#look in my previous podcast experience never have I been so obsessed with one that I stay up to 5am binging it but. here we are

[theearnestonion]

I continue to be fucking abnormal about podcasts

anyways go listen to Where The Stars Fell

#look in my previous podcast experience never have I been so obsessed with one that I stay up to 5am binging it but. here we are #Ed Tucker My Fucking Beloved #could listen to her yelling and cussing and adhd-bisexual-disaster-ing all over the place forever #and Lucy...shjfkahsjkgfjkhetd #*gestures* her <3 #this podcast put good omens and gravity falls in a blender and then made it sapphic #Newt Surname-I-Can't-Remember I owe you my life

[bubonickitten]

Fic summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Chapter summary: The process(es) of resigning from a terrible, no good, very bad assistant position.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Full chapter text & content warnings below the cut.

Content warnings for Chapter 22: discussions of eye-gouging/eye horror (not graphic); brief mentions of spiders/arachnophobia; anxiety/panic symptoms; lots of dissociation/dpdr; Peter Lukas being a manipulative shit; Lonely-typical content (including fear of abandonment & some abysmal self-esteem on Martin’s part); allusions to police violence & Hunt-related themes (re: Daisy’s past actions); swears. SPOILERS through Season 5.

Chapter 22: Resignation

Georgie paces in a slow circle, alternating between biting her nails and picking at her bottom lip – entirely immersed in her own thoughts, judging from the faraway look in her eyes. Jon hasn’t seen her this overwrought since the last depressive episode he witnessed. Just watching her is enough to make his chest tighten with vicarious unrest.

Wary of contributing to a vicious feedback loop between the two of them with his own customary pacing and handwringing, he forces himself to keep his knees locked and hands at his sides. Still, he can’t help rubbing his fingertips together and rocking minutely on the balls of his feet.

“Why don’t we sit?” Jon finally interjects, wincing when it comes out more curtly than he intended – more like a command than a suggestion, but luckily without any accompanying static.

Be mindful, he silently chides himself: being on edge like this only makes him more susceptible to accidental compulsion.

“What if something goes wrong?” Georgie whispers. Jon doubts she even heard him beneath her nervous refrain. “What if –”

“Georgie?” Jon tries again. No response. He steps into her path and places a hand on her shoulder. “Georgie.”

“What?” Georgie raises her head, but she isn’t looking at him so much as she’s looking through him.

“I think you should sit down?”

“What?” Georgie says again, sounding utterly lost. Her eyes are darting around the room now, as if she doesn’t recognize her surroundings.

How the tables have turned, Jon thinks grimly.

“Come on,” he says, taking her hand and guiding her to the nearest chair. She offers no resistance, trailing behind him like a flagging balloon. When he presses on her shoulder to coax her into a sitting position, she goes easily. Keeping hold of her hand, he drags another chair closer to her and takes a seat.

Okay. Now what?

Jon jiggles his leg as he wracks his brain for the right thing to say. She deserves more than handholding and awkward silence, but soothing words have never come naturally to him.

“Do you, ah… do you want to talk about it?” Jon cringes at his faltering delivery. “I’m sorry, I’m – I’m still not very good at this,” he adds with a self-deprecating laugh – then immediately shuts his eyes, kicking himself. Why are his attempts to relate to others always so clumsy and – and weirdly self-centered? “I mean –”

“I’m scared,” Georgie blurts out.

“You… what?” Jon tilts his head. “But I thought – you don’t feel –”

“Fear?” Her clipped, brittle laugh dies in her throat. “No, I don’t. And that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it?”

Jon strokes the back of her hand with one thumb, but remains silent. She always elaborates on her own time, given some space to order her thoughts.

“I don’t feel… terror,” she says slowly. “After I had my… encounter, I did a lot of research on how the brain works. Trying to understand what was happening to me, you know?”

Jon nods. He’s intimately familiar with that urge. As a child, he went through a spider phase, as his grandmother called it, obsessively seeking out any information he could on them, hoping even then that he could conquer his fear if only he could see the world through a detached, academic lens. There were plenty of academic odes to the spider to be found; no shortage of enamored arachnologists waxing poetic about the wonders of evolution and the vital role that arachnids play in their particular ecological niches.

Unfortunately, a phobia – especially one arising from acute trauma – tends to be resistant to reason and reality. His obsession only ever yielded heart palpitations and lucid nightmares. Despite that failure, he never stopped clinging to that idea that if only he could know everything there was to know about a thing, he could finally scrape together some semblance of control over his fear.

In many ways, that fixation is exactly what drew him to the Magnus Institute.

Unless the Spider really was pulling the strings all along, he thinks, and then: No, we are not going there.

“As far as I can tell,” Georgie continues, “my sympathetic nervous system still functions. I can still experience all the physiological aspects of sympathetic arousal – and fear is only one possible trigger for those sorts of responses. What’s missing is my capacity to interpret those responses through the lens of fear. To emotionally process or identify them as fear.

“I can still experience anxiety, to an extent – or something close to it. But mostly in the context of worrying about others, being scared for them. I mean, I can feel apprehensive about the possibility of experiencing pain or loss or failure myself, I have a stake in my continued existence, I can recognize danger, but sometimes it feels… I don’t know – mechanical, almost? There’s just always the feeling of something missing. Something important. And there are times when I feel that void more acutely.”

“Like now.”

“Yeah.” Georgie looks away, chewing her lip in silence.

“I’m listening,” Jon coaxes, sensing that there’s more she’s holding back.

“It’s just… hard to feel like a full person sometimes, you know?” Georgie says helplessly. “I worry sometimes that it – I don’t know, does a disservice, I guess, to the people I care about? Like no matter how much I love someone, it isn’t… complete? Or – genuine, in the right way? It’s – hard to find words that actually describe it. There are times when it feels like I’ve lost something vital that made me human, that made me me, and it’s… difficult to reconcile who I was – who I could have been – with who I am now.”

“That I understand,” Jon says softly.

“I know.” Jon wishes he was less familiar with the sad smile she gives him just then. “It’s just… I remember a time when I would have been terrified of all this. Not just worried, or upset about someone I care about being hurt, or devastated by the prospect of losing someone I love. Terrified. And knowing what I should be feeling – what I would have felt at some point – is… it’s unnerving. There’s a void there that shouldn’t be there. It’s like… having part of you gouged out and left hollow. An absence that’s so present it’s almost visceral.” She frowns. “Does that make any sense?”

“In my future I had a Flesh Avatar reach into my chest and wrench out two of my ribs, so… yes, actually.”

Georgie blinks several times, then laughs breathlessly. “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not.” Jon returns a cautious smile, but the levity evaporates after a few seconds. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think that you don’t have to have access to the full spectrum of human emotion in order to count as human. And I don’t think any of this makes your concern for others any less heartfelt, or – or comforting. You might not be the same person you were before you were marked, but that doesn’t make you any lesser as a person.”

“You should try applying that metric to yourself sometime,” she replies, not unkindly.

“It’s –”

“Don’t say it’s different,” she cuts in. “Just… keep it in mind, okay?”

“I’ll, uh… I’ll try.” Georgie nods, but says nothing. Jon grips her hand a little tighter. “Listen, I – I know you’re worried for Melanie, but I think it’s going to be alright? I can’t predict the future –well, I have knowledge of one possible future, but that’s because I lived it. I don’t have any precognitive abilities, or anything like that. But… it turned out okay last time.”

Until I jump-started an apocalypse –

Jon reins in the thought before it can gain momentum. Georgie doesn’t need his brooding right now.

“Melanie is a fighter,” he says instead, offering a tentative smile. “And she has you.”

Georgie shakes her head. “I can’t believe you came out of the apocalypse sappier than you were when you went in.”

“Side effect of traversing a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a hopeless romantic, I think.” That gets another little chuckle out of Georgie. “I mean it, though. I think Melanie will be okay, especially with you looking out for her. Not to mention, the Admiral is a perpetual serotonin generator.”

“You really miss him, huh?”

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve pet a cat, Georgie?” Jon practically whines, playfully dramatic. It manages to keep the amused smile on Georgie’s face, he’s pleased to note.

“Maybe I should bring him by sometime.”

“Absolutely not. This place doesn’t deserve him.” Georgie snorts. Although Jon is reluctant to ruin the temporary shift in mood, this is as good a time as any to broach a subject he’s been dreading. “Also, I, ah… I don’t want you to feel obligated to continue visiting here.”

“What?” Georgie says, eyes narrowed.

“If you have to take a step back,” Jon says carefully, “I’ll understand.”

“I mean, I might not be able to come by as often as I have been, especially while Melanie is still recovering, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be around at all.” Georgie’s frown deepens. “I’m not about to cut you out of my life, Jon.”

“I know. And I don’t want you to. But – no, listen,” Jon insists, seeing Georgie about to protest. “What I’m trying to say is – I know Melanie wants to put as much distance between herself and the Institute as possible. If it turns out that you staying involved in all of this is too close to home, then… well, I don’t want her to feel like she’s still trapped in the Institute’s orbit, is all.”

Or mine, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t want to be a reason for Melanie to feel unsafe. In the past, he has been – and that’s not who he wants to be.

These days, Melanie has come to view him more as a fellow captive than a complicit enemy. Lingering resentment still sparks to life from time to time; she still struggles with her anger, and once or twice, she’s had to leave a room for fear of that rage boiling over. Overall, though, she no longer directs the majority of her ire towards him. When they do butt heads, it hasn’t gone much further than bickering – and even that feels comforting in its familiarity and mundanity. Almost companionable, in its own way.

Most significantly, ever since their talk, Melanie hasn’t once likened him to Jonah Magnus. Jon doesn’t know if that’s because it’s no longer an automatic association at the forefront of her mind, or because she’s consciously watching her words around him, actively taking care to avoid tripping that perpetual trigger. Either way, Jon is grateful.

But Jon also knows that he’s inseparable from the Institute. Despite his intentions, and regardless of whether or to what degree the others hold him personally responsible, the fact remains: he’s embroiled in something unspeakably evil, and that poses a danger to anyone who stands too close to him.

Georgie doesn’t immediately respond, instead taking the time to seriously consider his words. He’s always appreciated that about her, as uneasy as these moments of silent suspense can make him.

“I’ll talk to her about it,” she says eventually, “once she’s recovered enough to have that discussion. I don’t know how she’ll feel about staying in direct contact herself, especially at first, but… I doubt she expects me to cut you off. And I imagine she’ll still want to know how everyone is doing, even if she doesn’t want the details.” She glances up to meet his eyes. “Anyway, regardless of how often I visit in person, I’m still going to be checking in with you, so answer your damn phone, will you?”

“I do answer my phone,” he says defensively. “I just… forget to answer texts sometimes. And I don’t get service in the tunnels –”

“Well, come up for air and cell service from time to time.” She wrinkles her nose. “Honestly, I don’t know how you can tolerate being down here for hours on end –”

Jon startles slightly as the trapdoor creaks open above their heads. Georgie stands as Melanie makes her way down the ladder, hurrying over to fold her into her arms. Basira follows behind, closing the trapdoor behind her as she goes.

“Mission successful, I take it?” Jon says quietly as Basira approaches him, giving Georgie and Melanie a moment to themselves.

“Uneventful,” Basira says with a shrug. “A few sidelong glances, but otherwise, none of the library staff even acknowledged us. Definitely didn’t seem keen on asking why we were rummaging in the repair supplies.”

“They probably didn’t want to know.”

“Yeah.” A small, rueful smile crosses her face. “Some of them used to talk to me, you know. Nothing personal – we weren’t close – but… when I returned a book, they’d ask what I thought of it, give me recommendations, that sort of thing. Now, though…”

These days she prefers to wait until everyone has gone home for the day before visiting the library, Jon Knows. He also Knows that the library staff are well aware that she’s the one pilfering research materials in the dead of night – and that they have no plans on confronting her about it. She never leaves a mess, after all, and always returns items to their proper places once she’s finished with them, which is more than can be said for many of the students who make use of the library’s resources.

“You know, I don’t think any of them have looked me in the eye for months.” There’s a distinct note of regret in Basira’s voice. “They just watch me out of the corners of their eyes when they think I’m not looking. I don’t know if that’s because they’re afraid of Lukas disappearing them for fraternizing, or because everyone is leery of the Archives these days, or because I’ve just become less approachable. Maybe all three. Suppose it doesn’t really matter.”

Jon knows the feeling well. Before he can answer, though, Melanie clears her throat. Jon looks over to see her facing his direction, one hand clasping Georgie’s tight enough to blanch her knuckles.

“This is it, then,” Basira says solemnly.

“Yeah.” Melanie closes her eyes and breathes a long, shaky exhale. “It’s time.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me there?” Georgie asks.

Melanie shakes her head. “I don’t want you to see that.”

“But –”

“She won’t be alone,” Basira says. “I’ll be right outside the room.”

Melanie faces Georgie fully, taking her other hand as well. “The plan hasn’t changed. Basira will call 999. I’ll make it quick, and – once it’s done, Basira will come in and sit with me until the ambulance gets here.”

“I have a general idea of what the response time should be like,” Basira adds, looking at Georgie. “If we time it right, Melanie will have medical assistance within minutes. I can come get you when the paramedics get here, if you want to ride in the ambulance.”

Georgie nods and tightens her grip on Melanie’s hands. “Is that okay?”

“Only if you want,” Melanie says haltingly. “But – maybe try to avoid looking too close, if my eyes are uncovered? It’s just – it probably won’t be pretty.” A stressed laugh claws its way out of her throat. “Potential trauma fodder, you know? I don’t want to worry about you remembering me like that every time you see me, even after I’ve healed.”

“Okay,” Georgie replies softly.

“It shouldn’t take long. Just – wait here with Jon until then, okay?” Georgie nods again, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “Speaking of which –” Melanie glances at Jon, as if just now remembering his presence. Startled by the sudden direct eye contact, he reflexively straightens his spine and stands at attention. “I guess this is goodbye, huh? For a while, anyway.”

“I, uh. I suppose it is.”

“Right. So, um… good luck, I guess?”

No disclaimers or ill will tacked on this time, Jon notes privately.

“You too.” He forces a smile, but he suspects that it comes off as awkward rather than reassuring.

“Try not to die.”

“Yes, ‘not dying’ is relatively close to the top of my to-do list.”

“If I come to find out that you’ve gotten yourself killed and broken the eldritch employment contract binding us all to this place after I’ve gone and gouged my eyes out, I’m going to be livid.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” Jon says wryly.

“Seriously, though.” Melanie’s smirk melts away, taken over by a somber, quiet sort of intensity. “Either beat Elias at his own game, or get the fuck away from this place the instant you find an out. Whichever comes first. Preferably without any of the self-sacrificial bullshit.”

Fractious as its delivery is, the demand is oddly touching, coming from Melanie.

“I, uh… I’ll do my best?”

“You’d better.” Melanie nods – a curt but cordial dismissal – and turns her attention back to Georgie. “Hey,” she says, her voice going measurably softer, releasing one of Georgie’s hands to reach up and cup her face. Her watery smile belies her mental state: resolve warring with trepidation. “Look at me?”

For a long minute, she studies Georgie’s face, clearly enraptured. Jon forcefully tears his gaze away from the intimacy of the moment.

“Okay.” Melanie takes a deep breath in and releases it slowly. “I’m ready. I’ll see you soon, okay? Or – well, I won’t see you, but – you’ll see me, and I’ll…” She huffs, rolling her eyes. “Oh, whatever – you know what I mean.”

Georgie lets out a tearful chuckle, and Melanie relaxes marginally.

“I’m sure about this,” she says. “I promise. This is what I want – a life with you, away from all of this. And if this is the price I have to pay, then… I’m okay with that. Really, I am.” She stands on tiptoe to give Georgie a peck on the cheek. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” Georgie says, leaning down for a return kiss, smiling weakly against Melanie’s lips. “See you soon.”

When Martin first heard the bustle outside his door – coworkers venturing outside their solitary offices to trade whispered questions and eager gossip as word of paramedics in the archives made its way upstairs – his stomach gave a little lurch: a combination of horror and wonder. He hadn’t expected Melanie to change her mind – he knows how determined she can be once she’s settled on a course of action; how desperate she was to extricate herself from Elias’ – Jonah’s – schemes. Still, though, faced with the reality of it, he found himself in awe of her nerve.

That was yesterday. Martin didn’t get much work done, preoccupied as he was. He isn’t having an easier time of it today: his attention keeps slipping away to linger in remembrances of sterile hospital rooms and muted hallways, thoughts drowned out by the ghosts of sirens and beeping machinery.

“Well, this is an unexpected turn of events.”

Martin jolts in his seat, heart leaping into his throat. It only takes an instant longer for his alarm to mutate into aggravation.

“Peter!” Martin spins around to glower at the man. “How many times do I have to–”

Peter flaps a dismissive hand. “To be honest, Martin, the drop in temperature tends to tip most people off. The only reason you continue to be surprised by my arrival is because you’ve become acclimated to the Forsaken.”

The revelation is slow to sink in, a stark chill blooming in Martin’s chest and snaking its roots outwards. Only now that it’s been brought to his attention can he feel the nip in the air.

“Here I was certain you were becoming estranged from our patron, but it seems I needn’t have worried.” Peter’s smile is laced with malice. “Or should I?”

Martin says nothing, eyes wide and stinging from the now-conspicuous cold. Peter sighs, folds his hands behind his back, and begins a meandering back-and-forth pace.

“Our success is dependent on your voluntary isolation, Martin.”

“Yeah.” The word turns to fog as it touches the air, and Martin finds himself transfixed by the sight. “You’ve said.”

“It seems you need a reminder.”

The condescension dripping from the words is enough to drag Martin back into the present moment. Heat rises in his cheeks, contrasting with the temperature in the room and making the chill that much more noticeable.

“You still haven’t told me your plan,” he snaps. “You keep expecting me to just – go along with whatever you’re scheming, no questions asked.”

“You ask many questions, Martin –”

“Yeah, and you never answer them! You’re so – so bloody cryptic about all of this.”

“Martin, Martin,” Peter says, placating in the most patronizing way possible. Martin bristles: he hates the way Peter says his name. “There’s no need to get so worked up –”

“If you want me to be a partner in – in whatever it is you’re planning, you can’t expect me to go on blind trust!”

“I’m still conducting my own research,” Peter says mildly. “I would rather not confuse you with extraneous details before I have all the kinks worked out.”

“I’m not an idiot –”

“Rest assured,” Peter interrupts, “if I was capable of stopping the Extinction alone, I would. Unfortunately, it will require someone touched by the Beholding.”

“Why?”

“Because it requires this place, and this place” – Peter’s lip curls in distaste – “is the Eye’s seat of power. The One Alone has no dominion here.” Martin crosses his arms, unimpressed. “You are the only one who can do this, Martin.”

“Why?” Martin repeats.

Judging from the muscle ticking in Peter’s jaw, his limited supply of patience for conversation is precipitously depleting.

“No, really,” Martin presses, “why me? I mean” – he spreads his arms out with a scornful chuckle – “look at me. I’m not exactly hero material, am I?”

“That really depends on you. I can’t force you to cooperate. It won’t even work unless you’re a willing participant.”

“And what makes you think that your plan is the only way? You – you keep going on about how it’s my choice. Well – what if I choose to work with the others? It can’t hurt to have more eyes on the problem –” Martin rolls his eyes at Peter’s unconcealed revulsion. “Yeah, I know. No one would ever accuse you of being a team player, obviously. But I can be the liaison; you don’t have to interact with anyone at all.” Would prefer you don’t interact with anyone at all, Martin thinks. “I mean, that’s already my role, isn’t it? Dealing with people so you don’t have to?”

“Martin,” Peter says, low and dangerous.

“I’ll do it off the clock, even. I’ll isolate myself in my office during the workday, or whatever” – Martin gives a flippant wave of his hand – “and continue researching the Extinction.” And practically running the whole damn place on an assistant’s salary, he grouses silently. “After hours I’ll pursue my own research with the others.”

“Part-time isolation will not suffice to equip you with the power you’ll need.” Peter presses his lips into a pale, rigid line. “Be reasonable. Are you really willing to risk an apocalypse, just because you can’t appreciate solitude?”

“If it starts to look like there’s no other option, I’ll reconsider.”

“And if the Extinction emerges while you’re wasting time searching for an alternative that doesn’t exist?”

“Based on the limited information you’ve given me, I don’t think the Extinction is going to just… emerge overnight. I’m still not even convinced it’s going to be worse than any other Fear. I mean, the Flesh is relatively new, isn’t it? And it didn’t… leave the fear economy in shambles, or whatever.”

“It isn’t about competition, Martin.” Peter releases a slow plume of fog through his nose before continuing, voice cool but simmering with pique just under the surface. “The Extinction is different from the other Powers. It is defined by widescale eradication. The other Powers may seek to change the world, but none of them strive for a world without us.”

“But what makes you so sure the Extinction would?”

Peter’s eyes narrow. Ignoring him, Martin runs his thumb along his bottom lip as he replays Jon’s impassioned conjectures on the matter: It thrives on the potentiality of a mass extinction event, not the fulfillment of one.

“What’s to say it wouldn’t be just fine with the world as it is, like the End?” Martin says, more confidently now. “People have been prophesying about the end of the world for – all of human history, probably. I doubt we’ll stop anytime soon. Maybe at its core the Extinction is just… the fear of an uncertain future. And a particular future doesn’t have to be realized in order to inspire fear, as long as the potential is always there. It’s about the suspense – the ‘what ifs’, the unknown, the – the lack of control in it all.” Martin laughs. “In a way, that’s… that’s what most fears boil down to, isn’t it?”

“The stakes are rather high to gamble on a thought experiment, don’t you think?” The temperature plunges a few more degrees as Peter speaks. “I think that the most important ‘what if’ you should concern yourself with is what if you’re wrong?”

“And what if I’m not?” Martin counters. “You act so authoritative, but aren’t you also just speculating? When I agreed to work with you, you told me you would provide me with evidence to support your theory. So far, I’m not convinced. You’re going to have to give me more to go on than just ‘trust me.’ I mean – if it’s between trusting you and – and trusting Jon, and the others? You can’t really be surprised if I choose them over you.”

“Oh, Martin,” Peter tuts, shaking his head with derisive, disingenuous pity. “Since when has the trust you’ve placed in others ever been reciprocated?”

“I trust him,” Martin says defiantly.

“But does he trust you?” Peter pauses for effect. “Of all the times you’ve allowed yourself to form attachments, has anyone even once genuinely returned those affections?”

Jon did.

Whatever expression Martin is wearing brings a sneer to Peter’s face. Martin clenches his teeth and ignores him.

Jon does, he corrects. Present tense. He said as much.

Martin still can’t fathom what Jon could possibly see in him, but Jon wouldn’t lie about something like that, right? He wouldn’t.

…would he?

No, he wouldn’t, Martin chides. You know he wouldn’t. Trust him.

“Sure,” Peter persists, “you may open yourself up to the potential for something more, but you know as well as I do that it won’t last. Is the inevitable loss really worth the risk?”

“I don’t know,” Martin says. He tries to ignore the slight quaver that insinuates itself into the declaration. “But if I never take the risk, I’ll never know, will I?”

“I think you already know the answer.” Peter’s pale eyes glitter with spite. “Remember what it felt like, languishing at the Archivist’s deathbed. Recall the state you were in when you first came to me.”

The words are incisive, sliding under Martin’s skin and lodging there like shrapnel. He can feel his confidence waver, the conviction he stood fast on only seconds ago splintering underneath him like thin ice.

“How many times do you think he can court death and survive? He all but died stopping the last apocalypse; he was willing to bury himself alive for a woman who tried to kill him. How do you think he’ll react if you tell him about any of this? You think he’ll listen to reason? Trust in your judgment?” Peter fixes Martin with a smug, hungry look. “Or will he throw himself in front of the first bullet he sees?”

He already knows about all of this, Martin reminds himself. Jon isn’t about to sacrifice himself on account of the Extinction. Moreover, he seems to be genuinely committed to working as a team rather than striking out on his own.

But he also sees himself as a cataclysm waiting to happen, says the nagging doubt skulking in the far corners of Martin’s mind. As much as Jon insists that he doesn’t want to die, he’s already lived through one apocalypse. Martin has no doubt that Jon would sacrifice himself to prevent another, if it came down to it.

Jon is a powder keg of fear and guilt, and there is no shortage of potential ignition sources waiting in the wings. It only takes one untimely spark to set an archive ablaze.

“I trust him,” Martin repeats to himself, but the statement is rendered feeble by the leaden, frozen knot unfurling in his chest.

“Can you really weather another round of grief?” Peter continues, triumphant. He knows he’s found a gap in Martin’s defenses; all he needs to do now is twist the knife. “You’ve already done your mourning, cut the infection off at the source. Let him back in, and you only open yourself up to more pain. Better a numbed scar than a wound that never heals, don’t you think?”

“No.” There’s something off about Martin’s voice – as if it doesn’t belong to him; as if it’s originating from outside of himself, faint and frail and faraway, smothered by the cold, empty fog clogging his lungs. “N-no, I…”

“Connection is a fleeting, fickle thing,” Peter persists. “It’s a lie people tell themselves. The truth is that we are all alone. In the end, all we have is ourselves. Think about it.”

Unthinkingly, Martin shrinks away as Peter steps closer.

“You asked for more evidence.” Peter slides a few statement folders onto the desk. “Take some time to yourself. Consider whether you’re willing to wager on the fate of the world.”

When Martin looks up, he is alone.

“It’s so loud,” Daisy mutters heatedly, stalking to and fro like a panther in a cage. She scratches furiously at her forearms as she goes, blunt fingernails leaving faint red stripes on pale skin.

“Daisy,” Jon says evenly, “I think maybe you should –”

“Itch I can’t scratch.” She pivots on her heel, retracing her short path in the opposite direction. “Feels like fire under my skin.”

“I don’t think clawing your skin off is going to help.”

Daisy barks a laugh. “With what claws?” She stops short and brandishes the backs of her trembling hands, fingers splayed to highlight nails gnawed to the quick, ragged cuticles stained rust-brown with dried blood. “Dull now.” Her eyes go unfocused, staring vaguely at her hands as if she doesn’t recognize them. “Too dull.”

“I’m sorry,” Jon says, and he means it.

It never gets easier to witness her like this, frenetic and fraying in the throes of the Hunt’s compulsion. These spells have a way of making her features look sharper, her mannerisms more animalistic. She’s all protruding bones and sallow skin, but that seeming frailty does nothing to tame the violence thrumming in her veins. If anything, that all-consuming hunger only makes her more fearsome.

