#this is only partially autobiographical...

[trilliath]

What does the photo mean?

(I have not watched Heated Rivalry and I know nothing about hockey beyond what I learnt from reading Check Please! and its fanfiction, but you have made me curious)

(also, hi, I miss sharing a fandom with you <3 )

This is a photo from the 2005 world juniors international men's hockey tournament. In this photo Canada has just triumphed over Russia to win gold, leaving Alexander Ovechkin (Left) and Evgeni Malkin in tears. Two young Russian men (18 or 19 years old here), so overcome with emotion at being second best that they are weeping in public. Yes, Ovi will go on to be the greatest goalscorer of all time. Yes, Geno will be a three-time cup champion. But in this moment their whole lives have been building to this moment and they failed.

I think also in order to understand this you need to understand that (at times) in Russia, hockey is political in ways that it is not in other parts of the world. When an American says they want to do their best for their country at, say, the olympics, you know, they'll get a little misty-eyed and feel kinda patriotic maybe when their anthem is played or whatever and some camaraderie with their fellow countrymen at the village. Meanwhile in Russia, if you're Alex Ovechkin, perennial captain of the national team for international contests, Vladimir Putin might call you up on your personal cell phone (because he DOES have your number) to yell at you and demand an explanation for why you have personally failed in your service to your nation (in a goddamned team sport ffs, sometimes while you weren't even on the ice because of injury, but I digress).

Ovi as captain quickly grew into someone who doesn't much wear his heart on his sleeve and can navigate the complexities and politics of captaining a team the way he does - the loud side you see of his personality is carefully selected, in my opinion. I don't think we ever got quite as raw and honest a look at how he continues to feel about such things than we did in that 2005 world juniors tournament, but I can only assume what he feels is even more intense than what Geno does - and we do know that when Geno returned from the Sochi olympics he was profoundly depressed at his national team loss on home soil. So much so that there are articles about how the only thing that helped him climb out of his funk was his captain Sidney Crosby having a deep private conversation with him - presumably about all that crazy pressure and grieving the loss. I can only imagine how hard that had to be, especially in the context of being Sid's teammate - whose arguably most iconic triumph is (as you may well know being Canadian even if you never followed hockey) personally scoring the gold medal winning goal in the Vancouver olympics as captain of the team. Storybook shit.

Sid (who's partially the inspiration for Shane Hollander) is very much the closest analogue to Ovi on the Canadian side of the world, and he undoubtedly has felt incredible pressure to perform, to bear the weight of Team Canada on his shoulders too. But it's... just different.

Even if you're not in hockey RPF or heated rivalry fandom it's interesting stuff just in terms of history/anthopology alone. I can recommend a fascinating read From Behind the Red Line: A North American Hockey Player in Russia by Tod Hartje and Lawrence Martin which is the autobiographical story of "a young Harvard-educated varsity hockey star, who travels to Russia in the dying days of the Soviet Union to play elite league hockey." Basically a guy who was probably not gonna make it far in the NHL and had the opportunity to do an exchange program to the USSR instead - because again, in this time period in particular, hockey is genuinely part of political maneuvering and diplomacy. It's very much from one perspective and of its time, but it's a very human and fascinating historical look at the cultural differences in hockey between two halves of the world, and it's set from the time period people like Alex Ovechin and Evgeni Malkin (and in the fiction realm, Ilya Rozanov who is partially based on Ovi) are coming up as children in professional hockey in the USSR and Russia.

So. Getting back to my original point, in Heated Rivalry, in the first episode we have some scenes of Shane and Ilya facing each other in a world juniors equivalent tournament. I've seen (non-hockey) people talk about these scenes as like a little meet-cute, a ha-ha how fun for them to flirt in the handshake line - oh look at how brusque Ilya is he must be flustered by Shane's happy flush and freckles and "see you at the draft" or whatever the line is. Aw look at them riling each other up getting competitive! Meanwhile I'm sitting there like - fucking look at him, Ilya is crushed. The fact that he's going first in the draft is still (at least at that time) tainted by his loss on the world stage. Yes, Shane has been in a pressure cooker his whole life too, and going second in the draft is a disappointment that will eat at him a long time, but that pressure is different. When Shane has his turn losing his tournament, his disappointment is personal. He's probably never had the thought that if he fails in a hockey game a politician could decide to make life difficult for his family members back home.

