I do now. This month, I am apparently into Jazz and Soul music. Now, is that because I just like it or because the 1920s-60s era Zouxie content is so compelling🤔, I’m not even sure I know, but my playlists are growing! I almost learned how to play the guitar...I am not even joking. Then I just think of them whenever I watch anything like any of the stories from Buzzfeed guys, or any of the old recipes made by bdylanhollis on tiktok! 😅

5. That waiting for the movie would scare and excite me so much.

I’m kind of glad I wasn’t on the hype train for Wizards. This life is stressful!!! ROTT is in T-Minus 4 days and there isn’t one day that I haven't had at least a moment of panic or anticipation. This show is going to end me, isn’t it? 💀

#trollhunters #3below #toa wizards #hisirdoux casperan #toa zoe #just personal thoughts #might delete later

[purplesurveys]

1184

survey by xflirtykaosx

Alphabetti Spaghetti (2/3)

F o r e v e r - y o u r s - F

Do you fancy any celebrities? If so, who? KIM TAEHYUUUUUUNGGGGGGGGG

Do you watch any FBI shows? Which ones? No.

Have you ever been to a festival? Which one? I don’t think so.

Do you have a fireplace in your house? Hell no. Just the idea of having a fireplace considering where I live and the general climate we have all year makes me nauseous haha.

Do you have a hot flask? I’m not so sure what you mean but if you’re referring to tumblers like Hydro Flask that keep drinks hot/cold for a really long time then yeah, I have one.

What decade were you four in? 2000s.

Do you like the TV show Friends? I love it. I haven’t watched an episode in a while, but it’s always a go-to for me whenever I feel really really really down.

Do you like the feeling of cat fur? Sure, it’s pleasant. Same with dog fur.

Go girl, go; G

Do you have a back garden? Not really a garden but we do have a sort of backyard; basically some space behind the house. 

Do you have a gentle touch? Idk...depends on what I’m holding or touching, I guess? Like I would obviously hold an infant as gently and gingerly as possible, but I wouldn’t pay as much attention if I’m holding something ordinary like my phone.

Do you like girly programmes like Gossip Girl? LOL at girly. Who says Gossip Girl and literally any other show out there has to be for a certain audience?

Do you ever use gloves? Only when I order from Frankie’s since they provide gloves with their meals.

Do you prefer gold or silver? Silver.

Are you a greedy person? What makes you greedy? A little bit, when it comes to food hahaha. I don’t like sharing and I get angry if someone eats a portion I already called dibs on.

Have you ever seen a gypsy? No.

Hold on honey, I'm here. - H

Do you have any bad habits? What? I pick at my nails - either set - when I get tense. I also tend to get a liiiiitle bit reckless with my money, if I do choose to spend. I’m pretty self-disciplined for the most part, but I let that go as soon as I give myself the green light lol. Exhibit A would be me spending a total of nearly P7,000 just this week alone on BTS merch...

Do you know anyone called Helen? I don’t think so. My dad has a cousin named Helena, though.

Have you ever watched a documentary about Hitler? Not directly related to him, but I remember watching Night Will Fall in high school.

Do you put hm in a lot of your survey answers? Not a lot. Occasionally, though.

When was the last time you went to hospital? What was it for? May last year. Blood and urine tests.

Do you like HP (Harry Potter)? Who's your favourite character? I didn’t grow up with it, but it’s not as if I’m a passionate anti. It’s just not my cup of tea, even after trying to read the books.

Do you spell it honey or hunny? I never spell it as hunny unless I’m saying it sarcastically or playfully with friends.

Are you afraid of this Swine Flu Hype? That’s gone now, right? We’re dealing with something else entirely.

In the end we all die broken. - I

Have you ever been to Ibiza? Nopes.

Do you take ice in your soda/fizzy drinks? I don’t really have a preference as I don’t regularly consume fizzy drinks anyway, as long as it’s not lukewarm.

Who do you think is a complete idiot? Anyone supporting the government at this point is a good runner-up.

Do you often wonder what if? Sometimes. But I also find it a waste of time, so I don’t dwell on them.

Have you ever seen an Igloo? I haven’t.

Do you get ill often? No, almost never.

Do you ever imagine you were not human? What did you imagine you were? No, this has never come to mind.

Do you like sexual innuendos? If it’s not too trashy, sure.

What is your IQ? Idk, I’ve never had it checked.

Do people often call you irrational? I’ve never been called this before, at least not to my face.

Do you think the name Isis is pretty? ...Welp, not anymore.

Do you get itchy eyeballs? That never happens. Is that even possible?

Do you know what ix stands for in roman numerals? 9.

Just breathe baby, breathe. - J

Have you ever been in jail? I have a very vague memory of visiting a prison with my parents before, but I no longer remember why I was there.

Do you like JD (Jack Daniels)? Nahhhhhh. Had a tiny sip of it once, found it absolutely nasty.

Do you get jealous easily? Not anymore.

Do you tell a lot of jokes? Yeah. I like making people laugh, so I drop jokes whenever I can whether I’m in a formal or informal setting.

Do you finish school/college in June? When I was in college, my school year ended every May. Before that, the academic calendar ended every March.  

Kiss me, kill me, thrill me. - K

Do you know a girl called Karla? Yeah, one of the managers at work is a Karla but I don’t work with her. I also went to grade/high school with a girl named Karla; she was my friend for a while as well, but we grew apart over the years.

Did you watch Kenan and Kel? Nope.

Do you prefer kisses or hugs? Depends on the person, I guess. But in the context of being in a relationship, I do love being kissed.

Do you like Korn? I don’t listen to them.

Do you like watching films with Kung Fu in them? Not in particular.

Lessons learnt the hard way are the best I've ever had. - L

Do you like Lady Gaga? She’s okay. I’m not super crazy about her but I tend to like all the stuff she puts out.

When was the last time you had lemonade? Wow, it’s definitely been a while. Maybe a year or so ago? I don’t get to have it a lot; usually only when it’s offered at hotels or resorts when I go on vacation.

Do you ever lie to save your own skin? Sometimes, but I never let the lie be too big just in case it bites me back in the ass one day.

Do you think llamas are cute? Sure.

Do you use Lol a lot? Yes.

Do you think you are lucky or unlucky? Neither.

Melody in my heartstrings. - M

Do you like Mac and Cheese? Loooooove mac and cheese, especially truffle mac and cheese.

Do you ever eat at McDonald’s? What's your usual? Not very often tbh, but I do like McDonald’s. I don’t eat it frequently enough to have a usual order; I get whatever I feel like having at a given moment. And since we’re here, I’m gonna be plugging the BTS Meal, in stores 5/26! HAHAHA

Do you like Medieval games like 7elda? You mean The Legend of Zelda? I do love that franchise, but I don’t like the medieval genre as a whole; I just happened to grow up with the Zelda series and Nintendo as a whole, so I’ve taken a liking to it. 

What's on your mind right now? That it’s Monday again tomorrow. I feel like I’m starting to get burnout :/ I’ve definitely noticed I haven’t been being 100% at work lately...but it could also be because the weather is crappy hot again, which makes it a lot harder to work and keep focused.

Is money in your opinion, the root of all evil? It’s part of it.

Do you like Mr and Mrs the show? I’m not familiar with it.

Do you read murder mystery books? Which ones? No.

Do you find Mystical stuff fascinating? Not really.

Nobody loves me, what a change. - N

Do you know the name of your local shopkeeper? We don’t have those here.

Have you ever been called nerdy? I’m sure I’ve been.

Are you you truly a nice person? I hope that’s what people see and think.

Do you overuse nouns in your sentences? I like using adjectives, for one; but I don’t exactly know how you can overuse nouns hahaha.

Do you know anyone personally who is a nurse? Yes, I have several relatives who are in nursing.

Only you - it always has been. - O

Do you obey authority or deliberately disobey it? Obey for the most part.

Is there anything in your room that is an Octagon? What is it? I don’t think so.

What odor can you smell in the room you're in now? The neutral scent my aircon is blowing out.

Do you get offended easily? I think sensitive would be a more fitting word.

Have you ever been to Ohio? No.

Do you ever say Oi? Sure, but not frequently.

Do you spell it OK or okay? I use both; I don’t have a preference. What I avoid is ‘K,’ though.

Are you older than the number day you were born on? Yes.

Have you ever watched the film the Omen? I haven’t.

Name one thing you always have taken for granted? The basic things, I guess, like breathing.

Have you ever had an operation? On what? Never.

Do you like things in a set order or doesn't it matter? As much as possible I do want things to be organized, yeah. I get restless if I see a very messy spreadsheet or Powerpoint, for instance.

Do you have a habit of overreacting? I was a lot more...theatrical in my reactions before haha. Not so much these days; I’ve toned down a lot.

Do you think Owls are nice? Sure.

Do you know what an Oxymoron is? Yup.

Have you ever tried Oyster? Yessssssss I love them and now you’re making me crave them :(

#survey #surveys

[mothchamp]

Things to do during this god-awful hiatus

It's like 2016 all over again: no Doctor Who. At all. But! It's a 55 year old franchise guys, there will always be new content, no matter how much you've consumed.

[Under the cut because I'm not THAT Guy]

Watch the rest of NuWho. Yeah, this might sound obvious to some, but it's come to my attention that a lot of the new fans have only seen season 11! If so, I personally recommend the 11th Doctor (his run starting on season 5), because him and 13 are very similar. Honestly though, just start with season 1, it's really good (never skip 9 was a really big rule back in the day, you know).

Watch the spin-offs! There's three of them now, and yes, there have been some riots about side characters who deserve shows of their own, but the ones we have are actually pretty good! There's Torchwood, following Jack Harkness and his group of alien-fighting friends (a bit more mature that dw); Sarah Jane Adventures, which contains the woman herself, her son, and a couple of friends as they defeat aliens from their attic. This one's a bit more kiddy, being a CBBC show, but I still think it's really good; and Class. There are mixed opinions about Class, but the overall consensus was that it should have been renewed for s2. It has a completely new cast, so you've never see any of the characters before, and it has some really good lgbt rep.

Give Classic Who a go. Honestly? It's up in the air as to whether or not I think these new fans would like it, but if you can see past the... let's say obvious display of a low budget, then it's very good. Yes, 26 seasons is a lot, but you don't really have to watch them all in order, just pick a Doctor and watch his run, then pick another and watch that, etc. It's what I'm doing right now!

Watch the film/read the EDAs. As most people know, 8 (Paul Mcgann) was only around for the film, then disappeared and NuWho came back with Christopher Eccleston. But! Did you know that there are countless novels containing many, many adventures with 8? With new companions and aliens and everything? As a product of it's time, it's actually pretty gay (no spoilers but whew eda fans Fitz's dream, right?) and the writing is really good. Just... see past the obvious crack the writers were smoking.

Read the other books. Read, you heathens, read! Literally there are at least three books from every era just find them online or on Amazon or something.

Have a go at the comics? The comics... whew I honestly would believe it if someone said there were more dw comic issues than episodes. They're in every era with every doctor, sometimes even multiple doctors! Yes they've got 13 content already out.

Listen to the audio dramas. Ok, I'll be the first to admit they're pricey as all hell (I torrent mine shhhh) so you might not be able to access these as easily (seriously just use audiobookbay it's all there) but I really do think you should give them a go. The fanservice is so good it makes me weep honestly. Lgbt rep? Check. More content from your faves? REALLY check (seriously, there's a Paternoster Gang series coming soon, and Missy has one, and River). Your faves being messy? Yup. Your wildest headcanons being achieved? Oh yeah. Seriously. I recommend.

The Faction Paradox. No. No. N O.

Watch the minisodes? I dunno, they're pretty entertaining, but it's not much content at a l l. They're mostly 11th Doctor, season 6-ish era. Kind of slice-of-life shenanigans. If you like River Song there are a few where 11 and her go on some dates.

Is that it? I don't know, honestly. There's always going to be something about Doctor Who that I don't know, but I think all of this content should supply you until 2020. I hope. God please let it be enough.

#doctor who #torchwood #sarah jane adventures #class #classic who #big finish #jack harkness #8th doctor #paul mcgann #edas #fitz kreiner #the paternoster gang #madame vastra #missy #river song #11th doctor #matt smith #13th doctor #jodie whittaker #thasmin #yasmin kahn #thirteen x yasmin #ryan sinclair #graham o'brien

[beesloosewithcanon]

11 Questions Meme

Rules: answer the questions of the person who tagged you, come up with 11 new ones, and tag 11 new people. 

I was tagged by @natsora​! Thanks, lovely! this was fun!

1. What’s your favourite food?

It’s a dead tie between maki rolls and mushroom risotto. Both have rice… so should I just say rice?

2. What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done?

Heh. Story time.

I was in technical theatre all through high school (building sets, managing sound levels, creating props, and, my specialty, lighting). My high school had a massive auditorium that sat a over a thousand people. Not only was it used for our school productions and events, but it was also consistently used by the city for things like the Symphony and traveling professional ballet performances. Anyway – so this massive theatre had catwalks about three stories up where we hung 80% of our lighting instruments. Normally when you have a theatre with a lighting rig like that, you wear a safety harness while you’re working. Not me (or the other technical theatre students). We used the buddy system: one of us would lie on the catwalk floor and pretty much dangle over the edge while we worked to adjust lights or change out colors while our buddy would hold ankles and sit on our feet. And I did this all the time. While I was doing it, it never seemed dangerous. But looking back on it, if the buddy wasn’t strong enough, I would have definitely fallen to my demise on more than a dozen occasions, like two phones of mine had.

I also grew up in Alaska and came face to face with a least half a dozen bears when wondering around the mountainside alone as a kid. So... my definition of what is or isn’t dangerous is a bit skewed I suppose. 

3. What’s your guilty pleasure?

I haven’t watched it in ages but I’d have to say the TV show Lost Girl. It’s awful, like – all around awful (acting, premise, story, directing, etc.) but I enjoy it.

4. What’s your dream job?

Character/dialogue writing for a triple-A game franchise or simply being a writer in the gaming industry.

5. What’s your favourite song or music?

My music tasks are super eclectic (like I’ll go from listening to EDM to top 40 to classical symphonies to rock, and then dubstep in the same car ride. It’s wild), but the one song that always makes me stop and listen is a piano piece called The Heart Asks Pleasure First.

6. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?

A cabin in the woods a few miles outside of a small town. It’s not that I dislike people (I’m an extrovert who really enjoys people and enjoys hosting people at my house), but my mental health is better when I’m surrounded by nature instead of concrete. A specific place that fits the bill is a tiny fishing town in Alaska, called Gustavus.

Or I’d love to live in Northern Japan, in the Hokkaido region of Japan.

7. How many pets do you have? 

I have two! An eleven-year-old corgi named Piper and an almost one-year-old border collie lab mix rescue named Twig.

8. Do you have other creative outlets beyond the one you are engaging in most often?

Yes! On Tumblr it’s all fanfiction, but I also run a review site for queer media called thequeerblr.com (which I haven’t posted to in two months because I’ve been busy with other things); I write original queer fiction but haven’t finished anything yet or have tried to have it published; I am the Game Master (GM or DM depending on your tabletop RPG experience) for my D&D group that plays every weekend and have created a completely original world setting and story for my players; I slowly crochet blankets for friends (but mostly for my dogs); I draw and paint on occasion; and on even rarer occasions, I play guitar and piano if I have them available to me.

9. Recommend me a book or a fanfic

Oh, do I have a book recommendation for you! I love the Princess Series by Jim C. Hines (The Stepsister Scheme, The Mermaid’s Madness, Red Hood's Revenge, and The Snow Queen’s Shadow). The first book is a little slow on the uptake, but it’s a four-part book series that is a vague retelling of several popular fairy tale stories with like a… Charlie’s Angles twist? Basically, there are three princesses who work as the Queen’s special task unit and I know that sounds cheeky as hell, but the characters are amazing. Each princess has her own unique character arc and character development.  And there is a lesbian main character in it who I love to pieces.

10. Can you go one week without your mobile phone and internet?

Absolutely. Just put me in nature with a journal and a tent.

11. How many WIPs do you have at the moment?

Hahahahaha …. Ha… haaaa. Fuck. Um… fanfiction alone I have 7 (only three of which are currently posted), and for my original fiction, I have… 10? 12 if you include a game concept and a podcast concept? So almost 20 altogether.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

Alright, tagging: @natsora​ @sredmund​ @ieatlazers​ @renwritesstuff​ @caniusproductions​ @adventurewithtea​ @korra-of-the-south​ @wolf-heart1197​ @rpgwarrior4824​ @theoreticallye​ @raedmagdon​

Obviously no obligations. <3

Your questions:

1. If you could rewrite one game, which one and why? 2. What is one thing you like about reading fanfiction over published fiction? 3. What is one thing you like about reading published fiction over fanfiction? 4. What is one piece of media that you love but have yet to dive into its online fandom? 5. What fandom consumes most of your Tumblr feed? 6. Given the opportunity to live in another country, would you? Or would you stay in your current country? Why? 7. If you were given the opportunity, by like a wizard or something, to suddenly be a master at your preferred craft (writing, drawing, painting, sewing, etc.), would you take that offer? Or would you continue to learn the skill and grow on your own? 8. What period setting do you enjoy the most for the media you consume (historical, modern, futuristic, etc.)? 9. What type of artwork (if any) do you have hung in your living space? 10. What is your favorite genre to write? (If you’re not a writer, what is your favorite genre to read?) 11. What is your favorite type of nature (forest, beach, plains, etc.)?

