Interviews - Tumblr Posts
"He said it almost absentmindedly, that we’d hit the point of diminishing returns. How deeply that hurt, bland statement of fact that further effort would yield less than desired. That I would be less than desired. That the monumental effort I was putting in to be desired was not profitable enough, in his eyes. That I was not enough.
I died that day.”
“Told you.” he says before I close the door. Evidently word spread. “Did I not tell you?” he queries before I can settle myself. “I told you first time what you had to do, but no YOU had to get a second opinion. Now look where we are, huh? Shit hurts that much more for letting it wait, doesn’t it? Hot tip, kid: listen to warnings. Now fuck off”
My grandmother died last year. Last week, I mentioned her in passing and an acquaintance said they were sorry. That seemed odd to me. I don’t know how to respond to a thing like that. Eventually I said what my dad learned to say — ‘it was sudden, but not unexpected.’ She was sick for years. Some of those years were alright, even, and I don’t think there’s a better way for a thing to happen than that. Sudden and unexpected is bad; slow and unexpected is worse. Slow and expected isn’t worth talking about. Fast and foreseen is called graceful. I wish everything went down like that.
“I don’t like making eye contact. There’s too much information, people are always telling you things or asking you stuff with them and it is very overwhelming especially when they are telling you stuff or asking you things with their song or their body at the same time. I don’t like making eye contact. I cannot look my aunt in the eye. Her nests have never prospered, no chick survived to fledge. She sings songs of abundance in the grass and the branch and tries again to brood every calling but her eyes beg to me answers why her eggs snook, nest catted, why strewn bodies brokenly greet her return. I don’t like making eye contact."
“when i was, oh, i wanna say four or so, my mom took me and my older brother and my baby sister to visit a friend of hers she hadnt seen since college. my brother was in this phase where he carried a bag of these little green fruits that he would eat, biting off part of the skin before squirting the fruit into his mouth with a pinch and spitting out the seed afterwards; i still dont know what they were called and have never asked. my mother’s friend lived in a studio apartment i think, at least i remember it being all one big room with a sofa acting as a divider with his bed beyond it. my mother’s friend i remember as being very thin and tired, but generally affable and accommodating of several children showing up between the ages of toddler and beginning school, poking around his stuff while he and my mother talked of how their lives had changed in the years they had been apart. i found some odd purple fruits on a table and asked if i could try one. two things i learned that day, i learned that a man dying of aids keeps his kitchen stocked with high fiber fruits to help deal with the side effects of the medicines granting him just a few more seconds minutes days weeks months of life, and i learned what plums taste like it was bittersweet.”
"i have, in my purse, a whole pocket specifically to hold reasons to live; it contains, hang on now"
she reaches down and hefts a small satchel-like bag, festooned with pouches and replete with pockets; she rummages into a smaller flapped exterior pocket, and extracts at first
"a letter from my husband," sent on new years of some year, undated
"a ticket from a boardwalk sideshow museum," from the last time she saw her husband, three years prior
seeds for various melon fruits, a packet for the vine of the sugar baby bush, and a packet for the fruit of the huerfano bliss plant
"and a --" her voice quavers, "an anatomical art piece,” inscribed with a prayer of well wishes from a creator held in esteem, personally received on her birthday five years prior
she pauses for several moments, wipes away some tears, sifts through the final bit of pile
"and finally this origami wallet, thing, that i made" at least four years prior, date unknown but "a couple months before" the appointment card for her hormone doctor, dated 29 july, four years prior "in the window here, at most; these things dont wear well past a season"
she holds open the pouch in one grip, carefully pushes the collection back in, chuckles to herself, extracting one last item, "a bunch of napkins i stole from a restaurant, probly fairly recently, its always a good idea to have a bunch of napkins on hand, you need 'em surprisingly often"
"There's a certain dark irony to it," she says after several long minutes of quiet. Her toes dabble at the water's edge as she gathers herself to continue,
"Like... the nurse said to me 'I am furious on your behalf, for how you were treated' after I told her about that, and she could not connect that precisely the same thing was happening right there then by her very hand. Her voice was shaking! And I had to sit there, using all of the absolutely critical survival skills I learned back then to be as still as I could and generally agreeable because anything less and, well..."
The investigation, opened in October 2020, revealed thousands of incidents of seclusion and restraint in just two and a half school years. Although students with disabilities make up only 10.8% of students enrolled in the district, every single student the district secluded was a student with disabilities, as were 99%—all but one—of the students the district restrained. The district routinely resorted to seclusion and restraint in non-emergency situations instead of using appropriate individualized behavior interventions tailored to individual students’ needs. The investigation found that these practices often intensified students’ distress, with some students engaging in self-harm and showing other signs of trauma while in seclusion.
pingo1387 Interview
ABefore we get started with the questions, would you mind introducing yourself and telling us just a little about yourself?