All the details they put in there, the nuances in the acting choices, the references being made to all that context I described above changes the way those scenes work. These two young men are the same in so many ways, facing the same tournament, the same draft and the yawing chasm of their pro hockey career on the horizon - but they are profoundly foreign to each other at the same time. There are much bigger forces in play complicating how they can interact with and relate to each other than just general societal homophobia and romance story tropes.

Anyway, I'm probably taking it all a little too seriously here, but really, I just kind of don't feel like I'm watching the same show as people who don't have any of this context.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Memory Maker - Longreads

OpenAI's Sora allowed you to deepfake yourself. Users started to remember things that never happened.

To understand why we’re so susceptible to false memories requires understanding that the brain doesn’t store memories the way a phone stores photos. When you live through something, your hippocampus— a deep brain structure vaguely shaped like a seahorse—encodes that experience by binding together its constituent pieces: what you saw, what you heard, where you were, how you felt. That bound-together pattern is the memory. Over hours and days, the hippocampus replays these patterns, perhaps while you sleep, gradually strengthening their hold in the cortex, in a process called consolidation. What makes these memories so unlike phone storage, and especially relevant here, is that recalling a memory means the brain must partially relive it. The brain recalls by reactivating some of the same sensory and spatial patterns that were present during the original experience. Your brain doesn’t access a stable, static stored memory of yourself at that summer picnic in the park; your brain recreates it by activating some of the same neural circuitry that fired when you were actually squinting in the sun, actually wiggling your toes in the warmed grass. During recall, it fires again, faintly. The beauty of memory, not as a static storage bank but as a dynamic process of on-demand re-creation, is that it’s efficient. You can access a tremendous amount of information about your past without having to dedicate special storage space to your personal archive. But that efficiency comes with risks. Each time you replay and reconsolidate a memory, it can subtly change. Other things you’re thinking about during recall, how you feel while recalling it, other, similar memories that activate similar patterns of neurons, these can mix and mingle and, ultimately, change the reconsolidation of the original memory itself. And once changed, it doesn’t revert because there is no gold-standard stored version. There is only the latest replay. And because memories are, essentially, reactivations of specific patterns of sensory and other neural activity, that means that sensory patterns alone can get consolidated as memories. This is a false memory. And a false memory, once seeded, benefits from the same machinery as real ones. And the brain’s fact-checker, the prefrontal cortex, arrives late to the scene: the reactivation of sensory and other neural pathways is already underway, the memory reconstruction already in progress, before any evaluation of whether the memory is genuine even begins. Applying any of this to a deepfake app is uncharted territory, but talking to Loftus, I started to see how false memory science might apply. The passage of time would likely be important. Initially, a person might remember creating a specific video, and the mind could reject the contents as false. But if the memory of creation fades while the contents persist, the pre-frontal fact-checking defenses begin to disappear. The false memory is more likely to feel real. False memories would probably strengthen with repeated exposure to the video—the illusory truth effect shows that repetition makes false claims feel truer, and while studies of false autobiographical memory have mostly involved active suggestion rather than passive viewing, those using multiple sessions consistently produced stronger effects. So false Sora memories would probably strengthen with repeated exposure to the video—essentially, Sora would be stimulating replay processes in the brain, helping to further consolidate the false memory. And knowing they are AI generated may not matter: In Loftus’s MIT study, labeling content as “AI-enhanced” didn’t prevent false memory formation. We would probably tend to defer to AI-generated videos simply because they resemble the kind of external record we’re used to treating as incontrovertible truth. Sora capitalized on every one of these dynamics: synthetic video of yourself, in your pocket and infinitely rewatchable, stealthily inheriting the authority already granted to the phone’s camera roll.

9 April 2026

[keepthemacramesecret]

ok i started this post last night but i was sleepy and also didn't like the way i was framing it so im starting over—

it is well established that holmes' return/empty house was partially influenced by hornung doing the same with raffles in black mask/no sinecure, im not saying anything new there. BUT i haven't actually re-read Return in order all at once since i got completely absorbed into raffles, and i have been kind of astonished recently listening to the coules radio holmes at Just How Much of return has explicit or abstract references either to raffles or to hornung irl! which is really cool! and i think some of these are things that i wouldnt have even noticed before i started getting into like. detailed behind the scenes reading on hornung so it really wouldnt be on the radar for ur average holmes fan. so:

Raffles and Hornung References in The Return of Sherlock Holmes:

Empty House: this is one you hear often but it's not just in the overall idea of holmes returning from the dead, it also starts with a pretty solid inverse of No Sinecure specifically. The missing-presumed-dead leader of our central partnership shows up suddenly, in disguise as a frail older man, at our narrator's own medical practice, under a guise of selling something. vs SINE's narrator summoned to interview at a doctor's practice for a potential job where a resident patient is revealed to be the missing-presumed-dead partner disguising himself as a frail older man. (And it's only fair to say SINE is also clearly drawn a little from RESI of course)

Then you have holmes' ten mile run from reichenbach ending in florence, for raffles' ten mile swim to naples.