#11 questions meme #holy shit coming up with questions was way harder than answering them #ask me stuff #ask me things #this was fun

[neckpaste3-blog]

Best 10 Accounting Myths

So many occasions I am out at a cafe, store, or outing and someone in my family or group of buddies suggests "You're the accountant, how a lot is this?" and wants me to determine anything in my head. I am going to allow you all in on a minor magic formula... I am not a mathematician, I am an accountant. If my calculator is not in close proximity to, don't request me to determine anything. I am going to permit you in on a number of a lot more secrets as nicely. Read beneath to discover the leading ten Accounting myths I have put with each other. #1 Accounting Fantasy Accounting is about math. This could not be more than the reality. Sure, you use math, but so does an engineer, salesman, advertising individual, garden man, hair stylist, and so forth. If you want to get paid out, you will have to estimate the amount you are owed, the alter if paid in money, your commission percentage, and many others. Accountants use math similarly. Accounting is accounting for belongings, liabilities, earnings, costs, and so on... of course nonetheless, the "meat and potatoes" of accurate accounting is investigation and storytelling. Do you take pleasure in placing a puzzle with each other? Properly, in accounting, when you look via people quantities you are searching for holes to set that right piece into. You have to use individuals numbers to inform the proprietor of a company, shareholder, lender, or supervisor what they suggest how they can use them and what to count on in the foreseeable future. It's analytics, not algebra. #2 Accounting Fantasy Accountant = Tax Preparer or IRS Agent. Oh so incorrect, mistaken, incorrect. Realize that when you enter a major tax franchise or chain your taxes are most very likely currently being ready by a educated "tax preparer" NOT an accountant. The true definition of an accountant is a single who has a diploma in Accounting. Sure, I geared up taxes proper out of higher education when I worked for a community CPA company, but the only explanation that I was necessary to do this kind of was since the companion I worked for experienced a handful of tax consumers. Mainly, I audited firms. This does not indicate a tax audit. This means that I went in, looked at their publications and place-checked for accuracy. Soon after this, we would give them a report on necessary improvements and regions that looked great. This is a extremely brief summary of a organization audit. Several accountants work in personal businesses compiling financials for the managers and house owners, some operate in fraud analyzing where they support companies detect or look into fraud, even though other individuals merely check with on numerous subject areas. Be watchful when somebody claims they are an accountant. I listen to bookkeepers and secretaries say this all the time and they never know the big difference amongst a journal entry and the coffee pot. Not to undermine secretaries and bookkeepers. I regard them all and I significantly recognize their function as I have several functioning on my staff, but they are NOT accountants. I will not inform my clients that they are this kind of. This is not a fair description of who they are and their qualifications. #3 Accounting Fantasy Accounting is for Men only. In every single organization exactly where I have been utilized or worked with, the ratio of women to men is possibly 50% or increased in the women's favor. As a subject of simple fact, most are dominated by females. Indeed, I have seen primarily gentlemen in the government positions, but ladies are growing rapidly in this area as properly. As several businesses see that women can balance household and work [most times greater than you guys], they are respecting the abilities and qualifications of ladies in these fields. Now men, you are not becoming pushed out. This is a great location for the two sexes to show their likely. Just never expect your gender to establish your location in the accounting globe. #4 Accounting Fantasy Accountants are introverted or uninteresting and truly do not like functioning with buyers. Even a tax accountant has to be a people-individual. We all have to perform with consumers, personnel, distributors, client's customers, etc. I enjoy this subject simply because of the men and women conversation. I love to speak [I'm certain my husband would concur] and I love to instruct. To consider accounting and flip it into comprehensible language for my customers who range from Funeral Residences to Hair Stylists. I get to train them how their figures can inform them the stories they want to listen to and what their futures could maintain. My colleagues and friends in college had been wonderful and we were all accounting college students. We went out for beverages, went dancing at golf equipment, went to the lake swimming and skiing, worked out at local fitness centers, and so forth and so forth. Life is not dull for us at all and as a organization proprietor and accountant now, I can assure you that my life is something but unexciting. I have two tiny kids, a spouse (company associate), staff, loved ones, buddies, clubs and organization meetings and the listing goes on. If I have time to take treatment of chores, this is a perk in the 7 days. #5 Accounting Fantasy Modest Firms do not need to have accounting or it can just hold out until finally it's get to be too much for me to manage myself. Ok, so this implies that as a modest enterprise owner, you would say that you will not require to budget, forecast financials, know about developments in your company, or know the latest, best tax rewards. I have clients that are as modest as a one-guy services business making only about 20K a yr. Every single business wants an accountant viewing their again. Now, this individual or company demands to be reputable and competent, but you need them, all the exact same. A enterprise are not able to and ought to not be run based on whether or not there is income in the lender at that present time. At the finish of the year, how do you know whether or not you are likely to report a decline or cash flow to the IRS? You require to report as a lot loss as you can to spend as minor taxes as you can or you are just dishonest your self. Numerous tax corporations will charge you an arm and a leg if you go in with a box or in some situations, a trash bag, complete of receipts and say, "Listed here. Make sure you do my taxes." They have to charge you the time they are going to allocate to thumbing by means of these receipts and most likely they will not take the time to be sure they put every small nickel and dime they can to losses so you spend as small as achievable in taxes. Bokföringsbyrå Stockholm will be adhering to your financials the whole year and everything need to be neat and clean appear time to file your taxes. Also, your accountant must be able to give you month to month financials that inform you in which you can enhance in an location, have reports prepared for achievable financial loans, support you make fiscal choices, aid you make the most of recent tax rewards, and notify you if your organization will craze towards decrease or larger revenue in certain months based on heritage. This is all necessary information and after my customers occur into my services, they are shocked that they ended up at any time able to operate their company without my services. #6 Accounting Fantasy An Accountant will expense me an arm and a leg. Properly, this might be the case if you go to a high-greenback agency, but while searching for an lawyer, if you retain the services of Robert Shapiro, it would not be inexpensive both. You have to uncover the appropriate agency or specific for you. Check out references, qualifications, and services. Be positive the value matches the industry standards in your area and be positive they make you come to feel very good about working with them. You must be number 1 to them and you must be capable to discover a certified individual or firm to work with. My agency is acknowledged for reduced rates due to the fact this is the way I created it. I desired to develop a company in which I could cater to little and commence-up companies yet be reasonably priced for them as properly. I have always priced my services significantly less than the price of choosing a full-time staff and occasionally I have gone a lot, much much less based on the consumer, their needs, and their monetary situation. Get in touch with me or e mail and we can discuss to see if we can aid you or at minimum level you in the appropriate course. #seven Accounting Myth I pay out enterprise expenditures out of my very own pocket. It really is really no huge offer. Improper. If you possess or function a organization, it is a company, not your wife or husband. You need to have to observe when you have paid an bills out of your very own pocket. This is funds that could be returned to you tax-totally free. For instance, I have a consumer that I achieved with just lately. She owns a beauty salon. She does not have a enterprise financial institution account and all bills are paid out by means of her personal account. Now, she requires the earnings into that very same account. Her husband is a total-time employee in yet another firm. 1st, there is no way to explain to if she is really making a revenue or not. Second, she is paid out a wage. Her salary is taxable. If her business is breaking even, she has been spending double the taxes she need to have. She was in no way reimbursed for her out-of-pocket costs appropriately which need to have been TAX-Cost-free. She should be ready to at least be refunded for the expenses she has compensated for out of her own pocket [tax-cost-free] ahead of using a income which is taxable. As her accountant, I have advised her to open up a business financial institution account. At this stage she will deposit revenues into this account and shell out invoice from listed here. If there is not adequate money to shell out charges, she will shell out them out of her very own pocket but she will be confident to notify us when she does this. We record this as reimbursements that are owing back again to her tax-totally free and she will obtain this money again when the business money movement permits for this. #8 Accounting Fantasy I never have time and never need to have to established goals for myself and my company. Each firm I have ever known, read through about, or been included in has employed objective-location as an intricate portion of managing their business. Life as we know it moves at a head-spinning velocity. No issue the business, shifting instances can cause chaos and in many cases set a company out of enterprise if they do not remain up-to-day with developments, technology, and buyer details. Sit down and create out 10 targets for by yourself and your organization. When finished, put these objectives in priority purchase from greatest to cheapest. Set them in a spot in which you will continually be reminded of your goals. Each and every month sit down and assessment these goals. Compose down what you have carried out to come closer to each 1 and if you have reached any of them. As you get to your ambitions, cross them off the list. Do not eliminate them. This offers you a sense of accomplishment and displays you that your challenging function is paying out off. #9 Accounting Myth I really don't require accounting reports to know how my enterprise is carrying out. If you are busy, this does not suggest that your enterprise is performing effectively. You need stories to tell you if your prices are the place they want to be in comparison to expenses you are incurring. You require to run stories to display dilemma locations like theft, loss, squander, rewarding regions, and so forth. As soon as you run these reviews, you then need to comprehend how to use them. If you run a report that displays that you have a major spot of waste in your production method, you then need to arrive up with a answer to the dilemma and both uncover a way to reap cash flow from the waste materials, uncover a way to reuse the material, or much better the method to reduce the amount of waste. In the service industries, reviews can present how time is allocated. If time is allocated inadequately, income is being lost and as 99% of businesses in the region, I am certain you are making an attempt to make a income. These studies can aid reveal the issue spot and assist to change worker duties or routines in a way that will provide income back again or enhance the revenue of your business rapidly and efficiently. #10 Accounting Myth I can take care of my accounting myself. I have QuickBooks. Ha! This one particular actually makes me chuckle a minor. QuickBooks is an great plan and one that I use on a everyday basis, but it does not just take the require for an accountant away. As a subject of reality, most open up QuickBooks only to turn out to be overcome and baffled. Obtaining this program is extremely good and can become an amazing tool, but your accountant requirements to help you established it up, educate you on how you can and need to use it, and come in periodically to be confident almost everything is in get, run studies, and resolve issue places. You can be superb in company but except if you know how to operate the accounting side of your enterprise properly, you need to really do oneself a favor and at least get suggestions from an accountant on this approach.

[girlsbtrs]

The Five Best Songs in Movie Scenes, According to a High School Senior

Written by Jennifer Moglia. Graphic by Laura Cross. 

As a girl who was born in the 2000s, lived out my childhood in the 2010s, and turned 18 years old in the year 2021,  all forms of media have played a huge role in my experiences growing up. From movies and TV shows to all different types of music to YouTube videos and social media creators, I’ve spent a large portion of my life watching other people do things, whether it was acting, singing, playing an instrument, or even just reviewing makeup products on Vine or TikTok. 

However, one of these mediums has stood out from the rest; movies (or as the nerd in me would like to call them, “films”). As a freshman in high school, I decided to try to start watching more movies when I realized that my favorites consisted solely of Disney cartoons and the occasional cheesy rom-com. 

Over the years, I’ve practically exhausted Netflix and Hulu’s libraries, bought a ridiculous amount of DVDs, and my Letterboxd diary has just reached 200 films (shameless self-promo, you can follow me there @happilyjennifer). When watching movies, especially ones that I’ve never seen before, I always try to pay attention to the music used in each scene - not the instrumental score, but the specific songs used to highlight pivotal moments. 

The right track can make a sad scene heart-wrenching or a happy scene exhilarating, a romantic scene fairy tale-worthy or a death scene absolutely traumatic; a particular song can elevate a key scene in a film, making it that much more impactful. So, without further ado, here are my five favorite uses of songs in movie scenes, from films I’ve seen throughout my 18 years.

Honorable Mention: Heroes by David Bowie in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

Some might be shocked at this scene’s placement in the “honorable mention” section due to how revered it is, but that’s almost why it lands there. This film and book have both been overhyped to death as a coming-of-age staple for as long as I can remember, and for that reason, I was underwhelmed when I first read and watched it. 

However, I don’t think it should suffer because of its reputation, which is why I simply couldn’t pick a numbered spot for it. Standing alone as a scene, without any of the praise, this song and movie combination is absolutely breathtaking. 

The visual of Emma Watson’s character Sam standing up in the car with Patrick and Charlie, her arms outstretched as the trio zooms through the tunnel to the city, is a visceral experience. Charlie proclaiming that he feels “infinite” is the cherry on top - he finally feels free, free from any past trauma or current stresses or general pressures of being a teenager. 

It’s a beautiful moment, and it’s made iconic by the addition of Bowie’s hit song. The pairing of Heroes with “Perks”’ instantly recognizable “tunnel scene” is unforgettable.

5. God Only Knows by The Beach Boys in “Love Actually”

As a member of “Gen Z”, you won’t be surprised to hear that my attention span is not the best. That’s why, at times, “Love Actually” dragged a bit for me - I felt that the two-hour and 15-minute runtime was just a little much, especially with so many different stories to keep up with. 

Despite all of that, though, I think that the ending practically saves this movie. The words “one month later” flash across the screen, and we are brought to Heathrow Airport, the place that David, played by Hugh Grant, spoke of at the beginning of the film. 

We’re reminded of his opening sentiment, that whenever he’s feeling down, he thinks back to watching families reuniting at the gates in this airport, and he instantly feels better. It’s a perfect opening to a film about love, and calling back to it makes for a perfect ending. 

The viewers see each of the film’s stories wrapped up neatly with a bow, particularly helpful for people like me who practically forgot about some of the characters by the time the two-hour mark was reached. What really makes this scene one of my favorites, though, is the very end of it. 

As the lyrics “God only knows what I’d be without you” repeat and start to fade out, we are taken away from our characters and the screen now shows real families reuniting in Heathrow Airport, not actors. The clips form a collage and then, ultimately, a heart, before it all fades to black. True human connection can warm even the coldest of hearts, and this classic love song by The Beach Boys is the perfect soundtrack to these heartfelt moments.

4. Fooled Around and Fell in Love by Elvin Bishop in “Guardians of the Galaxy”

Throughout my middle school and early high school years, I knew more about Marvel movies than I did about my family or the material I was learning in school. I saw “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in theaters five times, skipped my first spring formal dance to see “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” in 3D on opening night, and even had a personalized Iron Man sweatshirt that I wore nearly every day.

The Marvel franchise that utilizes music, or at least recognizable music, the most is definitely the “Guardians of the Galaxy” series. Chris Pratt’s character Peter “Star Lord” Quill’s mother made mixtapes for him while she was still in his life, filled with pop music from the 1970s-80s that she listened to when she was younger.

Titled “Awesome Mix Volume 1”, Quill becomes attached to it as it was one of the only items he had left of his mother after they were separated. The music that she shared with him becomes a key piece of this movie as well as its sequel, from Baby Groot swaying in a flower pot to “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 to Star Lord completing a mission while Redbone’s “Come And Get Your Love” plays through his headphones.

My favorite use of a classic song in a “Guardians” movie, though, is in an interaction between Quill and his love interest, Gamora. The two are bonding over their unusual relationships with their parents with Quill talking about how music connects him to his mom, pulling out his tape deck and headphones.

The dynamic between the two characters here is hilariously adorable, as Gamora explains that she doesn’t believe in music or dancing, which appalls Quill and leads to him explaining the plot of the movie “Footloose” to her, applying it to the people on her planet. He then takes off his headphones and puts them on her head, allowing her to listen to “Fooled Around and Fell in Love”, though she doesn’t quite appreciate the moment, talking over the music about how the “melody is very pleasing.”

I’m a sucker for awkwardly cute couples and the mini enemies-to-lovers storyline between Star Lord and Gamora gives me butterflies every time; I can’t help but giggle when Quill goes in for the kiss and Gamora immediately pulls a weapon on him. The use of such a well-known love song makes this moment that much sweeter.

3. Where is my Mind? by The Pixies in “Fight Club”

Yes, I realize that I’m automatically breaking the first rule of “Fight Club” by even listing it here, but I had to. This is a movie that countless people (men, countless men) had told me to watch for years, and I finally caved about a year ago out of “quarantine boredom.”

While I don’t praise this film as much as others do (men, as much as men do), I can certainly appreciate the influence that it has had on the world of film at large. There’s a lot of commentary on consumerism, violence, individualism, and the concept of masculinity packed into these two hours, even though many people (you know what these parentheses are about to say: many men) miss all of that and just watch it for the fight scenes.

The scene I chose from “Fight Club” as one of my favorites uses of a song in a film is the ending, which includes “Where is my Mind?” by The Pixies. The Narrator (Ed Norton) has just shot himself, effectively killing his alternate personality of Tyler Durden, and his love interest Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) has been kidnapped and brought to him by his Project Mayhem workers.

Marla is horrified upon finding The Narrator in the condition that he’s in and learning that he’s the one who put himself in this situation, or at least he thinks so. All he can offer to her is to say this: “I'm sorry...you met me at a very strange time in my life.” This is when the buildings start to fall.

All of the explosives planted by Project Mayhem begin to detonate, exploding and imploding as Marla and The Narrator look on, The Pixies’ hit playing softly in the background. She looks startled at first, before relaxing and allowing him to take her hand, and the two watch the city crumble to the ground with “Where is my Mind?” as the backing track; it’s masterfully done.