Sure! I write under pingo1387 online on FanFiction.net, Archive of Our Own, and Tumblr. Fanfiction was the first kind of writing I posted in a public internet space, and I’ve been posting it since for about six or seven years fairly regularly.
Q1: What kind of fan fiction do you write/ have you written?
A1: All sorts of genres. I’ve written long high school AUs, tragic romances, fairy tale-based stories, and plenty of adventure. Right now I’m in the middle of writing mostly romances with a few friendship-themed adventures and an AU set in 20th-century America.
Q2: What made you start writing fan fiction?
A2: I started writing in 9th grade, and the main reason I wrote was because I had an idea for a crossover fanfic that I wanted to make a comic out of, but I couldn’t draw to save my life (I still can’t). I’d always had a pretty good grasp on grammar and read a lot, so I decided I’d write a fanfic about it instead and make a comic later (I never did).
Q3: Were you scared to begin posting it online?
A3: I sure was. Part of the fear came from Fanfiction.net’s comment system being called “reviews,” which made me think people would be posting paragraphs of criticisms and critiques, since the only kind of review I was familiar with was newspaper columns rating new films and novels. I was pleasantly surprised when this not only was not the case, but that people actually liked the story!
Q4: Has writing fan fiction taught you anything? About writing? Reading? Something else?
A4: Writing fanfic has definitely helped me improve my writing skills, simply because I wrote so frequently and reread my own stories, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. It also taught me to be more patient when waiting for updates from other authors, now that I knew how difficult it was to upload more than once every few weeks!
Q5: Do you ever want to be published in a professional capacity one day?
A5: Absolutely. I have some original stories in mind, and I’d love to make a living off of them while seeing other people enjoy them.
Q6: How you feel about the stigma surrounding fan fiction and fan fiction writers? Or, do you not feel any stigma at all?
A6: I feel like there is some stigma regarding what fanfiction is and what its writers are like—that it’s not real writing, that it’s all porn, and that it’s generally terrible. Fanfic and its writers get a bad rap.
Q7: Do you think that stigma is warranted? (Whether or not you have personally experience it?)
A7: It’s absolutely unwarranted. I believe if you look up statistics, you’ll find that most fanfic isn’t explicitly sexual, and of course there is plenty of bad fanfic out there, but there’s plenty of bad published writing, too, and a lot of fanfic writers are not professional and/or just starting out as writers. Of course there’s going to be bad writing; you can say that about almost any site with writing, fanfic or not, on the internet.
As for it being “real writing,” first off, what defines real writing? Does it have to be professionally published, hit a bestseller list, win a Hugo award? Does it need to have a blockbuster film based on it? Does it need to be in classical Greek, written by a scholar only two people in the world have heard of?
Guess what? Even if you say yes to any of those, there’s a lot more fanfic in the world than you might realize. Paradise Lost is essentially fanfiction of the Book of Genesis from the Bible. Medieval painters in Italy often painted scenes from the Bible, making many famous paintings fanart. Dante’s Inferno is a self-insert, one of the most ridiculed kinds of fanfic, into the Catholic afterlife, where he meets many famous and infamous figures (not unlike a so-called “Mary-Sue” self-insert who gets to meet her favorite characters all in the span of two chapters). Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a horror fanfic of Pride and Prejudice. I could go on, but you get the idea. There are so few truly original ideas simply because everything has been done, and fanfic just takes recycling ideas to the next step.
Q8: What’s your favorite piece of fan fiction you’ve ever written? Why?
A8: Currently my favorite piece is a one-shot called “Swallow Your Soul,” a One Piece AU fanfic with the premise that a mysterious affliction is negatively affecting people with powers. My guilty pleasure favorite is a Hetalia high school fanfic, spanning three long stories and written over the course of three or four years.
Q9: What’s something you’ve never been asked but want to be?
A9: For various stories, I’d love to be asked how I came up with certain aspects, where an idea came from, or for details on a worldbuilding thing I never had the chance to fully elaborate on in the story. I love rambling about those sorts of things, and if any one of the answers is that it’s a reference/homage to something, then I’d jump at the chance to talk about where it came from, because it’s probably something favorite of mine.
Q10: Do you write outside of fan fiction?