And this is maybe a stretch but i do think the scene in the empty house itself, climbing up a dilapidated house in the dark with no explanation til the last second to keep watch through the blinds, certainly feels like an echo of IDES.

Norwood Builder: Don't really have anything here besides maybe MacFarlane's asthma.*

Dancing Men: Elrige's 'very lonely farm' in East Ruston where Slaney is hiding out; Hornung had a house in East Ruston at the time, and while he had his own name for it, it was called 'Old Farm' on official maps and postal directories. (And this is a VERY small village, theres like six names in that directory, its not a coincidence)

Solitary Cyclist: mysterious uncle Ralph 'realname' Smith who went to South Africa and disappeared?*

Priory School: This one is almost a quote!

“A bicycle, certainly, but not the bicycle,” said he. “I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tyres. This, as you perceive, is a Dunlop, with a patch upon the outer cover. Heidegger's tyres were Palmer's, leaving longitudinal stripes."

vs. in The Wrong House

"I had my eye on the road all the way from Ripley to Cobham, and there were more Dunlop marks than any other kind. Bless you, yes, they all leave their special tracks, and we don’t want ours to be extra special; the Dunlop’s like a rattlesnake, and the Palmer leaves telegraph-wires, but surely the serpent is more in our line.”

Black Peter: Woodman's Lee is a pretty loose match, and i wouldn't even mention this if it was the only thing i had here, but this could easily be based on Compton's Lee— Hornung's brother Pitt's (nickname for Peter) home in Horsham at the time, who was also friends with Doyle.

But more solidly, the whole Neligan backstory here. His father fleeing the country in disgrace with allegedly stolen shares then later proven innocent when it becomes clear he was betrayed and murdered on the voyage is almost exactly the plot of Young Blood (semi-autobiographical 1898 Hornung novel)**

Charles Augustus Milverton: This ones pretty easy, it's most directly comparable to WILF but we're doing gentleman burglar antics we're doing blackmail we're showing off our cool burglary tools you get it

The Six Napoleons: Mr. Horace Harker, anxious and chatty writer at 131 Pitt St, Kensington. #131 is not a real address (the street only goes up to 18) but Hornung lived at #9. Also there maybe something here about the famous pearl and the mafia but its generic enough.

Gold Pince-nez: Smith being a former Uppingham student— its a small detail but a specific one. and as far as i can remember there's no other holmes character that gets a specific school mentioned that way?

Abbey Grange: Another thats very possibly just a trope but Mary Fraser from Australia marrying a man very quickly on arriving in england, who turns out to be abusive and an alcoholic, and then becoming implicated in his murder IS very similar to the setup of Shadow of the Rope (i haven't finished reading this yet though tbf)***

Three Students and Second Stain: i can't find anything in these 🤷‍♂️

It's hard to avoid comparison to Holmes in writing about Raffles (even though imo the amount of Raffles that is actually based on Holmes is sort of exaggerated) but u see a lot less about the influence going the other way which is a shame bc its cool! And i am shocked how consistently its peppered through this collection especially. If Amateur Cracksman was 'this form of flattery', what does that make Return!

*i'll grant you these are basically nothing. but i didn't want to leave it out in context w everything else!

**this is somewhat trope-y to be completely fair, but in Young Blood's case at least it is (very) loosely based on his actual family history so its certainly something doyle would have been familiar with also

***I'm not counting the mock trial here because MJR is later than Return but it IS fun that they both have one

[axlrosesarchive]

Axl Rose, MTV Interview with Tabitha Soren. September 9, 1992. [Transcript included].

TABITHA: We talked to Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses recently, the terminally tardy guy. If fans think that they are the only ones that Axl keeps waiting, they should know that I waited till 4:00 in the morning for an interview with Axl last weekend in Houston, and we talked about Guns N’ Roses being the recipients of the Video Vanguard Award. Here’s more.