2. Everytime by Britney Spears in “Spring Breakers”

I want to start this section by saying that I’m fully aware that this scene shouldn’t work, let alone be beautiful, and the same could be said for this movie as a whole, but for some reason, there’s something captivating about “Spring Breakers” and the renowned “Everytime” scene. Netflix first suggested this movie to me as a freshman in high school (complete side note: Why, Netflix? What was okay about suggesting this to a 14-year-old?), and it has stuck with me for years after.

The way that “Spring Breakers” sugarcoats itself in its marketing is almost a microcosm of its themes and storyline. The neon color schemes and promos including former Disney Channel stars Selena Gomez and Vaness Hudgens hide a story of four girls on their spring break consumed by crime, drugs, and murder, and this scene exemplifies that perfectly.

After Gomez’s character Faith gets scared and goes back home, drug and arms dealer Alien (James Franco) takes Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) to a strip club where they meet his rival, fellow drug dealer Big Arch. Alien arms the girls with shotguns and pink ski maks adorned with unicorns (hello, symbolism!), and they gather around the piano next to his pool to listen to him play.

Franco’s character begins to play Spears’ hit “Everytime”, the girls singing along, before Britney’s original version takes over, playing as a montage of the group participating in multiple armed robberies plays out on the screen in slow motion. The juxtaposition of the soft, feminine song with the violent crimes being carried out sums up this entire film in a nutshell; I strongly believe that this scene helps this film earn its title as a masterpiece.

1. Young Blood by The Naked and Famous in Disney’s “Prom” 

Giving the top spot to a movie that most people probably haven’t seen could be seen as a bold move, but I’m telling you, this movie raised me. I have such a vivid memory of seeing it in theaters with my mom when I was only eight years old, dreaming about the day that I’d get to dress up and go to my own prom; pretty crazy that ten years later, I’ll be attending my high school’s prom in a month, and I still think about this movie often.

I identified with Aimee Teegarden’s character Nova Prescott heavily when I was younger, the star student who always wanted to be the best and do the best, quickly turning into the obsessive perfectionist who doesn’t know how to have fun and let go. Thomas McDonnell’s portrayal of Jesse Richter, the bad boy with a soft side who introduces Nova to a whole new world, has always tugged at my heartstrings.

The scene in this movie that has stuck with me for a decade now comes when Nova and Jesse are starting to work together to plan and decorate for prom while also started to develop feelings for each other. Nova is stressed that another school’s theme is too similar to theirs and that they will be upstaged, to which Jesse says, “let’s see how starry their night really is.”

The pair hops onto Jesse’s motorcycle and sets off to visit the rival school. As they take the ride, indie band The Naked and Famous’ song “Young Blood” plays in the background, the upbeat chorus and “yeah yeah yeah”s perfectly framing Nova’s change of heart towards Jesse.

They sneak into the other school to check out their decor, only to be caught by the police and taken home by their parents. Nova’s father snaps at Jesse, and while the girl she was at the beginning of the movie would have agreed with her dad, she doesn’t; in fact, she defends Jesse, and apologizes to him for her parent’s behavior the next day.

In addition to being one of my favorite coming-of-age movie moments, this movie also introduced me to The Naked and Famous and the album that this song is on, “Passive Me, Aggressive You”, which has become one of my favorite records of all time (listen to Girls Like You and Punching in a Dream and you’ll be hooked). As I mentioned earlier, the right soundtrack can make a romantic scene a million times more magical, and that’s exactly what the use of Young Blood does here. 

#jennifer moglia

[mockymyths]

Jeepers Creepers: Jezelle Gay Hartman - Psychic, Informant, Badass Grandma? - In My Dreams

Aside from providing some tension, information, and giving the plot one final push to the finale, this character is relatively simple and disappointing as a whole. Now before you decide to comment, let me discuss her specific role and actions in the movie and WHY she ends up being relatively disappointing with very little payoff. I’m also going to bring up a few suggestions as to how her character could have been used better.

It’s gonna be a spoiler palooza up ahead so if you care about that kind of thing don’t read I guess?

1.) The phone call:

So the first time we meet Jezelle it’s through a phone call that Trish and Darry receive while waiting for the cops at a diner. She calls to warn them that they’re in danger and what will happen to one of them if they’re caught by the Creeper.

This introduction feels very confused for multiple reasons.

First of all, we’re told that she doesn’t remember/see every little detail in her visions which allow her to have this kind of information in the first place. It gives us leniency in what we are and aren’t allowed to know, thus leaving an air of mystery until the very end. The frustrating thing about this though is the fact that later on it’s implied that she kinda lied about what she does and doesn’t know (expanded upon in number 2). It’s implied that she DOES know who will die and somehow she’s able to figure out when the two will be at the police station for her to meet up with. But if she’s able to see and figure that out then she should also have known when they would have a run in with the cats as well. That, along with the fact that she calls the diner at the exact time Trish and Darry are there, basically make this phone call stupid for so many reasons; because let’s be real: either she calls that diner constantly to try and catch them or she’s got some weird ass spidey sense going on (if she doesn’t actively know when they’re going to be there).

The only purpose this phone call really provides is tension. Later on when the siblings get a police escort and hear an alternative song to the one Jezelle played for them, Darry begins panicking saying that they’re in real danger whilst Trish tries to explain to him that it’s not even the correct song and that they’re fine. Ironically, they actually ARE in danger, they just don’t notice it yet because the action is happening in the background. It’s a nice scare and tension builder, by all means, but it really only works once and could have been alluded to better.

2.) The Police Station:

So as I mentioned earlier, near the climax of the movie, Jezelle finally meets the siblings in person at the police station. It’s here that she expands upon the nature of the Creeper and what their fates will be when he finally catches his intended target. This provides an excellent tension builder because this also gives the siblings the chance to confront her about who it will be that the Creeper chooses. This allows for a proper climax and a wonderful “stepping up” moment for Trish whom tries to bargain with the Creeper to save Darry and it’s wonderful because it gives us the reaffirmation that she truly is the caring protective older sister that we only see hints of throughout the movie.

But as you’ve probably guessed by now, I have an issue with this too.

Jezelle being promoted as a psychic character just feels tired. No one believes her and everyone thinks she’s crazy. Just that one sentence alone makes me feel TIRED of that trope. Now that being said, I do understand the reasoning for it. There’s really only so many ways you can provide information on a supernatural creature, but when the movie recycles the “visions” trope on another character it just feels even WORSE because now it’s cliche in the franchise with barely any rhyme or reason aside from information. Realistically, it would have been fine to not have these bits of information. Everything we were told could have been gleamed from what we saw in the movie and the only real important piece she provides us with is that one of the siblings will die by the creature’s hands. That’s it.

Now i’m not saying that psychic characters themselves are tiring, but the way they were handled in this series itself was. And this will be something I will be discussing further in part 5.

3.) Jezelle’s Last Stand:

So then we go off to the climax and Jezelle tries to buy the kids some time to escape by using herself as bait for the monster. She faces off with him and either she isn’t actually scared or she has absolutely nothing the Creeper desires for himself. He promptly ditches her to head straight for the kids. This paired with the ending where she responds to Trish by saying “I’m just a crazy old lady.” really gives everyone the feeling of inevitability and uselessness. These scenes were the most impactful for Jezelle and can really give us a deeper feeling and emotion than what was probably intended. And this is also where I feel like her character was most powerful.

Jezelle goes out of her way to try and help them because she can’t stand the thought of anyone else suffering by the Creeper’s hands whilst she does nothing. She doesn’t listen to what the others say when they claim that she’s crazy and even puts herself in harms way to try and save the siblings. So the look on her face when the Creeper barely gives her a second look and immediately goes after Trish and Darry is a little heart breaking. It’s like she realizes that she wasn’t even good enough to buy them a few minutes, that there wasn’t much she could do in the end.

And then later on, when Trish confronts Jezelle about her lying about who the Creeper was going to take, that gives us even more heart break. Jezelle was probably hoping that by telling them that Trish would be taken, that Darry would become less scared and maybe make himself undesirable to the Creeper in doing so. But ultimately there was nothing she could do to help, in the end she really was a “crazy old lady”, and it’s in that pain and acceptance of failure that we can feel the most for Jezelle.

4.) Payoff:

This is also why I feel like the use of her character was disappointing and the payoff was too small. Two thirds of her scenes amount to very little aside from building tension and scares and the information she gives is wholly unnecessary. If she had a larger part in the film then perhaps her final scenes would have been even more impactful. Because as much as this movie is about the siblings, the ending really paints us a depressing picture that begs the question of “if you can’t change the outcome, is there even a point in trying?”

Because although we can hear and feel Darry’s terror build until the finale and shudder at the...sight... EVEN THOUGH we can feel the pain in Trish as she chases down the Creeper and is left to face the awful fact that she couldn’t do her job of the elder sibling properly and protect Darry despite everything else she’s done in the movie to protect him, Jezelle possibly contains the most widespread emotion I think that we as humans can REALLY get on board with the most.

“If you can’t change the outcome...”     “If you don’t succeed...”

“...Is there a point in trying?”

5.) Improvements:

So earlier I mentioned things such as Jezelle’s phone call, the information she provides on the Creeper, and her ability as a Psychic.

My primary complaints on her use as a character is that the scares and tension as well as information provided were ultimately pointless due to the lack of actual use. The information she provided on the Creeper, being a super old creature, reappearing for 23 days every 23rd summer, and can’t really die due to the fact that he can consume human parts to rejuvenate his body which is mostly why he hunts- All of this could have been provided in alternative ways and really kinda was. Things like missing people cases in the area, the Church of Pain (where all the bodies were sprung up like a mockery to the Sistine Chapel mural and others), and what we see in the later half of the film where Trish runs him over and then he eats cops to fix his parts, all of this was really all we needed in order to learn of the Creeper’s culture and motive. The only piece of information needed from Jezelle at this point was (ultimately) the ending. And even in this I have a simple solution.

One of my head canons happen to be that the close proximity to the Creeper allows for random individuals to have psychic abilities in order to combat him (he’s lived in that area presumably for at least a few hundred years, so if Jezelle lived in that area she could be one of the few who have insight to his habits. This would also be a great explanation for why Minxie was given the information needed on the Creeper.) This paranormal seepage into the world around him would also allow for technology to flicker and react to his presence and in the very first scene where he harasses the siblings in their car (as well as the second time) this could allow for the radio station to skip around and play bits of the song for Darry to connect to the Creeper later on. He’d hear bits in the car the first two times, hear the actual thing at the church of pain via a gramophone, connect it to the creeper when they have the police escort and start panicking, and then BOOM problem solved and we still feel that same terror at the end when it’s playing. No dumb phone call that has basically no real payoff; however Jezelle could still allude to it being Trish later on for the aforementioned reasons.

The only downside to this is that this would make Jezelle’s character SEEM completely unimportant and that’s where I say NAY! Because now that we’re not focusing on dumb attempts to build a one off scare we can actually USE her LOGICALLY. If she can track them well enough to know when to call them at the diner then she can fucking FIND THEM AT THE DINER HERSELF, or just as well, FUCKNG FIND THEM WHEN THEY’RE GETTING ESCORTED BY THE POLICE. Either way, she’s there when the escort get essentially FUCKED by the Creeper and Jezelle with a gun just shoots the hell out of the fucker and Trish runs him over for good measure (or the other way around, or they trade off, fuck it’d still be a cool scene either way!) Jezelle escorts them to the closest police station and THATS when she could tell us about her visions and desire to help out.

This would lead to an even greater payoff with her character because now we can feel more engaged with her (imo). This wasn’t just someone who kinda tried to help and then finally at the last minute decided to come in to still do essentially nothing- No, NOW it’s someone who was so fed up with being unable to help that she gets off her ass and ACTUALLY HELPS. She gets badass granny moments, maybe even bips him a few times in the police station while also acting as bait and is STILL IGNORED AND STILL FAILS.

That would be THE BIGGEST KICK and makes her failure and pain even more palatable in the end. Just imagine it and tell me that wouldn’t be badass and depressing as hell with the same amount of horror aspects built into it.

#jeepers creepers #Jezelle #headcanons #improvements #character analysis

[next-lvl]

Majority of my followers know what Wakfu is, but not all know about the game: how many wounds it left in my heart, and everyone else’s. This post isn’t gonna be precisely explaining the wrongs that Wakfu did, I just wanted to mention that, in aftermath, it was a disaster of a game that left its most loyal players hurt, disappointed and immensely sad. I still keep meeting people who love this franchise, but can’t stand the game anymore since it’s.. Changed too much and didn’t stay enjoyable, to say mildly. I’m surrounded by, literally, traumatized veterans who look back at the good old days and shed tears. And I’ve been talking a lot about GW2 recently, not for no reason.

I want you to heal, just like I did. I mean.. I’m still hurt over Wakfu and I’ll stay this way forever, but I found a game where you can feel safe, loved, cared about. Devs in GW2 are humans who talk to us, who put smileys and memes in their posts, who hang out on reddit and ingame. This’s one of the major and striking differences between Wakfu and GW2. I’m still genuinely stunned by my own experience with customer support, I had a few troubles during my 1.5 years in GW2 and the response was not only fast and effective, it was HUMAN AND CUTE. I’m still not over it. Now that I’ve been invited to be a creative partner.. I’m still not over it too. They shower their regular players and content creators in gentle attention and kindness. I cry. During the 5+ years of being the most active and visible artist in Wakfu fandom, literally promoting it with thousands of drawings, I’ve never got a tiniest bit of official recognition. Not even a single placement on official media. When I took part in contests, I never won. Overall it’s been a one-way street. During my first 1.5 years in GW2, I’ve been noticed, picked up by the team, pampered and spoiled to the point of barely believing it’s true. That’s my personal experience, but it should indicate Anet’s general attitude towards the players. They. Do. Care.

I just wanna try and convince more ex-Wakfu players to give GW2 a shot. The two games are different in the visual and core gameplay aspects, yes, transitioning from an isometric 2D turn-based to a 3D, real-time game was somewhat harsh, but boy, how glad I am that I did it.

There’s EVEN MORE TEXT, brace yourselves. :D In GW2, I found everything that I wish was in Wakfu.

GW2 is a true sandbox. You log in, you do whatever the fuck you want. Level your first (second, 12th, 33rd, 68th) char? Grind mobs and dungeons? NO. Run around, look for events, explore, literally everything you do and everywhere you go, gives xp. You can level via crafting! Which, btw, is relevant throughout the entire game, unlike in Wakfu.

You do have dungeons of two kinds, and you CAN farm them if you want, but it’s your deliberate decision. There ARE farms in GW2, but they’re fun, if you’re not trying to get a legendary weapon in a month. I personally like running around with a bunch of random people who are there to FARM events in a specific map, but that happens once every two months.

Said legendary weapons ARE hard to get and yes, they can get you burnt out in no time if you don’t have a concept of a “long term goal”. Leggies are a prestige item, and, just like other prestige items (auras, specific minis, skins, etc), they’re meant to be your ultimate show-off item. People see you and know that you’ve been through.. A lot. BUT. Your hard-earned prestige item is to stay prestige. I assume you know relics in Wakfu? Then you must know what happened to them after a few years.

There’s no devaluing in GW2. Your trophies stay relevant and rare. Your prizes, your exclusive titles, skins, etc stay exclusive. You aren’t losing half of your wealth just because the devs decided to revamp ALL GEAR FOR THE THIRD TIME.

Speaking of the gear, the orange set you get at 80, is endgame gear. GW2 is 5 years old, so that orange gear is. People crafted it on the release and.. It stayed endgame. Yes, there’s also pink gear, which ~5% better than orange and is only needed if you do high lvl fractals or are min-maxing in raids. If you’re casual or just starting, you don’t even have to think about it. But once you craft your set, it stays relevant forever. People’s effort is never shoved up their asses.

There’s no constant carrot-on-a-stick gear upgrades. Level cap is 80 since release and will stay so. The game promotes safety and stability, that’s what attracted me. You take a 2 years break? No problem, you log in and go play. Nothing has lost its value, you don’t feel inferior, you don’t need to catch up to play with your friends.

Which reminded me: there’s a wonderfully done level downscale system. You’re a lvl 80 in a lvl 16 zone? Your stats are auto-adapted so the enemies you fought as a noob are still dangerous, and your reward (xp/gold/materials) is adapted to your true lvl. You go and play anywhere you want, and get fair rewards.

Crafting materials of all levels are also demanded and relevant. Oh yeah, you can run around for hours just gathering wood/ore, familiar to Wakfu players? It’s nice and relaxing until you meet another player. Well, in GW2 all gathering nodes are NOT shared. You see a tree? It’s your tree. That dude who runs up to it won’t steal it from you.

Oh also there’s no kill steal! Which is big, imo. You’re encouraged to play together, to help people kill stuff, to contribute to any event you see around, since everyone gets rewarded equally.

Legendary stability of GW2 servers. Lemme just say: there’s no weekly maintenance. There is. No. Downtime. Even on the big update days, you can download and play pretty safely. If there’s a hotfix, the game KINDLY WARNS YOU that you need to update and you have TWO FLIPPING HOURS to do so. Before you did that, you still can play, finish whatever you were up to.