Jon’s strict rations have given him an underfed, pinched look as well, but at least he has something. Not enough to put meat on his bones, so to speak, but enough to stave off starvation. Daisy, though…

When Jon takes a step forward, she rounds on him with teeth bared and a snarl in her throat. Jon flinches at the sudden movement.

“You’re afraid of me.” Daisy exhales an exhausted rattle of a laugh, as if vindicated. “Good. You should be.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Jon says. “I have an overactive startle reflex. Always have, really.”

“You’re lying.” Daisy breathes heavily through her nose, fists clenched at her sides now. “Admit it.”

Jon knows what she’s trying to do. She wants him to lash out, to bite back, to make her bleed. He’s uncomfortably familiar with that craving. It’s like looking into a mirror.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he reiterates.

“Liar,” Daisy hisses, fixing him with a baleful glare.

He’s seen her like this many times before, hunger-ravaged and swamped by bloodlust. She’ll doggedly bash herself against the nearest witness to her shame like a ship crashed against a jetty, driven forward again and again by cresting waves of guilt and self-loathing until she’s free-floating wreckage. Every time, it gets more and more difficult to gather up all the debris and repair the damage. Jon fears that one of these days, the storm will pass and there won’t be enough pieces left to put her back together.

“I’m not a knife you can cut yourself on, Daisy,” he says patiently.

Daisy looks positively mutinous, mouth opening and closing several times before erupting: “Why wouldn’t you be afraid of me?”

“I used to be,” Jon admits, leaning back against the tunnel wall to take some of the weight off his bad leg. “Before the Buried. I was terrified of you. Dreaded every moment I had to be alone with you. Thought it was only a matter of time before you finished the job.”

“It was,” she rasps out – and with that, her shoulders slump and her fists relax to hang limply at her sides, fingers jumping and twitching with the last dregs of her agitation.

“I know. But then you changed. You were different, after the Buried. As afraid of yourself as I used to be of you. As afraid of yourself as I was of myself.” He looks her in the eye as he speaks. “I looked at you and saw my own fear reflected back at me. There are so many things to be afraid of. You were – you are trying very hard not to be one of them.”

“If I’m afraid of me, you should be, too.”

“Are you afraid of me?” Jon asks, shaping each word carefully to keep the compulsion at bay.

She pauses, considering the question.

“No,” she says eventually. “Afraid for you, sometimes.”

“As I am for you.” Jon’s tentative smile fades after a moment. “I’ll admit, I do have… reflexive reactions, sometimes. There were a few incidents where I walked into the breakroom and you were holding a knife, and my fight-or-flight response kicked in before my conscious brain could catch up with reality.”

Daisy squeezes her eyes shut, wrapping her arms around her middle.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. When she opens her eyes, the look on her face isn’t pleading so much as it is resigned. She isn’t asking for forgiveness. Jon doubts she ever will.

It’s just one more thing they have in common.

“I know,” he says quietly. “To be clear, I don’t feel unsafe with you, as you are now. It’s just… flashbacks. They can be – unpredictable. And if I’m already feeling on edge, or – or not quite present, it doesn’t take much to set me off. But,” he adds, giving her a serious look, “I don’t want you walking on eggshells around me. That only puts me more on edge.”

“Fine. But will you tell me if I do something to scare you?”

“Yes.” She made the same request last time. “But I’ve never had to. You could always feel when I was afraid. From a few rooms away, even.”

“Yeah,” Daisy says with a choked laugh. “Your blood is – very loud sometimes.”

“And now?”

These episodes tend to be capricious. Sometimes, what seems to be the calm after the storm proves to be only a lull before a second wind. If the way she’s wobbling on her feet and favoring one leg is any indication, Jon suspects that the worst of the flare-up has passed for now, taking her adrenaline surge with it. Still, he waits for her confirmation. Daisy takes a minute to mull over the question, head cocked slightly to the side as if listening.

“Quieter,” she says.

With that, Jon lowers himself to the ground and sits with his back against the wall, beckoning her over to take a seat. She hesitates for a moment longer before following his lead, slumping down next to him with a labored sigh.

“Sorry for growling at you,” she says sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Daisy tilts her head back to stare at the ceiling. “You said I ended up going back to the Hunt last time.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“September. But – but that doesn’t mean it has to happen again,” he adds hurriedly when he sees her face fall in a mixture of anguish and resignation. “It was – sort of a perfect storm of extenuating circumstances. Like I said before, if you didn’t let the Hunt back in, you and Basira would likely have been killed. But I think you knew you wouldn’t be coming back from it. Before you changed, you made Basira promise to hunt you down and kill you.”

“And did she?”

“She lost track of you in the chaos. You gave chase after one of the Hunters. Once you killed her, the other Hunter started hunting you. For revenge.” Jon’s voice drops to a low murmur. “A few weeks later, the world ended.”

Which makes it sound far more passive than it actually was, but Jon isn’t in the mood for a scolding should he opt for an ‘I’ statement.

“And then what?”

“You were a full-fledged Hunter in a – a perpetual fear generator of a world,” Jon says grimly. “Do you really need to hear the details?”

“Tell me,” Daisy says. “Please.”

Jon understands the need, but recounting the apocalypse never gets any easier. He closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and takes a moment to gather his thoughts.

“When I opened the door and let all the Fears into this reality,” he begins, “the world was divvied up into thousands of different domains, each belonging to a different shade of terror. With few exceptions, most people were confined to one domain – usually whatever aligned with their deepest fears. Avatars and monsters were subject to the Ceaseless Watcher, but otherwise able to exercise control over the humans in the domains of their patrons. Most seemed to stake out territory and settle in one place – customizing their own little spheres of influence, creating playgrounds of their own making. But some got around. You were one of the ones that traveled.”

“What was –” Daisy grimaces. “Who was I hunting?”

“Well… in that place, no one got what they deserved, only what would hurt the most. And people are rarely afraid of just one thing. Most were magnets for multiple fears. The more nomadic Avatars and monsters would gravitate towards whatever individuals were most susceptible to their power, so to speak.” He bites his lip. There’s really no tactful way to phrase this next part. “In your case, you had a roster of specific targets that you were tracking. Former prey. Whether you were drawn to them because of their own fear of you, or because some part of you judged them to have ‘gotten away,’ so to speak… I’m not entirely certain. It may have been a bit of both.”

“I see,” Daisy murmurs. “Guess it makes sense that I would rank high among some people’s greatest fears.”

“Basira was tracking you when we ran into her. We were with her when we found you.”

“And was I… still me?”

“Yes and no,” Jon says hesitantly. “You were you, in a way, but only a small part of you. The Hunter. Everything else was buried too deep. Drowned. Even if I could have brought you back, it would have killed you. You – you didn’t even recognize me, or Martin. You recognized Basira – saw her as pack, wanted her to join you in the Hunt – but…”

“You were prey,” Daisy says quietly.

“Yeah.”

“You never did manage to grow a self-preservation instinct, did you?” Daisy squints at him. “I went full monster on you, and you still want me to sit next to you now.”

“You had sharper teeth then,” Jon says drily. Daisy scoffs and nudges his shoulder with hers. She doesn’t draw back after making contact, and when Jon doesn’t pull away either, she leans into him.

“Basira kept her promise?” Daisy asks after a minute.

“Yes. She didn’t want to, but…” Jon swallows thickly, the memory of Basira’s heartbreak bringing to mind his own. “It wasn’t an easy decision.”

Daisy rubs at her chest with one hand, as if to soothe an ache. “It wasn’t fair for me to ask that of her, was it?”

“Maybe not,” Jon sighs. “It seems fair choices are hard to come by, for most of us.”

“I… I don’t want her to have to make that choice this time.”

“Neither do I.”

“It’s never going to stop, is it?” Daisy glances at him, allowing her head to rest lightly on his shoulder. “It’s only going to get worse.”

“I’m sorry.” What else is there to say?

“Melanie got away,” Daisy says, a tinge of bargaining in her tone. “She managed to purge the Slaughter. And break away from the Eye.”

“Her situation was… different from ours. She wasn’t as far gone as we are. The Slaughter hadn’t fully claimed her, and the Eye never took her as an Avatar. But you’ve been living with the Hunt for most of your life; I signed myself over to the Beholding the moment I became the Archivist. We’ve become… attached to our patrons, dependent on them for survival. Symbiotic, in a twisted sort of way.”

“You really don’t think there’s a way back, then.”

“I don’t know for sure. I’ve seen it before, in my future, but – the world was different then. During the apocalypse, I was able to, uh… shift a person’s status from Watched to Watcher. I – I mean, technically everyone was Watched – the Eye had dominion over everything – but I could give someone control over one of the smaller domains. Create new Avatars, for lack of a better term.

“But turn a Watcher into solely the Watched, and they would typically unravel. I don’t know if that’s because the full focus of the Ceaseless Watcher’s gaze just happens to be lethal – particularly for Avatars aligned with other Powers – or if an Avatar is simply unable to survive being cut off from their patron regardless of the means of separation. I do Know that I wouldn’t have been able to survive being cut off from the Eye unscathed. I was… too much a part of the Eye in that reality. Not sure about now. For either of us.”

“That’s a roundabout way of saying ‘no.’”

“I’m not saying no, I’m saying that I don’t know. Supposedly escaping the Buried was impossible, and here we are.”

“Apples and oranges,” Daisy says sullenly.

“Maybe. I think it’s all too complex for clear-cut categories. Even the hard-and-fast ‘rules’ are only as strong as our collective belief in them. Almost like our expectations shore them up. I’ve witnessed all of reality being rewritten – all physical laws and supposed universal constants reshaped to center the Eye.” He reaches one hand up to tug on the hair at the back of his neck. “After all I’ve Seen, it’s difficult to conceive of anything being categorically impossible. Between all the dream logic and reality bending, there’s plenty of space for firsts and exceptions to the rules.”

‘I don’t knows’ are where the hope lives, Martin said once. At the time, Jon teased him for being a hopeless romantic, but truthfully, Jon was just as hopelessly endeared by Martin’s belief in such things.

“Have you talked to Georgie yet today?” Daisy asks, apparently ready to change the subject.

“Oh, uh – yes. This morning.”

“And?”

“Melanie was out of surgery and stable, but she wasn’t awake yet. Georgie promised to call tonight with an update.” Assuming nothing major comes up before then, a worried voice in Jon’s head supplies. He shakes his head to jog the thought loose. “Speaking of Georgie… have you given any thought to her suggestion?”

“What,” Daisy says, drolly skeptical, “playing a video game?”

“I realize it’s… somewhat out of the box, but it might be worth a try. Like Georgie said, there are multiplayer games where you can, uh… hunt down other players.”

Daisy plucks absently at her collar, glowering at the opposite wall as if the bricks there committed a personal offense. “It’s not the same.”

“A simulation might not come close to a real hunt, no, but – you might still get something out of it? Maybe?” Daisy directs her scowl up at the ceiling. Jon only digs his heels in, undeterred. “There are even some that have a survival horror theme. An aesthetic that already puts players in the mindset to be frightened, you know?”

“People play those games for fun, Sims.” She finally looks at him, eyes narrowed. “It’s about thrills, not mortal fear.”

“Sometimes genuine fear can sneak through. Haven’t you ever been so creeped out by a horror story that it stayed with you after nightfall?”

“Not really?”

“O-oh. Well, some people have that experience.” Jon gives an awkward little cough. “Anyway, under the right circumstances, a game can get the adrenaline pumping as well as a chase can. A fight-or-flight response doesn’t necessarily require a real physical threat.”

Daisy raises her eyebrows, transparently cynical. “Do you really think the Hunt is going to be satisfied with jump scares and – and low-stakes adrenaline rushes filtered through a screen?”

“No,” Jon admits. “But it might take the edge off. Sort of like reading old statements does for me. Not enough to stop you starving, but maybe enough to distract from the hunger pangs. At least temporarily. If nothing else, you did say you need a new hobby, and it’s not like this place is overflowing with viable entertainment options.”

“I guess,” Daisy sighs. “I mean, it’s not like I’m paying rent. May as well squander my paycheck.”

“If that’s the case, you should see if that eBay listing for that vintage The Archers board game is still up,” Jon says drily. “Last I checked, it was £2 with no bidders.”

“Yeah, and £30 shipping.”

“Sounds like £32 well spent, if you ask me.”

Daisy snorts and bumps her shoulder against his. “You, Jonathan Sims, are an absolute menace.”

Adrift and thoroughly divorced from the concept of time, end of the workday passes Martin by without his notice. Once again, he wonders whether Peter deliberately assigned him an office with no external window, not only to put another wall between him and the rest of the world, but to make it easier for him to lose track of time.

For an interminable stretch of time he sits catatonic, mind peppered with sporadic sensory input: Dead-weight limbs, listless and foreign-feeling. The brush of fabric resting against bare skin, every point of weightless contact a violation. The distant ticking of clockwork, rote and irrevocable.

Stand up, comes the thought, detached and intrusive: an instruction he cannot parse; empty phonemes wafted into a vacant mind, abandoned there to echo and disperse until they lose all meaning. A fragment of a signal from brain to nerves to fingers presses numb fingertips to thumbs, a cautious test yielding no sensation but for the vague, spongey give of flesh.

Then the body ostensibly belonging to him is on its feet, the connection between floor and soles disturbingly incongruent with unreality. Walking now, every footfall jarring in its impact; every step stretched and blurred like a botched time-lapse photograph; every molasses-sluggish forward motion met with invisible resistance, like swimming against a sludgy current.

He does not remember how or when or under whose direction he arrives in the Archives, swaying at the threshold of the Head Archivist’s office. Empty and still. Silence so pervasive it’s almost tangible. Viscous and inexorable. Trapping him like a fly in honey. Drowning.

When next he becomes aware of his surroundings, he’s wavering at the bottom of a ladder. Walls curving up and over his head, a brickwork warren stretching on and out into the murk.

Standing in place. Hovering like an afterimage. Rootless and incorporeal. Searching for… staring at… calling to…

There: something real.

“Martin?” Jon’s breath fogs the air as he speaks, but the way he says the name… his voice seems to cradle the word, shielding it against the cold. He sits up straighter, keen gaze sweeping the area like a lighthouse beacon. “Martin, is that you?”

That’s me, Martin thinks, and then, wonderingly: He says your name like it’s something precious.

At that thought, Jon’s eyes land on him like a searchlight.

“There you are.” His soft smile immediately falters, brow furrowing in concern. “Are you alright?”

He’s sat on the floor with his back against the wall, one knee drawn up to his chest, and Daisy pressed up against his side in a mirrored position, sharing a pair of corded earphones. Daisy is already thumbing at the screen of her phone, presumably pausing whatever it is they’re listening to, as Jon removes his earbud.

Martin opens his mouth to speak, but the air in his lungs has turned to viscid fog and the confused tangle of half-formed thoughts in his mind refuse to coalesce into actual words. Jon exchanges a glance with Daisy, who is already moving to stand. Martin wants to object – she doesn’t have to leave on his account; he can see that they’re busy; he’s fine; he’s just overreacting – but before he can cobble together a protest, she’s halfway to her feet, gripping the wall for support.

“I’m alright now,” Martin can hear her say.

“You’re sure?” Jon asks in a low murmur.

“Yeah.” She winces as she straightens her spine. “Knowing Basira, she’s still pouring over the same statements as she was this morning. She could do with an interruption.”

“Can you manage the ladder?”

Daisy stretches her leg out, testing her mobility. “Think so.”

They give each other another long look, a shared nod, and without another word, Daisy staggers her way to the exit and mounts the ladder.

As it does every time he witnesses these displays of unspoken understanding between them, an ugly pang of jealousy burns in Martin’s chest – some combination of envy, inadequacy, longing, and loneliness. Possessiveness, almost – and an instant later, the shame sets in.

But then the trapdoor closes, Jon looks Martin in the eye again, and the sincere, tender warmth sheltering there is enough to leave Martin reeling. It’s hard to comprehend anyone – let alone Jonathan Sims – looking at him like that; difficult to reconcile requited affection with a lifetime of fruitless want. Martin can’t shake the feeling that it will always be this way – and that his inability to trust in unconditional love is precisely what makes him so unlovable in the first place.

Jon clears his throat and pats the floor beside him. He’s seated on a blanket, Martin just now notices, folded over several times to cushion the hard ground.

He’d better not be napping down here, Martin thinks to himself.

“Martin,” Jon says, in that impossibly soft tone he’s taken to using around Martin these days, “I’d like you to come sit, if you’re amenable.”

It’s such a Jon way of phrasing the invitation, and the familiarity it engenders has Martin accepting without a conscious thought. He settles himself beside Jon, close but not touching. Those few inches of distance manage to be simultaneously loathsome and assuring. Martin lets his hand rest in that vacant space, fingers clenching around a fistful of blanket.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Jon’s hand twitch, as if fighting back the urge to reach out and touch. Instead, he starts to rub the fabric of his trouser leg between his thumb and forefinger.

“What do you need right now?” Jon asks.

“I…” Martin pauses, unsettled by the sound of his own voice, grating and almost unfamiliar to his ears.

“Take your time.”

It takes a minute for Martin to wrap his mouth around more than one syllable.

“Nothing,” he says, the weight of the word nearly pinning his tongue in place.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing.”

Several more minutes pass before Martin is able to construct a full sentence.

“I’m just being stupid.” The words seem to echo faintly in the tunnel, despite how quietly he says them.

“What do you need?” Jon asks again.

“Nothing,” Martin repeats dully. He doesn’t need anything.

Jon doesn’t immediately respond. Martin can feel himself go rigid, anticipating… what – aggravation, impatience, disengagement? But Jon only runs a thumb along his jawline, a thoughtful frown on his face.

“Okay,” he says eventually, “what do you want, then? What would – what would help you feel better right now?”

“I… I don’t know,” Martin says in a voice so feeble it’s nearly inaudible. He flexes his fingers uncertainly, chasing after any physical sensation at all, only to find them numb and deathlike. The helpless sigh that shudders out of him wants to be a whimper. “I just – didn’t – don’t – feel real. Feels like I’m not really here.”

“Hmm.” Jon looks at him – really looks at him, taking his time to study Martin’s face. “Well, I can confirm that you are here.”

“You… you can see me?” Martin asks meekly, pleadingly, dreading the answer.

“Yes.” Jon pauses. “And if you’re agonizing over being a bother, don’t, because you aren’t. I always like seeing you.”

He should trust Jon – he does trust Jon – but it’s still a constant struggle to drown out that Lonely part of him that insists that isolation is safer, more dependable, and far more habitable. Unthinkingly, Martin reaches over, hand trembling in the air above Jon’s, fingertips just barely ghosting across scarred skin.

“Would you like me to hold your hand…?” Jon ventures.

Martin’s fingers curve inward as he pulls back slightly. “I, um.”

“You can say no,” Jon reminds him.

“I… I want it, but I – I – I don’t know if I can handle it right now, and I –” Martin draws back entirely, flapping both hands in frustration, trying to relieve the pins-and-needles sensation prickling through his veins. “I hate this. I hate being like this.”

Martin grimaces at the outburst, but Jon doesn’t seem to be judging him. Instead, he’s looking off to the side, a crease between his eyebrows now, as if he’s working through a problem.

“No skin-to-skin contact,” he says to himself, and then he looks to Martin. “Pressure helps me sometimes, when I feel like I’m not real. You could… lean against me? If you want.”

“I…”

“You don’t have to,” Jon rushes to reassure him.

“It’s – not that I don’t want to. I guess I’m just…” Martin can feel himself flush with embarrassment. “It’s daft, but I’m worried that I’ll be – I don’t know, incorporeal, or something.”

“I distinctly recall you telling me that you’re not a ghost.”

It takes a few seconds for Jon’s deadpan humor to sink in. When it does, Martin nearly chokes on a surprised laugh.

“I still can’t believe you thought I was a ghost,” he says, cracking a smile. The tight, bitter-cold knot in his chest yields just a little, like ice disintegrating under a spring thaw.

“In my defense, I was quite distraught at the time.” Jon’s eyes wrinkle at the corners and Martin is struck by overwhelming fondness. He doesn’t pull away when Jon reaches out, open palm hovering just above his shoulder. “May I?”

Cautiously, Martin nods.

“Hmm.” Jon applies the lightest touch at first, watching Martin’s face carefully. He waits until Martin nods for him to continue before he presses down more firmly. Before long, Martin can feel the warmth of Jon’s hand through his jumper. That warmth carries over into Jon’s smile. “Feels solid to me.”

The confirmation comes as a relief, as foolish as that makes Martin feel. He braces himself and leans against Jon’s side, releasing his held breath when his body meets with tangible resistance. At first he worries that Jon, scrawny as he is, won’t be able to support the weight, but he doesn’t budge when Martin melts against him. After that, it’s a struggle for Martin to keep his eyes open.

Jon must notice, because he whispers, “You can rest. I’ll be here.”

Martin doesn’t even have the strength to nod, let alone the energy to argue. He allows the steady rise and fall of Jon’s chest to lull him into an almost meditative state, his mind still floating somewhere outside of himself, but now tethered to the ground.

Then the silence starts nipping at his heels.

“Too quiet,” he mumbles. “Talk to me?”

“What about?”

“Anything.”

“Did you know that highland cattle have a double coat?” Jon says after a minute of consideration. “It insulates them against the cold. The outer layer is long – the longest hair of any cattle breed, in fact – and oily, which helps ward off the rain. Underneath is softer, almost woolly hair.”

Once Jon gets started, those little scraps of trivia soon progress to a nearly encyclopedic lecture. It doesn’t take long for Martin to lose himself in the rich timbre of Jon’s voice as he goes on about various Scottish breeds of cattle. Although he doesn’t fall fully asleep, Martin manages to drift in and out of consciousness enough that he loses track of time once more. This time, though, it’s a comfortable daze: there’s someone to keep him from straying too far.

At some point, he unthinkingly seeks out Jon’s hand. Jon presses his thumb into the center of Martin’s palm, rubbing small circles there, coaxing Martin further into peaceful relaxation.

“Sorry for interrupting you and Daisy earlier,” Martin murmurs groggily into Jon’s shoulder.

“Oh, we were just listening to The Archers.”

“Are you taking the piss?” Martin asks, opening one eye to scrutinize Jon’s expression.

“Unfortunately not.”

“You like The Archers.”

“Good lord, no. Blame Daisy.”

“Daisy likes The Archers,” Martin says, even more dubiously, sitting up now to squint at Jon.

“There are stranger things.”

Martin snorts and nestles into Jon’s side again. “If you say so.”

“Feeling better now?” Martin reflexively snuggles closer. Jon laughs softly, a little puff of a breath that rustles Martin’s hair. “I’m not going to deny you cuddles if the answer is ‘yes,’ you know.”

“Cuddles,” Martin whispers, the word dissolving into a clipped giggle.

“What?” Jon tilts his head. There’s a puzzled scowl on his face, as if he’s trying to decide whether or not he should take offense. It’s impossibly endearing.

“Cuddles,” Martin repeats, in a poor approximation of Jon’s voice this time. “Not a word I ever expected to hear from you.”

“Quiet, you,” Jon huffs, but he can’t disguise the way his indignant pout cracks into a smile under the weight of his own amusement. He almost seems to preen, as if pulling a laugh from Martin is a victory on which to pride himself. He reaches up with his free hand, pausing just above the top of Martin’s head. “May I?”

At Martin’s affirmative, Jon begins to comb his fingers through Martin’s hair, fingernails lightly scratching against his scalp. For the briefest of moments, some primal fragment of him recoils from the contact, instinctively unnerved by the vulnerability inherent to such closeness. Martin spurns that voice, breathes through its fit of angst and panic, and leans into the touch.

Little by little, step by step, he’s acclimating. He just wishes that it wasn’t such a process each and every time he lets his guard down like this.

“Bad day?” Jon asks once Martin settles.

“Something like that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Martin groans. “But I should.”

“Only if you want to.”

“No, you should know, I just…” Martin heaves a wearied sigh. “Peter’s back.”

Jon gasps like he’s had the wind knocked out of him. The hand stroking Martin’s hair abruptly stills; the other, still clasped in Martin’s, constricts like a death-grip.

“Did he hurt you?” The question is steeped in an artificial, fragile sort of calm, but Jon can’t quite mask the intensity buzzing just under the surface: fear, protectiveness, and desperation all intermingled and reinforced by that ominous inkling of power that, despite his intentions, lurks behind every word.

“He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. Just… trying to get me to recommit to the Lonely.” Martin scoffs. “And of course he was trying to do it in a way that would make me feel like it was my idea. Get me to convince myself that it was what I wanted, rather than something he was pressuring me into.”

“Of all the Powers, the Lonely is one of the most insidious, I think,” Jon says quietly. “It seeks out victims who already have one foot in the Lonely, reinforces those fears, promises kinship – a paradoxical form of it, anyway – and then it just… waits. Spend enough time disconnected from the rest of the world, and it doesn’t take long to start telling yourself the lie that it’s for the best. That it’s what you are; that it’s all you’re meant to be.”

“And I fell for it,” Martin mutters.

“Anyone would, subjected to the right conditions.” Jon waits until he catches Martin’s eye before he continues. “It isn’t your fault. This is what the Fears do. It’s what they are. They find an opening, they sink their hooks in, and they pull you under. They don’t let go until either you drown or you learn to breathe fear. The only way out is for someone to throw you a lifeline, and even then, the odds aren’t great. And the Lonely in particular – one of the first things it does is make it difficult to even conceive of a lifeline. It’s hard to catch hold of one if you never think to look for it.”

“I thought you hated convoluted metaphors.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately the Powers That Be tend to elude any sort of straightforward, concrete discussion,” Jon grouses. “Just one more reason to begrudge them, really. My point is, the Lonely is an insufferable liar and so is Peter.”

“What do you know, they’re perfect for each other.” The remark succeeds in putting a lopsided smirk on Jon’s face, much to Martin’s delight. “Anyway, Peter said his plan won’t work unless I’m voluntarily Lonely.”

“He’s right, although his plan has nothing to do with the Extinction. He needs you to choose the Lonely because those were the terms of his bet with Jonah. He poaches you out from under the Eye – gets you to pledge yourself to the Forsaken – and he wins, with the Institute as a prize. He fails to convert you, he loses, and he does what Jonah wants, which is for me to be marked by the Lonely.”

Jon says that last part so nonchalantly. As if it’s a foregone conclusion; as if he’s become so accustomed to dehumanization that it doesn’t even give him pause. Martin grits his teeth, biting back a surge of anger on Jon’s behalf.

“Yeah, well,” he says tightly, “Peter bet on the wrong horse.”

A sharp intake of breath leaves Jon sounding strangled when he says, eyes wide and lips parted, “Oh?”

“I mean, he can’t just sic the Lonely on me like he would any other victim, right? That wouldn’t count as a win. He needs me to choose it. And I’m not going to do that.”