VOICE-OVER: Guns N’ Roses earned the Video Vanguard Award by elevating the art of music video to dramatic heights, especially through the elaborate ‘November Rain’ and ‘Don’t Cry’ flicks. Those videos are two parts of a continuing saga that the band plans to expand into a feature-length film. 

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW THE CUT]

AXL: It was a fictional story that my friend Del wrote based off—you know, I inspired him to write this story, because, you know, we’re a rock band, and we were working on our first album—it wasn’t even out yet—and I was pretty much out of control, and we were all into the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. And he wrote this story about this guy who just becomes bigger than life, and the troubles he has in his relationship and keeping that together, and basically about this couple in this relationship, and trying to deal with this lifestyle, and how—and what happens to them. And so, little by little, we think about it, figure out how the next part of the story and stuff—we’d talk about it and he’ll write a little bit more. And all of a sudden it was kind of like, we sold 8 million records, and all of a sudden, I was becoming what he had written about. He called me really upset one day, going “I wrote my friend’s death.” You know? It was like, we’re in that one video where I find my gravestone and stuff like that, and that really freaked him out and he writes four other stories. So it’s kind of like a fictional story which had autobiographical and based off things that happened in real life. And now it’s like, with Stephanie, it’s a real trip because some things are based off my relationship—my previous relationship, and some things are fictional, but I’m in relationship with her.

VOICE-OVER: Axl’s girlfriend, model Stephanie Seymour, co-stars in ‘Don’t Cry’ and ‘November Rain’. In both music videos Stephanie takes on roles partially inspired by Axl’s ex-wife, Erin Everly, one of the women in the Sweet Child O’ Mine clip. 

AXL: It’s really strange, you know. It’s a bit difficult for her, but she gets into the parts and understands what we’re doing. But sometimes it’s very surreal, like when we got married it was—I mean, Slash looked at me and said, “Dude, I just watched you get married 9 times.” 

VOICE-OVER: Surreal is one thing, but for some viewers the videos for ‘Don’t Cry’ and ‘November Rain’ are just plain confusing. And the fans aren’t the only people wondering what the videos are about.

GILBY: I have no idea what it means at all. I mean, just the obvious of what anybody that watches it gets, but, you know, when you’re doing it—

TABITHA: You’re supposed to be on the inside.

GILBY: I know! I was on the inside and I’m still confused. I’m waiting for the movie to come out.

SLASH: Both those videos, even if you don’t understand them or you can’t make any sense of them, they’re very compelling to watch, because you wanna try and figure it out, you know? I mean, I catch myself, like, flipping through channels and I hit MTV, and I see one of our songs, and I’ll stop for a minute, you know, and look at it, and it means something new to me every time I see it. 

AXL: I’m really proud of ‘Don’t Cry’ and ‘November Rain.’ I really like the writing of the story and putting all the scenes together. And “Why did she die?” “How did she die?” “What happened?” And it’s like, we’ll tell you later. [Chuckles].

[BREAK]

TABITHA: Thanks John. I’m actually back by Axl Rose’s dressing room. He has been on tour with Guns N’ Roses for the past year and they’ve gotten in all sorts of trouble. Axl is getting very well known for his antics, and I talked to him in Houston, and here’s part two of our interview.

VOICE-OVER: Guns N’ Roses has spent the past 15 months on tour playing to sellout crowds and being involved in more than their fair share of controversy. For starters, the band had a little trouble with punctuality, sometimes showing up two hours late for a concert. Axl says it took him a while to get back into the grind of touring.

AXL: That was a whole change of life. You know, realizing, “Okay, now we’re out on tour;” I haven’t toured, I’ve been sitting on my ass at home or whatever. And then I’ve been out, you know, running around and rocking out; and had to, basically, like change my whole life in order to be able to keep doing this. And so, you do a show and then you’d be shot, you know, where you’d be, kind of like, shot for three weeks. But no, you’ve got a show tomorrow. So then it’d take, like, all these hours of preparation, where now it doesn’t take me near as long to be ready for a show.  

VOICE-OVER: During the course of the tour Axl has been involved in heavy-duty psychotherapy in an attempt to deal with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, among other problems.

AXL: Last year, I was doing extensive emotional work on myself, so when I go out to do a show, if something—I was, you know, uncovering something in my unconscious mind or in my mind, or whatever, and kind of experiencing it, it’d be really hard to go out and do the show, where that took, like, a year to get things under control. I’d come off stage, and either get on the phone or have the person fly out personally into four or five hours right after stage. You know, where someone goes, like, once a week to work out their problems for half-hour or an hour, I was doing four-five hours a day; like, every day.