Everything revolves around player’s happiness and convenience. There are constant quality-of-life updates. Your bags are full of crap? Here, salvage it into materials with two clicks, then deposit into your bank with two clicks (from anywhere in the world), then compact the rest of your shit. Yeah, with two clicks. x’D

There’s wonderful Fashion Wars. The game offers so much customization, and it’s taken so seriously, that it’s one of the endgame aspects. There’s 30000+ achievement points to earn, which are mostly fun and make you go out of your usual way. Dailies? You get 10 points and 2 gold for doing 3 easy tasks that take ~15 minutes.

There’s LORE. There’s fun little interactions all over the world. You just did an event? Stay here and listen, probably npcs will say/do something and start another event, logically following the previous one. The world lives and breathes. You can just walk around and observe. You’ll learn so much. And of course, there’s always a good cause to laugh. Dialogues/reactions are just hilarious sometimes.

Regarding the lore: there’s a so-called personal story which accompanies you up to lvl 80, then there’s “living world”, smaller events and single maps being rolled out every once in a while - so far there’s 2 seasons available, and 1 being “historical”, not playable anymore. In that season, they fucking crushed the main capital city. It changed forever. It was an epic event, which I missed, but watched people’s videos later. Then season 2, then HoT, then season 3, and now we’re waiting for PoF, second expansion. The updates have picked a nice pace and are frequent now.

There’s just so much to do. Just go, dive into the world and drown forever. :3c And meet me on the bottom. x’DD

GW2 feels different from Wakfu, but I found similarities for myself. It’s a sandbox after all, and later endgame has a lot of strategy. GW2 is never tank-and-spank. You just, literally, can’t facetank shit here. You gotta use your skills wisely, time your dodges, play with traits/passives until it all flows together. You’ve got a HUGE BUILD FREEDOM. There’s 9 classes, each having at least 3 defined roles, with more variations. You don’t just go ranger (oh archer it’s like a cra rite??) and do pew pew from max distance. Well, yes, you have a bow and can pew pew.. Or you can be a melee fighter, you can be a full blown healer/support.. As a ranger, yes.

I’ll be wrapping up now, I swear. GW2 is true f2p. Which of course does have a few restrictions (can’t trade or use map-chat), but you can get to 80, gear up and explore to your heart’s content before you decide to pay. I personally played for 5 months, every day, before I bought HoT.

Why’d you buy an expansion? More story, more maps, new class traits, gliding in HoT and mounts in PoF. The expansion and living world content has been constantly improving, visually, mechanically and lore/writing-wise.

Other than that, there’s a gemstore offering cosmetic and convenience items (gems can be bought for cash OR ingame gold). There are infamous rng boxes, but none of those are p2w. GW2 is oriented at the western consumer, which means, yeah, they know that we hate p2w and they’ll never do that to us.

*breathes out* I had to get that off my chest. I wanna talk about GW2 forever, but it’s exhausting to do one-on-one. :P Hopefully someone’s still reading this!

Now lemme remind you that now I have those partner links, if you use this to create a new account and play for free (for an hour or two months? w/e), or this to buy an expansion, I’ll get paid a bit. Not much, but it definitely helps!

And I was gonna write this wall of text regardlessly of the partnership one day, now I just have more incentive. x’DD Plus, we’re gonna have a beta weekend on 11-13 august, where you can preview the second expansion for free! It’s a perfect timing to write this post and try convincing you. You’ll just need a f2p account, and you’ll be given a lvl 80 boost and whatnot for that beta weekend. I’m not sure yet, but I assume you WILL. Just please register using my link above, so that I get paid for the two hours I spent on this post. :D

#wakfu #gw2 #guild wars 2 #please read it's like a matter of life and death to me #gw2 is everything for me right now #and i want YOU to play a game which would love you back

[kingofthewilderwest]

Alright I’m writing this post before I wimp out on this decision that I need to make. I’m going to try to explain with some thoughtful honesty about where I’m potentially going to be heading with my main blog. But because I have the habit of being... verbose... I’m putting my TL;DR at the top:

I am opening my ask box even though I still have dozens of analysis prompts saved from before I closed the ask box. It’s because I’m tired of not chatting with people in this amazing fandom. I love interacting!

I can no longer consistently analyze prompts. This means I cannot guarantee I will give a thorough analysis if I receive an analysis prompt. I will have to start giving answers like “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” or something based more on my gut than thorough research. If a topic really intrigues me, I might give a classic Haddock thorough response. But I can no longer guarantee long, consistent asks. I will, regardless, still respond to every ask I get!

I am so thankful for the experiences I have had with the HTTYD fandom and I would not trade my time on tumblr with you guys for anything. Seriously, you’ve all been amazing. I never would have expected to have such journeys, find such laughter, or make such friends as I have with all of you. Here’s to more fun times to come!

So now... the long version... 

I do encourage people to read it.

I have known for at least a year, if not two, that I could not keep up the pace of my blog analyses... not without sacrificing major opportunities or experiences in my life. I will be honest, me spending too much time on tumblr during my one year of the PhD program could have been one of the key reasons I couldn’t keep up. As much as I enjoy the community and as much as I am so happy to answer asks - it’s very fun and somewhat addictive - I know that I have to make decisions with my limited time.

I’m currently working three part-time jobs (~60 hours a week), am trying to find a good game plan for a stable lifelong career, and I have a lot of other adult-ing to do. When I do have free time, I want to be able to spend it hanging out with irl friends, reading books, studying theology and other topics of interest, reintegrating myself in the local church, writing novels, playing music, composing, drawing, conlanging, cosplaying, hiking, jogging, skiing, snowshoeing, watching good tv shows and movies, playing video games, spending time with family, making meaningful memories, etc.

I want to say that answering analyses on tumblr is something that is very meaningful to me. I don’t know how to say how touched I am that people are curious to hear my perspective. I never intended for kingofthewilderwest to be an analysis blog, yet here I am, wowed and grateful for over five thousand followers who have listened to me yak up a storm about an amazing franchise. I never would have imagined this would happen. I’m beyond grateful. What’s made it so worthwhile is interacting with you guys. I’m so happy to have had this experience and... I want to keep having this experience.

That said, answering asks on tumblr is perhaps not as “helpful” to me in the long run as working on a novel I hope to someday publish, or making sure I get a good night’s rest so I’m ready for another day of work. If I want to reach my life goals and have the meaningful experiences I dream of having, I have to make changes to my current day-to-day situation. I HAVE to. I want to get my life back in order, and I recognize my life has not been as “put together” since I started investing more time in tumblr. To get myself really firmly on track, I do have to loosen my hold on some of my free time activities, if not drop some things out altogether.

Answering analyses is a very time consuming process. VERY time consuming process. It can take me forty minutes or four hours to answer a single question. Not an exaggeration. This is because I often have to rewatch episodes and movies, do a bit of research online, give myself time to mull, and, all in all, invest a lot of time into answering a question. Even when I do consistently try my best to stay on track with answering asks... I cannot keep up with the volume of questions I receive. I wish I could, but I acknowledge I can’t. I still have asks in my inbox from the new year or older (Btw: the way my ask box system works: I keep the ask box open until I am >100 asks behind, then I close the box and answer all those, then open the ask box again). I am so, so sorry that I haven’t responded to all of you who have been patiently waiting for me, or you who may have even forgotten you sent in a question or comment.

I am sorry for all the people I will disappoint by not getting to your submitted asks with the thoroughness you were hoping. I will answer them, albeit not to my previous thorough standard. However, I hope you understand I feel it would be more thoughtful to provide you any response than to never return your messages.

My ask box has been closed because I still have about fifty asks left to answer before I’m caught up. But my ask box has been shut for a long time and I want to hang out with people and chat back and forth. So...

I’m going to open up my ask box again, but I hope you understand I suggest you do not inundate me with analysis requests. I want to open up my ask box so I can interact closely with everyone again... I always feel a little shut off and stale when I have my ask box closed. Now, you can send me analysis requests (when I’m not going through the really old ones in my drafts... again, sorry), but I cannot guarantee I will write an analysis in return. I’ll answer, but it might be a short “I’m not sure” or a few sentences of speculation instead of an essay. I’m happy to chat, I’m happy to discuss back and forth, whatever I want to do when I have the time for recreation, but I cannot be a one-person powerhouse publisher.

I don’t like doing this, but I’ve been needing to do this for a long time. So while I have the guts to write this and post it, I’m going to do it and make the decision final. Don’t make me back down. Don’t make me reverse this choice. Keep me accountable to my long-term life goals.

Another truth, and I am sorry to admit this to you guys, is that I’m not someone who’s used to staying in one fandom mindset for so long. I mean, I always love what I consume and always will get into it. But I’m more of the person to dance from passion to passion, from current interest to current interest, jumping in and out of the buzz of what I love. For instance, I might be on-and-off again with Star Wars, one year thinking about it and fanning about it a lot, another year not really caring. And I usually don’t get involved WITH a fandom... usually just scream about it with a few close irl friends and then move on. How to Train Your Dragon was a notable anomaly, a strange divergence from my typical patterning, and frankly it’s something I wouldn’t have stuck with for so long if not for my interaction with tumblr. If not for the HTTYD tumblr community, I likely would have been out of my HTTYD craze by mid-2015.

And while the HTTYD community has helped me sustain my ongoing interaction with the fandom, my personal passions are focused elsewhere now. I’m still always happy to talk dragons, mind! You guys can fuel me up again when I see you posting about it on tumblr. But in the last year and a half or two years, my mind hasn’t been focused on HTTYD. It’s been first Gravity Falls, then Undertale... and then, with the release of Andromeda, the Mass Effect franchise. I’ve also been going through crazes for things like Voltron: Legendary Defender. So, currently, my head is obsessing about Paladins and Alteans and Salarians and Spectres and Pathfinders and Space Exploration... not so much dragons and Vikings. It’s why my video game blog has been more active and responsive than this one. I’m very sorry if that statement disappoints you, friends. It’s a little weird for me too because I don’t know who all I can shout about my interests with (I only have a few friends who share these interests with me, and I’m sort of annoyingly “late in the fandom” if you know what I mean... don’t want to annoy the same people over and over again about something that’s 5+ years old, but who else do I talk to?). But, well, it is what it is. And it’s more fun for me to charge around with my latest obsession.

Let’s be clear: I’m not leaving you guys or running away or shutting myself off or becoming a hermit or anything. XD You guys mean too much to me to run off. I’m stuck here for good with you dragon nerds. Again, this community has been an extraordinary thing to me, and honestly, my interactions with the HTTYD fandom was the way I got out of a big depressive slump in 2014. So I’m still here! I’ll be staying here! I’m still going to commit to respond to every sincere message I receive! I’m just saying I’m going to invest less time in original posts, especially analyses. That’s all. :) 

It’ll be the best for my life. I hope you friends can all understand. We have to make decisions about the limited time in our lives.

But please! Feel free to chat and say hello and hop into my inbox again! Send little nothings or whatever’s on your mind. I’ve missed getting new asks! It’d be wonderful to hear from you again. <3

So yeah! That’s my honest report and stuff.

Take care, dragon nerds. 

#httyd fandom #kingofthewilderwest #analysis #my analysis #it's not actually an analysis but I'm tagging it so people see it when they look through my tags #blabbing Haddock #my life #PS if you like Mass Effect scream with me please!

[ourexes]

The "GIRLS" you hate are not on TV

Why the actual HBO show and its showrunner do not match the ones in your head.

              It’s so funny-slash-tragic that the overwhelming majority of people who hate Girls most adamantly are actually hating on a completely different show. One that must air in their minds whenever they get really angry at Lena Dunham or at Starbucks, but not on HBO at ten on Sundays.

               The latter is a half-satirized, half-empathy-demanding study on a very particular group of young women, with no intention or desire to represent the whole of either the millennial or female experiences—an impossible venture. Only that of these ultra-specific, oftentimes obnoxious four characters. Yet after six seasons of endless debate, many still don’t seem to get this.

               In preparation for the finale, I recently spent an afternoon scouring YouTube for old clips from the series, and in that dream-like coma made the always perilous and ill-advised decision to scroll down and scan the comments—if anyone cares to know, the post in question was a hilarious car-ride scene involving a Maroon 5 sing-along and Shoshanna’s thoughts on female presidential candidates. After some obligatory praise for Adam Driver’s character��the only dude involved—one observation with exactly forty defiant, icy blue upvotes read: Does Lena Dunham even listen to what comes out of her mouth?!

               Now, when I stumble upon things like these, me being the big boy that I am, my soul sinks a little—and unbidden red fury rises in its stead. Well, very confused person, A) Yes, she does, because this was actually put on paper many months in advance, perhaps even by herself, unless it was an improvised bit, and at any rate B) It’s really coming out of Hannah’s mouth, her character, the part she’s playing, and not hers. This is a scripted television series, not The Hills. Does not one of these people know the difference?

               In a wonderful piece by Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker two weeks ago, she attributes this tendency to conflate the two to the show’s ability to craft such raw, fully-fledged characters and stories. She argues that the writing and directing are so excellent, audiences can’t tell the difference between these scenes and real life. That’s high praise for a series with the naturalistic instincts and sensibilities of this one—for any scripted show, one would say, save for maybe Game of Thrones—, and a much more optimistic theory than the next most plausible one: sexism, and generational side-eye. These guys simply could not believe that a twenty-four-year-old woman could create a thoughtful, poignant fictional world, instead of the real-life version of UnReal’s very fake The Bachelor. Could she be capable of some actual, what’s the word? Self-awareness? Could she and her co-stars portray such narcissistic characters without they themselves being just as shallow? No, impossible. She doesn’t even look like a model! She must be a mess.

               Yes, it was mighty surprising to these folks when HBO—Deadwood-, The Sopranos-, Game of Thrones-, all-these-shows-these-macho-men-revere-HBO—succumbed to Dunham’s tricks, letting themselves be fooled by this chick’s—what, wanton sex-appeal? No, we’ve already discarded that. Um, art-world connections? Yes, HBO was tripping over itself to greenlight her pilot after that one.

               It’s so exhausting when everybody alive in this planet insists on having strong opinions about a TV show of which not even half of them have watched a single minute. Maybe a quarter of those have seen an episode, or two—if we’re being charitable. And then maybe ten percent, or five, actually understood what they were watching.

               And then they liked it—or they didn’t. Maybe it tickled their fancy, or they respectfully concluded that this wasn’t for them. But that makes Girls a perfect metaphor for the West’s current political climate—brace yourselves for we are reaching peak Girls think-piece here—: how can we have meaningful conversations about any one issue if we can’t even agree on what’s true and what isn’t? How can we talk about Girls, ultimately a piece of art, a work of fiction on premium cable, if we’re never even looking at the same show?

               A good illustrative example of this disconnect lies in the line that will likely go down as the show’s most memorable (and no, sadly it’s not “It was nice to see you. Your dad is gay”.) Near the end of the very first episode, an intoxicated Hannah rushes to her parents’ hotel room to hand them her manuscript, and announces that, while she doesn’t want to freak them out, she thinks that she may be the voice of her generation. “Or at least a voice”, she continues, “of a generation”.

               This comically self-aggrandizing statement is meant to be a joke on Hannah—who, it bears repeating, is on drugs in this scene—, on the complete lack of self-awareness that would come to characterize all the major players in the series, and most of the humor. But that didn’t stop smug bloggers and hot-takers from reading it as a mission statement by Dunham herself, all lines between reality and fiction be damned. In related news, Bryan Cranston cooks meth in his backyard.

               It is telling that these misunderstandings extend to Ms. Dunham as a creator and public figure. She first faced backlash for building a show that was ostensibly white—lambasted to an extent, it’s worth noting, that probably no other series in the history of television ever has or ever will be—, and supposedly trying (and of course failing) to act as a spokesperson for every woman in her twenties—an extremely lazy and outright inaccurate take, as we’ve established.  Never mind her much-repeated explanations that she, like so many of her peers, was only writing about her own experience—by definition limited—; and her willingness to engage with these conversations in a significant way, using them as a chance to learn; never acting dismissive or over-protective of her creative property. A willingness translated into attempts to bring on more non-white actors in guest-starring roles, her constant vouching for creators and storytellers of color (and of different genders, religions and sexualities) to be given the same chances that she got—a sentiment turned into tangible action with her feminist newsletter Lenny Letter, and her production company A Casual Romance, which provide a platform for those who lack one (both projects a result of her collaboration with Girls executive producer Jenni Konner)—and her own admission that, looking back, she “never want[s] to see another poster that’s four white girls”.

               And yet, has any of this been successful in appeasing the naysayers? Not a bit. Both Girls- and Lena Dunham-fueled loathing seems to exist in a stagnant pond near a fast-flowing river: unable to grow or morph into anything else, and unable to ever be challenged or debunked by the goings-on of the actual waters. Not unlike those liberal and conservative bubbles we keep hearing so much about.

               So, aside from the admittedly misguided remarks she sometimes makes in public (for which she tends to apologize), and a healthy little dose of envy towards her privileged status as a well-to-do white woman (which she seems aware of), the Lena Dunham you so vehemently hate probably does not exist either.

               This whole piece is not an attempt to shut down any criticism you might want to level at Girls if you haven’t consumed the sixty plus half-hours of content available—there’s a very important discussion about diversity that you’d still be rightfully invited to, for one (though I would still beg you to listen to what the people behind the scenes have to say on the matter, so that it is in fact a debate and not a monologue). But when we talk about the quality of the show, its value, again, as a work of art (and it is sad that so few of the conversations around it have actually been about this), if you haven’t even seen it—or you have, but refuse to engage with what it’s trying to tell you—, how to put this gently? Just shut up.