“Yeah?” The expression of unguarded, cautious hope dawning on Jon’s face makes him look years younger.

“Yeah,” Martin says, feeling increasingly emboldened. “The funny thing is, I don’t – I don’t think I ever chose loneliness. I never wanted it – that was just a lie I told myself, and the Lonely just – echoed it back to me. S-so Peter’s out of luck, because if there are other options, then the Lonely will always be involuntary. Because it’s not what I want.”

“You – you mean it?” Jon brightens, leaning forward.

Martin’s heart skips a beat and flutters hummingbird-quick against his ribs. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Jon smile – not like this, that is, beaming and uninhibited and altogether breathtaking. Immediately, Martin decides that he wants more. It seems wrong for something so exhilarating to be so rare.

He doesn’t know which of them moves first, and it doesn’t matter, because Jon is in his lap, and Jon is nuzzling into his shoulder, and Jon is here and solid and so, so alive in Martin’s arms, breathing warm and steady into his neck, smiling against his skin, hands scrabbling at his back to cling to his jumper. Martin’s fingers seek purchase of their own, and then something clicks.

“Jon,” he says, leaning back just far enough to confirm his suspicion, “is this mine?”

“Are you just now noticing?” Jon asks, devastatingly fond. “Martin, I’ve been wearing this jumper off and on for the last several weeks.”

“You have?” Martin all but squeaks, heat creeping up his neck and to the tips of his ears. “No. No, you –” Jon’s grin is widening, leaving Martin increasingly flustered. “I – I mean, yes, you have, obviously, I know that, but I – I – I –” Martin gulps, mortified, as Jon finally fails to contain his suppressed laughter. “Look, I didn’t recognize it until just now, alright?”

“Well,” Jon says, ducking his head to chuckle softly against Martin’s throat, “it’s mine now, and you can’t have it back.”

Which is fine with Martin, really, because he would be lying to himself if he said he wasn’t helplessly charmed by the newfound knowledge that not only is Jon an unrepentant clothes-thief, but apparently also an insatiable cuddler.

End Notes:

To address Martin’s concern: Jon does, in fact, nap in the tunnels sometimes. Listen, with Jurgen Leitner (derogatory) in absentia, there was an opening for the position of Beleaguered Tunnel-Haunting Hermit and Jon has all the necessary qualifications.

So anyways, who else thinks Peter’s bio on a dating app would probably just be that “every living creature on this earth dies alone” quote from Donnie Darko? I bet he thinks 'survival of the fittest' means 'every man for himself'. What an insufferable clown.

No Archive-speak in this chapter to cite.

I wanted to make a joke about a The Archers-themed Monopoly, so I asked duckduckgo if it was a thing. Sadly, it is not. There IS, however, a 1960s The Archers board game, and yes, there ARE eBay listings for it.

The first section of this chapter was written before eps 190-192 dropped. I think it still lines up well enough with what we saw of Melanie & Georgie’s characterization in these most recent episodes, with the qualifier that things have gone very differently in this AU compared with canon. (Also, I took some liberties wrt Georgie’s not-feeling-fear thing, obvi. Some of it matches with the most recent episodes, some of it not so much, but I decided to keep it anyways.)

Oh and I think I might have given myself cavities with the last section of this chapter. (I’m aro-spec; it’s hard to tell when I’m going over the top, but hopefully it’s fluffy without being overly cloying.)

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fic #tma spoilers #long post

[justasparkwritings]

Codename Cupid: Chapter 16

Previous: How Cricket Got Her Name 

Pairing: Jeon Jungkook X Reader/OFC/You

Genre: Secret AgentAU, AgentAU, Government Agent AU

Rating: PG15

Word Count: 3.04K

Warnings: Swearing 

Summary: Our lovely P.I. goes on the search for Min Yoongi, and stumbles into the identity of the mystery man with Taehyung. 

(this is... rough? did not expect it to be so long...) 

Missing Min Yoongi

Present Day

           My sister always tells me she’s given me all she can, that she can’t help me past my one favor a year. It’s a ploy, a deception, a boldfaced lie she tells at work or anytime we’re in earshot of anyone else. Does she misuse her government clearance? Yes. Does she defy laws and challenge the ethical code? Yes. Has she ever gotten caught? No. You’d think the government would put more tabs on her, considering her sister is a registered and licensed PI, but no, no one seems to bat an eye.

           Min Yoongi, Park Yoongi, Yoongi, is nonexistent. I barely understand what he did at Lee Enterprises, let alone how he ended up bedding Euna. He supposedly comes from no money, no name to build off of, nothing. His grades were fine, his college experience came and went with nary a note of youthful rebellion. Now, now that he’s no longer at Enterprises, I cannot fucking find him. Nothing on the web, nothing in the statewide system, nothing in the national system. No death certificates, no marriage licenses, nothing.

           All I’ve got are his charges, well, Euna’s charges against him.

           Cheating in the 1st degree, no proof, no photos or receipts or basic evidence of his behavior. She had nothing but her recollection of the fight they had, and minimal information on what led to the break up. From her manifesto, it seems that Yoongi was pulling away and she clung to him, claws drawing blood, trying to get him to stay. He didn’t, clearly. With only that to go off of, it’s no wonder I can’t find Min Yoongi, and I’m beginning to think that just maybe, Min Yoongi doesn’t exist. He’s her Snuffleupagus, and I’m starting to not believe.

           While I’m unsure if Yoongi exists, I do know a person who does.

           The man with Taehyung.

           Spectacled and broad shouldered, quaffed hair and arms the size of tree trunks, this man exists. He goes to the gym regularly, religiously, makes his coffee at home, and frequents his local nursery. The man is obsessed with plants, it seems unhealthy. Multiple days a week he’s carrying one, or more, I have photos of him watering them, speaking to them… He tends to them with such care, such love, it’s mesmerizing. He goes to work, some corporation, and once a week meets Taehyung. They’re clearly pals, best friends, brothers. They laugh and eat and enjoy one another. It’s cute, their friendship date. Once in a while, Jimin joins them. The three laugh uproariously and often draw attention for their volume. The unidentified man doesn’t seem to understand how loud he is, his baritone resonating enough for me to hear.

           I haven’t intentionally bumped into the three of them, yet, but I’ve stationed myself near enough to hear bits and pieces of their conversations. They never discuss work, only music they’re listening to, books they’re reading, podcasts, plants, general culture. Have I written down a few of the artists and podcasts they listen to? Yes. Do I feel dirty about it? Yes.

           But it’s the job, and I tail them for a month before a package arrives. A package with my name on it, waiting outside my apartment door. It’s not addressed, no stamps or packing label. It’s new, not reused as a shipping box or gifted for the umpteenth time, no dingy tape sticking to its brown coating. The box is sitting, like it’s appeared out of thin air. A secure building is only as secure as the tenants make it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the owner snuck in behind some dummy who didn’t see the harm in letting a potential rapist, stalker, murder, into the building. Taking the package inside, and as my blood continues to cool and chills run down my spine, I delicately open it.

           I know, it could be a bomb. However, the only thought calming me down is the knowledge that my life has never once been a Shonda Rhimes production and thus, I’m not really worried this package is a bomb. Frankly, that’s far more sophisticated than any of the people I’ve worked for and gives them too much credit.

           Inside, there are copious amounts of surveillance photos and a note, written in a script that I’ve seen before.

           “That was your last warning / The line has been drawn and you’re bleeding / Next time, face to face is how we’ll be meeting”  

           Whoever heard of a stalker rhyming?

           I bag the evidence to toss under my bed so Jungkook won’t find it and pull out my list of potential threats.

Check It Once, Check It Twice

William Daniels

Cheated on his wife of 5 years with a stewardess who flew almost exclusively on his flights (big shock)

Threatened to ban me from American Airlines -  Jokes on him, I don’t fly American

Photos in the act & audio recordings

Wife divorced him immediately

He has to pay alimony out the nose

Lives in the area

Allanah McMahon

Arrested and tried for insider trading and embezzlement

Discovered who I was when I was subpoenaed to testify

Still in jail

My testimony added a few years to her sentence … oops

Cassie Harrington

Set up a Multi-Level Marketing scheme

Tried to hide out in Hawaii – but changed her Instagram to private after I’d already followed her

Ordered to pay back all the money she stole

On parole

Adam Gregory

Tried to run an illegal adoption agency for homosexual, non binary couples

Paid a fine and on parole – forbidden from creating any LLC’s or Incorporating

Brian Welch

Pissed that I found evidence of his partner cheating but turned him in on charges of possession of child pornography

In jail for kiddy porn and for threatening my life

His husband got everything despite the infidelity

           You acquire quite detailed list of people who want to threaten your life on the daily, but then again, wasn’t it Audre Lorde who said “I’m deliberate and afraid of nothing?” I can’t be afraid. If I’m afraid, they have the power. They have the power to intimidate me, to run my life for me, to make my decisions. I will not back down because they got caught. But I will protect myself, I will keep my license for my gun up and go to the shooting range often. I will strengthen the locks and security of my apartment, and I will ask Jungkook to stay over more, or sleep at his.

           I will not back down, not when Lee Euna has paid me what seems like the cost of tuition at Princeton for a year and wants answers. We signed a contract, didn’t we?

           And who am I if my word is no longer worth anything?

           Instead of harping on the sickening feeling that I’m being watched 24/7, I run through my plans for bumping into Taehyung and his friends. In the weeks that I’ve continued to follow him, he’s solidified Wednesday’s as his night for dinner with friends, and Thursdays as his cultural exploration. He goes to museum openings, concerts, movies, plays, clubs, all on Thursdays. While those nights are fun for me to watch and put on my expense account, it’s Wednesdays that I adore. I love following him from his house to the restaurants and am excited each week to see what he and his friends have chosen.

          This week, it’s an authentic Mexican restaurant. Slipping my coat on, I give them a few minutes before following in.

           The sound of mariachi welcomes me into the yellow painted restaurant. The furniture, dark mahogany against the vibrant walls, is full of people. I note the variety of sombreros, the different colors and patterns, the meanings hidden within the stitchwork. It’s not a large restaurant, but big enough to fit a few large groups of 7-10 people, and plenty of space for smaller groups such as the three men. The hostess asks if I want to sit at the bar, and I request a table near the men. Sitting a few feet away, I’m able to pick up their conversation easily. Instead of jotting it down, I hit record and let the metaphorical tape play.

           “Oh, it wasn’t that bad!” The mystery man says.

           “It was awful, Taehyungie couldn’t stop laughing, every time he hit the ball it went flying in the wrong direction,” Jimin says.

           “I was trying so hard!” Taehyung laughed.

           “That’s the problem, you were trying too hard,” The man tells him. “You’re too pure of heart.”

           “I am not,” Taehyung shook his head.

           “I know, you’ve experienced a lot, Tae,” Jimin says.

           “Joon, here’s the question,” Taehyung says, and I’m momentarily distracted by the utterance of the name, Joon. “You get to pick next week, we heading back to that barbeque place?”

           Jimin erupts in another fit of laughter, Taehyung following suit. It’s cute, watching them interact. I wonder if Jungkook has friends he does things like this with… those nights we aren’t together, if he has friends to spend his time with.

           I wait until they’ve left to take a glance at the signed bill on their table, Taehyung Kim is scribbled, no evidence of the other men, and I’m about to bag evidence when I hear my name.

           “Y/N?” Taehyung asks.

           “Taehyung! That was you!” I smile.

           “Have you been here the whole time?” Taehyung’s eyebrows express more than anyone’s I’ve ever seen.

           “I, yeah. I wasn’t sure it was you and Jimin. I didn’t want to interrupt,” I tell him.

           “Oh, you could’ve! Don’t worry about them, we’ve been friends a long time,” Taehyung smiles, it’s boxy and wide, the edges curling as his eyes soften.

           I’ve already started my dance, a waltz to an even tempo and I’ve got the next five paces planned. “Who was that new guy?”

           “Why, you single?” Taehyung smirks, his lips no longer joyful but devious.

           “I just was curious,” I reply, “And no, I’m not single, remember?”

           “Oh yes, yes, Jungkook,” Taehyung recalls with a nod.

           “You, Jimin and that other guy, go way back?” I lead him, it’s easy to lead Taehyung, he’s pure of heart, the most honest intentions in his eyes.

           “Mm, yes,” He continues smiling at me.

           “Your dinner looked fun, I’ll definitely be coming back to this place,” I tell him. It’s true, maybe I will bring Jungkook by one night when I know these three men won’t be around.

           “Yeah, we like it. We try a new restaurant every week. It’s a fun no work zone,” His arms are relaxed at his sides, one hand slipping slowly into his pocket, his cardigan open and glasses pressed close to his ebony eyes.

           “I like that, no work zone,” I agree, I wish I had one of those.

           “Yes, it helps clear the mind,” Taehyung tells me.

           “Do the three of you work together?” I inquire.

           “Kind of, we have a lot of the same shared interests,” he sidesteps.

           I nod, the final step in our dance presenting itself. “Very cool, well I don’t want to keep you from Jimin and –

           “Joon, yeah, very considerate of you. Maybe I’ll see you at the dog park again?” He asks.

           “Oh god, I hope not, Maisie is a nightmare,” I laugh.

           “Well have a good night, Y/N, take care!” He says as he walks out the door. I stand, watching, pretending to not notice how he gets in the car swiftly, not looking back.

           Joon.

           Joon.

           Joon.

           What kind of a name is Joon? If Taehyung and Jimin, and Jungkook, and Seokjin… and Yoongi, are all Korean, must Joon be short for something Korean?

           Glancing at my phone, it’s only 8:30PM, if I hurry, I can get in another few hours of work before I’m overcome with exhaustion and anxiety. But what will I find?

Oh Joon

Kim Joon

Lee Joon

Joon-Ho

Joon-Hee

Joon-Hyuk

Joon-Ki

Joon-Tae

Joon-Young

Byung-Joon

Ha-Joon

Hee-Joon

Hyung-Joon

Jae-Joon

Kyung-Joon

Jae-Joon

Kyung-Joon

Yong-Joon

Nam-Joon

Joon-Su

Ye-Joon

           Not to mention add in the top 5 Korean last names, and I’ve got hundreds of possibilities. Luckily, I can run the name against the address of the apartment building Taehyung picked Joon up from. Being a PI means I have access to the state databases, which gives me names and addresses. In the building, there’s one Joon, a Namjoon, Kim Namjoon. I pull the information before digging into my search.

           Unlike the seemingly nonexistence of Min Yoongi, Kim Namjoon is present. Every search result yields a perfectly manicured article dating anywhere from the year of his birth to age sixteen, and then, much like everyone else on this case, the trail begins to run cold. Whatever happened to him during high school, still radiates through his file. Whether he’s shaken it or not, that’s the question.

           No known career or job at all, his status as a prodigy in math, linguistics and rhetoric is astonishing. One of the highest IQ’s of recent memory, he’d mastered calculus by the time he was 8, besting PhD’s by 13, and then in a blaze of glory, disappearing by 16. He was studied, written about, documented, photographed, and somehow managed to be nominated for a Nobel Prize… how he accomplished all of that during puberty is beyond me. Not only does he accomplish that, but then, disappears completely, without a trace. How?

I’m ready to pack it in when someone steps into my office.

           “I saw the light on,” She says.

           “Ms. Lee, what do I owe this surprise visit?” I ask. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted to do tonight.

           “I wanted to, to talk to you,” She takes a few steps forward, pausing to ask for unspoken permission.

           “Please, sit. What did you want to talk to me about?” I lean back, hoping she can’t see the bags forming under my eyes or the tears from the yawn I’m stifling.

           “I wanted to tell you about, about why I need you to find Min Yoongi,” Euna informs me. She’s dressed in what can only be described as winter white, and only as a cashmere sweatsuit. Never have I ever seen such glamor in my dingy office. I feel bad that she’s risking the integrity of her outfit by being here.

           “Oh, okay,” I sit up and reach for a notebook. “Do you want me to write this down?”

           “No, you don’t need to. We can just talk between women, between friends,” Euna’s voice is soft. The slack in her jaw, the demur manner in which her hands are placed on her lap, it’s evident she doesn’t know how to be girlfriends. Raised by her family, groomed to take over, friends was never a word in her vocabulary.

           “I wanted you to know that I really saw a future with Yoongi,” She starts. “You know that place in your heart where you hold all your hopes?”

           “Yes,” I say hesitantly.

           Her eyes narrow in warning, “Do you have someone, someone who’s beginning to fill that space?”

           “Um, yeah,” I reply.

           “I thought that’s what Yoongi was. I thought we were, we were building something. Jun-Seo had Jimin, they thought they were building an illustrious future together, but one day he disappeared too.” She pinches the slight bridge of her nose, inhaling slowly to steady her nerves. “I don’t know what changed in our relationship. Yoongi didn’t want me anymore, he didn’t want to be around me, or with me at all. A switch flipped, like one day he realized he didn’t love me in the first place. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know why, but when your entire future is destroyed, do you stand back and watch it burn?”

           “Do you want me to answer that?” I ask.

           “Sure, what I did after that was terrible, but it was within reason. Everything I did was within reason. I tried to hold onto him, I did what I thought was right to get him to stay and he just, ran. Bolted, broke up with me on the phone like I’m Taylor Swift in 2012. Maybe I am,” Euna rolls her eyes, the comparison both too true and too terrifying. “At least Seokjin had the kindness to break up with me in person. But Yoongi? The coward! He knew I loved him. He knew I would carry his child, would marry him, would love him eternally and then some. I would’ve done anything for him. Even after he refused to go family dinners or go on trips with Seo and Jimin, after he started lying and cheating and stealing. He broke my heart, shattered it. If anyone is to blame for what happened after our relationship, it’s him.”

           Interested peaked, I inquire “What happened?”

           “It’s in my document,” She snaps.

           “The handwritten one?” I clarify.

           Rolling her delicate ebony irises, “Yes, of course.”

           “The abortion, the embezzlement, insider trading?” I try to rattle off the accusations she’d detailed. Somewhere I had a list and had sorted them by man, but damn, there were a lot of them.

           “Yes,” She snips.

           “That’s all true?” I ask again. The look she gives me is unwarranted, this is the first time in months, nearly a year, that she has sat down with me and discussed the charges. I am well within my right as her Private Investigator to ask clarifying questions.

           “Do you make a conscious decision to not believe your clients? Am I not paying you enough Y/N?” Euna snaps.

           “I’m sorry,” I respond.

           “I should go, I expect next week at our meeting you will have an update on the mystery man,” She stands.

           “Yes, yes, I will,”

           “Good, oh, there was a note under your door. I didn’t pick it up,” She turns and walks, stepping gingerly over the note. Scrambling behind her, I pick up the folded paper, and scrawled in crystal clear letters it reads:

           Cricket, was driving past when I saw the light on. Why are you working? Come to mine when you’re done, it’s been three restless nights without you.

          XO – Bunny 

           Fuck me, I love him.

Next: Cricket & Bunny Pt. 1 

#BTS #Jeon Jungkook fanfic #Jeon Jungkook x you #Jeon Jungkook x reader #codename #code name #code name cupid #codename cupid #BTS fluff #min yoongi #park jimin #kim namjoon #kim taehyung #secret agent au #government agent au #secret agent au #BTS agent #houseofddaeng #thebtswritersclub #ficswithluv #btsgoldnet #bangtanarmynet

[fletchermarple]

It All Starts with Two Missing Kids

I’ve been following this rather crazy story for a few days now and I thought I’d share it with you. Just be warned before you read that this is all ongoing, so there’s a lot we don’t know. I’ll do my best to make it less confusing than it really is for you, and to set aside rumors from known facts.

We’ll start in November of 2019, when Kay and Larry Woodcock called police in Rexburg, Idaho, and asked them to do a welfare check on Joshua “JJ” Vallow, whom they hadn’t heard from since late September. JJ is a 7 year old boy with special needs and although he was Kay and Larry’s biological grandson, he had been adopted by Kay’s brother Charles Vallow and his wife Lori. Charles had died in July 2019, so JJ was living with Lori and her new husband, Chad Daybell (more on that later, because it’s one big piece of this puzzle).

When police arrived to Chad (51) and Lori’s (46) house on November 26, JJ wasn’t there. They claimed that he was staying with a family friend in Arizona, but police soon found out that wasn’t true. They went back the next day with a search warrant, only to find that Lori and Chad had abruptly left town with an unknown destination.

If that wasn’t suspicious enough, authorities realized that JJ wasn’t the only kid missing. His older sister Tylee Ryan, who was Lori’s 17 year old daughter, had also vanished and no one had seen or heard from her since September. Neither of the kids had been reported missing by anyone.

JJ and Tylee’s whereabouts remain unknown, and we don’t even know if they’re alive. Rexburg police has openly said they “strongly” believe they are in danger. In a press release from December 30, they said that witnesses claimed Lori and Chad had told them Tylee had died in 2018, which wasn’t true, and that Chad had told someone else that Lori had “no minor children”. Meanwhile, Lori and Chad, wherever they are, have lawyered up. 

While the missing children is undoubtedly the more pressing matter, it’s only the tip of the iceberg in this case. Turns out that both Chad and Lori have quite a shady past, especially in relation to their previous spouses. 

Chad was married to a woman called Tammy (49), who was found dead in her home on October 19, 2019 (so a month after the kids went missing). At the time, her death was considered from natural causes, but now police consider it suspicious and have exhumed her body to perform an autopsy and testing. The results, if they have them, haven’t been released yet. Chad married Lori only two weeks after his wife’s death.

Lori, who’d been married four times before finding her fifth husband in Chad, was also a recent widow, but her husband’s death was way more violent than Tammy’s. Charles Vallow and her had separated in early 2019 and their divorce was getting nasty. On July 11, 2019, Charles was shot to death by Lori’s brother, Alex Cox, in Arizona (where Lori lived before moving to Rexburg). Alex’s story was that Charles had showed up at the house, an argument had ensued and Charles had hit him with a baseball bat, so he’d shot him in self defense. Alex (51) himself died of unknown causes on December 12, 2019, and his death is currently under investigation as well.

So here is where things get a bit muddier, since some people believe that all this is related to an alleged cult. Both Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow were very religious. Chad owns a publishing company called Spring Creek Book where he had self-published many of his books that talk about the end of times and near death experiences. He and Lori used to appear in podcasts from a media company called Preparing A People, which claims to help prepare people on Earth for the second coming of Christ, and it’s connected to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The owners of said company issued a statement in December in which they distanced themselves from the couple.

According to the Woodcocks, Lori was a nice woman until she started getting more involved with this religious group in 2018, where she supposedly met Chad. When Charles Vallow filed the divorce papers, he made some very shocking claims about Lori, saying that she was “obsessive about near death experiences and spiritual visions”, that she claimed to be “eternally married to the prophet Moroni” from the Book of Mormon and that she had lived “numerous lives on numerous planets”. The document from February 2019 says: “(Lori) informed (Charles) that she is a translated being who cannot taste death sent by God to lead the 144,000 into the Millennium. She is receiving spiritual revelations and visions to help her gather and prepare those chosen to live in the New Jerusalem after the Great War as prophesied in the book of Revelations”. Charles also claimed that Lori said she had been assigned by God to “carry out the work of the 144,000 at Christ’s second coming in July 2020″ and that if he got in her way she would kill him, and that had an angel who would help her dispose of his body. And as we know, Charles was dead only 5 months later.

There are reports that Lori left Charles because he was cheating on her during his business trips. One police report seems to believe that Charles was the most suspicious of the two, and you can read about it here. So I guess we need to keep our minds open regarding this part of the story.

To add a little to the weirdness, a man called Brandon Boudreaux was married to Lori’s niece and claims she abruptly asked for divorce after she started spending time with Lori’s religious group. Then, in October 2, 2019, Brandon was shot at by some unknown assailant while he was driving a car registered in Lori’s name. The bullet missed him, but Brandon is convinced that it’s connected to this alleged cult (which, to be fair, hasn’t been officially confirmed by anyone).

Tylee’s dad, Joseph Ryan, who was Lori’s third husband, died in 2018 from a heart attack.

So far no charges have been pressed against Chad and Lori, who remain uncooperative with the investigation and refusing to reveal where her kids are. Their lawer issued a statement saying: “Chad Daybell was a loving husband and has the support of his children in this matter. Lori (Vallow) Daybell is a devoted mother and resents assertions to the contrary. We look forward to addressing the allegations once they have moved beyond speculation and rumor”.

UPDATE Jan 27, 2020

Authorities have located Lori and Chad in Hawaii. The children are not with them and there’s no evidence they were ever in Hawaii either, and the couple has again refused to tell police where they are. They have been given a child protection order, which requires Lori to physically produce Tylee and JJ to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare in Rexburg or to the Rexburg Police within five days, otherwise she might be subject to civil or criminal contempt of court.

UPDATE FEB 11, 2020

The deadline passed, Tylee and JJ’s whereabouts are still unknown. We’ve learned a few things, though:

- In August 2019, about a month after Charles Vallow was murdered and shortly before Lori and her new husband moved from Arizona, where she lived with her kids, to Idaho, she gave away JJ’s service dog, even though he was vital for her son’s treatment. She tried to sell the dog, Bailey, first for 2.500, but ended up telling Bailey’s trainer to take him (x).

- Tylee’s cellphone was found in her mother’s possession in Hawaii. According to several sources, the phone has been used since Tylee was last seen in September, but a text sent to a friend didn’t sound like her (x). Her older brother Colby also got texts from Tylee until October, but would never be able to talk on the phone with him when he tried. Colby also found Tylee’s texting style back then different from usual (x).

- Between October and November 2019, Lori put all her kids’ belongings in a storing unit in Idaho (x).

- When Charles Vallow was murdered by her own brother, Lori told the news to his adult sons from a previous relationship by text, telling them only that their father had died and kept avoiding explaining how exactly he died (x).

So far no arrests have been made, despite Lori’s refusal to comply with a court order. Police are likely working on gathering enough evidence to be able to charge her with something.

Sources:

- Article Two Children are Missing from the Washington Post.

- A Timeline and Key Players from the Case (note that Charles Vallow’s date of death is wrong here)

- Charles allegations against Lori.

- Police comment on Tammy Daybell’s death and Lori’s older son begs her to come home.

- Police’s statement saying they believe the kids are in danger and that Lori knows where they are.

#true crime #tcoriginal #missing person #mystery #bizarre cases #lori vallow #chad daybell #joshua vallow #tylee ryan #current news

[josy72]

Back to One, Episode 95: Portrait of a Lady on Fire Special Episode

Peter Rinaldi

This is a very special episode of Back To One. Last year, in September, I sat down with the stars of Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel, and their director, Céline Sciamma. On this show, I only sit down with one actor every week, so for me to sit with two actors and their director from the same film, it must be very special. And it is a very special film. For me, it is the purest example, in recent memory, of a perfect synthesis of direction and performance. The exemplary work of these three women combined to create an extremely rare cinematic event. As illustrated by the first thing I say to them in this conversation, I might be a little obsessed.

