New here.
I’ve been in and out of guitar for a few years. I get random burst of passion or motivation but yet so tired of the same ol standard tuning stuff. Alternate tunings like Johnny Rzeznik and Myles Kennedy use have my heart. Is there a way to get that droning sound in chord progressions outside of keys relative to E major? Sorry if this is a dumb question

So I’m sure with the movie being five years old this has been discussed to death but as I said I just saw it and after a week of heavy drinking and ruminating I want to share my thoughts.
There’s a lot of things on a technical and narrative side I took issue with, which I list below, but I want to start with the larger issue of what makes the movie such a betrayal of the show and what made it a true masterpiece.
The show was always a brutal and unflinching look at life in the waning days of the Wild West, where true justice was rare and humanity was often at its basest. But what Deadwood showed was that despite this brutal reality, some people’s compassion and innate goodness could still shine through. That might not change the larger reality, but it gave people the strength to move forward despite the struggle it took just to get up in the morning.
The movie, on the other hand, exists in some parallel dimension where happy endings exist and good triumphs over bad. Because of this, the movie feels like fan service written by someone who never had anything to do with the original show.
Even from a visual perspective the movie is all wrong. Deadwood was surrounded by beautiful nature, but the town itself was dirty and ramshackle. The Gem looked sticky. It was a place you’d walk into and instantly feel the need to watch your back. In the movie, it looks great, with sun streaming in every window and every surface looking clean and new. A nice place for a family meal.
The characters are now all seemingly happy and confident in their places in society. No one squirms away from EB or belittles Johnny. They’re all one big happy family.
The dialogue awkwardly shoehorns in big words to try to mimic the show’s legendary dialogue without any of the poetic elegance. Instead of being wowed by how beautiful a random utterance was, I just found myself cringing at how stilted and forced much of it sounded.
The movie opens with a CGI train and ends with a street fight that looks equally fake.
EB Farnum is still mayor and still operates a hotel even though he hasn’t owned it for thirteen years.
Bullock is still sheriff despite being voted out at the end of season 3.
Dan is now just some dude in a fancy outfit. Con Stapleton is a pastor?!
Hearst has no edge whatsoever. He’s just a generic rich white guy and therefore the villain. He’s now a senator but still stays at the hotel and issues hits directly to hitmen.
Bullock, despite somehow still being sheriff, does the dirty work of burning Hearst’s lumber despite this being obviously a job for Dan or Johnny.
Utter and Hearst converse as if they’d never met, despite Utter having very harsh words for Hearst in the past. When Hearst has Utter killed, everyone is shocked as if Hearst hasn’t done exactly that before and was literally publicly called out by Trixie for doing so at the beginning of the film (one of the few parts I liked).
The town is suddenly very tolerant. General N——r is now just good ol’ Sam. THEY HAD AN INTER-RELIGIOUSLY TOLERANT WEDDING IN DEADWOOD. This isn’t a small point. The racism in the show was difficult to watch at times, but it’s a part of what made it feel so authentic. When you replace that with more modern sensibility it makes the whole thing feel false.
Aunt Lou is allowed to just hang back in deadwood after Hearst leaves and starts a career as a midwife. Again, nice to think about but in reality there’s just no way she’s allowed that kind of freedom.
And lastly (though I could go on ranting like Steve), while I think having Swearengen as a weak, mostly unimpactful character in the movie makes sense, his character suffered the most in terms of being a watered down “pretty” version. Nothing intelligent to say, just “witty” rejoinders to whatever is said to him. He walks trixie down the aisle, because apparently Deadwood is just an old west version of Full House.
The movie told us something pretty, and for that I loathe it entirely.