TABITHA: Is it helping?

AXL: You were at the show tonight. It seems to be fine. I’m in a good mood now. [Chuckles].

TABITHA: Do you feel like your fans are sort of understanding you better or take your problem seriously?

AXL: I think some people understand it, but a lot of people, you know, they want what they want, even if they understand. And it’s like, if there’s a problem on stage and you have to stop the show, they don’t really care at that point. They’re still upset ‘cause they didn’t get satiated. They came to see something, and . . . you know, there was technical difficulties in Montreal and we had to leave, and the crowd was really upset about that and they didn’t really, like, take the time to think about what went on for us. Now, that’s kind of hard to take sometimes. I don’t feel responsible for that.

VOICE-OVER: The ensuing riot in Montreal started after Axl walked off stage and stopped the concert because of a problem with their PA system. Axl says they’ve been having technical problems the whole tour and it was damaging his voice.

AXL: So, basically, I was happening to, like, sing over 50 kilowatts of sound or something. I didn’t do major damage to my vocal cords, but I did enough that if I sang anymore under those conditions, I wouldn’t be singing. In order to hear myself, to see if I’m on key and tell how loud or how hard I need to push to sing a song properly, I have to try to sing all over the PA, which was impossible. 

VOICE-OVER: After the riot in Montreal, the crew was able to fix the PA problem, but troubles aside, Axl feels like Guns N’ Roses pulled off a major feat, but putting together a stadium tour with their old friends, Metallica. 

AXL: One of the big things I learned was that everybody had wanted this tour so bad and worked so hard to make it—to be able to do this tour. You know, Metallica through their touring and through our touring, to be able to do a stadium tour together, that we thought that when we got here it would just be perfect!, that it would be so cool. Well, it kind of turned out to be that, “Wait a minute, this is so cool, that why shouldn’t it be the hardest thing we’ve ever done?”

[high-voltage-rat]

HIII SMILES :( I JUST WANTED TO SAY THANK YOU FOR THE NICE TAG ON THE COLE POST EHEHEHE I’m working on writing for my OCs more so the positive words mean so much :( time to dig through Corey’s posts in return eheheheee… do you have any most essential posts to read about her…

HELLO FRIEND!!! I am very 🤝 about trying to write more for OCs, especially publically! I love reading about other people's OCs though :^) you can bet I will be eagerly awaiting more Cole lore to peruse 👀

Corey has been a beloved blorbo for long enough that her tag on my blog actually isn't super consistent- my more recent posts about her are under #oc: corey-er, and those are the ones I recommend reading! This one about her SPECIAL stats, this one listing her fun facts, and this themed ask set are probably the most detailed I've done so far. I have some uh. Very old art of her hiding away in my blog, though it's not particularly up to my standards these days and I'd like to re-do a lot of it some day. I also have a post in the works about her brain damage because I love medicine and cranial GSW is a fascinating injury to explore.

The tl;dr is that she has retrograde amnesia, though it's mostly only autobiographical in nature. I like to describe her deal as "former self haunting the narrative". She brushes against her past a good deal, and is still affected by her trauma even if she doesn't realize she even has it, or remember where it came from. She's driven initially by her desire to find out who she is, so she chases familiarity pretty hard in the hope that it will jog her memory. She sides with the NCR, partially because of the fact that they feel so familiar to her and they're the most directly opposed to the Legion, who she has a very visceral instinctual hatred for. She primarily travels with Boone, Veronica, Arcade, Rex, and ED-E as companions, though she does travel at least briefly with all the companions in canon.

Outside of working for the NCR, she's most active as a member of the Followers, and is respected enough by the Brotherhood to have been offered an opportunity to join them, though she never accepted. She's also viewed positively by the Boomers, Great Khans, Kings, and most small townships around the wasteland. The Powder Gangers she put back in NCR custody are scared shitless of her, and her bounty in the Legion is probably the highest of anyone in Nevada. The Strip has pretty... mixed feelings? I would say? She essentially castrated the Omertas, and is generally frowned upon by the White Gloves for her crass and unsophisticated demeanour, so ironically that means the Chairmen like her the best out of the three families.

...She also is in love with wordplay and dark humour. She's obsessed with the Legion Ear joke Private Sexton came up with, and it never fails to make her laugh. (Not that that's hard to begin with. Because brain damage.)