(What follows is an unedited transcript of the conversation contained in this podcast.)

Filmmaker: I am happy that this film will not be nominated for an Oscar, because it will soil it. And I’m happy that it didn’t win the Palme d’Or because that’s beneath it.

I can talk for an hour, to you Céline, about different layers of it that I appreciate, the use and non-use of music, the playing with my anticipation of certain cinematic endeavors going on in the film, the idea of it happening post “me too,” and how, me as a man, as a straight man, If I saw this before “me too,” I would have maybe appreciated it in a different way, now it all works in and it’s something very very special.

But, because this is an acting podcast, we have to kind of keep it about performance.

Noémie, you talked about how you didn’t meet Adèle before the production began, right? And all of that work was done on camera, in the present moment. But I was wondering if that was something you were worried about, you know? How did you trust Sciamma that these things would happen on camera?

Merlant: Actually, I met Adèle before, at the audition. She was there. So I had the chance to try something with her and Sciamma at this audition, and so this convert[ed] me. I trust her. I trust them because I felt at this audition that the way Sciamma wants to work and Adèle wants to work, it is an equality collaboration. We’re all collaborators and we’re gonna…everything is in the script, like the looks and the breathing, all the words, the text is in the script, but we still have a space to play. And Adèle was there at the audition and she was, you know, just really excited, and she was, I don’t know, already proposing things, and I knew that something would work because we’re all in the same level and point. We want the same. We want to work. We want to play. We want to make fun and we want to do something good. And even if we have restraint, we want to get out of our comfort zone, and that’s the point.

So when we started to shoot the movie, we didn’t rehearse together, but we started at the same point we were at in the audition, just “ok, now we are in the present. we have restraint from the text, you know, the script, but now let’s play.” And sometimes Adèle was looking at me, I knew that she would look at me, but I don’t know how she would look at me, for example, so it was a new way every time. It was a new proposition. And so I was responding differently, and the opposite, all the time it was like that. So we built this relation of love and collaborators—Adèle, Sciamma and me, as in the movie—Marianne and Héloïse. It was a parallel.

Filmmaker: Yes, and I felt that really strongly the second time I watched it. This is a movie that rewards multiple viewings to understand this.

Adèle, you talked about this “traveling” from object to subject. And you talk about three different…parts. That’s not the right word.

Haenel: No. It’s right.

Sciamma; Steps?

Filmmaker: Steps, yeah. First of all, tell me how much Sciamma was in collaboration with you on that idea. Because this is kind of like a radical performance idea, in a way.

Haenel: Well, she was not aware of it.

Sciamma: No.

Filmmaker: That’s amazing.

Sciamma: I discovered it in promo.

(Laughter)

Haenel: But to me it was very clear, if she like…I had like, I don’t know, like all the scenes, you know, like resume [list] of all the scenes, I had it on my glass Mac, you know? So, I just knew, I had the three portions, because we don’t shoot in continuity, so I just had to say like, “Ok, now we are here.” So, it’s three parts. The first part, I call it the “Japanese Part”, because I, even if it’s a bit cliché, but I wanted to use, to do it like when I think about Noh, the theater Noh, even if it’s a clichè, it’s not exactly that, but it’s the way I think about it. You use your face as a mask. You use your face as if you were not there, or just behind something. So, this was the first phase. And then after there’s the, I call it dégel.

Sciamma: Unfrozen

Filmmaker: Oh yeah, you said it like a ”crack.”

Haenel: Yeah, crackle. So, it’s just when you start to have the intimacy that comes, then you start to crackle, so it’s kind of this transition phase. And the last one is the warmest phase, so when I talk about that I say it’s more spontaneous, it’s more intense, more joyful, more everything actually. It’s more life. So this was the plan. And at the beginning, I thought about this idea because I wanted to create this impression of an inside… (when I say “traveling” it’s the word in France which is the movement of the camera on the rail, you know?)

Filmmaker: Like a dolly?

Haenel: Dolly, yes this is the word I’m looking for. So it’s like a dolly movement, but through acting. This is what I was trying to do. So it’s a bit like an idea. And because the movie was about gazes, so I thought my character is not a character that is based on a psychological unity with its own history, blah blah blah, the past, future, I don’t care about that. I don’t build my character this way usually, but for this one, like, absolutely not. I wanted to create a character that would be not its own psychological unity, but an object seen through the eyes of somebody else, which would be, like, Maryanne.

So I try to have this movement inside, through acting, that would be this way, I was talking about Picasso because, he’s not the only one who did that, but even the Egyptian, he put like sometimes the face and the foot are not possible to be on the same level but it’s still the way he sees. Because art is also about what you see, the relationship you make, through element in life, you know you create the representation because you put in connection stuff that are, like, in our common eyes, not in relationship. I don’t know how to say that. But it’s the way you link these things. So when he decided to put the nose, the eyes, the ear, whatever, on the same level, he choose to offer his perspective on reality. So I tried to do something like that, but with acting.

Filmmaker: This is fascinating—

Haenel: Well then, therefore, I have never said that before.

(Laughter)

Filmmaker: But I’m trying to understand though, moment to moment, how you can play such a complex philosophical idea, you know what I mean? Moment to moment.

Haenel: Well, it’s all about…To me, the art of acting is about trying philosophical hypothèse, or idea, on the field. It’s like, ok, I believe this is interesting, this is my idea, this is the rule I settle in my head, and I’m just going to try to see what it brings when you hit the reality with this thing. So, this is the first point, and the second— it’s huge, in my mind it’s huge. I’m always like, this is my great fantasy, but when it hits the reality, it becomes something else. So it’s not the pure form of it, it’s like, I really want it to be pure, but when you strike the reality it’s too complex, it creates other waves, blah blah blah, but you don’t reach the point you want it to reach, but still there is the trace of the journey.

Filmmaker: And then it comes to me, and then it’s in me as something mysterious, that it wouldn’t have been if you didn’t have all those complex things. But, the person who set the field is here and that’s important. What you did to have these artists, authors as you call them, be able to confidently have authorship, how was that important to you, Sciamma, and what were you doing, moment to moment yourself, to keep that going?

Sciamma: Well it was part of my desire to make this film, also as a departure from my previous work, is that I would work for the first time with professional actresses. Otherwise I used to, you know they would become actresses in the process of making the film.

Filmmaker: Even Adèle wasn’t a professional actress when you first had her in Water Lillies?

Haenel: No I wasn’t.

Sciamma: No she wasn’t. But that’s how I learned. We became professional together. I wasn’t professional either. Then when you work with kids and teenagers, you’re pretty much in charge, and you’re very lonely. It’s a beautiful experience but you’re lonely with the film. You’re alone with the film. The whole process. Of course you give the whole intellectual outline of the film to your cast and there’s a strong intellectual link to the thing. It’s not about taking, it’s about them giving you something. But you can’t negotiate, you know, when they’re not professional. There’s some things they won’t do, they’re not able to do, and it should stay this way. Whereas with grown-up character, and grown-up actresses, to me it was like, ok, so now this is a new film, and I’m going to learn from them, because they’re professionals. And also, you know, I think this companionship with Adèle for a lot of years, I saw her growing as an actress.

Haenel: A lot.

Sciamma: And we were talking also about our intellectual process so I was really really confident that I would learn a lot from them. So that’s how you make it happen. And that was I think the process of Adèle’s philosophy for her character, or Noémie’s, it’s not about discussing this, it’s also about language that you build from scene to scene.

And the first time Adèle spoke as her character, I was totally surprised at how she embodied it. And I said “Oh ok, this is a very strong position and now we’re going to work around that.” But also how she pitched her voice, like this was part of the process of building the character. I wanted Adèle to pitch her voice a little higher than usual, so she knew that, we talked about it, but we didn’t try it. We weren’t like “ha Ha HA” it wasn’t like that. It was like she just did it. And then, it was more and more accurate.

And even in the process of post production, when we did post synchro. Like for instance, sometimes there’s this thing where you do post synchronization, and the actresses, they haven’t seen the film. Which I think is totally crazy. So they were the first ones to see the film. Even though we weren’t totally done with the editing, but so that they would see what we built together. And so there were things we had to re-do because of the sea, whatever, because of technical sound things. But there were also things that Adèle, watching the film, said “I wanna do this line again.” And I was like “Okay.” And we didn’t need to do it, I was happy with it, and the sound person was happy with it, but she said “I wanna do this in a different way.” And everything went “boom.” There’s like one word, there’s a “yes” on the beach, and she says “yes” when she says she wants to go to swim, and Noémie says “Do you know how to swim? Maybe when the sea will be more calm.” And she says “yes.” And that’s something that she wanted to re-do. And, there’s a miracle in that “yes” that really actually just broke my heart. And it’s just being more and more accurate in the process, in the whole process of making the film, even in post production.

Haenel: It’s all about details, as well, as Noémie says. I mean, we have, like, ideas, but then we are, like, in the inner kitchen, it’s line after line, it’s scene after scene, and we are just always like, “okay, I want to reach that point, so I think I have to change the rhythm, I have to change the melody, I want to see less the actress and more the character.” For example, in this way also we re-did the line in post production, because I felt, I mean, I’m myself so I know, but I felt like oh, I was scared that my tongue would slip on that precise line so I can see that I’m a bit stressed and I don’t like this feeling because it brings back the actress and you lose a bit of character. So to say she’s settling the field, she settled it in a very….she has a very rhythmic way of thinking the direction of acting. Of course we are talking about emotions, we are talking about the main movement, but what Celine really cares about is about rhythm and about opening and closing. It’s like – you close, you open and you know that, like for example, she would pay attention, so much attention, if the scenes would end with an in or out breathing.

For example, like “at this moment you have to…” for example I remember a gesture that Noémie should do at the end of the scene when she’s putting back the corset. She’s supposed to just make it tight again. And this was, for example, something that Sciamma really cares about, because she says “No, you do one, two, three, [makes pulling motion]” because she knows she will edit after. It seems like a bit simple, but it’s our meeting point on the scene, we had several meeting points like that.

Filmmaker: One of the things you said was, the gazes, the looks, are like words. And when she first sits down and poses for you, that’s a very important moment that I didn’t realize until the second time. It’s like the end of the act there or something. Something very very important happens there. And this time I noticed something with you Noémie, what she was giving you and what you were giving her back. But I wanted to know if you remember this moment and what you were “playing” there when she first sits down to pose?

Sciamma: Well I remember we would say “Look at me,” which is, like, for the first time the painter and the model is here and the sentence the painter says is ‘Look at me.’ So it’s not about her looking at the model, so it’s this kind of paradox. We could say, pitching the scene would be it’s the first time she’s going to look at the model as a model, but it’s actually the first time the model is going to look at the painter.

Filmmaker: Yes.

Sciamma: That’s where suddenly she’s confronted to what she feels, and she’s moved.

Filmmaker: Yeah, it’s like she’s looking at you for the first time in a way.

Sciamma: Uh huh.

Merlant: And for the first time, like… I was looking at her to paint her in secret. So, at that moment when I ask, kind of, this order, ‘Look at me,’ I’m surprised and shocked by something that I couldn’t imagine, like, this is a detail, like I said, but this is where started everything, like, it’s the magic, you know, of love, because you’re surprised of something you were not expecting, and so I was trying to, as I was playing, I was trying to be like, ok, I will ask her, like really, I’m doing my job, I will ask her because I’m someone who likes to control things, to concentrate, so “look at me,” and then she looks at me and that’s the moment where starts the sharing. And that’s kind of a huge big thing. And so I was trying to open. You know it was all about open things. So open my eyes, and open my heart, and even just the air, something in the air, and receive Héloïse/Adèle, receive her in my environment, so I think it was it was something like that.

Filmmaker: And it’s so perfect how, something so big as that, was played so finely, that you can just feel it.

Haenel: I think it’s an in-breathing. She does like, when I talk she does this [makes breath noise]. Something like, something to do with the breathing in there. And I think this look, when they’re like [looks at Noémie] there’s something, just something you get instinct.

Sciamma: But, the groove of the face, because in the shot-reverse-shot process, which is something that I’ve never done before. Very few shot-reverse-shots in my previous films. Well, I think we shot Adéle first. And so, then I have this as a reference, I know what she sent. Maybe she’s going to send something different when the camera is not on her, obviously, but I have this groove that she did. And so then also I can talk to Noami, cause it’s silence [MOS] and I can tell her, also like, “open your mouth.” Which is something that is really like an event, you know. “Open your mouth and breathe.” So we would also graft things on the moment based on what was happening between them, and half of it is not on camera, because we’re not on Adele. But, we have in mind what she did, and also so I could adjust also, and, even myself, be in the present. And so, yeah really about the breathing and looking, and so sometimes we could recreate like a whole package of looks and breathing and we would do it in the present.

Haenel: I definitely want to say something.

(Laughter)

No, what I want to say is also the way that, I mean, it’s a detail, the fact that she opened her mouth, but it creates, like, the environment, the air becomes essential, there is something in the air because then you can feel like almost like a wave through the air, so it’s a way that it changes the quality of the atmosphere. And so paying attention, and that is what Celine does in her movies, really, like we say “ligne claire” for the comics, you know?

Sciamma: Clear Line.

Haenel: Clear line. And it’s all about clear line. So, then, because you pay attention to details, because there is no, like, if you look at the movie, the frame is empty, there’s no like thousands of stuff in the frame that are supposed to be there because it’s the 18th century so we put all that, like, stuff that are usually in the 18th century films, because everything is very significant. This is a way, also, to portray desire, because it changed the atmosphere of the room, and so we are now in the same water, we are now in the same atmosphere. This is also why I think it’s something very relevant in the way that Celine would direct us, because we don’t overplay because it’s very simple. It’s not about us, it’s about the air changing.

Sciamma: And there’s a little bit of sound editing in the moment that is very discrete. A little bit of rain. Happening when Noémie opens her mouth.

Filmmaker: Now I gotta see it again.

Sciamma: Yeah.

(Laughter)

Merlant: I think, if I can add something— I think all the movie is built like that, and so the acting too about sobrie—sober?

Sciamma: Sobriety?

Merlant: Sobriety. Like for example the music. There is just, you know, the two musics and that’s all. And the fact that there were two musics it’s more profound, more deep, you wait to hear it because you feel the silence first and from the silence you feel the music. And it’s the same for the acting. It’s not like, if there were a lot of things in the play, it’s a different kind of acting, but when its too much, I think you imagine and fantas—and the erotic is less. Because everything is offered to you, and when you can just take the time, and this movie takes the time, and leave the silence and let all the details come, all the details of what we say and what we don’t say when we fall in love. How we look. How we touch. Everything comes out. And so it’s, I think, this acting in the… retenir?

Haenel: Holding back.

Merlant: Holding back, in the acting, I think it’s really powerful. And you use more your imagination. And I think we need that.

Haenel: It doesn’t all rely on us. It’s not like, separate bodies. Acting is about creating a new atmosphere, so, when we don’t find a solution…sometimes we don’t find a solution of expression to a specific emotion on our face or in our body, this is why, when I talk about the atmosphere, there’s also a certain…I don’t know how to say it… but it’s also about, not how we can change not our relationship between the two of us, but between us and the space. And this is also, like, the stakes for filmmakers to try to not only rely on the face of the actor or their separate body but try to create this common body. So good luck with that.

(Laughter.)

Filmmaker: We have to talk about this because you’ve mentioned it a lot, and you’ve kind of talked about it— the joy.

Sciamma: Well, it’s difficult to talk about joy, but, there was definitely the movie’s… [notices Adèle huffing]

[To Adèle] Do you want to speak?

Haenel: [To Sciamma] No. Because it’s an acting podcast, this is why I want to speak!

(Laughter)

Sciamma: You see, breathing is important!

(Laughter)

You can’t decide…well, yes, you can decide that you’re going to be joyful. You know, it’s not something that happens because there’s magic. It’s like you have to commit to the fact that you’re going to have a good distance with things, that even though you’re doing something really really important for yourself, and maybe for the world, you know, hopefully, there’s not going to be that kind of tension, there’s not going to be a hierarchy of “this is important so we should be…” it’s really about deciding that things are going to be joyful, because then you’re going to be at that standard. So it’s not about we had large because we loved each other whatever, it’s a decision that you’re going to have a good distance, you’re going to be pissed off about silly things, like, for instance, I wanted gray weather. I went to Brittany because I wanted to be Brontë Sisters, I wanted it to be gray and rainy, and had this big sun, and I just said “well, that’s good news” because, why wouldn’t it be? I don’t know. It’s about not fetishizing what you’re going to do, and it’s about, yeah, deciding that this is going to be happy so you’re going to have a good distance with it.

Haenel: And in the process of acting, it’s very important to get this lightness, because when acting strikes it’s like when you have your ideas, but there’s kind of like, yeah, it’s like a sparkle but it’s kind of like a lightness thing that is in life, even if you have a hard moment or whatever, there’s always this…you can face it actually…and for me joy is like, also believing that, whatever the shape—it’s doesn’t matter, there’s no perfect shape, but there is a good relationship to shape. You know what I mean? So art is not something that is….I don’t know how to say it….but there is no perfect shape, so you can relax with that, and just also try to do it, try to find the rhythm that would be the rhythm for the film and eternity, like this is it now, but when you do it you just know it’s because it was that day, and have this idea that we talked about before, about the dolly thing, for example, and you have your fellow actress, with whom you play, and, when you invent, it make you, there’s a little bit less weight on your shoulder when you have this perspective.

Merlant: As you see, we are all excit[ed] about what we do. And I think when we create something we are happy. And when we create something, we have to be in the present moment, and it’s when you’re in the present moment that you have the good distance with things, so if you’re in the present moment you’re open to all the accidents and what can happen. And so, if you are in this spirit, and I think we all are because that’s how Celine wants to work, and she is the one who opened the thing first to let us all come, so then it was in joy and humor, love, in this shooting. Celine has a big capacity of, how do you say, jokes, and this is an important thing also, to put humor on what we do.

Filmmaker: Yes. Céline Sciamma, Adèle Haenel, Noémie Merlant, thank you so much.

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Noémie Merlant

https://instagram.com/noemiemerlant?igshid=w6coabhdz3ba

Adèle Haenel

https://instagram.com/adelehaenel?igshid=fwuo95btzidr

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

https://twitter.com/Portrait_Movie

(Twitter)

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

https://www.facebook.com/pdljfef/

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

https://www.facebook.com/portraitofaladyonfire/

#love #amazing beauty #best woman #adele haenel #instagood #marianne x heloise #heloise #no?mie merlant #noemie merlant #celine sciamma #portraitofaladyonfireedit #portrait #incredible women #portrait de la jeune fille en feu #portrait of a lady on fire #top #film #movies #lovestory #amazing

[lovemesomesurveys]

1 - Are you a fan of garlic bread? Do you eat it on its own or as part of a bigger meal? Yesss. I typically have it with spaghetti. 

2 - When was the last time your area was under some kind of weather warning? Did it end up being as bad as predicted? The closest thing was back during the summer when California was having really unhealthy air quality due to all the wildfires. 

3 - Do you ever buy things from charity/thrift shops? What was the last thing you bought from there? No.

4 - The last time you got fast food, did you eat in, takeaway or go through the drive-thru? My family and I get takeout often. We do drive-thru as well. Haven’t gone out to eat in awhile cause COVID, but even before then I prefer just getting food to eat at home.

5 - If you have multiple pets, do they get along with each other? I just have my one doggo. 

6 - Do you ever buy things off eBay? If you do, do you participate in auctions or do you just use the “buy it now” option? I’ve bought a few things, but I’ve never bid on anything.

7 - When you go out, do you worry that you’ve forgotten to lock the door or turn something off? I used to worry about that all the time when I was coming and going on my own everyday in college. I don’t go anywhere alone now, so it’s not a worry of mine anymore.

8 - What fruits and vegetables have you eaten so far today? Do you tend to get your “five a day”? Zero. Ha, noooo. Not even a little bit. I haven’t had any fruit in a few years to be completely honest. :X I eat spinach fairly often with my eggs, as well as green onions. And I love potatoes. But yeah, definitely not getting the recommended amount of fruits or veggies. 

9 - When was the last time you were in pain? What caused it and did you manage to get it sorted in the end? I have chronic back pain and get other pains as well. I’m on a pain regimen that helps, but there are days where I’m having a really bad flare up and my pain med doesn’t really help. 

10 - Do you live in an area that gets lots of snow? Do you like it? If not, would you like to live somewhere that gets that cold? It doesn’t snow where I live. I wish it did. I would totally love to live somewhere that snowed. 

11 - What was the reason for your last doctor/hospital visit? My month pain doctor appointment.

12 - If someone had told you that 2020 would see a global pandemic, countries going into lockdown, compulsory face masks and millions of deaths, would you have ever believed that you’d live through something like that? That would sound so unbelievable. I would be like no way, that would never happen. I definitely never thought we’d ever experience something like this. Learning about the plagues that happened in the past always sounded so horrifying and I was always like, we’ve come a long way since then that wouldn’t happen today. Welp...

13 - Do you prefer having the blinds/curtains open or closed when you’re at home? Does it depend on the weather or the time of day? I keep ‘em closed. 

14 - Do you use an ad-blocker on your computer or phone? Why/why not? Yeah, Macs come with that built in. I’ve never had that issue on my phone, so I guess they come with that as well?

15 - Do you still use a paper diary/planner to organise your appointments and schedules? No, I use the notes, reminders, and calendar apps on my phone for that kind of stuff.

16 - When was the last time you charged one of your electronic items? Do you have to charge that specific item often? I just finished charging my Beats wireless earphones. 

17 - Have you ever thrown or broken something in a temper? No.

18 - What does your outfit look like today? Did you pick it out for a special reason? I’m wearing gray leggings and a new Linkin Park shirt I got for Christmas. It’s for their 20th anniversary of Hybrid Theory. 

19 - Do you follow any vlogs or podcasts? What is it about them that interests you? I’m subscribed to a few vloggers. 

20 - Aside from Tumblr, what websites do you spend the most time on? Do you go through phases of visiting certain websites? YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Those, as well as Tumblr are my staples that I check all the time. There was a time where I was like obsessed with Pinterest for awhile, but I haven’t been on there in a few months. 

21 - Do you have a good relationship with your siblings? If you don’t have siblings, what about your cousins or extended family? Yeah. My younger brother and I are very close. My older brother and I don’t have a bad relationship or anything, it’s just different. 

22 - When was the last time you were up early enough to see the sunrise? I’m always up past the sunrise.

23 - What movie series did you last watch from start to finish? Was it one you’d seen before? I think it may have been Star Wars. I’ve seen them all. The Marvel movies are a close second. 

24 - Do you still enjoy watching children’s TV programmes? What was the last one you watched? I still watch Doug, Hey Arnold, and Rugrats sometimes.

25 - Who was the last person to tag you in something on social media? How do you know that person? She’s my mom.

26 - What was the last thing you took a photograph of? It was a selfie on Snapchat. 

27 - Are you a fan of giving animals human names? Yeah. My previous doggo was named Brandie. My doggo now is Leia. Princess Leia to be exact. My first two dogs had more typical dog names, though, such as Buster and Scruffy.

28 - When was the last time you weighed yourself? Were you happy with what the scale said? It’s been a few years. I’m too underweight. 

29 - How often do you buy yourself new clothes? What was the last clothing item you bought for yourself? Somewhat often. Boxlunch and Hot Topic get me with their cute stuff and sales. I gotta stop, I don’t have any more room for clothes. And I don’t go anywhere, I don’t need that much clothes lol.

30 - What is the reason behind your mood today? Is this something you could have done something about? I’ve only been up for a couple hours, so I’m just drinking my coffee and waking up still, ha. I take time.

#personal #text #survey #surveys

[hellyeahomeland]

[Assuming I can count right, this is the tenth and last debrief. Thank you to everyone who participated. These questions are harder than they seem! See you all on the other side. --Sara]

Name: Sara (@carriemathison)

Answered on: various days over the last two weeks 

1. What is your idea of a perfect Homeland ending? 

It needs to feel right. I need to look back and think, “yeah, that was right.” What is “right” though?… I mean, I have no idea. I’ll know it when I see it and I’ll know when I don’t see it. How’s this for not answering a question? 

2. Which Homeland character do you most identify with? 

This is a tricky question because I don’t really relate to any character on this show. Their lives and circumstances are all so extreme. That said, I’ve spent the better part of a decade thinking about and trying to understand Carrie Mathison in all her maddening complexity, so at this point I do identify with her. 

3. What has your experience as a fan of the show been like? 

A rollercoaster, start to finish. This fandom has gone through so many iterations. It’s evolved in much the same way that the show has. I could never in 400 gagillion years imagined that after seven years we’d have amassed over 22,000 posts, five seasons’ worth of podcasts, and so many friends from all over the world. It’s been a ride. We really did have a time. 

4. What is a moment on Homeland that made you sit up out of your seat in awe or shock? 

There have been quite a few over the years. These stand out most vividly in my memory. 

Carrie going New Car Smell on Brody’s ass in “New Car Smell.” I have vivid, vivid memories of watching that in my apartment in college. This was before the days of the blog and the only place I had to discuss this show was TWoP. 

Brody dying. I remember watching that episode at my desk, in that same college apartment, and having an actual physical reaction to him being hanged. I think I started to shake. That hasn’t happened before or since. 

Strangely, the end of “Long Time Coming” really caught me by surprise. I felt that ending was actually kind of cliffhanger-y, because when the screen cut to black amid that familiar jazz music I think I stood up and screamed. It might also have been a delayed reaction to The Kiss, which was legitimately shocking at the time.

5. If you could have the writers redo one storytelling decision, what would it be and why? 

The popular answer seems to be that they should have killed Quinn in season five, which is correct. But let’s just assume they’ve already done that since we all agree they should have. 

I’m going to go with a left-field answer and say that I want a redo of the storyline with Carrie’s mother. In two straight season finales (“The Choice” and “The Star”) there are allusions to Carrie’s mother and to Carrie feeling abandoned. They set up all the right pieces in season four, a season that is largely centered around Carrie coming to terms with being a mother herself, with being a mother to this child she kept for a number of reasons that felt more and more tragic (and ill-advised) each day. 

Instead of focusing on the resolution of Carrie’s own anger and resentment toward Ellen Mathison in light of Carrie finally understanding what it means to abandon a child, they decided to make it about Carrie’s secret half-brother, her mother’s series of affairs, and the revelation that Ellen didn’t leave Frank because he was bipolar. The last, by the way, is important, but it’s framed in such a way as to provide context to her initial rejection of Quinn post-The Kiss (“I’ll just fuck it up”), and it all adds up to a jumbled, overwrought mess. We all deserved better. That scene is I think the only time while watching this show that I thought, wow Claire seems to be really struggling with this. 