Got a 690, nice.
Prior to this, my only real experience with Linux had been making a Raspberry Pi tablet that nobody really uses, and installing Kali Linux on a potato laptop. I'm a Mac user and I have used Terminal a bit, and I used DOS a lot in the 90s, so some of the material (particularly hardware, basic CLI) was familiar to me. I started studying about two and a half weeks ago.
In case this is helpful to anybody, this is what I did and here are my thoughts:

• I went through the Cisco NetAcademy course. I did some of the labs. I read all the content and outlined it. It was extremely boring.
  • I completed all the unit tests on the Cisco course (In one case, and chapter 9 I am looking at you, up to 11 times...) and looked up answers and reread material until I was consistently scoring 80% or, ideally, 90-100% on each unit, the midterm, the final, and the cumulative final. Last night I finally hit 80% on all except Chapter 18 (Special Directories and Files), which is sorta funny since I got 100% on the "Security and File Permissions" component of the exam.
• I made Anki flashcards for everything I got wrong or that confused or even mildly interested me. Basically, I "Ankified" everything that was not a transition sentence, lol.
• I also had a big document where I took notes from every single section. This was, honestly, mostly to keep myself from just skimming through and skipping over stuff because it was really really dull. It might not be efficient, but throughout my education (and this ain't my first school rodeo), I've found it useful to see how information is organized, so I generally make top-down outlines of what I read. I used to do this in MS Word but lately I've been using Notion since the formatting is nicer Maybe it's a total waste of time, because it took fivever. But I did it and now I have a huge Notion document of Linux notes....so I've got that going for me.
• I went through the big blue Linux book. It was also EXTREMELY boring. It was actually sort of impressive, just how incredibly dull they managed to make that book. After a certain point, it felt almost like meditation or a fever dream. I had a friend who did a silent meditation retreat and I think I started to feel like she described feeling towards the end of that. I did as many of the exercises and "explorational" activities as possible (some required permissions that weren't possible with the VMs I had at the moment).
• For a few days, I was using the online tests / flashcards that went with the LPI Linux Essentials Study Guide: Exam 010 v1.6 book, but apparently the site those were on was "retired" on April 30th, and it was annoying enough to get access the first time, so I didn't bother to try & figure out whatever it changed to. I found that book to be the least helpful of the materials anyway. The practice tests were the best thing about that one.
• I completed the Codecademy Bash scripting course one afternoon, since I like Codecademy's approach to scaffolding material and wanted to practice actually doing Bash scripting (but without, like, installing a VM).
• I took all the Dion exams multiple times.
• I followed the same process as with the Cisco exams, making cards / looking up anything and everything I got wrong.
• I made Anki flashcards for all of the above, and used GIFs or made graphics or used ChatGPT / Midjourney to generate ridiculous / weird images or songs to help me remember commands. Please, let me regale you with my and ChatGPT's interpretation of Johnny Cash, called "A Command Named Su." (And, actually, su came up ZERO times on the actual exam for some reason).
• I played this "Command Line Murder Mystery" game and really wished there was more to it, because while it's a great intro to the CLI that I'd recommend to anybody new to it, it also replicated a lot of the stuff I was more familiar with. I would have loved it if there had been something like that for every corresponding unit of the Cisco course or chapter of the book.
• I spent about a week and a half going through the flashcards during any and all downtime: During my kid's bath, on a flight, at a stoplight, at a family wedding, hair appointment, meals, whatever.
• I had started out by downloading a public Anki deck that was supposed to be for Linux Essentials, but ultimately I didn't think those cards helped nearly as much as the ones I made myself. The process of making the cards is important, and the deck I found was all "basic" format (instead of Cloze or Image like I was using). The deck I found had very open-ended questions that lacked context, and I regret wasting time on it instead of just making my own cards from the get-go. In the end, my deck was 835 cards, though that included the rando one I had downloaded. I don't think I use Anki in the most efficient way, so that was probably too many.
• I was able to attend one of the Cohorts and do the online game yesterday, and it was both fun and helpful. So I'd definitely recommend doing that.