A10: A little bit, yes. At the moment, schoolwork and fanfic keep me occupied, but I’m trying to put together characters and plots for original stories that I hope to sell one day. One is a collection of connected short stories, and the other is a YA fantasy-style adventure.
Q11: What site you (mainly) use to write fan fiction?
A11: I’ve been on Fanfiction.net for my entire fanfic writing career. I occasionally post one-shots or drabbles on Tumblr in response to events or requests, and I’m working on rewriting my favorite Fanfiction.net stories to post on AO3, as well as planning to post any new stories on both FFN and AO3.
Q12: Why do you write fan fiction?
A12: It’s still the best medium for me to get my ideas out into the world. It’s easier for me to use characters I’m familiar with for stories, even if the settings are unfamiliar, and though I’m developing my own characters, I don’t know them well enough to write them in anything outside the main story I’m planning for them. It’s very fun to play with the characters I know and put them in new situations, and writing stories several thousand words long over and over is great practice for when I finally submit something to be professionally published.
Find pingo1387 on Tumblr, FanFiction.net, and Archive of Our Own.
#RWRBMovie: deleted scenes
Matthew López:
The Cornetto scene. The breakfast scene at Kensington Palace. Everybody’s wondering what happened to the scene [at] the campfire. You know, in the course of making a movie and in the course of telling a story — runtime is less important in the streaming age than it is in theatrical distribution, but what was important to me is that the film be the right length. You cut things for pacing. You never want the audience to get ahead of you, you never want the audience to be bored. You know, there was originally a whole scene where Alex comes to the polo match. He meets Princess Bea. Henry and Alex have a little exchange after Henry gets off the horse. They go to the tack room together. What we found as we were watching the film was that Nick and Taylor were so good together in the scene prior, in Alex's bedroom. And actually when we did a version of that scene in Alex's bedroom, we got a note from the studio, from producers, asking if we could try and make that scene shorter. “It’s good, but it’s long.” So we did our first test screening and I did a shortened version of that scene in Alex's bedroom. I was really hesitant to cut it back. But I wanted to be a good collaborator and prove that I can take a note and I'm willing to try things. We actually got more than a few comments back literally saying, “We wish that scene were longer.” So that, of course, was great for me. That scene in Alex's bedroom is the entire scripted scene. There's not a single cut from the script to the final cut. As a consequence, though, of that being a rather lengthy scene, I needed to then regain momentum. We've spent it all on this scene and it's worth it because that scene between the two of them is so dynamic and wonderful. But now we gotta get things going again. So, I had a new editor come in halfway through because my first editor, Christina Heatherington, who's wonderful, had another project that she had committed to doing. And our post dates got extended a bit and she had to leave, so Nick, my new editor coming in, took a look and he says, “I wanna try something with that polo match.” He spent a weekend of his own time doing something, and then he was ready to show me. He sat me down and said, “I’ve done something crazy.” I’m like, “Great. We love crazy.” He showed me what was largely the version of the polo match that is in the film and with that music. I was laughing with glee the whole time I'm watching it. He was nervous, 'cause he is taking like six minutes of story and condensed it into two and a half minutes. But it has so much drive. It's sexy. It tells the story. It was a real lesson for me as a first time filmmaker: if you expand time, then you need to maybe also learn how to contract time. So that was a big lesson to me in pacing. With the Cornetto scene — that scene in Kensington Palace Gardens, it does everything I needed it to do. Weirdly, the Cornetto scene actually relieved some of the tension between them. I was like, look, if you take the Cornetto scene out, then the tension from that first scene remains when they go into the interview scene. I learned a lot of it is about taking the energy from one scene and using it to help you get into the next scene. One of the things I learned as a playwright, which I found was applicable to cutting a movie, is if a scene isn't working, it might not be the scene itself. It might be the scene before. “Why isn’t the interview scene playing as well as we think it should?” Look at what came before: the Cornetto scene … The Cornetto scene is charming. But we also understood, narratively speaking, it was unnecessary. And more to the point, it sapped the tension out.
(source)
A couple job interview hacks from someone who has to give a job interview every single goddamn day: (disclaimer: this goes for my process and my company’s process, other companies and industries might be different)
1. There are a few things I check and a few questions I ask literally just to figure out if you can play the game and get along with others in a professional setting. Part of the job I interview for is talking to people, and we work in teams. So if you can’t “play the game” a tiny bit, it’s not going to work. Playing the game includes:
- Why do you want to work here? (just prove that you googled the company, tell me like 1 thing about us, I just want to know that you did SOME kind of preparation for this interview)
- Are you wearing professional clothing? I don’t need a suit just don’t show up in a ratty t-shirt and sweatpants.