6. If you could be a Homeland character, which one would you like to be?

I would like to be Carrie for... let’s say a month. It would be supremely painful and dramatic, but imagine being that fucking awesome? That smart and powerful and fearless? 

7. What is your favorite episode of Homeland? 

“Marine One” and that’s been my answer for over seven years. I think it’s my favorite episode of television ever. Beyond it spawning twin years-long sartorial obsessions, I think it is really a masterpiece. I love the structure of the episode. It starts off very quietly. Brody’s tape is haunting and then the scene where Saul visits Carrie is disgustingly heartbreaking (“But Saul…” … I will never get over that). Then it ramps up into this anxiety-filled clusterfuck. Carrie realizing what’s happening but no one will listen (yes, I know all the words in that phone call scene, what about it?) except Dana. That’s irony. The Carrie and Brody cat/mouse game continuing outside the police station, Brody just digging and digging even after Carrie cries uncle. Carrie remembering who Issa is right before they erase her memory. These are all sentence fragments because I’m bad at articulating my feelings about this episode. Except that I can basically only ever watch it on an airplane because I have nowhere else to go. I build up some episodes of this show in my head, remembering them as better than they actually are. This is one of the few that is just as good. Legendary, iconic, will never be topped.

8. What is your least favorite episode of Homeland?

There are some episodes of this show that are boring and nothing to write home about (or blog about, for that matter). Other episodes have gotten a reputation over the years as being some of the show’s worst (“Broken Hearts,” “Tower of David,” “America First” -- all of which are better than you remember). I can deal with all of those episodes well enough. In fact I’ve been quite shocked at all the “Tower of David” slander in these responses over the last few months, but now is not the time for me to defend “Tower of David.” 

In keeping with this blog’s motto for the last seven years, I’m gonna go rogue on this one and say that I absolutely hate the double whammy of “Why Is This Night Different?” and “Better Call Saul.” Those episodes suck. In all our years of podcasting, the only episode that I have outright refused to do a podcast episode for is “Better Call Saul.” (At the time I made up an excuse, but guess what I LIED because I hate that episode.) Quinn leaning pathetically on Carrie’s shoulder after he gets shot and later tying himself to a cinder block to drown himself in a river will never not be legitimately, horrifyingly terrible. The only saving grace of these episodes is HAIR IN A BUN but they had to fuck it up with that awful wig. Bad.

9. If you could bring back one character, dead or alive, from the Homeland graveyard, who would it be and why? 

David Estes. Gone too soon and we deserved to see a Carrie/David romance redux. 

10. What will be your most enduring memory of Homeland? 

I’ve met so many amazing people as a result of this show and this blog. Real and true forever friends. There are so many fantastic memories, and not-fantastic ones that will nevertheless endure. 

Of them all, I will never forget going to Chicago the weekend of the season six finale with Ashley; seeing Hamilton on Saturday night; realizing that there was not an HDMI-equipped television in the Airbnb; buying a television at Best Buy on Sunday morning; going to a Chicago White Sox game where we proceeded to get pretty tipsy on alcoholic root beer; buying lots and lots of alcohol at a liquor store, including some trademark Carrie pinot grigio, because we were having a great ol’ time; maintaining the buzz throughout the finale; whispering “oh my God they killed him” when they killed Quinn, after which Ashley reflexively replied “no, he’s not dead”; recording a drunk podcast in the immediate aftermath that is sadly lost to the sands of time; realizing that everyone was freaking out about the episode; calling it a night at 10:30pm; groggily waking up a few hours later to Ashley telling me she was leaving the Airbnb; being hungover the next day and listening to Ashley tell me about how she did some light breaking and entering the previous night; driving back to Madison while we tried to make sense of anything Rupert Friend was saying in his post-finale interviews; and keeping the aforementioned television in the back seat of my car for the next six months before I finally sold it to a friend (“only been used one time!”).

#* #by: sara #homeland debrief

[mittensmorgul]

Hi Everybody! Y’all probably know by now that I’ve been obsessively listening to @season14podcast since it started (hooray for the updated weekly posting schedule! I haven’t listened to the new episode that dropped this morning yet because I’m still obsessing over the previous episode, which is the point of this post, actually, so maybe I should can the parenthetical and just get on with it! RIGHTO!)

OKAY! So the previous episode was about 2.06, No Exit. And I have feelings about this episode, specifically regarding Dean’s surface-level misogyny and his repeated dismissal of Jo’s ability as a hunter. PARTICULARLY the fact that when he eventually clarified that he didn’t have trouble with women hunting, but amateurs. Because honestly I don’t think this was about Jo at all. This was about Dean (and to a lesser extent Sam), and how he was raised.

In the early seasons of the show, I think this was partly an attempt to show just how isolating from “normal society” the hunting life is. Even after Sam and Dean make a sort of home base out of Bobby’s house. Even after they discover the roadhouse and make some connections with other hunters. They’re all still (all hunters, that is) still relatively secretive and isolationist.

This is a theme that will be addressed over and over again, in their dealings with a lot of other hunters. Remember this was Gordon Walker’s line when they first met him, that he hunts alone, and Sam and Dean should get out of town. And it will come up again in 4.04 with Travis the “rougarou specialist,” who called Sam and Dean in for help hunting the thing he supposedly specialized in his whole life. And while we will see hunters contacting each other for information, or to give others the heads up about events on the spooky side of the street, they largely DO work alone-- or at best as a regular team like Sam and Dean do (and like Ellen and Jo will by s5, and like Bobby and Rufus were implied to have done for years). But Jo was raised in this strange liminal space between hunting and the real world, where even hunters like Rufus were known to show their faces on occasion. It wasn’t really being raised in the life (like we’ve been shown that Sam and Dean were), but it also wasn’t being raised “normal” either.

And the mention of Bobby and Rufus, just thinking back to Bobby’s Hunter Origin Story is yet another example of why amateurs don’t hunt. His wife had been possessed by a demon, and not having any idea how the supernatural worked and being directly threatened by that demon, Bobby killed her before Rufus arrived to help actually get rid of the demon possessing her. Think about what we know of demons-- they leave the host or are exorcised, and if the body is unharmed, the person will live. Bobby’s complete lack of experience, of knowing a simple exorcism, drove him to kill his own wife. Can you even imagine? The guilt of it all literally haunted him. See 3.10, 5.14, and 7.10 for just how much it haunted him.

The thing is, once people have been on ONE hunt, which we typically think of as Hunter Origin Stories, they already HAVE experience surviving that hunt. They might feel compelled to continue hunting, but they also know first-hand the terror, the danger, and that anything can and will go wrong.

EVERY Hunter Origin Story we’ve heard is like this.

EXCEPT Jo’s.

I know this post is all over the place, but I swear it has a point. I’m gonna skip WAY ahead in canon for a minute, because Dabb era is STILL focusing on this. 14.16 involved a conversation DIRECTLY ADDRESSING THIS.

Dean: Knowing about monsters and fighting 'em are two different things. Sheriff Romero: So you make that choice for everybody? Imagine telling them. Imagine the lives you could save. Sam: No. No. It doesn't work like that. People die. Even when they know how to fight, people still die.

Because Sheriff Romero had grown up listening to the warnings, knowing there was something dangerous and evil in the woods, and yet he still didn’t believe it himself. Even knowing the weapon he would need to kill the thing, he brought a shotgun into the woods instead. Even being trained in combat, even knowing the whole story, he still was unprepared to face the monster until he had this fact pointed out to him by Sam and Dean.

There’s other stories. Jody’s, Donna’s, Claire’s, basically pick a character and think about their first brush with the supernatural and understand what inexperience got them. So I wanted this pointed out that this is definitely a recurring theme in the show. No one’s introduction to hunting goes smoothly. You can be armed to the teeth and combat trained (think of the soldiers Abaddon recruited in 9.02, or the soldiers who unwittingly brought khan worms back from a tour of duty). Police, military, even mercenaries are just completely unprepared in the face of something they’re not ready for.

It also works the other way around. You can study the lore, talk to hunters, and understand all of hunting in theory, but until you’re face to face with a monster trying to kill you, you have no idea how you might react to it.

Even the Men of Letters was effectively founded on this exact concept, you know? from 8.12:

DEAN: Okay, enough with the decoder talk. How about you tell us what this whole “Men of Letters” business is, or you're on your own. HENRY: It's none of your concern. DEAN: Why, because we're hunters? What do you have against us? HENRY: Aside from the unthinking, unwashed, shoot-first-and-don't-bother-to-ask-questions-later part, not much, really. SAM: You know what? Wait a second. We're also John's children. HENRY: You're more than that, actually. My father and his father before him were both Men of Letters, as John and you two should have been. We're preceptors, beholders, chroniclers of all that which man does not understand. We share our findings with a few trusted hunters – the very elite. They do the rest. DEAN: So you're like Yodas to our Jedis. [HENRY looks uncomprehending.] Never mind. You'll get there.

And then reinforced when we met Magnus in 9.16:

MAGNUS: Hunters? Wow! Hunters. With the key to the kingdom! The boys must be spinning in their graves. Damn snobs. Bunch of librarians, if you ask me. Although I was always fond of Henry. I was his mentor, you know? Yeah, till the squares gave me the boot. Yeah. 'Course, he came here to visit me, in secret. Called out to me, same as you did. Oh, yes. Quite the wild hair, your grandfather was.

and:

MAGNUS: Things never change, do they? I kept telling the boys over and over again -- I would say, "we could stop all this. We could rid the world of monsters once and for all if we just put our minds to it", but, "oh, no," they said. "No, no, no. It's not our place. We're here to study. We're here to catalog""

and then he went on to express the sentiment “all hunters are morons.”

So yes, this goes both ways, and it’s ingrained in the show’s language. Remember, for all their knowledge, for all their experience and their storehouse of supernatural weapons, they were still entirely wiped out by Abaddon in one fell swoop. Even after generations of training and the accumulation of knowledge, even THEY were entirely unprepared.

So... I don’t really think this is a comment on Jo specifically, or on her character. It was discussed in the podcast whether this sort of “taking her down a peg” was really necessary for her character development, and I’d argue that yes, it was. Because for all intents and purposes, in the context of this hunt, Jo is functioning as an avatar for the viewer. For all of us who’ve been watching the show and “learning to hunt by proxy.” Because isn’t that what her entire life has been?

She may never have actually gone on a hunt (she was little when her father died, and she had her mother to stay home with and have a relatively normal life compared to Sam and Dean), but she’s been tangentially exposed to the life since she was born, too. Her experience is in a context several degrees removed from actually facing the monsters. And as such, no amount of research, no amount of theoretical training, could have prepared her for actually going on a hunt.

Listening to a bunch of hunters’ fish tales (in 12.06 Dean even mentions having heard of Asa Fox at the Roadhouse, through the legend that he’d killed five wendigos in one night, and yet didn’t believe it could be true) is not a foundation for actually being equipped and prepared to go on a hunt ALONE. Because for all his blather (and yeah, the writing could’ve been handled better on this point), I really think that this is what Dean was trying to say. Not that “you can’t hunt because you’ve never been on a hunt before,” but you can’t just jump into a hunt alone without some sort of master/apprentice situation. Because it was implied that even JOHN didn’t begin hunting alone-- he was sort-of apprenticed to a lot of people, but specifically to Daniel Elkins in 1.20.

John knew enough to find the letter Elkins addressed specifically to him after his death, despite their previous falling out:

SAM: Wait, you came all the way out here for this Elkins guy? JOHN: Yeah. He was... he was a good man. He taught me a hell of a lot about hunting. SAM: Well you never mentioned him to us. JOHN: We had a... we had kind of a falling out. I hadn't seen him in years. (gesturing to the envelope) I should look at that. (He opens it) 'If you're reading this, I'm already dead'... that son of a bitch.

Because NOBODY just picks up after the sort of events John experienced in 1983 and just... goes off hunting without HELP.

Which is what Jo was trying to do in 2.06.

Which is what Dean specifically objected to.

NOT the fact she was there with them, but that she’d taken off from what Dean thought of as a comfortable and secure life of safety, deliberately lying to Ellen about where she was going and what she was doing, where she could’ve literally died if Sam and Dean had not shown up there, too. And I mean, she had to know they would make their way out to Philly to take on the hunt, and I kinda think she wanted to show them up by having handled the hunt before they ever arrived, you know? Or at the very least wanted to prove her competence, to prove she wasn’t afraid, to prove she could do the job, too, after having literally been raised surrounded by the competent bravado that most hunters adopt when they gather together for drinking and information swapping.

I also think this was literally an episode to demonstrate to her the reality of hunting removed from the relative safe-haven of the Roadhouse. This was deliberately to show her what was at stake if she chose to go hunting on her own, and give her something concrete to balance it against in her mind. She could still choose to go off hunting, but now she knows the reality of that experience, and not the barroom fish stories version. I hate to use this term for it, but there’d always been a certain glamour about it for her, and nothing wipes the polish off like getting buried alive by a murderous ghost, you know?

But she DID learn something from this experience. Bravado has NO place in hunting. Sam and Dean wouldn’t have marched into a ghost’s lair and thrown themselves in its face. Well, maybe they would, but they would have an actual plan. Usually. Hopefully. I mean, even their plans frequently go out the window, and even they get things wrong more often than most people would be comfortable with, you know?

And I know most of this isn’t something that could be addressed in the podcast, because hooBOY this is basically one big spoiler, and we wouldn’t want to spoil Jess on what’s to come. :’D But I had to write something out about this. I mean, definitely, the writer of this episode could’ve definitely taken a bit more coaching on characterization and not implied Dean was a misogynist jerkwad, but I’m willing to overlook that mostly because of ^^ everything else the series has ever said on how most hunters begin their hunting careers. So while the attempt came off a bit ham-handed, it’s still basically conveying the same message the rest of the series does.

One last thing before I close this out. It’s also a direct comparison between Jo’s relatively comfortable and stable upbringing, even exposed to tragedy and the supernatural from a young age, and the sort of upbringing that Sam and Dean had on the road with John. Sure, we can assume Bill Harvelle may have begun training Jo in basic weapons and maybe told her the sorts of stories we learned Mary experienced in her own family as a child (bedtime stories about The Colt? yeah... hunter families are wild), but it wasn’t the isolation and immersion in hunting Dean (especially, and Sam to a lesser extent since Dean shielded him for A LOT for a VERY LONG TIME) experienced in being trained to hunt from the time he could remember. Nothing drives that point home quite like watching 12-year-old Dean’s “failure” in 1.18, you know? THAT is the comparison point for hunting as a novice. Dean HAS experienced that failure. He KNOWS what is at stake. And he has known the risk since he was old enough to hold a shotgun.

Jo only learned it in this episode. All the research, all the planning in the world, all the bravado and confidence in the world couldn’t have saved her here. But now she knows.

One last thing about all those hunter origin stories I mentioned above. For Dean, no matter how prepared anyone thinks they are, no matter how much of “a freak” (to use Jo’s word here) they may feel like, no matter how averse they are to putting it behind them and trying to live a normal life, there’s something about the experience of hunting that Dean would’ve absolutely saved Jo from having to suffer through if he could’ve. Almost every hunter we’ve met on the show is broken in a way that Jo hadn’t been before this experience, and in ways that people who haven’t survived a brush with the supernatural can’t even begin to understand. This has also been an ongoing plot point on the show. Hunters don’t retire, they either die young and tragic or else live long enough to end up like Bobby and Rufus, or worst case, like Martin Creaser. There’s no happy at the end of the road, at least not in Dean’s experience. (and hopefully Dabb era will finally write them out beyond that dark curtain)/

This was never about proving that Jo was incompetent, or that she didn’t have what it takes to be a hunter. I thought it was quite the opposite, showing her the truth of it in a way that wasn’t recklessly catastrophic for her. Hey, at least she survived to live her life, whatever she chooses to do with it going forward.

(and I’m oddly thinking about her lines in 7.04 now, after a flashback to 2.06 earlier in the episode:

DEAN: He was right, you know – that dick judge, about me. JO: No, he wasn't. DEAN: You were a kid. JO: Not true. DEAN: You and Sam. I just – you know, hunters are never kids. I never was. I didn't even stop to think about it. JO: It's not your fault. It wasn't on you. DEAN: No, but I didn't want to do it alone. Who does? No, the right thing would have been to send your ass back home to your mom. JO: Like to have seen you try.

and that’s the difference a better writing effort from someone who has a much better handle on Dean’s character can make, because this is essentially the same sentiment, only refined over the years through reflection and yeah, through personal growth, too)

(and again, not forgiving the writer here because yeeeeeesh he could’ve done all this without making Dean look like a jerk, but “jerk” is kinda Dean’s default when people’s lives are on the line-- particularly people he cares about) 

#spn 2.06 #jo harvelle #i just had to put this out into the universe... sincere apologies to everyone involved :P #but most especially to jess who won't be able to read this post for at least a few years probably :'D

[the-potter-analyst]

Chapter 12 - The Mirror of Erised

One can never have enough socks!!

Harry Potter and the Sacred Text word of the day: (White) Privilege

When I learned that this was the word that the hosts would use for chapter 12, I was.... intrigued to say the least about how they would connect the concept. But once again, I was amazed on what they found! Basically the invisibility cloak was a symbol for both having privilege and not having privilege. The original word(s) of the day is “white privilege” but the idea can also work for privilege in general, which is why I have white in parentheses. Just to put it out there, I’m an asexual black woman which right off the bat puts me at a disadvantage for the top categories of privilege lol, so this topic is something very close to home and I will not sugar coat anything. istg if I get any defensive replies or asks

The invisibility cloak having a double meaning around privilege is so fascinating to me. It reveals how invisibility can be good or bad depending if a person is privileged or not. For example, if you’re white, you will largely be ignored on the things you do; you can get away with almost anything. This is the positive side of the invisibility cloak, as Harry can roam around the castle without being noticed, particularly at night, and not be caught. On the flip side, a white person will be seen as an individual, their actions defining themselves and not an entire group. Alternatively, this is the complete opposite of any minority. Any black person walking down the street will be noticed because they are black, my people literally can’t do anything without the cops being called on them. And a black person’s actions ends up being a collective definition of the entire race. Like... a white shooter will always be talked about as an individual and the event being an isolated case. If the shooter is black or Arab or whatever? The media will spin it like the entire minority is evil. But if a black person is successful, their efforts are ignored. Can you name any black inventors? Because technology wouldn’t have been the same without them, yet you never learn about them in history books.

Harry notes that the cloak doesn’t stop him from being solid, which made me think about how being invisible and ignored in a negative way doesn’t make a person any less of a human, no matter how they may be treated as such. Just food for thought I guess.

Something Sacred Text host, Vanessa, said really struck me. She talked about how she was literally side stepped by someone so they could tap her black friend on the shoulder and compliment her outfit. And Vanessa, connecting it with invisibility and visibility, commented how the person probably (unintentionally) gave the compliment because her friend looked nice, for being black. And... I’ve never thought about that stuff quite in this way. I just assumed (white) people just tried to go out of their way to be nice to a black person, but to be honest I never gave much thought about it or its meaning in the first place. I get compliments from complete strangers everywhere for articles of clothing to my hair. Like just yesterday this white man walked up to me at a restaurant to say he loved my hair, which was in an afro. I’ve always thought it was weird to compliment random strangers like that, not in the way that you’re standing in line or something and compliment a girl’s purse who’s right in front of you, but literally walking up to someone who’s just minding their own business to do it. And cause this happened after listening to the podcast, I kept thinking is he trying to be encouraging to people with natural hair? does he really think his opinion is going to boost my self esteem like that? (normally I’d just brush it off and think that person’s weird) I know that wasn’t his intentions, but this is what those actions imply when it comes from a white person who’s a stranger.

Dumbledore says something that really holds true about privilege: “Strange how nearsighted being invisible can make you.” When you have it, you aren’t always aware of what your privilege gives you or what others without it experience. Like for me, I admittedly don’t think about ADA regulations all the time because I have an abled body, so it’s not something that I personally have to worry about unless I get an injury. But someone in a wheelchair, someone with a cane, someone with an invisible disability has to think about these things, because that’s their life. They need an accessible doorway for example just to get in a building. As a female, I can’t go out alone at night or even the bathroom at a bar without worrying I might be assaulted, but this isn’t something that men have to think about. So next time you’re defensive about something that someone of a minority group says about your privilege, think about this quote. Think about how your privilege makes you nearsighted. And then fucking listen.

Another long post lol I can’t not rant about this topic The rest of the chapter will be analyzed under the cut.

I kinda wonder if Hermione wasn’t in Harry’s friend group, if he and Ron would be as motivated to find out who Nicolas Flamel was. Obviously the constant searching in the library was her idea lol, because that’s her thing. When she doesn’t know something, she consults books AKA goes to the library. Though I think because Harry knew he read the name somewhere, he would have been searching in books as his curiosity had hit an all time high, but it would’ve probably been limited to his school books. Ron probably would’ve only joined occasionally to help Harry out, or done the same and look through his own books. I find it funny that the trio only looked through books about modern or recently famous wizards, which makes sense because you don’t exactly expect someone to live over 600 years lol.

Christmas morning of Harry’s first year always gives me so much joy to read (and watch). He gets so excited that he has presents!! Even the 50 pence that the Dursley’s sent he responds with that’s friendly lmao. I will also never get over the fact that Mrs. Weasley, after learning from Ron that Harry didn’t expect to get presents, made him a goddamn sweater and some fudge 😭 I also love how the Weasleys basically adopt Harry, and it’s not just Mrs. Weasley, it’s Fred and George too. Fred pulls wizard crackers with Harry during Christmas dinner.... they played in the snow until they were cold and wet.... not to mention the twins look after him in Quidditch.

The contrast between Christmas morning and Christmas evening is so interesting to me. Harry wakes up to presents from many people, eats all he wants for dinner, spends the day having fun with the Weasleys, and then after an adventure with his invisibility cloak, finds the Mirror of Erised. And this scene is so heartbreaking. I can just feel the empty silence as Harry longingly looks at his family, I can feel his ache for the people he never got to know. The hosts brought up how white/western culture is very individualistic, but at the expense of feeling disconnect with one’s own heritage. I also want to add how the same disconnect happens with a diaspora. This topic is a little interesting when considering that there’s a widespread headcanon that Harry is half Indian or just poc, so the feeling of disconnect might be even more powerful.

For what Ron sees, I’ve said previously that Ron’s insecurity is being the odd one out in his family, the one who doesn’t have a special thing because all his older brothers have already done it. So in the Mirror, he sees himself being the best of all of them combined. And he’s alone. He wants to stand out. So far I’ve seen a lot of signs that Ron takes his family for granted, which I get since he’s 11 and one of the youngest in a large and loving family: he’s embarrassed about their class status, he pushes away his mother when she tries to clean dirt off his face, he tells Harry he can see family any old time. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since Ron’s still fairly young though (he also didn’t resist being told to wear his Weasley sweater like Percy), but again and again we’ll see moments like this where it’s apparent that Ron and Harry’s desires are the complete opposite of each other. Ron is also less obsessive than Harry, which is why I think he had a bad feeling about the mirror  while Harry didn’t despite the two fighting over it while in the empty classroom. And he gets so worried about Harry! He tries to get him to eat, or play games, or even visit Hagrid, anything to get Harry out of his depressive state.

I wonder why the Mirror was moved to the empty classroom for anyone to stumble upon though. Maybe Dumbledore needed space to tamper with it? And the best time would be the holidays when most of the students were away? Why not do it in the Room of Requirement where is was probably kept before this? And was Dumbledore invisible every night while modifying the mirror? Or just to keep an eye on it? I can’t stop thinking about his comment on not needing a cloak to be invisible.

Small things

The Weasley twins bewitching snowballs to basically hit Voldemort ahaha

I will always laugh at the “Gred and Forge” joke xD

What time do they have Christmas dinner.... afterwards it says they spent a “happy afternoon” playing outside, which I don’t know if they would do at night when it’s cold and snowy lol. And being in Scotland, the sun will set pretty early. So was this actually a Christmas lunch? I’m so confused

ONE CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH SOCKS CAN I GET AN AMEN

hjsdfhsjkdf but actually, as an adult that’s all I want for Christmas (even though I have no room for them anymore haha)

Scabbers why are you sleeping on Harry’s pillow you creep

Special shout out to all the Hogwarts house elves that make Christmas magical, as well as every other day at Hogwarts :)

Previous: Chapter 11 - Quidditch

Next: Chapter 13 - Nicolas Flamel

#so much happened in this chapter omg #i wrote so much #this is too long to try to edit lmao #hp #hp analysis #hp meta #the sorcerer's stone #sorcerer's stone meta #harry potter #ron weasley #hermione granger #albus dumbledore #molly weasley #fred weasley #george weasley

[doomedandstoned]

Coffin Torture Bring Hell To Earth In ‘Dismal Planet’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

If it's sludgy doom you're after, have I got a pick for you. No doubt, you've met South Carolina heavyweights COFFIN TORTURE in these pages or on our podcast before. The Westminster duo of Jim McMillan (aka Blind Samson) and Patrick Alex Thorfinn have been gigging for a solid decade now, last summer releasing the proof by way of a monster compilation of their three EPs and singles called, 'Slithering Through Your Dreams' (2017). The big news that brings them back to these pages, however, is their first full-on full-length, ‘Dismal Planet' (2018).

As the name implies, this LP is dank, dirty, and really delivers on the dismal. From the opening moments of "Bull Of Minos" to the closing moments of "Trench Hog," Coffin Torture seize control of your mind and heart, offering up a pulse-pounding beat, harsh vox, and some devilish riff-making. Thorfinn and Blind Sampson know their death-doom, alright, and present us with seven tracks that go straight for the jugular. A fuzzy, toxic sheen accompanies us throughout the record, which amp worshippers will go ape for.

It's worth noting that the colorful album art is the doing Coffin Torture's Thorfinn, who is a talented artist in more than just the real of music. In past years, he has contributed a number of his pieces to accompany the dark poetry of Lara Noel's dark poetry series for Doomed & Stoned.

Look for Dismal Planet to release this Friday, February 16th, via Sludgelord Records. You can pick it up in digital or CD formats here or here. Whenever we can, we try to give you an advance listen, so for the next 36 hours or so, you can get your fill of Coffin Torture right here, right now, on our bitchin' lil blog!

DISMAL PLANET by COFFIN TORTURE

An Interview with Coffin Torture's Blind Sampson

By Shawn Gibson

You have a new record coming out?