[maryawrites]

Sfumato - Prologue

Hi. We're going into this no lube, only trauma

Worst!Logan Howlett/Wolverine x Cis! Female Reader, Post DPAW

CW: implied roman catholicism, religious trauma, implied cult abuse and child abuse later in the story, ugly burning yearning, short and awful prologue, the story is partially autobiographical, the (Name) in this is a little emotionally stunted and horrible but that's what character development is for

Divider by @/saradika

 …Damn my neighbor. 

  No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that. That’s not kind. That’s not fair to him. He couldn’t have known. He shouldn’t know. He doesn’t know. I think.

  Damn it. Damn me.

-

  I don’t think that Wade is a genius, or that he has any level of omniscience. But…. Well, I know no human can have that kind of power, I just think the Hell he accidentally put me through is so strategic that I wouldn’t be surprised if he were an angel sent by God to test me.

  All I’m saying is that if he strolled up to my door and rapped on it a few times, just to blurt in my face that he’s some kind of dutiful sadist, I’d believe it. 

  It practically started overnight. Well, actually, it did technically start overnight. I wasn’t invited to Wade’s little surprise party, but I still got roped into searching for him when he literally disappeared in the middle of it. Because I like to think I’m a good neighbor like that. No one had a clue where he went, and so we all kind of parted ways like it was normal, which I guess it is; for him, at least, it is. But, the point is, we all wrote it off and went our ways, and I really did believe it was normal. I didn’t think anything was going to change.

  I didn’t really write it off, though. I prayed before I went to bed that night- on bended knee at my bedside, hands clasped together and eyes clasped even tighter. I wanted to ignore the urge, I really did. After all, he’s basically immortal, so it’s not like he’ll die. But then my brain pointed out that something could still go horribly wrong. Some unexpected accident, some miracle, some horrible tragedy. Yes, I could go and fall asleep like I know exactly where he is, but then the Lord might kill him just to punish my hubris. “Oh, you don’t want to pray for your friend’s safe-keeping just because you think he’s immortal? Hah! There, dead. And you could’ve prevented it by just praying.”

  So, yes, I fell to my knees and prayed. 

  Looking back on it, maybe I should’ve also snuck in a petition for my own safe-keeping. 

-

  Coming back home from work is a hurried affair. I want to get into the building, up the stairs, and into the confines of my apartment as quickly as possible. I don’t want any run-ins. I don’t want any accidents. I want to be good. I need to be good. 

  It should be so easy, shouldn’t it? I mean, I get off of work pretty late, and the halls always used to be deserted. But now they aren’t. Because sometimes, just sometimes, the latest of my spiritual trials is just waltzing through the halls like he isn’t killing me with a dull blade.

  It’s how I met him for the first time. He was smoking a cigar outside- I think he had some disagreement with Wade, or something along those lines- and I walked right past him, eyes down, and I didn’t want to think about it. I tried not to think about it.

  Then I saw him again.

  And again. 

  And again.

  And then, one unfortunate night, we were introduced to each other by his dear, cruel roommate. 

  And, nowadays, I do everything in my power to avoid him. As the Lord demands, I think. 

  The Lord demands, in a secret eleventh commandment: You shalt not speak to Logan Howlett unless spoken to first, and supervised by a third party. 

  That is a rule I can get behind. 

  It’s a rule I follow carefully, speeding up the flight of stairs to my apartment, biting down on my lip until my mouth tastes metallic. I have to shut out everything. I need to. 

  Am I obsessed? Whenever I think of him, I get distracted and warm, in a disgusting, saccharine way. And that’s not normal, is it? No, it couldn’t be. Thinking about a human being like that is just… wrong. It’s a messy feeling. Or perhaps a slew of messy feelings, completely uncoordinated with each other. Am I obsessed with him? Are these the early stages of some horrible stalker-story? Am I ignoring what could lead to me becoming a creepy, possessive weirdo? Oh, God. Oh, God. I cannot let my flesh rule over me, for his sake. 

  And my sake, too, but that is selfish. If I cast myself into Hell, it is my own fault. 

  I trip over one step, my foot getting caught and sending me scrambling, my hand gripping a higher step before I try to steady myself. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. That was loud. I think I bumped my knee, but that is the least of my worries, because it’s so late. I bet half of the building heard that. That little fact only makes me scurry faster up the stairs, reaching my door with a breath of relief, grasping for my keys. I made it. 

  I went all day without an accident. I was good. 

  I don’t say this proudly, but when I hear a door down the hall unlock and click open, I throw myself into my apartment. It’s not graceful. It’s not cute. It’s humiliating, and I feel my face burning as I slam the door shut. 