               You do not need to have opinions about every other thing under the sun (this is a hard concept for a lot of people to grasp, I know. I blame capitalism). And if you do, we certainly don’t need to hear them all. Girls is famously not a show for the faint of heart. Nor is it one for the lazy hot-take pitchers or the confirmation-bias-hungry. I mean, sure, you can still watch it—but it’ll be an entirely different piece.

               Having informed opinions to contribute to the conversation takes work. Work no one is forcing you to do—not every piece of culture needs to appeal to you, and not every Summer best seller or successful movie franchise requires your input. So, stop being lazy and make an effort to listen, to understand why a group of people have assembled all these different pieces to put together the product in front of you, what their goal is and whether they achieve it—and where, and how—, and how you might be expected to react to all this; or shut up, quit clogging the Internet, and put on Bones or whatever.

Find this post and more here.

#girls hbo #girls #lena dunham #please read this i worked hard to finally gather my thoughts and take you all to school #writing

[candidateofloyalty]

2019 Fic Retrospective

I saw a number of people doing this, and since I’m always up for talking about my own writing, I decided to imitate them. Admittedly, I’m a bit late, but since I didn’t have computer access for a decent part of this week I think it’s justified.

Apparently I wrote 55k words of fic this year? Given that I spent half the year out of the country, that is higher than I expected. I guess suddenly allowing a podcast to become my entire personality is a powerful motivator.

1/31

The Clock Strikes Midnight, Fire Emblem Echoes, 3.5k words

The prince is throwing a ball to find a spouse, and Faye just knows that this is her chance to make her dreams come true. There's no time for her to worry about the messenger who brought her the news, not when she can finally live out her fairytale.

My birthday gift for star, this time only posted one day after their birthday. Someday I will figure out this timing thing. They wanted a Cinderella AU, and as someone who read approximately 5 million fractured fairytale novels in high school, I had an immediate idea of where I wanted to take the plot. I’m pretty pleased with how this one came out, especially since I never actually played Echoes. It’s also one of my rare fics where the title isn’t a song lyric.

2/14

Sacred Simplicity, Dangan Ronpa, 900 words

Sakura and Aoi meet up for their weekly donut date, but Sakura's mind is elsewhere.

I can’t believe it took a fic exchange to get me to write Sakuraoi. The request was cute and I had a good time, though. I’m always a fan of the concept of Hope’s Peak practical exams. The whole premise of the franchise is that these kids have crazy skills, so let them use them.

3/3

My Fantasies from Long Ago, Persona 4, 5.2k words

While walking home from work, Yosuke is hit on the head by a mysterious cat-dog-thing. This is the least weird thing that happens to him over the course of the next 24 hours.

Apparently I had a lot of outside sources of inspiration this year. I guess that’s what all fanfic is, but even so. This AU is from kawaii-bunny-mel, and is ridiculously fun to write. This one sticks pretty close to the source material, since I intended it as an introduction to the AU. I wrote most of it on trains while cross-referencing the original episode. As it turns out, writing is much faster when you don’t have to worry about pacing or coming up with original events.

5/4

The Present You's Daydreams, Persona 4, 7.2k words

Yosuke's been doing magical girl temp work for about a month, and it's pretty much the best thing that's ever happened to him, even if it does mean having a weird bear roommate. Then Souji invites him to a party, and Yosuke has to face something even scarier than magical enemies: social interaction.

The second part of the BAPC AU, and the one where I went off and did my own thing. As much as I love the source material, I wanted to fit the rest of the IT in somewhere, and there are like 6 characters in the entirety of BAPC. Really, though, a significant amount of this fic was an excuse to have Yosuke use his customer-service voice on a dragon. I’d also meant for this to be the one where they got together, or at least showed mutual interest, and then Yosuke went and made things awkward. I don’t know what I expected. I got to write Hamuko being cryptic at Souji, though, which was even better.

5/19

Dazzling Blue Sky on the Window, Persona 3, 3.9k words

After Erebus, Metis is prepared to vanish, but Igor suggests another option.

This one was my birthday present to myself. You might wonder what that means when all of my fic is incredibly self-indulgent to begin with, and the answer is merging two universes and saving my favorite minor character in the process. It was only after the fact that I realized how much projection was involved. It’s fine.

6/16

Bright-Eyed, Tireless One, The Adventure Zone, 2.2k words

Minerva is here, physically present, and Duck's so glad to see her. The only question is what to do with her. They've got enough people hidden in the Amnesty Lodge basement as it is. (Immediately post Episode 28)

I caught up to Amnesty right after episode 28 was released, which is what we in the writing business call good timing. I immediately wrote this in a haze of love for Minerva and have not thought about it since. I think episode 30 confirms it as canon, though.

7/8

Not So Nec-Romantic, Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun, 1.7k words

Nene's been studying to join the Healers' Guild for years, and it's finally time for her admissions test. It doesn't quite go as planned.

Star egged me on to write this and then wrote their own, funnier take on an RPG AU, which would have been rude if it weren’t for the fact that I got to read the better fic without having to write it. My favorite part of this fic is Mitsuba and Kou charging in from their epic fantasy quest without noticing that they’ve landing in the middle of a comedy of errors. I kind of want to write what they were actually up to but also it’s funnier this way.

8/25

Open Seas and Ways Of Life I've Forgotten, Friends at the Table, 3.5k words

Cass is adjusting just fine to life on their own, thank you.

They'd be doing even better if their new teammate wasn't so eerily reminiscent of their sibling, but that's all right. They're definitely coping.

And here we hit the fatt tipping point of my year. The Kingdom Game was probably the point where I fully devoted myself to this show, and a large part of that was the ability to conspiracy-board all of Sokrates’ influences on Cass’ personality. I have not stopped thinking about the Pelagios siblings since.

9/29

Not the Only Ones Pretending, Friends at the Table, 1.2k words

It sounds so nice, in theory. Mako's just running into an old friend while going out for fried chicken. But even though the Chime has broken up, two of them in the same place can still throw the simplest of missions into chaos.

I wrote this in an hour after listening to the penultimate episode of Counter/weight because the Orth-Mako scene ended right where things got good, to my mind. I just wanted to know more about how the Chime interacted after the timeskip. This also marks the start of me defaulting to Mako’s POV in every other Counter/weight fic I write.

10/14

A Magic That Won't Go Cold, Friends at the Table, 4.5k words

Jacqui doesn't normally like being sent on bodyguard jobs, but then, she's not normally working for Joypark darling Aria Joie.

I’ll just come up with a fun Jacria AU to think about in my spare time, I thought to myself. There’s a lot to explore with an Aria who never left Joypark. I can come up with some neat bullet points and it will be a good time. Then I started connecting the bullet points and at that point I had an entire outline for a fic. It’s what they deserve.

10/18

Questions Ricochet Like Broken Satellites, Friends at the Table, 2k words

Kobus' entire life had been pointless, but for once, they could see exactly what they needed to do. Then Vicuna pulled them out of Liberty and Grace.

I could not tell you why I latched onto Kobus so hard, but that didn’t stop me from doubling the size of their ao3 tag in a month. This fic ended up pretty depressing, which is ironic since the whole point was to give them a happier ending than they got in canon, but at least they’re alive at the end of it.

11/4

Detect My Sudden Existence on Your Sonar, Friends at the Table, 3.1k words

AuDy didn't intend for the rest of the Chime to move in with them. They didn't object when it happened, though.

I had a lot of trouble trying to write from AuDy’s perspective but I’m pleased with the end result. Maybe next I’ll figure out how to do pacing and/or tonal consistency. I do like the Cass stuff at the end but I think my favorite scene from this fic is everyone helping Aria unpack her stuff and being goofy.

11/11

Telling Dreams from One Another, Friends at the Table, 1.3k words

Mako shows up on Kobus' doorstep holding a Divine, and doesn't even have the decency to bring fried chicken.

This started because I kept thinking about how Kobus’ form of Ambition would have been Faith and how close that comes to Loyalty, and then the more I wrote the more I liked the dynamic between Kobus and the younger Makos. A lot of it can be summed up as Mako being the mid-twenties upperclassman who looks at the freshman and goes “oh look, a baby” much to the freshman’s annoyance, except instead of being in college they’re both secret agents raised as weapons since they can remember. It isn’t addressed in the fic but I imagine this ends with Kobus following Mako back to Kesh and ending up with eight identical older siblings.

11/24

Find Out What Broke Me Soon Enough, Friends at the Table, 1.9k words

Kobus is still reeling from their failed attack on Grace, but when Aria Joie asks for their help, they can't think of a good reason to refuse.

Continuing the theme of “what if Kobus had friends,” I like the idea of Aria being worried about Righteousness consuming her and going to the one person she knows of who’s successfully stepped away from a Divine. Like the last fic in the series, I tried very hard to give Kobus a happy ending and they categorically refused. As it turns out, when you’ve been raised to see yourself as a sacrifice for the greater good, it’s hard to find other ways to make a difference, and Aria doesn’t know them well enough to push it. One day I will find the right combination of characters and circumstances to let Kobus rest.

12/7

Take Our Time 'Cause It Feels Like We're Dying, Friends at the Table, 1.7k words

When Cass coughed up the first flower petal, all they could do was stare at it in disbelief.

Yes, I know, hanahaki. I am surprised at myself too. I was just thinking about what it would take to get me invested in hanahaki and because of who I am as a person my brain immediately applied that to Counter/weight. I know where I’m going with it but I want to finish F&M before continuing, so keep an eye out maybe in February. Also, doing this retrospective made me realize that this is the second time I’ve used a line from this song as a title for a Counter/weight fic. Whoops.

12/17

The Movements of My Mind, Friends at the Table, 1k words

On his way back to Auniq for the negotiations, Throndir stops by the cave where he met Kindrali.

My first non Counter/weight fatt fic, and once again it is introspection about a Dre character, because without realizing it I ended up with a favorite player. I just like coming up with in-universe explanations for things that were probably mistakes on their part, and I’m always interested in how the Kindrali connection works. Even if I am now incapable of thinking of Kindrali without going “I wonder what day he remembers??”

12/25

Fantasy and Microchips, Friends at the Table, 9.2k words

Five times Mako hacks things accidentally because of Cass, and one time it's intentional.

The year ended as it began, with me taking someone else’s AU and writing a fic about it. In this case, it’s a comic done by drowzydruzy on twitter. I looked at it, went “that’s pretty funny, maybe I could write a fic about it,” and then two chapters in I realized how to exploit it for angst and pretty much didn’t stop. The trickiest part so far has been making Rigor references without getting too heavy-handed. I’m halfway through writing the last chapter now, so naturally I’m procrastinating by doing this meme. It’s actually a meta-narrative about defeating Rigor by not being too beholden to your own projects, or something.

#ignore me #fic retrospective #this will only interest me but i had to talk about my thoughts on a kobus-mako relationship somewhere

[jeroldlockettus]

Inside the Sports-Industrial Complex (Ep. 364)

The N.F.L. makes roughly $7 billion a year from TV contracts, more than any other sports league in the world — and more than all the other big U.S. sports leagues combined. (Photo: Ronald Martinez/Getty)

For most of us, the athletes are what make sports interesting. But if you own the team or run the league, your players are essentially very expensive migrant workers who eat into your profits. We talk to N.F.L., N.B.A., and U.F.C. executives about labor costs, viewership numbers, legalized gambling, and the rise of e-sports. (Ep. 5 of “The Hidden Side of Sports” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Lauren MURPHY: When you bleed and sweat and cry with somebody every day, you get to be pretty close to them.

JJ REDICK: For me, shooting a basketball and seeing it go through the net became just an obsession.

Kim NG: If you want something, you have to be aggressive.

Mark CUBAN: Yeah we were awful. When players were traded here, they just couldn’t wait to get out.

Daryl MOREY: Oh, I care so deeply, and it’s stupid. I have no idea why I care, but I like winning.

MURPHY: And I distinctly remember thinking, “I’m going to get better at this and I’m going to come back and I’m going to kick your ass someday.”

CUBAN: I’ll take e-sports. Yeah, buy e-sports, sell N.F.L.

Mark Cuban is an entrepreneur, and also a star of Shark Tank and owner of the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks. When he said he’d sell the N.F.L. and take e-sports — I’d asked him to play a game of buy, sell, or hold with three stocks: the National Football League, the Ultimate Fighting Championship or U.F.C., and a basket of e-sports. So why is Cuban selling the N.F.L., which is the most profitable sports league in the world?

CUBAN: I just think C.T.E. creates a problem.

C.T.E. being chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or the brain damage associated with contact sports like football.

CUBAN: So participation has been dropping the last few years and will continue to drop more. I have an 8-year-old son; there’s no way I’d let him play tackle football. If you don’t want your child playing contact football then you diminish the viewing in the house. Now he’d much rather play Fortnite than watch football.

DUBNER: Okay, and you’re buying e-sports. So say why, and especially explain to people who can’t get their mind around it at all: what is the appeal of watching — I mean there’s stadiums being built. So why do twenty, fifty thousand people want to go to a stadium to watch other people play video games?

CUBAN: Because once you play, you understand the nuances of the game, and it’s aspirational and educational. So if you like to play League of Legends — it’s hard. But one of the ways to get better is to watch other people play. And to learn the nuances and to learn the strategies, particularly given that they change the rules every 90 or 120 days. The e-sports teams have got to practice hours and hours and hours a day. So, it takes a real skill, it’s a real sport, and you also have to realize that anybody in front of a PS2, Xbox, or PC watching these kids that play, in their mind just like we watched sports growing up and say, “Hey if they can do it I can do it.” That’s the aspirational part of it as well. There’s no physical hurdles — you can be 4 feet 1 inch or 7 feet 1 inch, and if you’ve got the hand-eye coordination and the brain-processing speed and anything’s possible, you could do it too.

Is e-sports really the future juggernaut Cuban describes? At the very least, he’s putting his money where his mouth is: among his many sports-technology investments is an e-sports betting platform called Unikrn. In this regard, Cuban is not an outlier. A lot of N.B.A. teams — as well as teams from the National Football League and Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer — they’re all investing in e-sports franchises that play games like League of Legends, Fortnite, and Overwatch. A lot of venture capital firms are investing as well. The global e-sports market is said to be approaching $1 billion, up roughly 40 percent from a year earlier — and that doesn’t even include the money flowing to the game companies themselves. Blizzard Activision, which makes Overwatch, reported $4 billion in revenue in 2017 from in-game purchases. If I had told you 10 years ago that e-sports would be a booming industry funded by multi-billion-dollar sports organizations, you probably wouldn’t have believed me. But if I’d told you a hundred years ago that multi-billion-dollar sports organizations would even exist, you wouldn’t have believed that either. Sports, in the very beginning, were a proxy for war. Here’s John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball.

John THORN: The 30 best men of one side against the 30 best men of another, and both sides agreed to abide by the outcome.

Later on, sports became a tool of empire, of colonialism — a civilizing force, or at least that’s what the civilizers said.

THORN: Well, we sublimate our martial instincts by pouring them into sport. We can paint our faces, we can drink ourselves silly, we can yell insulting epithets at the umpire or certain players.

And what has sports become these past few decades?

ANCHOR: LeBron James agreed to a four-year, $154 million contract with the Lakers.

ANCHOR: Fox striking a five-year rights agreement with the N.F.L. worth about $3 billion.

ANCHOR: Record-shattering deal — Alvarez signed a five-year, 11-fight deal worth a minimum of $365 million.

ANCHOR: Serena Williams just topped the Forbes list of highest paid female athletes for the third year in a row.

ANCHOR: Rockets owner Leslie Alexander has agreed to a deal to sell the Rockets to Houston billionaire Tilman Fertitta for $2.2 billion a record for an N.B.A. franchise.

Yes, sports has become big business. How big?

Victor MATHESON: So, the answer here is actually surprisingly small. Sports has a social impact that is way, way bigger than its economic impact.

That’s Victor Matheson, an economist at Holy Cross and president of the North American Association of Sports Economists.

MATHESON: So the biggest league in the world in terms of revenue generated is the N.F.L., and the N.F.L. generates something like $14, $15 billion a year.

Add in all the other major American leagues, plus the P.G.A., pro tennis, mixed martial arts and so on:

MATHESON: You’ve got maybe $50 billion of pro sports, a few more tens of billions of dollars in college sports. But you’re still only up at $60, $70 billion. That makes spectator sports in the United States roughly the same size as the cardboard-box industry in the United States. Now obviously none of us gather around the water cooler on Monday morning saying, “Hey man, over the weekend, did you see that awesome cardboard box that American Paper just put out?” Of course we don’t. So obviously, culturally, sports is huge.

Okay, so the sports industry punches above its weight in cultural significance, that seems clear. One way to think about this is that consuming sports is really cheap considering how much attention we give it. That said, a $60 or $70 billion industry isn’t nothing. It’s an industry that offers a select few athletes the chance to become multi-millionaires; and it gives billionaires somewhere to park their money that’s a bit more exciting than cardboard boxes.