- Are you able to speak respectfully and without dropping f-bombs all the time? Not because I’m offended but because I don’t want to be reported to HR if you wind up on my team.
- Can you follow simple directions in an interview?
2. Stop telling me protected information. I don’t want to know about what drugs or medications you’re on, I don’t want to know about you being sick, I don’t want to know if you’re planning to have children soon, I don’t want to know anything about your personal life other than “can you do the job?”
3. When we ask, “What questions do you have for me?” here are my favorites I’ve heard: - What does the day-to-day look like for a member of your team?
- If one of your team members was not performing up to his usual standard, what steps would you take to correct that?
- What can I start doing now to accelerate my learning process in this job?
- What are some reservations you have about me as a candidate? (be ready for this emotionally….it will REALLY help you in the future, and I’ve had people save themselves from a No after this, but can be hard to hear)
- In your opinion, what skills and qualities does the ideal candidate for this job possess?
- What advice would you give to a new hire in this position/someone who wanted to break into this industry, as someone who has worked here for a while?
Those are just my tips off-the-cuff. I work in sales in marketing/SAAS, so these can be very different depending on the industry, but I wish the people I interview could read this before they show up.
Interview Studio Brussel with Ray Toro & Frank Iero (WERCHTER FESTIVAL, Belgium, 01.07.11)
can interviewers get more creative please it's been 6 years
Having Sebastian Stan as your boyfriend would include:
forehead kisses
-Sebastian trying to snapchat the two of you
-He having an epic fail at snapchat
-Teaching him how to use snapchat properly
-He kisses you all the time even when your teaching him about snapchat
-when Life gets tough, he does everything get you through them
- Sebastian always looking after you
- giving you some space but being close enough to hold you when you need him to
-You thinking its cute that he mispronouncing memes
-Explaining memes to him
-Going for walks in New York
- Some PDA
-Sebastian being very protective of you
-You being friends with his costars on Captain America
-Geeking out because you were friends with his costars of Captain America
-Going to events with him
-Defending him from the haters
-”You are so beautiful, Y/N”
- watching you sleep
-Him saying that he was made for hugging
-“Y/N, you know that I love you, right?”
-“Yes Seb, I know. I love you too.”
-Sebastian being an amazing Kisser.
-Amazing sex
-Taking him to meet your family.
- Him being nervous to meet your family
“There going to love you Seb”
“You think so”
“I know so”
-Your family loving Sebastian
-Your father pulling out the DVD of ‘The Bronze’
-You and Sebastian being completely shocked that they want to watch the movie
-Both of you being nervous about the sex scene.
-You and Seb doing everything you can to stop your family from watching ‘The Bronze’
-“ NO! lets not watch it”
-“YES! Its already in the DVD player.” say your dad.
-Watching ‘The Bronze’ with Sebastian and your family.
-You and Seb trying to hide your faces in embarrassment when watching ‘The Bronze’
-“Ohhhhhhhhhh are we about to witness the famous sex scene everybody on Tumblr was talking about?” says your older brother.
-“Sex scene?” says your father.
-“No were not. There is no sex scene in this. Can we turn it off now?” you say.
-Your other sibling spilling soda all over the DVD player causing it to mess up.
-You thanking your sibling for stopping the movie.
-“Well, I think that Sebastian and I are going to leave now “
-You and Sebastian making a random excuse to leave your parents house in a rush.
-He driving you home
-“OH MY GOD SEBASTIAN I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GOT A TATTOO OF A GOLD MEDAL ON YOUR -”
-“Don’t you dare finish that sentence, Y/N”
-“But Seb, you look so good”
-“Please stop”
-“ And your ass.”
-“Y/N”
-“I didn’t know that you can do that.”
-” When we get back, maybe we can recreate the ‘Famous sex scene’?”
-” Ohhhh I very much like to recreate the ‘famous sex scene.’
- Sebastian stepping on the gas petal and running a few red lights trying to get you guys homes
-You two recreating the sex scene.
-Sebastian constantly doing random things to make you laugh
-more cuddling
-”I love you, Y/N”
-forehead kisses
- Doing karaoke with Sebastian
What better way to start a new week than with Alex... 😁❤️
“You’ll see him do stupid stuff and he gets away with it. And that makes it even worse because then…he thinks he’s untouchable. And yeah, it’s going to be allot of fun.” Alex Hogh Andersen
Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:
This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.
Ⓘ ⓌⒶⓃⓉ Ⓜ︎Ⓨ Ⓜ︎ⓉⓋ
i hope youre all lying and hyping your cv/resume’s up