  Oh, my gosh. Did I even check who it was? I could’ve just made a fool out of myself for nothing. There’s, like, a one in a million chance that he was the one who opened a door. Over what, anyways? 

  Fuck, I really was that loud when I fell. 

  Sorry, I shouldn’t have swore. But it’s my head. I can swear, I think. I should be able to. But that doesn’t mean I should. 

  Is this what I’ve become? Wobbly and ungraceful, like a young girl? Flustered and distracted over a man? That’s so… uncouth. I can’t be tripping into my apartment any time the mere notion of him spooks me. I’ve never felt so convoluted. Where is my pride? My self-control? 

  I thought about him at work today, too. And when I got ready in the morning. 

  I’m becoming consumed by my desire. How can the flesh be so voracious? 

  I stand with my back pressed right up against the grain of my door, standing silently in the dark with halted breath as I listen to the feet padding so quietly through the hall. Probably to look down the stairs, and figure out what bumbling idiot just made all of that noise. Throwing myself into my apartment may have embarrassed me, but I think I would be five times more embarrassed if I was identified as the fool in the stairwell.  

  I’m burning up, regardless.

  I drop my bag and go through the shadows of my apartment, to the mirror sitting on the wall in my living room feet from my door. I settle my hands heavily on the hard feeling of the wall, staring at myself in the dark reflection of the mirror. 

  The rosary tucked under my uniform calls to me. It isn’t a siren’s call. It’s a demand. 

  But I thought I’d be better. I’ve been good all day. I don’t need to pray for myself over any and every inconvenience. That would be so greedy. There are at least another billion people in the world who could use a petition more than I. I am stronger than my flesh. 

  But my breathing is coming fast, and I feel more shaky as the space under my stomach remains warmed by his thought. 

  Bless me, Lord, for I have sinned.

  Bless me, Lord, for I have sinned. 

  I- I have warped a good man with my mind, and in turn, I have poisoned my own mind. 

  I crumble from desires of the flesh. 

  Have mercy on me, God, for I never rejoice in it. 

  Have mercy on him, Logan Howlett, my neighbor, for he has done nothing wrong.

  Free me, my Lord. I have dirtied myself with my thoughts. 

  Free me, my Lord, so I can be your loyal servant again. 

  Free me, my Lord, so I can one day look him in the eye. 

  Give me absolution. I do not want to sin. My body works against me, Lord. 

  Lord, if you have to, burn me raw in this life, so I may not burn in the next. 

  My eyes are blurry now, burning, along with the rest of my face. I’ve long since unbuttoned the top of my uniform, grappling to pull out my rosary. The fabric of my top is stuck to my back. I don’t know if it's the warmth of the summer night or the shame pouring out of my body which dampens my skin. 

  Kill me, now, Lord. If there is no way for me to be free, then I beg of you to strike me down at this moment. I cannot deal with this. 

  I wait in the still air of my living room, the sound of my breath being the only thing filling it. I wait. I wait for something. I wait for a sudden heart attack, an aneurysm, even a miraculous bolt of lightning. Anything. Because something must come. I cannot live with these feelings. 

  Something must come. 

  I wait. 

  I take a bath and brush out my hair. 

  The hair on my arms stands on end as I brush my teeth. 

  I wait. 

  And I think, surely, when I’m tucking myself into bed, this will kill me. This is how I will go. In my sleep. Everyone will think I died clean. The Lord called me home so early and easily as a reward. I have been so faithful, do I not deserve to die?

  When I awake in the morning with nothing more than a foot ache from the previous day, and the sun in my eyes, I don’t feel clean. I feel abandoned. 

[thebreakfastgenie]

Can you hit me with a weird fact about 52nd street? It was one of like three good records I had (honestly maybe the only good one) in my Teenage Vinyl Enthusiast Phase so it’s got a special place in my heart

Bonus points if you can do a weird fact per song 🤨

I can try!!

Good timing he just started talking about 52nd Street on the sirius XM channel lol.

52nd Street kind of doesn't get its due in the narrative which is very unfair! Mostly he says he didn't want to make The Stranger 2: Electric Boogaloo (I added the electric boogaloo part) and that he was influenced by jazz (which he calls grown-up music) and Latin music. 52nd Street won album of the year which he thinks is because The Stranger didn't win because it was up against Saturday Night Fever.