So, our “Hidden Side of Sports” series continues with a look at how this industry works from the ownership and management side. How does a game become a sport become a business become an industry? We’ll get into the economics of a startup league. We’ll hear how the big leagues are trying to get even bigger. We’ll hear what team executives hate about their own sports. We’ll learn about an exciting legal development. And we’ll get into the unusual fact that in sports, your labor force is also your product.

*      *      *

DUBNER: So let’s begin. If you would, just say your name and what you do.

Lawrence EPSTEIN: My name is Lawrence Epstein. I’m the chief operating officer at the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

DUBNER: And for those who’ve never seen a U.F.C. fight or maybe who don’t know anything about the U.F.C. or M.M.A., mixed martial arts, just describe it.

EPSTEIN: Mixed martial arts is essentially the sports of boxing, jujitsu, judo, karate, muay thai, taekwondo, and then both freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling all combined into one sport. And the U.F.C. is a brand name that we operate our promotion under.

DUBNER: Okay, so let’s focus on the U.F.C. then. How often does a fighter typically fight?

EPSTEIN: We’ve got currently about 525 fighters under contract and they fight on average about 2.3 times per year. Over our 25-year history, we’ve done about 9,500 individual bouts.

DUBNER: Okay, what share of U.F.C. fighters are female, and do women ever fight against men?

EPSTEIN: No. Absolutely no women against men. But about 15 percent of our athletes are currently female, and that percentage is growing.

DUBNER: So, I understand that you recently negotiated a new TV deal, this is with ESPN for—

EPSTEIN: $300 million per year, over five years, $1.5 billion in total.

If you’re not a fan of mixed martial arts, you may be wondering how such a league could be so valuable.

EPSTEIN: Dana White, our president, he says, “There’s four corners in any city, anywhere in the world. One corner, you got a soccer game going. On another corner, you got a basketball game going on. On the third corner, you got some guys playing tennis. And on the fourth corner, a fight breaks out. What happens? Everybody runs to the fourth corner to watch the fight. So people understand fighting. They get it. It’s part of our D.N.A. and they like it.

In 2016, the mega-agency W.M.E./I.M.G. and a group of private equity firms bought a majority stake in the U.F.C. for nearly $4 billion. Its ringleaders, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, had acquired the U.F.C. just 15 years earlier for $2 million.

EPSTEIN: Lorenzo Fertitta famously says that, “I paid $2 million for three letters, U.F.C.” And that was really essentially all that was purchased. There was literally a box of contracts and there was another box of tapes and there was a wooden octagon that had been used over the years.

Many businesses talk about, “We built this thing from the ground up.” We actually inherited a business that was about 10 stories underground and it took us about three or four years to get up to the ground level before we could actually turn it into a real business.

DUBNER: Now, how do you get that done? Because this was a sport that was nearly driven to extinction before it had the chance to get big. Senator John McCain famously called it “human cockfighting,” led the charge against it. So, how did you turn that around, state by state?

EPSTEIN: We put together a set of assets that included the economic impact our events were having in regulated markets, the truth about health and safety, whether our athletes were sustaining major injuries or not, and of course they weren’t. Third we had — and this was the most compelling thing — we had many of our athletes help us in this process and introducing elected officials to our athletes was key. And the other factor, which was really, really interesting was the staff at all of these offices around the world are generally young people. I mean, you’ve probably been to legislators’ offices, and you’ve got people that are right out of college. Early 20’s, mid-20’s.

DUBNER: And they’re fans.

EPSTEIN: They are fans. They love it. So they’re talking to their boss, saying, “This stuff is awesome. These people are cool. This is something that’s fun to watch,” and the staffers were absolutely key in convincing the elected officials to ultimately vote in favor of regulating the sport. But the whole premise of the original Ultimate Fighting Championship was: there are no rules. It was a no-holds-barred event. And that was just something that we felt didn’t have any sustainability. You had to have regulation. You had to have a regulatory environment that looked a lot like the boxing regulatory environment. And so that’s what we did.

So the U.F.C., in state-by-state petitioning, made itself legal and legitimate. But it still had one big problem.

EPSTEIN: We couldn’t get on television. There was no interest in putting us on any television other than pay-per-view. So we put on these pay-per-view events and we had to produce them ourselves. So we actually developed a core competency in putting on these fairly unique events with, many times, 20–24 different cameras.

This practice, interestingly, continues today.

EPSTEIN: One of the reasons why we are a little bit different than the other sports organizations is that we pay all of the production expenses for our event. As far as I know, we’re the only sort of major sports organization that does it ourselves.

Consider, for instance, the N.F.L.

EPSTEIN: When they do a deal with CBS Sports, they just get a check and CBS Sports, in addition to paying them billions of dollars every year, they also handle all of the production.

Okay, so the U.F.C. early on learned how to produce its own events. But they were still a fringe sport, relegated to pay-per-view. So they did what any sensible start-up sports league would do: they created a reality TV show.

EPSTEIN: You take 16 athletes, you put them in a house, they do a bunch of goofy things like you always see on reality shows, and at the end of each episode there’s a fight. Winner stays, loser goes home.

The show was called The Ultimate Fighter. It went on the air in 2005.

EPSTEIN: We were able to do a deal with Spike television, and they didn’t pay us anything, but they said, “We’ll let you put this on our air. We’ll give you not all, but we’ll give you half of the ad inventory.” And we went out and tried to sell that ad inventory. We were able to sell no ads at all, to any sponsor. So we took that ad inventory and used it to promote our upcoming pay-per-view. And any metric that you look at in the U.F.C., whether it’s profitability, or the number of fans that we have, or ratings, we have the sort of hockey-stick type of a graph and the inflection point is The Ultimate Fighter, Season One.

The U.F.C. has grown exponentially since then, and has the ESPN deal to prove it, but it still relies heavily on pay-per-view as well, distributed via cable and satellite as well as digitally, via Amazon and its own UFC.TV. Their biggest pay-per-view hit to date was actually a boxing match between the undefeated fighter Floyd Mayweather Jr. and U.F.C. champion Conor McGregor. Epstein points to one big downside of the pay-per-view model.

EPSTEIN: I mean, it’s a 100 percent churn business. We sold 3.5, 4 million-plus buys for Mayweather vs. McGregor, and every one of those customers left. We didn’t keep one of them. We got to resell them for the next fight.

DUBNER: So, that is a really interesting conundrum, and I’m kind of surprised that you guys haven’t solved that yet.

EPSTEIN: I mean, our decision’s been frankly strategic. We’ve decided this is the world we want to live in. Because as consumers change the way they’re consuming content, we can simply shift content into different buckets to meet consumer demand. But at the end of the day, pay-per-view is a bet on yourself. And listen, if ESPN was willing to pay us what they’re paying the N.F.L., I think we’d probably get off pay-per-view, but they’re not. And in the meantime, we are willing to bet on ourselves.

Betting on themselves has served the U.F.C. well; they’ve joined the pantheon of prominent American sports leagues. Which, they’ve discovered, presents its own challenges:

EPSTEIN: Well, the challenges are competition. And I’m not talking about just competition from other M.M.A. promoters, but we’re competing against the N.F.L., college football, baseball, video games, movies, YouTube videos, and the list goes on and on. The consumer is getting bombarded with options for lots of entertainment, and of course the consumer only has a certain amount of bandwidth for their time and a certain amount of bandwidth for their wallet.

Welcome to big-time sports. Where even the behemoths are worried about their future.

Jed YORK: We are the dominant sport in America. But if we really want to build our business and become an international sport, that’s going to take some figuring out.

That’s Jed York of the National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers. He’s the team’s C.E.O. and a co-owner.

YORK: I would first say that the biggest blessing and the biggest curse of the N.F.L. are the TV contracts, where it makes you very successful, but it also makes it so you don’t really try new things and try to disrupt.

How big are the N.F.L.’s TV contracts? Roughly $6 billion a year, No. 1 in the world. No. 2, at just under $5 billion, is the FIFA World Cup — which is pretty remarkable for an event whose finals are held only every four years, although they are playing to a global audience. Rounding out the top 10 global TV contracts are the N.B.A. and Major League Baseball; the top soccer leagues in England, Germany, and Spain along with the UEFA Champions League; and the Summer and Winter Olympics. Not cracking the top 10 are the N.H.L, M.L.S., or U.F.C. Which means the N.F.L. has more TV revenue than all the other big American sports leagues combined.

Al GUIDO: Thirty-three of the top 50 shows are still N.F.L. TV games.

That’s Al Guido, president of the San Francisco 49ers.

GUIDO: The eyeballs are still there, they’re just scattered. They’re just in different places. And I think the N.F.L., along with every other league, needs to do the best job they can getting content in a fan’s hands, wherever they are. And that’s changing dramatically.

Cable subscriptions in the U.S. have been dropping fast; 54 percent of viewers between 18 and 29 use streaming services more than cable. That said, live sports are much better-positioned than just about any other kind of content that plays on old-fashioned TV.

MATHESON: We still do watch the Super Bowl live, we watch the World Cup live, we watch the World Series live, and that gives advertisers a chance to put their product in front of a live audience. And it’s one of the last places that that happens. And this is why we still see increasing contracts even though the actual number of eyeballs watching sports contests is not going up particularly quickly.

The N.F.L. has also made big deals to stream its games: Amazon, for instance, recently renewed its N.F.L. deal, paying $65 million a year for the digital right to stream 11 Thursday night games that are already being broadcast on TV. That was a 30 percent bump over the same rights last season. Amazon reportedly beat out rival offers from Twitter and YouTube.

GUIDO: My 9-, 7-, and 5-year-olds don’t even turn on the TV.

The 49ers’ Al Guido again. He’d like the N.F.L. to grow, especially overseas; but that’s complicated.

GUIDO: In the N.F.L., we have what I would deem right now an event-based strategy. We host games overseas. And that is immensely — I mean, it’s successful. However, what is the global strategy and footprint long term? What is it at the league level, what is the team level? And how do we incentivize our clubs to invest more money outside of their footprint? I am frustrated at the inability for us to take our rights and marks across global footprints.

I’ll give you a specific example: Jarryd Hayne was on our team a few years ago, Australian rugby player, they said he was the Michael Jordan of Australian rugby. He comes over here, he plays, he’s an immediate success. Sells more jerseys than any player in the N.F.L. We obviously would love to do a deal over there with Rio Tinto, or we��d love to open up a pop-up retail shop in Australia. We can’t. Well, we can, but if we were to sell our rights and marks and they were to use it in Australia, that revenue is split 32 ways. Doesn’t necessarily come back to the team.

DUBNER: Thirty-two ways because 32 teams in the league?

GUIDO: Right. So we make as much money on a Jimmy Garoppolo jersey as we might on a Russell Wilson jersey.

Okay, let’s take a step back here. Jimmy Garoppolo is a 49ers player; Russell Wilson is not. Al Guido’s point is that the N.F.L., like most American sports leagues, is so devoted to its revenue-sharing model — from TV income all the way down to merchandising — that the incentives can be skewed. With revenue sharing, a team can make a lot of money even if it has a losing record every year; and why invest in new ideas when others don’t have to, and when you get an even cut of the pie regardless? As Jed York said, that’s the downside of the N.F.L.’s fat TV contracts:

YORK: It makes you very successful, but it also makes it so you don’t really try new things and try to disrupt.

This sort of revenue-sharing is a key feature of American sports leagues. It’s less business model than cartel model; it’s a sort of billionaire socialism. And this is not, by the way, how the big soccer leagues work in Europe — where, interestingly, there’s a lot of political socialism. The European soccer leagues do share some revenues but, unlike most American sports leagues, there are essentially no firm salary caps, and every year the weakest teams are relegated out of the league while new ones are promoted.

Stefan SZYMANSKI: Well, I’ve always been very surprised by this.

Stefan Szymanski is a British economist who teaches sports management at the University of Michigan.

SZYMANSKI: So to me, thinking as an economist, I think of this as the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. And when I think of Europeans in general, we tend to have strong systems of social services and safety nets, which ensure, really to a large extent, equality of outcomes within the European systems. But traditionally, we have a sense of limited equality of opportunity. We have class systems, we have big social gaps. And America, we always think of as being the reverse — where there’s equality of opportunity, but very limited safety net.

And it seems to me the sports story is completely the opposite. In Europe, we have this incredibly hyper-competitive, capitalist system where the devil take the hindmost, and we have a lot of financial failure in Europe. That’s also one thing that goes with this — an incredible financial distress and failure. And yet, in America, there’s these leagues which are essentially closed societies, which don’t allow any competition, and then share out the resources equally in almost a socialist fashion amongst the top teams. It seems that the mental framework for sports is at odds with the mental framework about competition in society more broadly.

That said, the American sports business model is too entrenched to change much, at least anytime soon. So how, in the face of more and more entertainment competition, are these giant leagues looking to grow?

Kim NG: Right now, one of the Commissioner’s main objectives is to spread the game globally.

Kim Ng is a senior executive with Major League Baseball.

NG: We’ve been very aggressive on that front. We’ve had games in the last couple of years from spring training to regular season games in Puerto Rico, Mexico, next year we’ll be in London. We’re doing a barnstorming tour in Asia as well as playing some regular-season games in Japan.

Major League Baseball, despite declining stadium attendance, is still the world’s second biggest sports league by total revenue. It hopes to maintain that status not just by bringing American baseball to the rest of the world, but by bringing the rest of the world to American baseball.

NG: We have three development centers in China. We have high-performing programs in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Nicaragua, Curacao, South Africa, and these are basically academies in which we train kids on a yearlong basis and they go to school as well. And our goal is to get them into colleges and hopefully some of them into the big leagues as soon as we can.

*      *      *

Even the most profitable sports league in the world — the National Football League — is concerned about its future. TV revenues are still strong, but viewership is slipping. Some people have been turned off by the sport’s violence, and the risk to players. Others didn’t like how the National Anthem protests turned the game of football into a political football. And the N.F.L.’s most visible attempt to globalize the game — it was called N.F.L. Europe — it failed. So, as in any maturing industry, the league has been searching for new revenues. The U.S. Supreme Court recently did its part to help. In May of 2018, it struck down a federal law that had limited legal sports betting to Nevada. Which should be good news for the NFL and other American sports leagues.

GUIDO: Yes, I mean, from a revenue perspective, there’s no question.

San Francisco 49ers president Al Guido.

GUIDO: If you think about what fantasy football has done, it’s increased the popularity of our sport.

EPSTEIN: Gambling on sport is good for sport in the sense that it creates revenue opportunities and it creates a deeper fan connection to the matches, the games, the events themselves.

Lawrence Epstein is with the U.F.C..

EPSTEIN: So there is no doubt that the proliferation of sports gaming around the United States is going to be good for not just the U.F.C., not just the N.F.L., but all sport.

The U.F.C. happens to be based in Las Vegas. Sports leagues used to stay far away from Vegas, worried about the long-standing, and well-deserved, connection between gambling and match fixing. The most famous fix — alleged fix, at least — was the 1919 World Series. In early 2019, more than two dozen professional tennis players were arrested for participating in a match-fixing ring based in Spain.

That said, even before the Supreme Court ruling, American sports leagues were finally starting to shed their fear of the Vegas connection. In 2017, the National Hockey League finally put a team there, the Las Vegas Golden Knights. Their first season got underway just a few days after the horrible mass shooting in Vegas where 58 people were killed at a music festival, and the Golden Knights turned into one of the biggest feel-good stories in recent memory by making it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final. And next year, the N.F.L.’s Oakland Raiders will become the Las Vegas Raiders.

The embrace between professional sport and professional gambling would seem to be complete. What does this mean for the leagues and their teams? Here’s Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

CUBAN: Yeah, I think it’ll lead to our franchise valuations doubling, literally, because there’s a lot more reasons for people to pay attention, a lot more reasons for people to watch. And that’s good for our bottom line.

It’s too early to say whether team valuations really will increase like Cuban suspects, or even to say exactly how gambling fees will be divided. Individual states are already setting up their sports-betting tax rates, and teams and players are angling for their cut as well. One idea that’s been pitched is a so-called “integrity fee” — an incentive to keep the matches clean. I asked the sports economist Victor Matheson who he thinks will be the biggest winners and losers as sports gambling grows in America.

MATHESON: So, I would say the biggest winners are all of the professional leagues. The people simply enjoy the sport more when they have something riding on it. There’s a reason why every March, everyone tunes into all those first- and second-round March Madness games: because everyone has filled out a bracket and it’s hoping their bracket isn’t busted on the first day.

So, we know that gambling makes things exciting, but we also know gambling can lead to corruption. And there’s two really big losers here: I think the N.C.A.A. is a huge loser here, because their athletes are particularly vulnerable to corruption because they’re not being paid. Now mind you, that’s the N.C.A.A.’s own fault for not paying their athletes. But we don’t have to worry about LeBron James or Steph Curry throwing games because they’re not going to risk their $30 million paychecks and their reputations to try to make a little money from a mobster. On the other hand, an unpaid, poor 19-year-old college kid might.

The other big loser might be the gamblers themselves. There are groups of people that this type of gambling will appeal to, in particular it was suggested that young, confident men are — this is exactly the sort of thing that will suck them in. They watch sports 40 hours a week. They’ve got to be good at gambling, they think to themselves, and guess what: there’s people who are a lot better than them still.

If gambling represents one way forward for the business side of sports — that is, a new revenue stream — there is of course another, time-honored way of staying in the black: controlling costs. In most industries, the largest single cost is labor.