Yeah, we recorded 'Dismal Planet' down at the Jam Room with Jay Matheson and Phillip Cope of Kylesa.

Yeah? Wow!

It's awesome man! It was really an experience! The reason we went down there, we were going to be recording with Jay, and Phillip was there. Jay had been working for like a month straight, recording every single day! He said, “You know what guys? I want to get Phillip in here and record the second guitar track and the vocals. Is that cool with you guys?”

Um, yeah.

Absolutely! (laughs) It was surreal, it really was.

I've seen Kylesa in Savannah. My god, they put on a hell of a show! Kylesa, Wet Socks, and Bag Lady at The Wormhole, bad-ass show!

I bet that was awesome! Phillip's got a new band called Oakskin. They have a really cool psychedelic sound like that of Kylesa, mixed in with a bunch of different stuff.

So where are you at, upstate South Carolina?

We're both from Westminster, SC. It's right in the corner, Oconee County. We grew up on the state line in between Georgia and South Carolina. I'm actually from Toccoa, Georgia, right across the state line. We both went to West Oak High School in Westminster, about an hour and thirty minutes from Greenville.

I've got a pretty good idea where that is. Is it snowing there?

No, not right now. There getting snow where you guys are, I think.

Yeah we got three or four inches in Savannah GA! It's crazy! Wow! I got some family in Brunswick.

Yep, further south. You guys never get snow! (laughs)

Parts of northern Florida got snow, man!

That's wild! Yeah!

We are all doomed when it's snowing in Florida! (laughs)

It might be!

Who else is in the band with you and what do they're doing Coffin Torture? You play drums, right?

I do. It's just me and Alex Thorfinn on guitar. It's just guitar and drums. Alex does vocals.

Well, you guys have some heavy ass music.

Thanks, man, thanks! We've had two bass players in the past, our friends Jeremy Bishop and Dustin Holiday played with us. They were really good bass players. When we play live it's kinda a loose feeling. We might do one riff as twice as long, then the next time do it as half as long. Being on drums, it frees you up to do a lot more jamming, you know if you want to extend a part out. We've been playing together since 2005, not as Coffin Torture, but that's when we started playing music together. We've got to where we can jam pretty well together on the fly.

You guys have something there: chemistry. To be able to do that, especially on stage, just riff and go to town and switch it up a bit, keeps it fresh!

Sometimes it's unintentional, sometimes by mistake, but we'll do something different. I might say, “Hey, you, remember what we did last time? Well, let’s do that every time.” Being only two people in the band it’s easy to make changes like that.

That's great that happens spontaneously and takes both of you guys for a ride.

When it happens live, in front of people it adds like an extra level of excitement. You’re already nervous playing in front of people, but when something like that happens, it's cool. It makes it like, almost like a Grateful Dead kinda mind set, you know?

They would jam and riff forever. One song almost turns into 'Dopesmoker.' (laughs)

Yeah, we don't get that extreme with it. Sometimes when we practice, we'll play for three hours just jamming on something seeing what happens ya know.

So what are some influences for both of you guys?

Well, shared influences would definitely be bands like Neurosis, Weedeater, Buzzov-en, Sourvein, obvious sludge influences. A lot of funeral doom, bands like Ahab Tyranny, Catacombs. I lean more towards stuff like Pentagram, Saint Vitus, and older stuff. The Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, you know Earthride, all that kind of stuff. Alex, he's more into extreme, like more death metal. He likes Disma and Coffins.

Yeah, I lean that way myself -- really heavy, really hard stuff. I do appreciate bands like Beyond Belief, Trouble, Pentagram, definitely.

Together, we're into stuff like Type O Negative, Queens Of The Stone Age, Butthole Surfers.

I Love Butthole Surfers! “I Saw An X Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas” is one of my favorites. That and 'Kuntz.”

Oh, yeah! (laughs). Off of ' Locust Abortion Technician.'

They re-released it!

I saw that! I got that album when I was thirteen and it warped me forever! I got into more strange stuff, I guess. I'm into Sisters Of Mercy, hardcore punk, some of the less heavy stuff. Alex is more into the straight up heaviest stuff around, that's what he likes.

You guys balance each other. (laughs)

I'll try and put something in that's maybe a little too out there and he'll reign in there, “Let’s keep it heavy!" Sometimes I get ideas and I go off into the stratosphere. We have all these influences, with a shared vision. What we're looking for is something as heavy as we can make it but still mixing it up as well.

That's good having some range and depth to it. Mixing in progression and keeping it fresh for both of you as well as your listeners.

Man, we try our best!

I want to talk about the “Web of Piss” cover of Iron Monkey's song, from your recent compilation, ‘Slithering Through Your Dreams.’ That thing is slow and low, man! Iron Monkey does “Web of Piss” as mid-tempo sludge, but you guys slowed it down and made it damn near death-doom metal and it's heavy as shit.

Thanks man! (laughs) We recorded that, I guess around 2012 when we did that for the 'Cave Dweller' EP. We would play that riff for fun ya know .We recorded that actually in my parent’s basement, the whole EP. We were like, “Let’s just record it!” We did and I think I actually laid down the vocals for that and we did it in one go, pretty much. We listened to the song a hundred times previous to that anyway so we pretty much had it down. We just jammed it out and put the vocals over it. We did a cover of “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” by Cream. We also did a cover of “Bedroom Thang,” stuff to have fun with. Thanks, glad you like it! Iron Monkey rules!

It's amazing, after all these years, they just released '9-13' on Relapse in October. I’d like to ask Billy if he can ask Relapse if we could get an interview with Iron Monkey for Doomed and Stoned.

That would be awesome!

What!? You bet your ass!

It'd be hard to do. I know back in the day they didn't do a bunch of interviews. They might do it now, you never know.

There’re newer bands out I like. Spectral Voice, have you heard of them?

No, I haven't heard of them yet.

They've been around awhile; they had their debut 'Eroded Corridors of Unbeing' out on Dark Descent last year. I think you'll dig em. They're death-doom.

Yeah man, I'll check em out. I love that stuff like Cyanide, Disma, and Coffins.

I love Disma's sound!

You ever listen to any Cyanide?

I’ve read reviews and interviews about them but haven't really listened to the music yet.

Check out an album they did in the late '80s, early ‘90s. It's called, ‘The Dying Truth.’ That album influenced us both a lot -- them and Coffins’ 'Mortuary in Darkness.’ I think that that album shaped how we founded, starting off more than any other.

Have you heard of Father Befouled?

Oh yeah! It's the same guys from Encoffination. They're really, really heavy!

Incantation worship!

Even the logo looks like it a little bit. I don't listen to that stuff as much as I used to. I guess I wouldn't say the lighter side of it, but the groovier side of it.

With that being said, what are some SC/NC doom/sludge bands that you like and or have played with?

Oh man, there's a ton of ‘em! If we start with the upstate, man: Waft, Tar Hag, and friends in Black Hand Thrown, Legba. Legba is on the Doom Charts.

I've sent some questions to Todd from Legba for an interview.

Cool! Todd's a really good guy. I used to play keyboards in Legba on their first self-titled album. They're great and they got a really good sound. Then you've got Fall Of An Empire. They kinda remind me of Sasquatch, that kinda sound; good vocals, really good band. If you go down to Charleston you got Hooded Eagle and Tripping The Mechanism, they're really good sludge band. Hooded Eagle is more a black metal/funeral doom kinda band. Then you got around Florence, you got Heathen Bastard, they're awesome; them and Thieving Coyote. Thieving Coyote kinda remind me of Clutch, but way heavier; they’re a good band. Compel from Florence, two-man band. We were going to play a show with them at Gottrocks in Greenville. It's been a couple years back. I think Joe or Tim got sick and couldn't make it. I hate we missed playing with them, it was a good show. In North Carolina, you got Temptation’s Wings.

I know those guys! I’ve been to their shows in Asheville at The Get Down, now The Odditorium. Hail Cronk! They were on my show at least three times.

Yeah, really nice guys. We played with them actually in Greenville at the Radio Room. It's been awhile back. In Asheville you got Broad River Nightmare.

Bobby Lamar Seay!

He's a nice guy, man!

He really is. It's some crazy music.

I'll see him when we go to the Mothlight, I've seen him at the Orange Peel a few times. The only show we played out of state, we played at The Odditorium.

I love that place.

Yeah, that place is cool. I’ve wanted to play there for a long time, but we never had the chance. Bobby set up that show, it was Pallor. They were really heavy, it was just bass and drums. You got Horseflesh up there, there really good.

Jaime Ward, yeah.

I saw them open up from Weedeater. I saw them at The Mothlight. They opened up another show, I think it was Big Business. It’s all kinda rusty.

I did see Big Business played in Asheville and I missed it! I know one of the local bands opened for them, just can’t remember.

It was Power Takeoff. Man, that was awesome. If you haven't checked them out, Power Takeoff from Concord, NC. I mean loud. We got to play with Jucifer a few times at Ground Zero. We opened for up for ‘em, too. I don't know Power Takeoff might be louder! (laughs) It was crazy loud.

Nice!

There's so many bands man. That's as many as I can think of right now, off hand.

It’s all good.

We've got a lot of good grindcore, power violence, and thrash.

Awesome, well-rounded scene.

Yeah, man. Upstate SC, we've got this band WVRM -- those guys, they are awesome. They just recorded with Kurt from Converge. They did a single or it might have been an EP with him. They toured with The Grind Mother, Funeral Chic, The Drip. You heard of The Drip on Relapse?

I’ve heard of them, but I haven't heard their music yet.

They toured with them and, actually, Waft was on the tour, as well.

Nice lineup.

If something doesn't happen with that band, I'll be surprised. They're really awesome! There's a lot going on right now, a lot of house shows. There's a place in Columbia, SC, called the Sludge Gutter that's really cool, like a house venue. They get a lot of shows.

That's great. I need to get my ass out to a show!

Man, did you catch West End Motel? They played The Jinx, in Savannah.

Oh, man. No.

I thought about driving down for that, when it was their CD release show. I kinda like that. I like Brent Hinds, Fiends Without a Face, West End Motel. Tell you the truth, I like that stuff more than the newer Mastodon stuff, but I still like it, its great music. I'm more into like, 'Remission,' 'Leviathan,' 'Blood Mountain.'

Yes. I got to see Mastodon live at the Orange Peel in Asheville, sold-out show with Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang in 2011. The entire crowd was singing along to every Mastodon song, I'll never forget it. After the show we got on the tour bus with Brent, Trey, his wife, and their son.

Oh, wow, that's cool. I was talking to a friend of mine on Facebook; he was at that show too! I found a Mastodon tour poster and it has that Orange Peel show on it!

Damn!

It’s actually signed by those dudes. I found it in Seneca for like thirty dollars.

What!

A friend of mine, he's got that same poster. I asked him if he was at that Orange Peel show. Mastodon’s awesome, man! You know what I've been trying to track down? I actually have two copies of Troy's old band Knuckle, back before he was in Four Hour Fogger. I've got to copies of 'Sixteen Penny Nails.’ I think it was the only Knuckle album. I've got one Four Hour Fogger seven-inch, the one that's got the cow on the cover. It's got “Road to Tibor” and “Marsha's Birthday” on it.

Holy shit!

I cannot find ‘Dollars for Red Books.’ That's the only full length album Four Hour Fogger did. They might have done another one, but I don't know. I know a lot of people that have it.

Yeah, nobody willing to part with it.

Yeah, man, I'd even settle for a burned copy of it.

At least.

The only place you can listen to that album, on YouTube, a guy named Sir Runt uploaded like six tracks off it and it's got like twelve or thirteen tracks on the album. That's the only place you can listen to that album! You can’t download it anywhere!

Damn, man.

I know man, I actually talked to Gary Lindsey, the singer from Four Hour Fogger. He did vocals for Hank III, Assjack -- you heard of that band?

Oh, yeah.

I actually messaged him on Facebook. I was like, “Man, do you have a copy of that? Is there any way I can get one?” He said, “No, man. They’re out of print. You just got to get lucky and find one!” The search continues! I found two copies of Knuckle and I bought both of ‘em! I've been looking online. There’s no Knuckle on YouTube. You can't hear what it sounds like. I gotta at least like upload a track or something, so if someone wants to hear it. I don't know how that works. I don't want to do it without their permission.

Right.

I just wanted to hear it. It’s really cool, too!

I bet!

It's kinda like Alice In Chains, maybe a little more sludgy.

Cool. What's a damn good book you've read?

I'm reading 'Contract Killer' right now. It's the autobiography of Donald “Tony The Greek” Frankos, a mafia hit man. He was Greek, so he couldn't be “made” into the mafia, you have to be 100 % Italian. He did hits for like almost all the families, the five major families. According to the book, he was in on the Jimmy Hoffa murder.

What!?

Yeah, I just got to that chapter. I'm just reading that now. He said that Tony Cilano “Fat Tony” ordered the hit on Hoffa. You know, Hoffa was big in the Teamsters, so they had all this stuff happen, so they had to get rid of him. They had to make him disappear forever and that's one of the most mysterious mob murders ever. Nobody knows exactly what happened. I've read some stuff online that they say now, “Tony The Greek, that that was bull-crap, what he said. He wasn't there.” Some people say he was there and he was in on the whole thing, you know, it's one of those mysteries. I've been reading The Misfits biography, ‘This Music Leaves Stains.’ It's really good. Also, ‘Let's Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers.’

I definitely need to get that. I wouldn't put it down, ‘till it was done. Gibby Haynes is nuts! You've heard of him, right?

(laughs) Yeah, he and Al Jourgensen stayed actually lived with Timothy Leary. You've heard of Timothy Leary?

Oh, yeah. The acid guru from the '60s.

They lived with him!

Makes sense for a lot of their music!

I can’t remember exactly for sure it’s been awhile since I read, it's not in that book. I saw a documentary about it. That biography is all over the place. It skips around -- now you’re at this point, then it skips ahead, then you're here.You gotta read it from beginning to end, you can’t skip around with it. It's crazy! It talks about when they started out, they would go on never-ending tours. They would just go and ping-pong from coast to coast. They would actually take half hits of acid to stay awake, take like small doses.

They'd stay dosed for months.

It's crazy! Then it talks about the legendary show at Danceteria in New York that people say it was the craziest Butthole Surfers show ever, They say that Gibby and Kathleen had sex on stage -- they say. At the end of the show they found out they were only getting half their money. Paul Leary started destroying speakers with a screwdriver, stabbing holes in the speakers with a screwdriver. They say they were all high on acid, the whole band. They started dosing the crowd! It's one of those shows that like if everybody was there that said they were there, there would be like a thousand people at that show. “Oh, I saw them at Danceteria!” Really, there would be like forty people.

Exactly -- at the most.

The book gets sad towards the end. I never thought about it, you know. The Butthole Surfers broke through with 'Electriclarryland,' become a big band. They were on Lollapalooza. They were scheduled to do a tour with Motley Crue, believe it or not.

That is crazy to think about.

Yeah, it fell through, thankfully. Towards the end, they sued Corey from Touch and Go Records, because the handshake agreement when they first got on Touch and Go was 50/50 agreement. As the years rolled on and became a big band, the sale of their back catalog exploded. Everybody wanted as much as they could get. Corey was getting 50% of all that and he wasn't being forthcoming with the money, so they decided to sue him. What happens when they decide to sue him, the whole underground turned on the Butthole Surfers. Never mind that the Butthole Surfers toured and lived in a van for all these years, just barely surviving. Everybody was like, “Oh they've gone corporate,” even though they didn’t.

I say that's fighting for what’s yours.

Yeah, that's what it was about, but it was like this big band was attacking this small label. I had no idea any of that happened, I just learned about it reading this book. It was nuts! They recorded the album, ‘After The Astronaut.’ Long story short, it got bastardized and turned into their worst album which is 'Weird Revolution.' Have you heard that one?

No, I haven’t.

It's got that song “The Shame of Life,” like their dance song. It was like a club hit. It's got an electric drum beat. ‘After The Astronaut' is supposed to be one of their best albums, but it got remixed and stopped by the label and turned into ‘Weird Revolution.’

Pretty much after 'Independent Worm Saloon’ I got off that ride.

You don't like 'Electriclarryland'?

I do, I had it on CD. I thought it was amazing because I thought, man these guys “made it,” finally. The Butthole Surfers are a big influence on me, the whole psychedelic thing turned me on at the time.

Oh man, the Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid, a lot of those bands from back then I can get into, the Jesus Lizard.

What's something that makes you laugh uncontrollably?

A lot of stuff! Thinking about one time -- Alex and I fish a lot, there’s a lot of lakes and ponds where we live. I was at this pond and fishing with him and Alex was on the other side and I was over here and all of a sudden, this beautiful girl came down. It was like out of a movie. Of course, her boyfriend walked out of the woods behind her. He was walking to the pond too. We thought it was going to be like one of those, “Dear Penthouse” letters.

They're going to start going at it. What the hell?

In our weird teenage minds, that's what we thought, I guess. Obviously nothing like that would happen in a million years. So anyway, my tackle box was at the top of the bank. I had it up there and I caught on something and I was pulling my line and I snapped my line. It was right then the couple walked out of the woods and we saw em and we were like, “This is the hottest girl that's ever been here!” We freaked out a little bit, then I turned around and I was walking up the hill and I got caught up on an ivy vine and bam! Face-first right into the bank and just rolled back down it.

Damn! (laughs)

I look over, the girl was laughing and Alex was laughing at me. Anytime I need a good laugh, I think of that! (laughs)

I have had several instances like that.

It's always more embarrassing when a girl’s there. Always.

Follow The Band.

Get Their Music.

#D&S Debuts #D&S Reviews #D&S Interviews #Coffin Torture #Westminster #South Carolina #Doom #Death Doom #Metal #Doom Metal #Sludgelord Records #Patrick Alex Thorfinn #Shawn Gibson #HeavyBest18 #Doomed & Stoned

[well-hidden-hot-mess]

today’s thoughts

this is going to be rambly but what else is new. just had a bunch of random thoughts floating around in my head that i just wanted to get “on paper” so hopefully they’ll stop floating around my brain and taking up space where more important things should be and stop stressing me out. 

to follow up on yesterday’s post, woke up feeling backed up and bloated so i was dreading the weigh in because i was sure i was going to have maintained or gained. which yes i know is stupid for it to be such a “worry” or be on my brain the first second i wake up but it wasn’t i swear. i was up at 5am and this happened at like 7am but the second i looked at my body and saw my stomach being all puffed out i was like this isn’t going to be fun... but i tried to be positive and be like look, yesterday you “only” (i need to stop using that word) went for a leisurely walk (i’ll go into that next) and did yoga for activity (even though I hit 11,000 steps) plus you didn’t drink all of your water and you ate an extra 230 calories in the form of a chocolate protein bar (more on that later too) so if you are up a little bit, it’s understandable and it’ll be okay... stepped on the scale, looked down, and was shook because I lost .9lbs... halle-fucking-luyah. i shouldn’t feel such a relief at that but i think it was just that weight was lifted (no pun intended) from my shoulders because i was kicking my ass so hard the last 10 days and wasn’t seeing any progress so it was just a lot of frustration built up since i knew there was zero reason this should be happening due to previous experience and just common sense with how this all works. oh idk if i mentioned, i did lower my macros yesterday back down because my activity level wasn’t as high as i thought it would be and i wasn’t as active in between my workouts and since i was maintaining pretty steadily, i figured that would be a good idea and i was right. 

for the walk part, i forced myself to slow the f down and do an actual leisurely walk and ended up losing track of time and walking an hour and afterwards i wasn’t absolutely wrecked and useless the rest of the day. so that’s the plan from now on unless i’m doing cardio as my more intense workout of the day (like if i’m pairing it with yoga or something) or doing the stairs or something. 

the protein bar. well i was all up in my feels and had no idea why and was just really tired and mentally drained but not like full on but like 75% done and just emotionalish. i had drank my preworkout and was determined to go workout but it like never kicked in and that kinda hinted to me that maybe i just needed a break and it would be better to do it today (my hip was ultra pissed plus i was exhausted so it wouldn’t have been the best and it would’ve just made me frustrated and not a positive experience). so i made myself a healthy dinner (air fried skinless chicken drumsticks (which holy fuck are my new favorite food ever) with asparagus and brown/wild rice) even though i wanted nothing to do with cooking (thankfully they were all already prepped) and figured they would fit in my macros. lol jk because the macros i thought i had left didn’t include the rice i had at lunch so with some switching around my carbs/fats, i hit everything pretty spot on. which i was happy about for .1 second until i wanted something sweet since that’s how i always end my day and i had zero macros left. so that little “fuck it” voice popped up and i was like you know what, it’s not going to kill me and i just want it so it’s fine, i don’t care (not like f it i don’t care but more like it’s only 230 calories, i’m not going to let that ruin my day) and crawled into bed. it was at that point that i realized i was emotional when a tiktok that was like “things will get better” like sweet but not like powerful enough to ellicit the reaction of tears rolling down my face. so i looked up exercise for depression figuring there’d be something that would help me and then one of yoga with adriene’s videos popped up called “yoga for depression” and it was like 15 mins so i’m like let me just do this in my bed and maybe i’ll feel better in general and less guilty for completely skipping the second workout. so i did that one... and then another... and another to total 45 mins. i felt so much better afterwards and like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders and i fell asleep really quickly and easily after that so i’m so beyond happy i did it and feel proud of myself to not give into the impending binge that i could feel brewing and to not just give up on the day and stay in that negative headspace. so that was a good end to a could’ve been terrible day. 

i went to target yesterday and as always went a little crazy with the spending but it was mostly on stuff i needed and healthy snacks that don’t go bad quickly. but my plan was to get back from my walk, eat something, clean myself up a little, and go to target so get there by like 12. i just couldn’t get myself to get up and go. i was ready, there was just something holding me back aka anxiety. like target is my happy place... i had more than enough money so it wouldn’t be a stressful thing... and i just couldn’t get myself to get up and go. i think quarantine and not working/leaving my apartment every day has made my anxiety expand into like very mild agoraphobia like symptoms. i finally was just like fuck it, i need to go now or else it’s going to be busy with all the kids getting out of school and people getting out of work so i ended up leaving at 3 finally. it’s just a weird feeling having this invisible thing holding me back to begin with but like ultra weird that it was holding me back from a place i love a little too much. but i’m proud that i pushed through and ended up having a nice relaxing visit and FINALLY found my favorite creamer (oat yeah oatmeal cookie flavor omg) when they’ve been out for months and a couple other fun snacks that i’m excited to try. plus i found cute little baskets to put in my shoe rack and i love them and some organizers for my bathroom drawers which desperately need to be reorganized so i’ll probably do that later since it’s a rainy day so i won’t feel guilty not being outside. 

i’ve been thinking about work again and some things have been floating around in my brain. like making a youtube channel (about what? no fucking idea), or a podcast (again about what tho?), or a blog (same issues) or something like that where i can work from home for now on my own schedule until i’m ready to go back out into the real world and work again. i think i’m going to do some brainstorming about that today and report back.

my dad got me the new ninja air fryer/oven and omfg i’m legit obsessed. it’s like the only positive thing i have right now and as sad as that is, i’m ignoring how pathetic that is and just enjoying it for now. #ignoranceisbliss

i think i’m going to adopt a kitten like this week. i need something cute and fluffy and to make me happy and to focus on so i don’t go insane. nashville humane has so many cute little nuggets and one is a tuxedo and his name is elmo and i’m obsesseddddd. 

okay this has been going on for way too long so i need to go chug an energy drink and get my walk started before the torrential downpour from the latest hurricane/tornado/whatever the fuck it is. 

[buddaimond]

”Chris Hardwick, stand-up comedian, actor, voice actor, television host, writer, producer, podcaster, and musician, CEO of Nerdist Industries interviewed Robert Pattinson for 50 minutes. Listen to this great podcast:

Highlights of Rob’s interview & my notes *Rob’s quote in bold:

Starts at 8:00

Explaining the current press tour, how the Safdie brothers (directors) are more focused than him.

Vaguely embarrassed about talking about his acting process “What if someone doesn’t like it?”

“Pretty much all of my drive and enthusiasm for anything is born out of chronic insecurity and self-hatred. It's kind of annoying. it's a vicious circle if you ever get out of that then you’ve succeeded in something, like you ain’t gonna be lost forever”

Shared that even Bruce Springsteen felt similar chronic insecurity and “visions of grandeur and sickness in equal measure”

His admiration for The Band, which he wanted to do a movie on, where these people who wrote “massive stuff” and “spectacular pieces of art” at only 22, recollected that he doesn’t even know what he was doing at 22.

He only thought he wanted to be an actor “ACTOR” at 25. "I always just think I approach everything thinking it's going to be my last time every single time, and a lot of my decision-making processes “is this the one you're going to go down for? Is that amazing decision for the right reason?”

Making movies whether it is a hit or whether people like it or not, at least he could take aways two things that were important to him from his past endeavours, prior to Twilight,

He was getting jobs up until a point that he thought "this is going to be my life” and then just suddenly hit a brick wall. Twilight came along to be his big peak, but he could quite successfully disassociate myself from that, because he could psyched himself in thinking that it could just be taken away, and it was another nut down the road of his career.

Praising the Safdie brothers for their incredibly organazied minds, phenomenal people skills (both of which he does not have), how they could imagine a movie in their head and know technically they could put it together, and he is only beginning to understand the relationships between a director and the actor.

“You just had to have more trust in yourself and because when you don't have trust in yourself then you can't trust a director either. And so I think I would constantly be thinking that I somehow needed to mold a story from inside. As the performance rather than just accepting that it's their medium, and also I just got better at choosing directors as well. I sort of realized because sometimes you do you work with a director and they're just not in control of it... You try and control it but you literally can't control as a director at all. It's impossible well...you have one small piece... you're just a cog and if you try and do your own thing you'll just break the machine”

“I guess now I just have quite a smooth relationship with everybody I work with, it's just way less contentious than it used to be.”

He recalled having to read the teleprompter the other day and having read his speech 15 times from his card (in the car) before finally understanding it.

”I get nervous when I think there's any kind of expectation that's in any form of my life. If there's any expectation then I'll freak out and fail. I just have to set up my entire life to make sure that I'm in my own lane and not competing with anybody. Otherwise I know, I can't compete. As I was talking about auditioning, I don't like it. but if you realized if you just invent your own game and no one else knows to rules aside from you, then its fine.”

He has auditioned twice and gotten one of them so far (post Twilight)

It is not a pick and choose situation at all for him when it comes to his projects. The big projects with well-known directors that he’d want to work with, he hasn’t done enough to be really recognized or sought after. For those that wanted him “to get financing” he doesn’t want to work with them anyway. He has recognized over the years that he really like to be the A&R (artiste and repertoire) kind of person who is trying to find something with true potential that the majority of people have not realized yet. Then he will “completely go in on them, committing a million percent” which is what he did on Good Time. 