I feel like there aren't a lot of weird stories per se from this era because he was just riding the momentum and excited about making albums although there was this story I think from a couple years later but that probably applies to this period too about how he would become a "raw nerve" and "handle with care fragile" while writing and the band had this dynamic where they were just.... mean to each other and they all started talking about his new songs were garbage but they couldn't tell him because he'd fall apart while "accidentally" leaving the intercom on in the studio so he could hear it as a prank. They all remember this period fondly.

Big Shot - He opened with this in Cuba and apparently the audience loved it but we don't have video because Elizabeth, who was both his wife and his manager at the time, wouldn't let them film him. She was probably doing what she thought he wanted and I suspect he had one of his little meltdowns about it because he hates being on camera but I don't have proof of this it's just a hunch. This song had multiple inspirations but it was partially autobiographical and he likes to say he's done a lot of research for it, lol. This used to be his most unhinged live song and a lot of videos where people comment that he was obviously wasted are from Big Shot and if you watch the full concert you can see that he was actually acting as part of the bit for the song.

Honesty - This one is easy. This song was originally Sodomy courtesy of Liberty DeVitto. Billy Joel also called it the most bullshit song he ever wrote.

My Life - I think he's over it now but Billy Joel hated this song for a while, said it didn't age well, said "I can't stand that song!" when he had to do a bit of it during a soundcheck, etc. Unrelatedly (or maybe not) someone filed one of those nonsense lawsuits all big artists get claiming Billy Joel plagiarized My Life from him etc. etc. and his lawyers told him to settle and I think he eventually did but he wasn't happy about it about he would say things like "I want to kill this guy" in public. Also Liberty DeVitto claims he wrote lyrics for this song that make Sodomy seem tame but he refuses to share them publicly because he "has daughters."

Zanzibar - This song took off on tiktok in like 2021 which means someone had to explain to Billy Joel what tiktok is which amuses me because in at the New Yorker 2015 he told us "I don't twitter" and said he only used the internet to occasionally browse porn.

Stiletto - Okay I only have one fact that relates to this song and another one further down but here's a weird thought: I've seen people talk about this song like it means he hates his wife or whatever and like while the song obviously describes a toxic relationship I have always gotten the impression that the narrator is extremely into it and that probably has implications but I won't speculate further.

Rosalinda's Eyes - He describes this as the song his father should have written for his mother and he made the characters in the song Latino because he was inspired by Latin music at the time and because his father and paternal grandparents lived in Cuba for about a year while waiting for the US to let them in after fleeing Nazi Germany (there was a quota for Jewish refugees!) and his father attended the University of Havana during this time and apparently this was at the same time Fidel Castro was there so technically Billy Joel's father went to college with Fidel Castro.

Half a Mile Away - The original lyrics to this song were "your love is like a razor blade" and he said that didn't make a very good song and has not commented on the fact that he has a song called Stiletto with that exact theme on the same album.

Until the Night - This song was inspired by the Righteous Brothers and Billy Joel sang a cover of a Righteous Brothers song at Don Henley's wedding that Jack Nicholson loved so much he followed him around for the rest of the wedding reception.

52nd Street - This is kind of for the whole album because this song is so short but they took the cover picture in alley outside the studio and Billy Joel is holding a trumpet, which is does not play, as a nod to the jazz influence on the album. Not that weird but I think it's funny that he very much does not play the trumpet.

[ohsalome]

What Ukrainian books would you recommend to a complete beginner? Someone who has no idea of Ukrainian literature but wants to support Ukraine.

Sorry in advance for answering so late!

If I had to recommend one single book, it would probably be Tiger Trappers (sometimes translated as The Hunters and the Hunter or Tiger Catchers) by Ivan Bagriany. It is a partially autobiographic adventure novel set in the 30s about a man who escapes the NKVD imprisonment and attempts to survive in the harsh Syberian taiga with a family of ukrainian settlers living there while running for his life from the state.

If you're interested in poetry, my #1 recommendation in Serhiy Zhadan. Out of modern authors I also recommend Oksana Zabuzhko

If you want to read our classical literature, the most Iconique (tm) authors are Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka. The level of enjoyment you might get out of them will vary greatly depending on the translation. Unfortunately, one major issue that exists with ukrainian literature is that translations of modern authors are more easily avaliable than those of the older ones.

Some of these books and more are linked in my masterpost document on ukrainian resources

There is also a lithub article with some recommendations, but out of those I've only read The Moscoviad and I probably won't recommend this book as the one to make your first impression about ukrainian literature.