MATHESON: For the economy as a whole, the traditional number that economists use is that roughly two-thirds of all gross domestic product goes to labor, and about a third of it goes to capital.

Sports, meanwhile, has had a dramatic trajectory.

MATHESON: If you’re looking back in 1970, you are seeing a world where players are making only a tiny fraction of the total revenues. The rest of that is going into the pockets of the owners. By the mid 1970’s and mid 1980’s we have free agency in every sport except maybe the N.F.L., which had free agency on paper but not in reality until about the mid-90’s. And in Europe, in soccer, you started to have free agency in about 1995-ish. And at that point you have players earning more like 50, 60, 70 percent of team revenue — so a huge increase in what they’re earning.

That’s a huge percentage increase to the athletes at the same time as revenues were also exploding. But, more recently:

MATHESON: More recently, the owners have clawed a bunch of that back, and in the big leagues in the United States, the N.B.A., N.H.L., and National Football League, by agreement between the union and the leagues, they basically split the revenue 50/50. Half of the revenue goes to the players in terms of pay and benefits, and the other half sticks with the owners as profit or to cover costs to run the league.

So, how costly is it to run the league, and how much is left over for profits? That’s very hard to say, since most pro sports teams are privately owned. One notable exception is the N.F.L.’s Green Bay Packers, who are publicly held and therefore publish their financials. The Packers are a venerable team but also a very small-market team: Green Bay has a population of barely 100,000 people. And yet, remember, they get the same share of N.F.L. collective revenues as the New England Patriots or the Los Angeles Rams. The last couple years, the Packers’ annual revenue has been in the neighborhood of $450 million, with profits averaging around 12.5 percent. The current salary cap — the limit a team can spend on player salaries — is about $177 million a year; and a team is required to spend at least 89 percent of that amount. So you might imagine that in a league like the N.F.L. or the N.B.A., with TV revenues locked up well in advance and total labor costs limited by a union agreement, there’s no way for a pro franchise to lose money. That’s what I suggested to N.B.A. owner Mark Cuban.

CUBAN: No, that’s not true at all.

DUBNER: Give me an example.

CUBAN: I can’t throw out names, but yeah.

DUBNER: Well, how many N.B.A. teams in a given year are going to lose money?

CUBAN: More than you think.

DUBNER: Really.

CUBAN: Yeah.

DUBNER: So, even with the revenue-sharing, with all the broadcast and other monies distributed evenly and with a salary cap that guarantees that you don’t have to overspend a certain amount, you’re saying that — how do you lose money? Is it by lacking game revenue?

CUBAN: Enough effort. Yeah. Lacking revenue period. Just like any business.

DUBNER: But what’s the major variable? Is it gate revenue or is it broadcast revenue?

CUBAN: Gate, broadcast, players, all the obvious things.

One obvious difference between the cost of labor in sports versus just about any other industry — except maybe the entertainment industry — is that the employees are the product, which makes them much more visible than employees in a typical industry. And potentially much more valuable. Consider a superstar like LeBron James, who this year is earning $35.6 million. Which sounds absurd — until you try to calculate just how valuable he is to the sport.

EPSTEIN: I mean, if LeBron James was getting what he deserves, he’d make $200 million a year, $300 million a year.

That again is Lawrence Epstein of the U.F.C. His biggest star, Conor McGregor, earned a reported $100 million for that pay-per-view fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr.

EPSTEIN: Oh man, I mean if Conor made $100 million last year, which is probably 20 percent of our revenues. LeBron James, he’s got to be worth 10 percent of the revenues of the N.B.A. He’s got to be. So what is that? It’s 400 million or something? It’s a giant number. Maybe he’s not Conor, which is 20 percent of our revenues, but he’s easily 10. He’s easily 10.

For the record, the N.B.A. produced about $7.5 billion in revenues last season, 10 percent of which would be roughly $750 million. Too bad for LeBron James that Lawrence Epstein isn’t setting his salary. And what about U.F.C. salaries? Before interviewing Epstein, I’d asked the economist Victor Matheson to compare athlete salaries in different sports.

MATHESON: If you’re trying to decide what sport to go into, you probably want to go into baseball or football, where at least you’re going to be earning a pretty big chunk of those television revenues. And man, stay away from U.F.C., because they’re making a lot of revenues but not much of that is going into the athletes. The amount going to the athletes there is about 10 or 15 percent of revenues. So, again, much less.

Why do the U.F.C.’s athletes earn so much less? Keep in mind what Lawrence Epstein told us earlier — that the U.F.C., unlike other leagues, pays its own production costs. Still, you might think that compared to the big team sports, U.F.C. athletes would do pretty well, since team sports require so much more labor to produce. We do know that U.F.C. fighters aren’t unionized, which means they don’t have collective bargaining power, like N.F.L. and other team athletes do. In any case, I asked the U.F.C.’s Lawrence Epstein about this disparity.

EPSTEIN: Well I think first of all, the 15 percent number,  I don’t think that’s accurate. I mean there certainly is some fluctuation in the percentage of revenue that goes to athletes. But the reason for that primarily is that we have a variable revenue stream model in our company. So, you mentioned the N.F.L. Let’s assume they’re giving 50 percent of the revenues to the athletes. Well, those revenues are contracted revenues with the largest media companies in the earth: ESPN, CBS, NBC, Fox, and others. The significant part of our profitability still comes from pay-per-view events. Which of course are completely variable in revenue.

And so because we just don’t have those contracted revenues like so many of the other sports leagues do, we’re taking a lot of risk every time we put one of these major events on. I mean you can’t just agree to pay certain people a certain amount of money if you don’t know whether or not that money is going to come in. And of course, the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball and the N.B.A. — multi-billion-dollar contracts with great credit on the other side of those deals.

DUBNER: I’ve read that the median U.F.C. salary is roughly $42,000 a year. We interviewed a fighter, Lauren Murphy, who’s the No. 5-ranked female fighter in her weight class. And she told us she gets about $12,000 per fight guaranteed, another $12,000 if she wins, and a $50,000 bonus if she’s the fight of the night. So she said she’s had years where she’s made just $20,000 and one year where she made around $90,000. Again, for a fighter who is No. 5 in the world in her ranking.

I understand there’s an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against U.F.C. which claims that the U.F.C. used an anti-competitive scheme of long-term exclusive fighter contracts, coercion, and acquisitions of rival M.M.A. promoters to establish and maintain dominance, etc., to suppress fighter compensation. I don’t expect you’re going to open up on that case to me right now, but I’d like you to talk generally to this notion of a league that is making a lot of money, that was bought for $4 billion, and yet one where the people who were doing the actual fighting seemed to be generally compensated much less than the average fan at least would assume.

EPSTEIN: Yeah, obviously can’t get into talking anything specific about the litigation. But, as I mentioned previously, Conor McGregor made about $100 million last year. When you compare the percentage of revenues that we deliver to our athletes, it’s very comparable to other sports organizations of our size, and the fact that both we have to produce the content, which adds additional expense to us, in addition to the fact that still a very large portion of our revenue is variable in nature — we’re very proud of what we pay our athletes and we think it’s certainly consistent with other sports organizations of our size.

And to a certain extent, it is a zero-sum game. And if Conor McGregor is going to make $100 million and Jon Jones and these guys are going to make tens of millions, there’s got to be money there to do it. The guys at the top end, the women on top of the food chain, they’re happy with the ecosystem. That’s for sure.

DUBNER: Does the league provide health insurance and other benefits?

EPSTEIN: So, our athletes are independent contractors, so we can’t provide that type of health insurance that you and I might get with our particular employers. But about seven years ago, we began providing what’s called an accident insurance policy which would cover our athletes for any acute injury that they would sustain while they’re under contract with us. In addition to that, most athletic commissions or federations around the world will require that insurance policies be in place for event related injuries. So when you combine the event-related injuries with the accident insurance policies, our athletes are covered while they’re under contract with us for any acute injuries that they would sustain.

We’ll hear more about these labor issues in an upcoming episode, this time from the athletes’ side and the union’s side. For instance, here’s DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the N.F.L. players’ union:

DeMaurice SMITH: The reality is: they are management, and we are labor. And there are going to be core philosophical differences between us. And I think the challenge becomes, there are people who are unwilling to perceive someone’s life in the other shoes. And frankly I think that’s on both sides of the table.

For now, let’s just say that there is a lot of friction between management and labor in sports. In most organizations, there’s one person whose job is to navigate that friction. A person who’s part of management but who’s also the primary liaison between ownership and the athletes. Not the coach — they’re seldom a part of management. This person is usually called the general manager. Like Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets.

And the G.M. of an N.B.A. team does … what?

MOREY: So, there’s the bringing in the coaching staff who then obviously direct the players. There’s the medical performance side, where you’re keeping players performing at the highest level. There’s the scouting side, and then there’s the data-and-information side.

Morey is particularly well-regarded on the data-and-information side. He was a pioneer in N.B.A. analytics, and he recently won the league’s Executive of the Year Award. Unlike most general managers, Morey neither played nor coached basketball at a high level; he took the nerd route to the N.B.A., having studied computer science and statistics.

MOREY: Yeah, I think “the nerd route” is fair.

Morey also enjoys musical theater; he recently commissioned a basketball musical called Small Ball.

MOREY: That is accurate. Yeah.

One character sings the following line: “Your cold calculations. You are ripping the heart from this beautiful game.”

MOREY: Correct. Yes, he sings that multiple times.

As for his day job: Morey admits the N.B.A. has had a tremendous growth spurt.

MOREY: Basketball in the late 40’s and early 50’s was thought of as the red-headed stepchild of sports. No one cared about basketball until maybe even the early 80’s.

And now?

MOREY: The N.B.A. is going to be the dominant sport in the future — along with soccer and e-sports. For me, the top sports are going to be global. The bottom line, just follow where people are spending their time. Especially under the age of 25. It’s all dynamic games on their phones or P.C.’s or consoles. And the fastest growing content that’s watched by far is people watching people playing video games. Both competitive and non-competitive. And it really is just overwhelmingly logical that e-sports is going to be one of the top sports.

Daryl Morey, like the people we’ve been hearing from in other sports, recognizes that the modern consumer has a lot of entertainment options. Just because a sport is dominant today doesn’t mean it’ll even be relevant in 20 or 50 years.

MOREY: I do think the N.B.A. does have a real challenge. We have a golden goose that’s laying eggs. The league would have to take a risk while the goose is laying golden eggs. We’ve done actually more changes to our game than any of these other professional sports, by far. But the reality is it’s sometimes hard to change.

There are a lot of things Morey would like to see changed in the N.B.A. For starters, he thinks they play too many games.

MOREY: Here’s a really simple way the N.B.A. has too many games: when you ask someone, “Should the N.B.A. have more games or less games?,” there’s not a single person alive who says there should be more games.

This is what Morey means when he talks about the golden goose — cutting back on games would cut back on revenues. At least that’s the conventional wisdom. Morey disagrees:

MOREY: Appointment viewing is what drives drives major advertising spend, drives everything, so I absolutely think there should be fewer games in the N.B.A.

His evidence for this argument?

MOREY: The N.C.A.A. tournament is 63 games. They make more TV money than we make in our entire 1,200-game N.B.A. regular season. I would have it be like the Premier League — everyone plays each other twice. Fifty-eight games.

Morey also thinks there are too many playoff games.

MOREY: I would do one-and-done N.B.A. playoffs. I would get byes to the top two teams in each of the conferences, similar to the N.F.L. I would then have a play-in tournament to be the other four teams that then play the two teams with the byes. All the games will be one-and-done.

One big reason he’d want fewer games, including the playoffs, is that N.B.A. games are too predictable.

MOREY: There needs to be more variance. Every good sport, game, board game needs to have a real healthy mix of skill and luck. I’ve seen many papers on this. It’s like 70-30, something like that. One big problem is we are the most deterministic on a single-game level. We know better than any other sport this team is going to beat that team. If we play one of the bottom-feeder teams — I don’t want to mention — we’ll have 90, 95 percent win odds on a home game. That often will create very, very low reason to tune in.

And the worst part of games for Morey is what should be the best part:

MOREY: The ends of N.B.A. games is one of my bugaboos. I just can’t stand the fouls and timeouts and it’s just not a good viewing experience.

There is a proposed solution for that.

MOREY: Yeah, you stop using the clock. So, let’s say you’re winning 85-82 with five minutes to go, now the clock turns off and you play to 92 and you just play regular pickup basketball from that point, and it’s a fantastic way to end games.

This idea — of turning off the clock toward the end of a basketball game and playing instead to a point total — it’s called the Elam Ending, after its inventor, Nick Elam.

MOREY: Yes, I would definitely do the Elam Ending.

It may strike you that Daryl Morey has an awfully long list of things he dislikes about basketball. After all, it’s the game he loves, the game that employs him. It may also strike you that Morey sounds a bit … grouchy. If so, there may be a reason for this: during his tenure as G.M. of the Houston Rockets, they’ve been one of the very best teams in basketball — and yet, so far, they’ve failed to win an N.B.A. championship. And Daryl Morey really likes to win. This goes for everyone we’ve been speaking with today — you aren’t at this level in sport unless you cannot stand to lose. Just how much does Daryl Morey love to win? When we spoke with him, the N.B.A. season hadn’t begun yet yet begun; he was in Las Vegas with the Rockets’ summer-league team — a rough equivalent of baseball’s spring training. In other words, games whose outcomes are meaningless. But not to Morey.

MOREY: Well, our dominant 4-0 summer-league team — we’re trying to hang another summer-league banner. Four-and-0, and our highest pick on our team is 45, I think, or something like that. So we’ve got our motley crew.

DUBNER: But the reason you have such a motley crew is your fault, right? Because you’re giving away all the high draft picks to get the superstars.

MOREY: Yes, exactly. I was about to mention that. Yeah, some G.M. idiot has mortgaged the future to try and put together our hopeful championship team and because of that we haven’t had a first-round pick in several years.

DUBNER: So it sounds like you care. It’s not just—

MOREY: Oh, I care so deeply and I’m not — and it’s stupid. I have no idea why I care, but I like winning.

DUBNER: What you don’t have yet, as you’ve alluded, is a championship. And I’m just curious what what it feels like overall. I’m guessing when you self-assess, you think, “Yeah, I’m doing a pretty decent job.” I’m sure you work hard, and, again, there is a lot of outcome success, but I’m curious how big a gap the not-having-won-the-championship leaves or what it feels like.

MOREY: It feels like an Ives piece, where it’s just dissonance the whole way but no final chord at the end to satisfy. That’s how feels basically. Stravinsky. Ives.

DUBNER: And then if you win it, it becomes Brahms or Mozart or somebody?

MOREY: Becomes Andrew Lloyd Webber. Just the perfect melody. Just a nice resolved power chord, basically.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Anders Kelto, Derek John, and Alvin Melathe with help from Matt Stroup. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Mark Cuban, owner of the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks.

Lawrence Epstein, chief operating officer for the U.F.C.

Al Guido, president of the San Francisco 49ers.

Victor Matheson, economist at College of the Holy Cross.

Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets.

Kim Ng, senior vice-president for M.L.B.

DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the N.F.L. players’ union.

Stefan Szymanski, professor at the University of Michigan.

John Thorn, historian and author.

Jed York, C.E.O. of the San Francisco 49ers.

RESOURCES

How to Win at the Sport of Business by Mark Cuban (First Diversion Books 2011).

The Economics of Sports, Sixth Edition by Michael Leeds, Peter von Allmen, and Victor Matheson (Routledge, 2018).

EXTRA

“How Sports Became Us (Ep. 349),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“How to Stop Being a Loser (Ep. 350),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete (Ep. 351),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Think Like a Winner (Ep. 363),” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

The post Inside the Sports-Industrial Complex (Ep. 364) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/sports-5/

[shyobjectangel]

RED Update #1: Restart Energy Expanding on All Fronts

New Post has been published on http://restartenergy.net/red-update-1-restart-energy-expanding-on-all-fronts/

RED Update #1: Restart Energy Expanding on All Fronts

Welcome to Restart Energy’s first article that deals with updates on everything we’ve been working on since the end of our public sale.

This article aims to solve the gap in our communication and show you all the fancy things we’ve been working on.

Of course, you will get more articles like this one in the future. How often? We’re still deciding, but there will be at least one per month, although it’s not guaranteed that there will be as many updates every time.

Let’s get into it.

RED-TRS: Token Renting System

Last week, you were introduced to our new TRS system, which adds more functionality to the MWAT token.

I am not going to bore you with the details, our Chief Editor (Rouă Denis) wrote a brilliant piece on it. You can read it here.

Global Expansion

Fueled by an increasing demand for RED franchises, Restart Energy decided to advance its expansion into several key international energy markets — entering ahead of schedule in decentralized markets planned for 2019 and beyond. Here’s how we’re doing so far:

#1. ‘Restart Energy DOO’ is a registered company in Serbia and has already received its license to supply electricity, Nr.312–90 to be precise. Retail to end consumers is expected to begin in Q3–2018.

#2. Restart Energy opened a subsidiary in Singapore on Feb 6th, 2018. The company has already started the process of obtaining electricity and gas supply licenses in the State of Singapore. The newly created entity will act as a hub for Restart Energy operations in South-East Asia, with a focus on high-growth emerging markets and a rapidly increasing demand for decentralized energy solutions like Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.