His love for movies, he watched a lot of them. Sometimes doubting himself imagining that he will ruin the movies if he were to play the roles he has his eyes on. He chose script by finding a fit to the kind of zeitgeist, the idea of the type of character that he wants to play and will search for it.

His preparation process before a project: his anxiety builds up before a project starts, when he gets really obsessed with the script and thinks everything is going to be amazing. When the date draws closer he just reaches a point of not understanding anything “it doesn’t even make any sense, it is not even written in English…the directors’ previous works are all shit…” and gets worse and worse spiralling out of control, and he will start to act out on everyone around him, getting their sympathy etc. Then one day his agent told him “you just like this feeling, you get high from anxiety” which he admitted about feeding on the adrenalin from anxiety.

In making the “fear” real. “The most real thing in the world is pain, and if you somehow figure out some kind of psychological or physical pain which is associated with the job” ….many artists or actors set up walls when they feel the devastation from pain (even when faking it) or doing it as an addiction, “whatever you still have to do it, ....you have to figure out a way, to trick yourself... to use everything inside of you...now I am going to make it real”

Funny story : My dad has always given me relationship advice. And my mom and dad have been married for nearly 40 years, and my dad said “You know, at the end of the day, love is just a fancy you’ve created for yourself. It’s only in your own head”…and I said “you shouldn’t this right in front of her (his mom). And his mom said “he’s right you know”

Living in character: “That is generally why I kind of stay in isolation if I’m trying to do something. It got so much easier because you create real arguments with everyone in that situation”

“I have those conversation the whole time (with my brain) every single decision I made, I consult my brain and especially like  “is the yes bigger or the no bigger?”…. I don’t know, I think that’s a yes…”

"I always find it strange when someone's saying “oh yeah well this is because of this, and this or that” it's like, if you say something and someone acknowledges your unique individuality I think it's much more comforting.... It is scary to think you are part of a herd and you're just a number. I think I would almost prefer to be unique and alone.”

“I am very very in my own head like almost constantly. Since I was a kid. Need to be in therapy to be less afraid of confrontation. I hold grudges and never tell people because I don’t want to piss them off. I just don’t talk to them again, just ghost it!”

“I remember growing up, my dad was like “you can do anything you want, just don’t be loud” I was just very uncomfortable with that kind of people not thinking things through all the time, and I think that’s why now I’m very attracted to parts where people are very upfront, not really second guessing themselves.”

He never understood that acting to be fun (for some performers). It is a kind of hybrid therapy for him. “Some people see it as a job, but I think that’s crazy. What you’re doing there, so you’re making faces, practice making faces so people are able to hire you? I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, I have no idea what the skills are, I literally just know there’s something which I want to confront in my real life, I am going to use the excuse of this fictional situation, which is like a kind of reality safety net so I can do all these stuff, because it is not real.”   

“It is just a way to experiment, how you would feel in a situation and you can have a safety net. Most of the time you avoid doing certain thing because you don’t want to have to deal with the consequences afterwards, whereas in a movie, you can do things and then sort of not really deal with it.”

He talked about Netflix, Cinephile videos where he can get an entire catalogue of directors from that place a lot of which is not on Netflix. He loved doing that. “I'd like being a sponge the things”

He felt Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (a Columbian movie) is an insane and magical thing from the first shot. He was mesmerised, and he doesn’t understand how it was made. He hassled Gueraa to give him a job which is happening early next year “How can you make something so magical?” “I want to know how you make it so magical!”. He doesn’t think anyone can really explain their thing in creating magic, he knows some will have innate talent. In general, it is putting in tonnes of time and practice and work till you get it right.

The story about his sister’s magician friend who did this card trick of always getting the right card (90% accuracy) he picked. He knew it is about certain patterns and work put in, and concluded that “if you are a true magician, then you are actually looking for the thing which is real...then the real matter is not a trick.”

He has waited for years to work with Claire Denis. “I think all these things are just like having a relationship with someone. You have that initial moment, you only fall in love with people of things so many times or that find something, you just get that feeling of falling in love with it, you might not necessarily know what it is but you should 100% chase it down afterward.” Like this next thing (Claire Denis project) “I remember seeing it, as it is directly clear to me, who is one of my favourite directors, but I remember seeing her first movie when I was shooting the last Twilight movie in Louisiana and it was on TV. I remember being so struck five and a half year ago, and I tracked her know. She’d never made a fully English language movie before and I just kinda stay involved...”

He was going to Jimmy Kimmel later and his mind is going crazy. What goes through his mind where there was a fans-”grabby period”. Luckily, when he is in a calm situation, his brain will be filed with anxiety and panic and then when he is in a panic-anxiety-inducing situation, his brain completely calms down (totally zen). He has no idea why and it is kind of helpful, like he gets dumped of serotonin. When something feels really nerve wrecking, his heartbeat will slow down and have this weird out-of-body-experience. In those situation (similarly to being on social media), he would have a desperate need to make everyone like him. “just like me, like me!” That is why he will never have social media, he will never go off his phone and will be staring at it all day which is 100% complete waste of energy.

Fight or flight situation. He is either zen and calm, or (a few times that happened) when someone confronts him said one thing, then he has compressed rage (built up from 5 years) thrown out at that person.

“To maintain any kind of career for long, somehow it will get out, people will get a feeling of who you actually are, it is impossible to keep something contained, especially now. Unless you literally never leave your house, but then, it reflects on what type of person you are”

#robert pattinson #The Nerdist #Chris Hardwick #Good Time Interview #Podcast transcript

[hyperbolicgrinch]

Tagged by the marvelous: @grungeshojo and @ryujin-zanba!

Thanks so much, you guys! I haven’t done this in years! Really had fun reading your answers, and you both came up with such great questions! I’ll just answer both sets here to save time.

1- Always post these rules 2- Answer the new questions given by the previous person 3- Write 11 new questions 4- Tag 11 people

grungeshojo’s questions:

1. Have you been out of your country? Nope! Not yet. 

2. What is your current obsession? Well, it’s footy season over here so… AFL! Besides that… Probably still All Out!! 😂

3. Do you like sushi? Mate, mate, maaaateee, I love it. Had never tried it before so thought I wouldn’t but then I did and haven’t looked back since.

4. How would you describe your fashion style? Me? Fashion? Style? Pffft, I suppose pjs and that just woke up look. Though I’m normally throwing on a fave pun shirt and some jeans if forced to head out so, casual????

5. What was the last thing you googled? ‘all out manga’ (ayyyyyeee)

6. What’s your favorite vine? Don’t think I’ve got one, never really watched them much unless they came up on my dash but I eat a lot of avocado so I always hear that ‘welcome to my kitchen’ one every damn time I eat it now.

7. Favorite holiday? Uhhhh, I don’t think I really have one??

8. Favorite superhero movie? Uuumm… None??? Not yet, anyway…

9. Favorite thing about summer? Don’t really have summer so I couldn’t say! All my experience comes from Phineas and Ferb. 😂

10. Famous person (alive or dead) you would like to meet? Hmmmm… Can’t think of anyone! But if we’ve got the ability to meet people that have passed on, I’d like to talk to my granddad again!

11. Last song you listened to? The Moana soundtrack. Fell asleep during it though so don’t know which one was the last I heard.

ryujin-zanba’s questions:

1. Favorite animal? Horse!!!! 😂 Those precious neighs stole my heart! 🙏

2. Favorite names? Oooooh, uhhhh: Ollie??? Evan??? I don’t even know actually (it’s a great name, I know, I know 😂).

3. Favorite movie? Shit. Ummm… Mulan?? Lilo & Stitch?? Spirit!???

4. Rosegold or seafoam green? Probably seafoam green. Had to google these… 😂

5. Cherry or watermelon? Watermelon, I think!

6. Glitter or goo? Glitter Goo! 😂

7. Favorite drink? Whhhaaa? Ummm… Water??? Or an organic juice!

8. Favorite landmark? The giant boxing crocodile statue in front of my post office. It’s the one I see the most so, yeah.

9. Forest or beach? Guuhh, the beach is fun to ride on but I love trail riding through the “forest”, which is actually probably more “bush” in my case so I’ll go beach, I suppose. 

10. Fairy lights or candles? Both! But sometimes my doggo is scared of candles so fairy lights it is! Not too many though cause sometimes they give me anxiety??? *shrugs*

11. Paperback or hardback? Probably paperback! Although I don’t really mind, but I just find it easier to read big books if they are paperbacks.

12. Favorite planet? This is super duper hard!!! But seeing as I’ve never been to any others, I’m gonna go with Earth. 😉

Aaaaaand, here are the boring-ass questions I managed to come up with... Enjoy!:

Any chance you’ve got a fave type of dinosaur?

What’s a glorious pun you’ve made?

What’s a sport you dig?

Tell me about your oldest teddy bear?

Is there someone that just makes you smile/laugh?

Do you listen to any podcasts?

A meal you always enjoy?

Is there a particular moment in your life when you were really proud of yourself?

A magazine you read?

Ever made something cool at school/university/work?

Have any special goals in mind for this year?

Ignore this if you’ve already been tagged or just don’t wanna, and feel free to say I tagged you if you want to get in on this!

@tibuki, @moonpath, @winter-fandoms, @cass-act, @ginkoko, @temistheranger, @killabin999, @master-burglar, @necoconeko, @sammyswolf, @randomanimeart, @saya-aensland & @disintegrey!

#grungeshojo #ryujin-zanba #tibuki #moonpath #winter-fandoms #cass-act #ginkoko #temistheranger #killabin999 #master-burglar #necoconeko #sammyswolf #randomanimeart #saya-aensland #disintegrey #have fun guys #can't wait for your answers! #tagged in

[birdlord]

What I Watched in 2016

Here are the movies and TV series I watched in 2016, some with commentary and some without. The number after the movies is the date of release, my faves are bolded, and rewatches are marked with as asterisk. Last year’s list!

01 Do I Sound Gay (14)

02 We are The Best! (13)

03 Hateful Eight (15)

04 Welcome to Me (14)

05 For Your Eyes Only (81) - I listened to a lot of back episodes of the James Bonding podcast early this year, which of course led to watching a bunch of Bond movies. Not all, and not in order, certainly.

06 She’s the One (96)

07 * Diamonds are Forever (71)

08 It’s Complicated (09) - I think it was an article about the kitchen design in this movie that led me to watch it?

09 The Natural (84)

10 * Anna Karenina (12) - Never having read the book I can’t REALLY speak to this movie but haha I kinda love its commitment to artifice. 

11 About Time (13)

12 What We Do in the Shadows (14) - I did enjoy this, but wasn’t as taken by it as I thought I might be. Found the werewolves the funniest by far, so I wish they’d turned up more often. 

13 The Abominable Bride (15) - counting this as a movie, it was the Sherlock xmas special and I recall exactly zero about it, so…..must have been amazing, right?

14 Wake in Fright (71) - Never Go To Australia 

15 Hail Caesar (16) - I think I’d have to see it again to determine if the whole thing actually holds together, but at the time, it felt of a piece with the Coen’s cheerier output. 

16 In the Heart of the Sea (15)

17 The Night of the Comet (84)

18 Laggies (14)

19 * Bowling for Columbine (02)

20 A Gentleman’s Agreement (47) - confessional, experiential journalism, but done by Cary Grant in the 40s. Ahead of his time/gender?

21 Barefoot in the Park (67)

22 Suddenly Last Summer (59)

23 Tangerine (15)

24 * His Girl Friday (40)

25 That Touch of Mink (62)

26 * Charlie’s Angels (00)

27 9-5 (80) - Holy shit, somehow I thought this movie was just a rah-rah, girl power story about a bunch of secretaries getting together and overthrowing their boss and yeah, that’s SORT OF it but it gets way way weirder in the final third.

28 * Who Framed Roger Rabbit (88)

29 * The Addams Family (91)

30 * Addams Family Values (93)

31 Frida (02)

32 Bridge of Spies (15) - A E I O U and sometimes SPIES :O

33 Swimming With Sharks (94)

34 Sleeping With the Enemy (91)

35 Fatal Attraction (87) - Watched this movie and the previous one as part of an 80s/90s thriller weekend. These two are an interesting contrast to one another, being as the first is about an abusive husband and the second focuses on the most notable example of the “crazy ex-girlfriend”.

36 1 Cloverfield Lane (16)

37 The Man Who Never Was (56)

38 * To Die For (95) - This was a super fave of Teen Emily, who definitely identified with the Lydia character. Watching this time was a huge reminder than Illeana Douglas is a goddamn national treasure.

39 Trouble In Paradise (32)

40 Eraser (96)

41 * Flashdance (83)

42 * Notting Hill (99)

43 Gone to Earth (50) - Not the best Powell and Pressburger out there, but one takes what one can get, right?

44 Holiday Camp (47)

45 Never Sleep Again (10) - This is a four-hour doc about the entire Nightmare on Elm St series, and is the reason I watched Freddy’s Revenge a couple of movies down the list. It’s not a series that I have a particular attachment to, so I learned a ton.

46 Clouds of Sils Maria (15)

47 Mommie Dearest (81) - I’m not sure that I have enough appreciation for high camp to really get into this. There were some moments, but overall it’s a fine example of the kind of thing that is Not For Me.

48 Nightmare on Elm St: Freddy’s Revenge (85)

49 Inside Man (06)

50 Trainwreck (15)

51 White God (14)

52 * Sleepwalk With Me (12)

53 Amy (15)

54 * Meatballs (79)

55 Everybody Wants Some!! (16) - I found this a huge disappointment, and I’ve been a bit mystified by its positive reviews and inclusion on critics’ end of year lists. While D&C definitely has a “main character”, and we do follow him and his friends, other people and subsets of the high school are given serious time and consideration. Ultimately, I don’t think following this one dude tripping through a bunch of different college subsets was as illuminating. Plus, weak jokes.

56 * Dazed & Confused (93) - had to cleanse the mind-palate by watching the original!

57 Summertime (55)

58 The Money Pit (86)

59 Zombeavers (14)

60 Mistress America (15) - I am finding Greta Gerwig more and more charming, the more I see of her. Greta, let’s be friends!

61 While We’re Young (14)

62 The Invitation (16) - quite effective, very upper-middle-class bohemian LA horror film. I’ve heard some complaints about the final scene, but I thought it was an effective & clever way to show an expanding scope without an extra expense or sets.

63 End of Days (99)

64 Escape From New York (81)

65 Escape from L.A. (96) - Watched these two together, on the same night. They definitely should NOT be watched that way, given how identical the plots are. Unbelievably terrible ’96-era CGI in the second one, hard to believe that Jurassic Park was three years previous?? Gotta get that Spielberg money, am I right?

66 High Rise (16) - my only real disappointment in this movie was not being around to see the decline of the civilization - we jump straight from things being fine (if weird) and everything gone to heck. My favourite part is the decline, give me decline!

67 The Great Outdoors (88)

68 * Catch Me If You Can (02)

69 Little Darlings (80) - just your classic losing-virginity-at-camp story, but…wait for it….with GIRLS.

70 * Good Will Hunting (97)

71 Popstar (16) - diminishing returns, but some funny bits (mostly in the songs, not surprisingly). 

72 Tarzan (16) - watched this with friends and relatives, at a drive-in theatre a couple of days after my wedding! It’s NOT a good movie, but it was a fun time.

73 Love & Friendship (16) - got completely obsessed with Tom Bennett based on his 100% rate of scene-stealing in this film. Sevigny feels utterly out of place - am I capable of seeing her in a period piece set before, say, 1975 without feeling weird about it?

74 The Night Before (15)

75 Ghostbusters (16) - So I know I was supposed to be charmed by Kate McKinnon, but her schtick just doesn’t work on me, for whatever reason. I was also really frustrated by the final fight scene of this movie - it had obviously been hacked up in editing, and wtf is up with punching ghosts instead of containing them? I’m glad this movie happened, and certainly a great deal of the criticism it came in for was deeply unfair, but it was distinctly disappointing to find that this movie just wasn’t that great.

76 Brooklyn (15)

77 Poltergeist (82)

78 * Before Sunrise (95)

79 Love & Basketball (00) - Effusive praise for this movie somehow came to my attention from all over the place this year, so I finally had to watch it.

80 The Man Who Knew Too Much (56)

81 * Road House (89)

82 Carol (15) - watching this FINALLY allowed me to fully participate in Today’s Meme Culture

83 * Out of Sight (98)

84 Happy Texas (99)

85 Red Rock West (93)

86 Weiner Dog (15)

87 The Trouble With Harry (55)

88 * When Harry Met Sally (89)

89 Jungle Fever (91)

90 Ocean’s 11 (01)

91 Star Trek Beyond (16)

92 Two For the Road (67)

93 * Seven Year Itch (55)

94 Maggie’s Plan (15) - like I said earlier about Greta Gerwig? I liked this one even more than Mistress.

95 The Dish (00)

96 Splash (84)

97 Desk Set (57) - watching this and the next were inspired by stumbling across a blog about depictions of librarians on film. I particularly hit on this one because I’ve always wanted to see a Hepburne/Tracy film, and never had (to my memory, anyhow).

98 Party Girl (95) - one of those movies I’d always noticed on the shelves at the video store, and never actually watched it.

99 * Young Frankenstein (74) - saw this in the theatre, Gene Wilder notwithstanding I…..don’t think it’s good. It’s only extremely intermittently funny, you guys! Plus, the Putting’ on the Ritz bit makes me uncomfortable (especially in audio-only form, which I heard TOO many times after Wilder died).

100 The House of the Devil (09)

101* The Witches of Eastwick (87)

102 The Borning (81)

103 * Shaun of the Dead (04)

104 Dolores Claiborne (95)

105 The Conjuring 2 (13)

106 In a Valley of Violence (16) - definitely watched this because I happened across an article about the movie’s dog star. 

107 The Witch (16) - very effective in getting across the supernatural, natural, and social dangers of early puritan America, and Black Philip has entered my idiolect for any creepy animal/person/twitter feed. 

108 * Wayne’s World (92)

109 What if (13) - riffs on When Harry Met Sally’s fundamental question of women and men being friends, and basically comes to the same conclusion. yawn.

110 The Martian (15) - I read the book as part of a book club last year, and finally got around to watching the film. Since I found the worst of the writing in the book to be those passages dealing with description, the movie was a lot less annoying to experience.

111 Sleepless in Seattle (93)

112 * Thelma & Louise (91)

113 Casino (95)

114 Other People (16) - wept several times. GOSH I love Jesse Plemons, he’s so hugely sympathetic. Would watch in virtually anything.

115 The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp (43)

116 Primary Colors (98)

117 Edge of Seventeen (16)

118 *Die Hard (88) - loaded up the laptop with this and the next four xmas-set movies, for watching on planes and in airports, while we were on the road at christmastime.

119 *Batman Returns (92)

120 *Scrooged (88)

121 * The Apartment (60)

Theatre - 5

Drive-in - 1

All the rest at home or at friends’ homes!

TV SERIES

*The Office US S2-3

War & Peace (2016) - you bet your BOOTS I started the book after watching this. Did I finish it? Not even close.

Love (2016)

Better Call Saul S2 - this is a show I enjoy while I’m watching it, but I don’t particularly find it memorable. Why? Who knows. It’s still something I look forward to, but not a show that sticks with me.

Great British Bake off *S1, *S2, S7 + Xmas Specials - a eulogy for Bake-Off as it was. Pour one (pint of double cream, that is) out for what once was.

Broad City S5

Travel Man S1, S2 - I find Richard Ayoade so desperately charming, but ever time I’ve watched one of the movies he’s directed, I’ve ended up disappointed. This show is a bit hit or miss, depending on the guests he brings along, and the episodes definitely have a sameness to them, but if you find this guy even a sliver as entertaining as I do, it’ll pull you along anyhow.

The Night Manager - so looking forward to Hugh Laurie’s upcoming career phase as Bond Villain.

Cooked

Newsradio S1-S3 - I’d seen an episode or two of this over the years but never sat down to fully appreciate it. It’s making me miss Phil Hartman all over again, a fresh devastation, plus haha did u know Tone Loc plays a security guard on this show? It’s all true.

Lady Dynamite

OJ Made In America - I’ll count this as a series, since I didn’t watch it in the theatre. Still haven’t seen the other big OJ series of 2016, but I loved loved LOVED this. What impressed me the most is that, in spite of its 7 hour+ running time there were still aspects of this story that could have been expanded upon.

Silicon Valley S3

* Veep S1, S2

Catastrophe S2

Pulling - went back in time to get more Sharon Horgan in my life, since Catastrophe seasons are terribly short and far-between. I’d been aware of this show for a long time, and somehow wasn’t expecting it to be as near-devastating as it ended up being. What, did I forget what a British show was like?

Another Period S2

Difficult People S1, S2 - Another late discovery, but a great one. A fine example of just giving some funny people a show, and letting them just do their thing on it every week.

Fleabag - yes, I’m in for this, obviously. And if I wasn’t, the show designed itself to put me off, from the first moments. A wise move!

One Mississippi

Very British Problems S1, S2

Atlanta - I’ve got a bad feeling that this show’s deserved success will lead to surreal elements being deployed, but much less deftly than they were here.

Please Like Me S1-S4 - Tore through this entire series greedily, am now suffering until they make another season. Balances some very harrowing elements with comedy and an ensemble cast of loveable/terrible humans.

Divorce - Sharon Horgan’s writing minus her acting is a hollow empty shell, but hey, I’ll take what I can get, when I can get it.

The Fall S3 - I’d decided last year after S2 that I was done with this show, and yet, here we are, I was drawn back in.

The Crown

Insecure

[thatsacult]

The big work question used to be "Do you live to work, or work to live?" Now, it's "Can you ever work hard enough?"

In February 2019, Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson wrote a viral article about workism - that "work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver."

How widespread and cult-like has this become? Helen speaks to a workplace wellness expert, those trying to define success, and a 'workism reformist', to find out.

You can read the original Atlantic article by Derek Thompson here bit.ly/2SUfNEZ

Contributors: Professor Sir Cary Cooper twitter.com/ProfCaryCooper Max Maher bit.ly/2GyIC1D Josh Mackey www.dailydriven.com Anna Lundberg www.annaselundberg.com Sam Spurlin www.samspurlin.com Hannah Kass

Listen to Anna's podcast, Reimagining Success - apple.co/2Yo0MgA Read Anne Helen Peterson's Buzzfeed article, How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation - bit.ly/2F8ONJA

Written and edited by: Helen McCarthy twitter.com/helenlmccarthy
 Music by: Antti Luode www.anttismusic.blogspot.co.uk

Episode sources:

CONTRIBUTORS Sam Spurlin http://samspurlin.com/ Specialist in "organisational culture and transformation" at The Ready, an organisation that "helps you discover a better way of working."

Professor Sir Cary Cooper https://twitter.com/ProfCaryCooper "Director & Founder of Robertson Cooper, 50th Anniversary Professor of Organizational Psychology & Health at MBS Manchester University."

Max Maher https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLr9nHPNpj7U3096nEo8Qfg "A serial entrepreneur and strong believer in doing things because they are hard."

Josh Mackey https://dailydriven.com/ "Owner & Operator of Mackeydesigns.com & DailyDriven.com."

Anna Lundberg https://annaselundberg.com/
 "A business strategist and personal coach who writes, coaches and leads workshops to help highly motivated individuals, employees and entrepreneurs achieve their full potential in their professional and personal lives."

SUBREDDITS r/Work https://www.reddit.com/r/work/ Discussions about work and working life.

r/antiwork https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/ "A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles."

r/Entrepreneur https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/ "A community of individuals who seek to solve problems, network professionally, collaborate on projects and make the world a better place. Be professional, humble, and open to new ideas."

r/GetMotivated https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/ "This is the subreddit that will help you finally get up and do what you *know* you need to do."