#3. On Feb 26th, Restart Energy officially registered it’s UK subsidiary under the name ‘Restart Energy One UK’, having the company identification number 11224104. The process of obtaining a dual fuel (electricity and gas) supply license has already been initiated and together with a controlled market entry procedure, will take between 8 and 12 months to complete. Operations will include the supply of electricity and natural gas to domestic and non-domestic customers.

#4. Restart Energy is in advanced negotiations for the acquisition of an established Bulgarian energy company. The agreement is scheduled to be signed in March and retail operations to end consumers are scheduled to begin in Q3–2018. Cross-border operations in Greece and Turkey will be managed by Restart Energy Bulgaria.

#5. Restart Energy has started a due diligence process for the acquisition of established energy supply companies in Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, andAustria. The process is scheduled to be completed in Q3–2018.

#6. Restart Energy has employed reputable law offices for registering and licensing subsidiaries in Germany and Spain as licensed energy suppliers. The new subsidiaries will be registered in March and the licensing process is expected to be complete in Q3 and Q4–2018.

RED Platform Update

#1. The first public part (Alpha version) of the RED platform will be the Signup/Login systems based on the MWAT token. This system will allow a verification of ownership for MWAT tokens and as such is crucial for the entire RED ecosystem.

#2. Along with the above release we will present the tokenized voting system, based on the actual MWAT tokens held. If the testing phase goes well, it should be live by the end of the month.

#3. We are actively testing several solutions for bringing some of the principles of blockchain into energy, such as transparency, security, and reliability. To achieve this, we are going to employ a hybrid approach — on one hand, the main database will be kept in a classical cloud-based database. A second database, running on top of the first one, using blockchain technology, will be used to expose the relevant data for the public — such as transactions history — and will act like a shadow to the first one.

The team is trialing three types of blockchain technologies to achieve this with the help of our four new blockchain devs, that joined our Bucharest team in the last few weeks. More details about this will be revealed during our internal testing phase.

RED Franchise Update

Not so much an update, but rather us bragging about how many applications we’ve received from people all over the world for opening an energy supply franchise.

We’ve had over 200 applications, out of which 30 were for type A franchises, that each cover an entire country.

Another interesting fact that we’ve figured you’d like to know, is that the top three countries from which we’ve received applications are: the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.

Right now, this is all we can share, but we’ll update you the moment we’ve got more news on this subject.

Restart Energy is taking on new franchise applications. You can apply for a RED franchise here: RED Franchise Request Form.

Update on The Number of Customers

In the first two months of 2018, Restart Energy managed to bring another 5,000+ customers onboard. These new customers are only from Romania — we should be able to grow at a much higher pace once we expand to multiple countries around Europe and the rest of the world, as stated in the “Global Expansion” section of this article.

Update on Our Financial Situation for 2017

Restart Energy has ended the 2017 fiscal year with approximately 20 million USD in revenues, with very small variations possible due to exchange rate differences between EUR/USD. This both confirms our revenue projections and affirms a solid 425% net growth based on our company’s Romanian operations alone.

The 2017 financial statements containing detailed numbers will be published at the latest on May 31st, 2018.

New PR Director — Mihai Herman

As stated above, Restart Energy listened to your feedback and has already taken action, by starting a collaboration with a new PR Director.

In case you didn’t notice, this article is written by said PR Director, so I’ll introduce myself below.

At heart, I am an entrepreneur — started my first online business when I was 19 years old. In the past eight years, I’ve ran several businesses & blogs, including being an SEO & marketing consultant, a fashion blogger and a business coach.

I am a big believer in authenticity and transparency when it comes to delivering a message or building a brand, which are the main values that I aim on cultivating here at Restart Energy — and it’s going to be pretty easy because the fundamentals on which this company was built are exactly those.

PR wise, I was able to collaborate with some of the biggest names in the men’s fashion industry, as well as attend New York Fashion Week, Pitti Uomo in Florence and WebSummit in Dublin.

You can find me on Twitter & Telegram @mihaiherman.

Restart Energy is hiring

Our team has expanded even more by hiring 4 blockchain developers and one UI/UX designer to help the current team handle the workload and deliver a spectacular platform as soon as possible.

We are hiring passionate and ambitious professionals that want to forever change the energy world with us. The following positions are available:

#1. International Positions

RED Franchise Business Developer

RED Platform Marketing Manager

Blockchain developer (Solidity)

Full stack developer (Node, Angular, Truffle experience is appreciated)

For development positions, be sure to include your Github profile.

#2. United Kingdom

Energy Supply Manager

Franchise Sales Manager B2B

#3. Singapore

Energy Supply Manager

Franchise Sales Manager

Renewable Energy Business Developer

Job applications can be sent along with a professional CV and short description at: [email protected]

Website Makeover

An update to our website is due, so we’re passively working on a new design and feel, that we believe will appeal to a more B2B audience.

This is an important step, as the more professional a website looks, the more applications we will receive from respectable business people, and as such, the faster we’ll be able to expand. In this regard, of special importance is our Franchise page.

As the saying goes, ‘first impressions matter most’. The timing of the redesign is also near-perfect, since we’re preparing ourselves for the publicity that the company will receive in the coming months through our marketing & PR efforts.

Speaking of…

Updates on Our Marketing & PR Progress

Now, let me show you what we’re working on in terms of gaining awareness for our awesome project.

Besides what’s mentioned below, we’re also working on a few secret projects and on bringing you exciting contests in the coming months.

#1. We hired two reputable PR agencies to help Restart Energy get the publicity it deserves. Currently, we’re working on getting story ideas and finding angles to deliver the news in a way that reporters can’t help but say yes.

Starting next week, however, the first releases should be sent and hopefully we’ll have the first media appearances soon. The strategy was thought so we tackle the energy and blockchain industry at the same time.

Of course, we’ll share each and every one of them with you.

#2. Restart Energy is actively discussing collaboration terms with some Youtube bloggers that should help us gain more awareness in the crypto space.

#3. These are all the articles and videos talking about our project and the $MWAT token from the past two-three weeks. We’ve shared most of them with the community, but I am sure some of you missed them and will appreciate the list.

(Help us spread the word by sharing your favorite article/video on Twitter)

In Hackernoon: https://hackernoon.com/restart-energy-a-decentralized-and-delocalized-electrical-energy-supply-platform-on-the-blockchain-97ec4b280139

In SeekingAlpha, a whole article about our franchising model: https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/22912651-daniel-jennings/5095182-taking-leap-restart-energy-franchise-model

In Crypto-Prospects, Restart Energy got a rating of 8 out of 10: http://crypto-prospect.com/hot-icos-watch-wepower-vs-restartenergy/

In a Medium blog, referred to as an alt coin with big potential: https://medium.com/@aminder2525/5-altcoin-that-can-bring-highest-returns-in-2018-67cec94b854a

In BTCManager, a nice comparison between the biggest energy projects on the blockchain: https://btcmanager.com/blockchain-meets-energy-industry-analysis-powr-mwat-wpr-slr/

In a Steemit blog: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@anamnesia/my-strategy-and-4-investments-i-believe-are-ready-to-explode-during-the-next-altcoin-bull-rush-season

Youtuber Mike B posted another video about us — he talks about why he thinks Restart Energy, as a project, is “life-changing” and also about wanting to own a RED franchise himself:

  Crypto Gurus talked about RED as well — including the reasons why they’ve bought MWAT:

Suppoman mentioned Restart Energy as well:

Look-What-We’ve-Found-on-Twitter Section

We do our best to reply to every tweet from our valuable community, but you can all agree that it’s humanly impossible to cover everything all the time.

However, we do check every now and then to see what are people tweeting using the $MWAT tag and we’ve found these tweets that made all of us at Restart Energy smile.

Special thanks to all of you who took the time out of their busy lives to share an article and/or mention MWAT to a Twitter crypto influencer.

  That’s all folks! Truly hope you’ve enjoyed this article and feel free to give us suggestions in the Telegram Group regarding this update.

Make sure you follow Restart Energy on Twitter // Facebook // Reddit // YouTube.

#Blockchain #Energy #Franchise #Franchising #Green Energy #Mwat Token #Red Mwat Token #Renewable Energy #Restart Energy #Restart Energy Democracy #Token Sale

[thesinglesjukebox]

TAYLOR SWIFT - ...READY FOR IT? [5.79] After the last one, sure!

Katherine St Asaph: The old Taylor's not quite dead -- that pre-chorus is pure Nashville melody, from melody to bowdlerization ("you should see the things we do" is about as explicit as someone marveling over a particularly large pumpkin harvest.) Like her former/current/who knows anymore rival, "Ready For It" pumps up Swift's numbers by sounding like interstitial music for Big Sports -- premiered for the NFL, currently being stripped for instrumental parts by NBA promos -- but also like blood sports. The track's a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic version of 1989, the Yeezus to "LWYMTD"'s 808s. Or possibly approaching NIN: the pretty date machine of "Blank Space" gone rogue, locking onto someone arbitrary (the gossip algorithms still cross-referencing it against increasingly nonentity dudes) because "I see nothing better." It's romance only in the literal sense -- the jailer/thief scenario is even pulpier than "Bad Romance" managed -- and otherwise love reduced to plan and execution. The verses are alternatively tryhard, artificial and vaguely offensive, as if it isn't Taylor on the mic but Microsoft Tay. But the all-consuming, heat-seeking mania of a certain inadvisable sort of crush is palpable as adrenaline, and stokes the all-consuming, heat-seeking maximalism of Max Martin and team throwing every resource and songwriting trick into ensuring this is a hit. Petty points for Swift saying the word "island" this many times in a track with no trop-house whatsoever, and given that she's enough of an in-joker to come up with "Nils Sjoberg," I bet it's on purpose. [9]

Ramzi Awn: The most commendable thing about "...Ready For It?" is that it completely erases any memory of the single that preceded it. A confusing, feverish dash for relevance, the song makes Katy Perry's "Swish Swish" sound even more fun, an accomplishment not to be taken lightly. [3]

Alex Clifton: The rapping is an atrocity. The production is a slicker version of Sleigh Bells with half the heart. Taylor's enunciation is bizarre: "no one has to know" is such an awkward line delivery, second only to the nasally "he can be my jailor" and "let the games begin." Her vocals are a piss-poor imitation of Rihanna; at first listen, it's hard to find a shred of the Taylor I've known and loved. It's a travesty. And yet. It's 100% a Taylor production, overdramatic, narcissistic, full of easter egg references to old songs like "Haunted" and "Wildest Dreams". It's obsessive dark love writ large: "I keep him forever / like a vendetta" marries romance and vengeance perfectly. And the sheer force of that chorus makes me want to scream "IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIIIIIGHT" in public. I love the idea of sexy, dirty Taylor, less concerned with perfection and more with ghosts and robbers and gritty feeling, but the haphazard execution of the verses is so frustrating. Par for the course with all Max Martin creations, though, that chorus is a melodic masterpiece. I've got this on repeat and I'm upset about it. [6]

Eleanor Graham: Who would have guessed that the legacy of Taylor Swift's fifth album "reputation" would be to have production so DIABOLICAL that it makes "Welcome To New York" sound like "Heroes"? No one on pop's A, B or C list should come within 100 feet of something that sounds like this. I've seen comparisons to Yeezus, which is fair because they are comparable in terms of sheer nerve, but on tracks like "New Slaves" or "I'm In It", Kanye's sleaze is a feasible sparring partner for electro-roar. Taylor's Pennsylvania-goth-Bratz-doll-masochism-adjacent-revenge-core is not. You'd think that would be obvious! To, you know, anyone! I don't even know what's happening anymore. The 2 points are mainly for the way she says "go", which does something to me; no, I don't want to talk about it. [2]

Stephen Eisermann: Taylor's thrown caution to the wind and no longer gives any fucks. The provocative chorus and the weird, rapid-fire, off-putting rap/sing hybrid verses are the most prominent examples of her willingness to toss out all consistencies previously found in her music. None of this feels like Taylor and that's fun, but I'm not sure everything works. The verses especially, though lyrically fun, are delivered so oddly that the parts that should be "cool," instead make me cringe - the "Burton" line, specifically. I mean, I'm not sure what I was expecting based on the first single, but it certainly wasn't this, for better or worse. [6]

Ryo Miyauchi: Taylor writes her tried-and-true narrative of love as tragedy into self-parody. The bare-bones beat and the anti-chorus structure of "...Ready For It?" laughs at the many hits of 1989. Her self-satisfaction is maddening, truly: the snicker to "the Burton to my Taylor" is designed to drive everyone nuts. But I should remind: the real target is not exactly you but, as always, her exes, who she destroys without lifting her voice: "every love I've known in comparison is a failure" doesn't so much rip apart the journal pages where they're enshrined than it sets her entire bookshelf into flames like some great purge. [6]

Claire Biddles: Speculating who the 'real' Taylor Swift is is reductive and boring, but my favourite Taylor Swift is the wide-eyed, extra, romantic, saying-too-much-too-soon Taylor Swift that we get a glimpse of in the bridge, swallowed up before she even gets started by that sub-Kanye womp-womp in place of a chorus. There's a mutated version of her in the verses ("We'll move to an island/and he can be my jailer" -- I'm imagining she's just met the guy for full effect) but the self-conscious, sub-Lana Del Rey delivery dampens it. Perhaps I'm just being selfish, wanting for the Taylor who most relates to (and thus excuses) my embarrassing romantic tendencies, but Cool Girl Taylor's attempts at aloofness are unconvincing. [5]

Alfred Soto: A bad single, an uninteresting bad single. Mouthing "are you ready for it?" over synth bass farts comes off like preparing listeners for the punch line: Taylor Swift rapping with as little regard for cadence as Lou Reed in 1986. At least "The Original Wrapper" had the performer's rage as its subject, affected or not; Swift is writing bad bumper music. [3]

Will Adams: It's standard practice now for Taylor Swift to drop an incendiary lead single that gets the discourse a-churnin', only to reel in the masses for the more palatable, less batshit follow-up (and she's not the only one to do this). But for "I Knew You Were Trouble" and "Blank Space," there was still a distortion of who we thought Taylor Swift was (dubstep; dissection of public image). The distortion in "...Ready For It?" is... distortion. But it's hard to care about whether Swift is stoking more controversy when the song is so bracing. There's nowhere to run as blocks of drums stack atop the opening pounds and warped roars, all culminating in, finally, an actual chorus. Where "Look What You Made Me Do" was a firebomb kindled by thinkpieces, the fire in "...Ready For It?" comes from the song itself. [8]

Iain Mew: Like "Wildest Dreams" with the wild dreams added in. [8]

Joshua Copperman: A couple of years ago, I actually co-wrote a song where we used that phantom/ransom rhyme. Until that song actually comes out, here's Taylor being the ransom phantom instead of someone else haunting her. I wish that the opening line was "Loki was a killer/first time that I saw him," because that would be hilarious for her to bypass the "tilted stage" subtweets altogether and talk about how Hiddleston's now pining over her. These lyrics are also as good as anything she's even written, so a "Loki" joke would work better than whatever she was on about last time. What bugs me, though, is the empty space in the chorus. Taylor's best melodies are stream-of-consciousness, but "in the middle of the night/in my dreams.................... you should see the things we do" feels like something got cut out last-minute. I do love the idea though, the way it flips the narrative of Wildest Dreams in a really interesting way - now, she's seeing him in her wildest dreams. That's the kind of self-referencing and subversion I'd rather see Taylor do. [6]

Edward Okulicz: So many of the ingredients of Good Taylor Pop Songs are in this one -- dreamy and melodic chorus, don't care attitude, groan-inducing but quotable lyrics -- but the production feels really dated (to around the time of Red, in fact), stalling the track when it tries to accelerate. [6]

Sonia Yang: On one hand, this is generic pop I would have brushed off had it been any other artist. On the other, it's refreshing to see Swift step out of the zone of what I've come to expect from her in particular. I love the ominous synths and how the entire track has a spy thriller vibe. The best part is that breathy prechorus, you can really feel the "island breeze" as Swift delivers that line. The chorus, unfortunately, is a wisp of a thing that doesn't have any impact. The melody neither compels nor is purposefully anticlimactic. The lyrics, while not quite Love Story levels of awkward, are not great; the Taylor-Burton reference is campy at best and cringe at worst. [5]

Jonathan Bradley: Taylor Swift has rolled out singles from Reputation like trailers for the next release from a blockbuster film franchise: not only songs, "Look What You Made Me Do" and now "...Ready For It" (next: "Gorgeous"?) have acted as teasers for a new product launch. Unveiled during a college football broadcast, "...Ready For It" sounds like sports, like a pre-game huddle, like a highlights reel from last season building excitement to see how the new line-up will perform. "Welcome to New York" did the same for 1989 and was fine, but "...Ready For It" is better because it crams more into its pop overload: a rap that traces the "Empire State of Mind" flow, K-pop synth blasts, a gleefully audacious pun on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and a chorus about "dreams" and doing things in the night that throws it all in for the romanticism Swift has always been so resolved to earnestly commit herself. If Reputation should turn out to be her New Jersey album, and if all the stage-setting should ultimately overshadow the show itself, I hope we'll one day rediscover how good the songs themselves were. [8]

#Taylor Swift #...Ready for It?