WORKISM Workism Is Making Americans Miserable Derek Thompson, The Atlantic. 24 Feb 2019. "For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/

Letters: Readers Discuss American Workism and Its Discontents The Atlantic. 8 March 2019. “My passions, such as they are, are not going to get me meaningful, fulfilling, or well-paid employment.” https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/archive/2019/03/readers-respond-workism-is-making-americans-miserable/584377/

It’s Time for a Workism Reformation Sam Spurlin, Medium. 15 March 2019. "Too much has been sacrificed at the altar of Workism. It’s time to chart a new path." https://medium.com/@samspurlin/its-time-for-a-workism-reformation-9239793192b1

Work as a religion: The problem with ‘workism’ and its critics Joseph Sunde, The Acton Institute. 26 Feb 2019. "If you’re a young person in America, you’ve undoubtedly been bombarded by calls to “follow your passion,” “pursue your dreams,” or “do what you love and love what you do.” https://blog.acton.org/archives/106727-work-as-a-religion-the-problem-with-workism-and-its-critics.html

Is It Too Much To Ask That Work Have Meaning? John Baldoni, Forbes. 25 Feb 2019. "Two recent articles, one each in The Atlantic and the New York Times, get to the heart of a feeling bubbling beneath the surface of many workplaces. People find their jobs unfulfilling." https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbaldoni/2019/02/25/is-it-too-much-to-ask-that-work-have-meaning/#4318c0ce70f3

MILLENNIALS & WORKISM How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation Anne Helen Petersen, Buzzfeed. 5 Jan 2019. "I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected." https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work

Millennials aren’t lazy, they’re workaholics Katie Johnston, The Boston Globe. 19 Dec 2016. "The millennial generation, the first to grow up with smartphones in their hands, is often stereotyped as lazy and entitled." https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/12/19/millennials-aren-lazy-they-workaholics/3ZD86pLBYg954qUEYa3SUJ/story.html

Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? Erin Griffith, New York Times. 26 Jan 2019. "I saw the greatest minds of my generation log 18-hour days — and then boast about #hustle on Instagram. When did performative workaholism become a lifestyle?" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/business/against-hustle-culture-rise-and-grind-tgim.html

Paycheck or Purpose: What Drives Millennials? Amy Adkins and Brandon Rigoni, Gallup. 1 June 2016.
"Millennials have a complicated relationship with money. They're financially optimistic, yet they feel economically restrained." https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236453/paycheck-purpose-drives-millennials.aspx

DEFINING SUCCESS Rethinking What Success Looks Like Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace, The Atlantic. 19 Dec 2016. "For women who left the workforce, their ambitions didn’t disappear so much as found a new target." https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/redefining-ambition/510389/

Your “Dream Job” Is a Myth Alison Green, Slate. 12 May 2019. "It’s impossible to tell how perfect a position truly is until you’re in it." https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/05/dream-job-myth-work-nightmares.html

10 things I realized after I quit my job without a plan Anna Lundberg, Business Insider. 25 Feb 2019. "The security I felt in my previous job was an illusion. After leaving, I found myself meeting a huge array of people and getting opportunities I never could have imagined." https://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-i-realized-after-i-quit-my-job-without-a-plan-2016-1?r=US&IR=T

Imposter syndrome has a much bigger impact on mental health than we first thought Hollie Richardson, Stylist. 16 July 2019. "New research shows that women are experiencing negative feelings at home with their families, as a direct result of imposter syndrome in the office." https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/imposter-syndrome-at-work-impact-homelife-dissatisfaction-at-home-study/279891

WORKPLACE CULTURE Screw “Work-Life Balance”. This is what you should strive for… Jon Roa, Medium. 4 March 2018. "For entrepreneurs, work is life and life is work, but if you do it right, you can experience the best of everything." https://medium.com/@johnroa/screw-work-life-balance-this-is-what-you-should-strive-for-e3e1aeee3b7f

Work/Life Balance is impossible Nick Irving, Medium. 13 Feb 2019. "Discipline and governance in the neoliberal workplace." https://medium.com/@nickrirving/my-boss-recently-told-me-that-in-order-to-do-my-job-id-need-to-take-work-home-with-me-55a759448954

The 'coffee cup trick' used to catch out potential employees in job interviews Matthew Cooper, Manchester Evening News. 2 June 2019. "One employer thinks he has the perfect trap for potential employees - the 'coffee cup trick'." https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/coffee-cup-trick-used-catch-16367654

Dropped wrappers and dirty cups: the tricks bosses play at interviews Emine Saner, The Guardian. 5 June 2019. "Employers have shared some of the ways they pick a suitable candidate. But does washing your coffee mug mean you’re right for the job?" https://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2019/jun/05/dropped-wrappers-and-dirty-coffee-cups-the-tricks-bosses-play-at-interviews

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant David Graeber, Strike! Magazine. Aug 2013. "Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed." https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Your Co-Worker Is a Total Slacker Alison Green, Slate. 9 June 2019. "Should you tell your boss?" https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/06/slacker-coworker-unequal-workload-unfair-office-culture.html

America’s Job Listings Have Gone Off the Deep End Amanda Mull, The Atlantic. 13 June 2019. "What even is a data-obsessed, project-juggling digital ninja?" https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/looking-for-a-job-americas-listings-are-inscrutable/591616/

End the Plague of Secret Parenting Emily Oster, The Atlantic. 21 May 2019. "If mothers and fathers speak openly about child-care obligations, their colleagues will adapt." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/normalize-parenthood-workplace-dont-hide-it/589822/

How workplace counselling helps employees and employers Rich Hughes, Personnel Today. 23 Feb 2015. "Rick Hughes, lead adviser for workplace at the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, explains more about the counselling profession and the important role that it can play within an organisation." https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/workplace-counselling-helps-employees-employers/

Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy.’ Claire Cain Miller, New York Times. 26 April 2019. "How America’s obsession with long hours has widened the gender gap." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/upshot/women-long-hours-greedy-professions.html

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber review – the myth of capitalist efficiency Eliane Glaser, The Guardian. 25 May 2018. "Is your job one that makes the world a better place? If not, it is probably bullshit, part of a system that is keeping us under control." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review

Time Off and Vacation Usage US Travel Association. 2017. "Vacation is essential for strong bonds, a productive workforce and a fulfilled life. But each year, more than half of Americans leave vacation time on the table, accumulating to 705 million days in 2017." https://www.ustravel.org/toolkit/time-and-vacation-usage

The Work Martyr's Affair: How America’s Lost Week Quietly Threatens Our Relationships Project: Time Off. "In less than 15 years, U.S. workers have lost a week of vacation time. For decades, Americans used more than 20 vacation days." https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/media_root/document/2015_Jul15_Research_The%20Work%20Martyr%27s%20Affair%2C%20How%20America%27s%20Lost%20Week%20Quietly%20Threatens%20Our%20Relationships.pdf

You Are Not Your Work Identity Pavel G. Somov, Ph.D. Psych Central. 9 July 2011. "If you’re like most people, you will spend about a third of your adult life working for somebody.  Employment is most likely a huge part of your identity and a source of meaning in your life." https://blogs.psychcentral.com/mindful-living/2011/02/you-are-not-your-work-identity/

Work email is making us a ‘generation of idiots’. Time to switch off Cary Cooper, The Guardian. 14 May 2015. "Einstein warned that technology could surpass human interaction. It’s happening, and workplaces have to step in when employees can’t kick the habit." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/14/work-email-benefits-technology-human-interaction

Superhuman: the startup offering a shortcut to empty inbox nirvana Alex Hern, The Guardian. 12 July 2019. "The Silicon Valley firm makes bold claims for its slick technology that aims to rid people of torrents of unread emails." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/12/superhuman-offers-users-a-shortcut-to-empty-inbox-nirvana

The UK’s forgotten workers without sick pay – and why new rules won’t help them Anoosh Chakelian, New Statesman. 16 July 2019. "A government proposal could change eligibility criteria to give two million more people statutory sick pay. But many will have to continue without it." https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2019/07/uk-s-forgotten-workers-without-sick-pay-and-why-new-rules-won-t-help-them

What really happened when Swedes tried six-hour days? Maddy Savage, BBC News. 8 Feb 2017. "Sweden has been experimenting with six-hour days, with workers getting the chance to work fewer hours on full pay, but now the most high-profile two-year trial has ended - has it all been too good to be true?" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38843341

Eat, work, sleep, repeat: Why the UK has the worst work-life balance of western Europe Max Kelly, City AM. 2 Nov 2018. "Brits work 325 more hours a year than their German counterparts – translating to roughly nine extra weeks a year, according to an analysis of 2017 data." https://www.cityam.com/eat-sleep-work-repeat-why-uk-has-worst-work-life-balance/

‘HUSTLE CULTURE’ Reddit's Alexis Ohanian says 'hustle porn' is 'one of the most toxic, dangerous things in tech right now' Jim Edwards, Business Insider. 6 Nov 2018. "Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian wants you to know that "hustle porn" — the fetishization of extremely long working hours — is bad." https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-alexis-ohanian-hustle-porn-toxic-dangerous-thing-in-tech-2018-11?r=US&IR=T

‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice Olga Khazan, The Atlantic. 12 July 2018. "A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our careers.” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/find-your-passion-is-terrible-advice/564932/

Busyness 101: Why are we so busy in modern life? (7 hypotheses) Kyle Kowalski, Sloww. 25 Sept 2018. "We feel like we’re 'pressed for time', that there’s 'not enough time in the day', and that we are 'running out of time'. But, our amount of time hasn’t changed." https://www.sloww.co/busyness-101/

'Hustle' on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/uk/search?q=hustle&ref=pagination&page=1

BURNOUT What you need to know about burnout, now it’s an official medical condition' Patrick Heardman, Dazed. 17 June 2019. "The World Health Organisation is predicting a global pandemic of burnout in the next 10 years." https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/44672/1/burnout-world-health-organisation-syndrome-workplace-stress-sufferers

Why burnout is such a controversial issue in Switzerland Jessica Davis Plüss, Swiss Info. 17 June 2019. "The latest Job Stress Index survey found more than a quarter of Swiss workers suffering from critical levels of workplace stress." https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/mental-health_why-the-world-is-so-divided-on-burnout/45023452

You Can Now Be Diagnosed With Burnout Katie Heaney, The Cut. 28 May 2019. "Burnout — generally understood as reduced interest and productivity in one’s work precipitated by overwork — can now be classified as a diagnosable condition, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)." https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/you-can-now-be-diagnosed-with-burnout.html

Boris Johnson’s “toxic” mental health comments show just how out of touch he is Kayleigh Dray, Stylist. 17 July 2019. "Bryony Gordon, Poorna Bell and Matt Haig are among those who have criticised Boris Johnson’s “upsetting” comments on mental health." https://www.stylist.co.uk/people/boris-johnson-mental-health-cure-work-twitter-response-poorna-bell-bryony-gordon-matt-haig/280287 
What Makes Entrepreneurs Burn Out Eva de Mol, Jeff Pollack, and Violet T. Ho, Harvard Business Review. 4 April 2018. "By now we are all familiar with the risks of burnout. Research shows that it leads to work-related issues such as job dissatisfaction, absenteeism, inefficient decision making, and turnover, as well as health-related issues such as depression, heart disease, and even death." https://hbr.org/2018/04/what-makes-entrepreneurs-burn-out

The trillion-dollar taboo: why it’s time to stop ignoring mental health at work Lilah Raptopoulos and James Fontanella-Khan, Financial Times. 11 July 2019. "Stress is costing businesses and claiming lives, so why do employees feel unsafe asking for help?"   https://www.ft.com/content/1e8293f4-a1db-11e9-974c-ad1c6ab5efd1

[jessicakehoe]

These Celebs Are Destigmatizing Mental Illness

Many campaigns have worked to normalize the discussion around mental health (Bell Let’s Talk and CAMH’s One Brave Night among them). But one thing that really reaches the masses is when a celebrity speaks out about his or her struggle to spread the message that it’s okay to have a mental illness; it doesn’t make you weak.

Anyone who has ever suffered from depression or anxiety—whether temporary or chronic—knows the feeling of wanting to crawl into bed and stay there until things seem okay again. And somehow when these celebrities who seem to have it all come out and say that they actually don’t have their shit together, it is encouraging to us. By focusing on their health, it normalizes the conversation and gives us the courage to take care of ourselves (and be vocal about it).

Below, see the celebrities who are helping to fight the stigma against mental health by being open about their own struggles. Want to learn more about mental illness? Here are 5 myths about anxiety and depression, and information about different types of treatment.

Post Malone

In an interview with GQ Style, the Grammy nominee opened up about dealing with an unshakeable sadness from a very young age. “Middle school, I would cry myself to sleep every f**kin’ day,” he reveals. “High school, the same thing. I tried to drink some beers to get rid of that shit but it just never goes away. And I don’t think that’s anybody’s fault; it has to do with something predisposed in you.” Music has become his way of coping with these struggles, and of processing what he’s going through. “I’m trying,” he says. “It’s difficult. Through my songs, I can talk about whatever I want. But sitting here, face to face, it’s difficult.”

View this post on Instagram

"Through my songs, I can talk about whatever I want. But sitting here, face-to-face, it's difficult.”–@PostMalone Photographs by @jason_nocito_studio. Styled by @mobolajidawodu. #gqstyle #postmalone

A post shared by GQ Style (@gqstyle) on Mar 2, 2020 at 8:16am PST

Prince Harry

View this post on Instagram

Day two of #SussexRoyalTour is underway, and The Duke and Duchess have joined young South Africans and @WavesForChange to focus on mental health and take part in ‘surf therapy’. • Hundreds of young people from Cape Town’s townships meet every week at Monwabisi beach to surf, but also share stories with mentors and talk through the daily challenges they face. Their Royal Highnesses were able to hear how the sessions are building trust, confidence, and belonging, and they also got to join in as children took part in ‘power hand’, which teaches them how to keep calm down reflect on strengths. While on the beach The Duke and Duchess met @TheLunchBoxFund – which was one of the charities they nominated to benefit from donations following the birth of their son, Archie. Almost 30,000 meals are provided by the charity every day across South Africa, including for three @WavesForChange projects. And before they left The Duke and Duchess joined the Commonwealth Litter Programme (CLiP) – which was teaching the surfers about the impact of plastic waste on the ocean. #RoyalVisitSouthAfrica • Photo ©️ photos EMPICS / PA images / SussexRoyal

A post shared by The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (@sussexroyal) on Sep 24, 2019 at 5:00am PDT

The Duke of Sussex has spoken out extensively about his own mental health journey, and the trauma he suffered as a result of losing his mother, Princess Diana, at a young age. In an interview with Bryony Gordon for her podcast about mental health, Mad World, the royal said, “I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well.”

“I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle,” he added.

After seeking out counselling and learning to open up about his struggles with friends and family, the royal co-founded Heads Together, a mental health awareness campaign, with Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2016. While on a recent trip to South Africa with Meghan Markle, the royal couple met with Waves For Change, an organization promoting mental wellbeing through surf therapy, and spoke out about the need to counter the stigma against mental illness in our society.

“I think most of the stigma is around mental illness [and] we need to separate the two… mental health, which is every single one of us, and mental illness, which could be every single one of us,” he said. “I think they need to be separated; the mental health element touches on so much of what we’re exposed to, these experiences that these kids and every single one of us have been through. Everyone has experienced trauma or likely to experience trauma at some point during their lives. We need to try, not [to] eradicate it, but to learn from previous generations so there’s not a perpetual cycle.”

Ariana Grande

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ariana Grande (@arianagrande) on Mar 30, 2019 at 9:57am PDT

In British Vogue’s July 2018 issue, Ariana Grande opened up on her experience with PTSD after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. “It’s hard to talk about because so many people have suffered such severe tremendous loss. But, yeah, it’s a real thing,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever know how to talk about it and not cry.”

In November 2018, the singer/songwriter dropped a single titled “thank u, next,” dedicated to all of her exes, including the late-Mac Miller (who died this past September of a drug overdose) and ex-fiancé Pete Davidson, which resulted in fans wondering who her therapist is. “Therapy has saved my life so many times,” Grande tweeted in response. “If you’re afraid to ask for help, don’t be.”

photography via instagram/@arianagrande

In an Instagram story posted on April 11, Grande shared a side-by-side image of a healthy brain and a brain affected by PTSD. She also included an image of what is allegedly her brain, which appears to show incredibly high levels of PTSD. “Not a joke,” she captioned the story. In a follow-up story, Grande posted a selfie containing the captions “life is wild,” “she’s trying her muthafukin best,” and “my brain is tired.”

Selena Gomez

View this post on Instagram

I have a lot to be thankful for this year.. My year has been the hardest yet most rewarding one yet. I've finally fought the fight of not 'being enough'. I have only wanted to reflect the love you guys have given me for years and show how important it is to take care of YOU. By grace through faith. Kindness always wins. I love you guys. God bless

A post shared by Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) on Nov 24, 2016 at 6:21pm PST

In August 2016, Selena Gomez announced that she would be taking a break from her career to deal with anxiety, depression and panic attacks associated with lupus (an autoimmune condition from which she suffers). She made a return to the spotlight in November that year at the American Music Awards, where she delivered an emotional, heartfelt speech, briefly touching on her battle with mental health issues.

“I had to stop because I had everything and I was absolutely broken inside. I kept it all together enough to where I would never let you down but I kept it too much together to where I let myself down,” she said. “If you are broken, you do not have to stay broken.”

The songstress also opened up about her issues with mental health in the April 2017 issue of Vogue (which she covered). “Tours are a really lonely place for me,” she told the magazine. “My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it—which, I think, was a complete distortion.”

She revealed she spent 90 days in a mental health facility in Tennessee, surrendering her cell phone and taking part in various forms of therapy. And while Gomez is the second most-followed person on Instagram, she told Vogue she no longer had it on her phone, and an assistant had her password.

“It felt like I was seeing things I didn’t want to see, like it was putting things in my head that I didn’t want to care about,” she said. “I always end up feeling like shit when I look at Instagram. Which is why I’m kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit.”

Camila Cabello

Former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello made headlines in September 2016 after she left the stage early during a performance under the guise of a wardrobe malfunction. She later revealed, on Snapchat, that the cause was excessive anxiety, even tweeting, “just wanna sleep for 3 days.”

Cabello had already been open about her struggles with anxiety prior to the incident, however, telling Billboard that 2015 was a “low” for her, personally.

“I was having terrible anxiety, nonstop. My heart would beat really fast the whole day. Two hours after I woke up, I’d need a nap because my body was so hyperactive,” she recalled. “I was scared of what would happen to me, of the things my brain might tell me. I realized the stuff I thought was important isn’t worth my health. Now I write in a diary every day, work out and meditate.”

In March 2017, the Cuban-born star revealed to Latina magazine that she also deals with obsessive compulsive disorder. “It was just totally out of control,” Cabello told the magazine of her OCD. “I would wake up with a super-accelerated heartbeat and really negative, intrusive, compulsive thoughts. I was so inside my head, and I didn’t know what was happening.”

She continued, “I totally understand now, being in it, why there shouldn’t be such a stigma on mental illness, because it’s a pretty common thing for people. But you can get help. If you’re dedicated to making it better, you can—because I’m in a much better place now. I started reading books about it and it really helped a lot when I understood [the illness], and that [the thoughts I was having] weren’t real. Sometimes you have to remind yourself to slow down and take care of yourself.”

Zayn Malik

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Zayn Malik (@zayn) on Aug 14, 2018 at 10:01pm PDT

In June 2016, former One Direction member Zayn Malik cancelled a U.K. concert due to anxiety. He made the announcement on Instagram, writing, “Unfortunately, my anxiety that has haunted me throughout the last few months has gotten the better of me. With the magnitude of the live event, I have suffered the worst anxiety of my career.”

Later that year, Malik revealed in his memoir, Pillow Talk, that panic attacks have stopped him from performing on more than one occasion. “I just couldn’t go through with it,” he wrote. “Mentally, the anxiety had won. Physically, I knew I couldn’t function. I would have to pull out.”

And while a member of his team offered to say he was sick, Malik insisted on being open about his struggle. “I was done with putting out statements that masked what was really going on. I wanted to tell the truth. Anxiety is nothing to be ashamed of; it affects millions of people every day,” he explained. “I don’t want to say I’m sick. I want to tell people what’s going on, and I’m not gonna be ashamed of what’s happening.”

Cara Delevingne

In 2016, Cara Delevingne took to Twitter to reveal she took a break from modelling due to depression. “I suffer from depression and was a model during a particularly rough patch of self hatred,” she explained. Later that year, she told Esquire she had been struggling with mental illness since she was a teen, more specifically, after she discovered her mother’s drug addiction.

“I was suicidal. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I realized how lucky and privileged I was, but all I wanted to do was die,” she told the magazine, adding a six-month break from school and medication might have helped save her life at 16.

However, Cara stopped the meds at age 18, saying “I get depressed still but I would rather learn to figure it out myself rather then be dependant on meds, ever.”

Adele

View this post on Instagram

Auckland / Mt Smart Stadium / Mar 25

A post shared by Adele (@adele) on Mar 25, 2017 at 9:41pm PDT

Despite being a 15-time Grammy winner, Adele still experiences stage fright. In March 2017, she admitted to her New Zealand concertgoers that she may never tour again, due to the ongoing issue. “Touring isn’t something I’m good at–applause makes me feel a bit vulnerable. I don’t know if I will ever tour again,” she told the audience. “I get so nervous with live performances that I’m too frightened to try anything new. It’s actually getting worse. Or it’s just not getting better, so I feel like it’s getting worse, because it should’ve gotten better by now.”

Lady Gaga

View this post on Instagram

I felt like a princess in custom @tiffanyandco made just for me for the #GoldenGlobes 🤗 The Aurora necklace was named after the Aurora Borealis as an homage to #AStarIsBorn 🌟 #TiffanyAndCo

A post shared by Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) on Jan 8, 2019 at 10:29am PST

In 2016, Lady Gaga revealed she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after she was raped at age 19. “I suffer from PTSD, I’ve never told anyone that before,” she said on the Today show in December 2016. “But the kindness that’s been shown to me, by doctors as well as family and friends, has really saved my life.”

More recently, Gaga opened up about her mental health struggles in a conversation with Prince William, as part of the royal’s Heads Together #oktosay series, which aims to end the stigma with the help of celebrities.

“For me, waking up every day and feeling sad and going on stage is something that is very hard to describe. There’s a lot of shame attached to mental illness. You feel like something’s wrong with you,” she told the Duke of Cambridge via FaceTime. “In my life, I go, ‘Oh my goodness, look at all these beautiful, wonderful things that I have. I should be so happy,’ but you can’t help it if, in the morning when you wake up, you are so tired, you are so sad, you are so full of anxiety and the shakes that you can barely think.”

But despite her hardships, the A Star is Born actress told William “the best thing that could come out of my mental illness was to share it with other people.”

“I feel like we are not hiding anymore, we’re starting to talk, and that’s what we need to do really,” she said.

Demi Lovato

Demi Lovato is one of the most vocal mental health awareness advocates in the biz. The former Disney star, who has battled drug and alcohol addictions, bipolar disorder, self-harm and an eating disorder for years underwent rehab in 2010 and in 2013. Now, Lovato is much healthier and is committed to ending the stigma against mental illness. In 2015, she launched the Be Vocal campaign as a way to encourage individuals struggling with mental illness to talk about what they’re going through.

“I think the more people vocalize what they’re going through—their experience or just simply educating themselves so that they can learn more about what they’re talking about—that’s going to be the key to creating a conversation about mental illness and making it more understood,” she told HuffPost. “There’s a lack of compassion for people who have mental illnesses and there’s a lot of judgment. Once you make people realize that mental illness can happen to anybody—and it’s not anybody’s fault—then I think they’ll become more understanding of what mental illness really is.”

Jennifer Lawrence

Photography by Steve Granitz/WireImage

Jennifer Lawrence opened up about her struggle with anxiety in 2013, telling Madame Figaro that she began experiencing symptoms as a preteen. “When my mother told me about my childhood, she always told me that there was like a light in me, a spark that inspired me constantly,” Lawrence told the magazine. “When I started school, the light went out. It was never known what it was, a kind of social anxiety.”

She eventually went to seek help from a therapist and turned to acting as a form of self-therapy. She also revealed to the New York Times that she manages her anxiety with the use of prescription meds.

Emma Stone

Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage

Oscar winner Emma Stone told Rolling Stone in 2016 that she experienced bouts of anxiety and panic attacks as a child. “My anxiety was constant,” she said. “I would ask my mom a hundred times how the day was gonna lay out. What time was she gonna drop me off? Where was she gonna be? What would happen at lunch? Feeling nauseous. At a certain point, I couldn’t go to friends’ houses anymore–I could barely get out the door to school.”

She did reveal, however, that therapy and acting, specifically improv and sketch comedy, is what helped her work through it. “You have to be present in improv, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety,” she explained.

Chrissy Teigen

View this post on Instagram

My stoop buddy

A post shared by chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) on Apr 29, 2017 at 6:47pm PDT

Chrissy Teigen is never one to hold back, but she shocked fans when she penned an essay for Glamour in 2017 on her struggle with postpartum depression. “I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy. I blamed it on being tired and possibly growing out of the role: ‘Maybe I’m just not a goofy person anymore. Maybe I’m just supposed to be a mom,'” she wrote, later adding “postpartum does not discriminate.”

Months later, Teigen finally saw her family doctor, where she got her diagnosis. She began taking antidepressants. “I’m speaking up now because I want people to know it can happen to anybody and I don’t want people who have it to feel embarrassed or to feel alone. I also don’t want to pretend like I know everything about postpartum depression, because it can be different for everybody. But one thing I do know is that—for me—just merely being open about it helps.”

Troian Bellisario

In November 2016, Pretty Little Liars star Troian Bellisario revealed via a voting PSA that she struggled with an eating disorder when she was younger. She said it was early detection and mental healthcare that saved her. “If I had just been shunned to the side as not having ‘real problems’, I don’t know that I would be living today,” she explained. “I just want to make sure that everybody has the same opportunity for treatment that I have, and I think that we have to make sure that our government invests in those programs.”

Troian shared her story on her struggles with anorexia in her film Feed, which she wrote and directed. “It was not easy; it was like engaging with an addiction,” she told Interview magazine of revisiting her story, adding that working on the film was “like poking a sleeping dragon.” “One of the things I really wanted the film to explore was that once you have this relationship, once you have this mental illness or this disease, it never really goes away.”

And just like many others who suffer from mental illness, Bellisario said she feels like no one truly understands what she went through. “Still to this day, I couldn’t get anyone—even the people who loved me the most, even my boyfriend or my mother or my father—to understand what that experience was truly like for me,” she said. “It was about my eating disorder, and I found there were so many people who thought that it was about losing weight or being skinny, and I couldn’t quite get them to understand that it was about control on a very, very literal level.”

Gina Rodriguez

View this post on Instagram

One year after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, there is still work to be done. Thank you @ricky_martin for giving us all an opportunity to continue to contribute to the reconstruction of our beautiful island of Puerto Rico. #allin4pr #miislabonita ❤️🙌🏽 link in bio 🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷

A post shared by Gina Rodriguez-LoCicero (@hereisgina) on Oct 26, 2018 at 4:12pm PDT

Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez got candid about her struggle with anxiety in a moving Instagram post. “I suffer from anxiety,” she captioned the video, which sees her makeup-free in a New York Yankees cap. “And watching this clip I could see how anxious I was but I empathize with myself. I wanted to protect her and tell her it’s ok to be anxious, there is nothing different or strange about having anxiety and I will prevail.”

Shawn Mendes

View this post on Instagram

Je t’aime France ! 🇫🇷 x

A post shared by Shawn Mendes (@shawnmendes) on Nov 10, 2018 at 2:31pm PST

It may be hard to believe that Canada’s very own heartthrob has had his fair share of anxious episodes, but he has. In April 2018, the singer-songwriter told The Sun in an interview that he had seen a therapist a few times. “I found I was closing myself off from everybody, thinking that would help me battle [my anxiety], then realizing the only way I was going to battle it was completely opening up and letting people in,” Mendes said.

Said anxiety was chronicled in his single “In My Blood” (Lyrics: Help me, it’s like the walls are caving in, sometimes I feel like giving up, no medicine is strong enough, someone help me.)

“All pain is temporary, and the thing is with anxiety, and why it’s such a hard thing for people who don’t have it to understand, is that it is very random and it hits you at moments you don’t expect it. Sometimes it lasts two hours, sometimes it lasts a day and sometimes it lasts five minutes,” he said.

Sarah Hyland

Back in December 2018, Sarah Hyland opened up about experiencing suicidal thoughts after her body rejected a kidney donated by her dad. The Modern Family star, who has had a slew of health problems her whole life, appeared on Ellen in early January 2019 and spoke about her depression.

“After 26, 27 years of just always being sick and being in chronic pain every single day—and [you] don’t know when you’re going to have the next good day—it’s really, really hard…” she said.

“I would write letters in my head to loved ones of why I did it, and my reasoning behind it, and how it wasn’t anybody’s fault,” the 28-year-old revealed, adding that she was “very, very, very close,” to taking her own life.

When asked how she overcame her suicidal thoughts and depression, Hyland said that she confided in a close friend (“I finally said it out loud to someone… just saying it out loud helped immensely, because I kept it to myself for months and months at a time.”) who urged her to see a therapist.

The post These Celebs Are Destigmatizing Mental Illness appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

These Celebs Are Destigmatizing Mental Illness published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/