Exam:

• I was mildly surprised that there were a few more "pick X of these options" questions than I'd expected. I had thought there'd be 7; by my count, I had 9.
• In case you aren't aware, there are about 3 fill-in-the-blank questions on the exam. They only ask for one word, though. The practice exams do not have these types of questions. However, since I had no idea until yesterday that this was even a question type, I wanted to put that out there, since some people might get thrown off by a question type they're not expecting.
• I did my exam at a testing center and it felt like a damn vacation. I managed to show up precisely on time for the first and probably only time in my entire life. It was, just extremely nice people, free parking, free locker for my stuff, a nice sunny window in the testing room, everything was very clean and bright. I wish I could take all the OAs that way!
• I've taken the Dion and Cisco and Study Guide practice tests so many times they run together, so it's hard to say exactly which questions came from where, but I was surprised that a lot of the questions on the exam were verbatim from the pool of practice tests I'd been using.
• In general, I think Dion's exams were a little bit easier than the actual exam and Cisco's were a little bit harder. Dion tends to have some goofy or humorous "distracter" wrong answer options (which, frankly, I appreciate because this was generally extremely boring material to me, sorry), but the other practice exams I took were all srsbiz. Also, since Cisco's unit tests are specialized to each topic, I think they go into greater depth than the actual exam might.
• In the end, I think I did substantially better on the exam than I had on the Cisco material, so I'd say that Cisco over-prepares you a tiny bit and that's probably what you want, right?
• I was so psyched about the "Command Named Su" and never even got to use it. :(

Recommendations:

• I am sure the best actual approach is to have and use Linux daily via the command line, or perhaps to be bo(u)rn(e) to a family fluent in C and grow up speaking Bash or C as your native language... but failing that, I'd start with the Cisco course (Link). It's fantastic that it's FREE. Note that about once a week they take it down for an annoyingly long maintenance window, but still. Each unit test is only 10 questions, and it doesn't actually tell you what the "right" answers are if you get them wrong, so it's extremely hard to get through a unit without having a good understanding of the material.
• If you're not familiar with the CLI, definitely try the game I linked above. It's really cool. Actually, try it even if you are, it's just a fun way to practice.
• If you can figure out where the practice tests went for the LPI Linux Essentials Study Guide: Exam 010 v.16 (by Bresnahan and Blum), they are fairly useful, but they are also very, very similar to the Cisco course.
• It took me some time to figure out that the Dion course on Udemy is really two courses. One has videos and 2 practice exams, one is just 6 practice exams. Between the two courses, there are 8 practice exams. I took all of them multiple times and thought they were really good practice. I tried feeding the exams to Chat GPT and asking it to generate new questions, but it didn't work very well (they were too easy / just reworded, etc).
• I love Anki, though I guess it might not work for everybody, and don't take a shortcut; make your own flashcards.
• A lot of the material that seems to be floating around about this exam is redundant to the big boring book and the Cisco course. So I think it probably matters to just find a format you enjoy, or at least that you can stand (e.g., video, course, whatever) and stick with it all the way through.
• The thing that helped the most for me, in terms of both trying to stay sane and memorizing the material, was trying to turn it into something fun and interesting. I actually began to enjoy the process of studying once I started making stupid / weird / traumatizing AI art images. I am sure a smarter person than myself (which is most of you) would've probably figured that out a lot faster.
• The real kernel is the soul-crushing boredom we found along the way. Right?

OK, onward and upward. Hope this helps somebody out.

This is the second half of my list for Oklahoma's execution roster. As mentioned in the first part, I broke it in half to comply with reddit's character limitations. For the link to part 1, please click here.
The currently executed 124 offenders, cases 63-124:
63. Robert Knighton (~1960s-2003, lethal injection): In 1973, after being released from a 1968 armed robbery conviction, Knighton went on his first major crime spree. He stabbed and strangled several men and women during many robberies and home invasions. The only victim that was killed, 32 year old Coffier Day, was shot dead while Knighton was arguing with him in his home. Coffier's father, 53 year old Claude, was also injured in the shooting. Knighton's first crime spree ended when he kidnapped a married couple and their 6 year old daughter. They escaped when the wife and mother of the family attacked Knighton with a knife to protect her husband and daughter. The family then notified the police of their abduction. Knighton managed to secure a 30 year manslaughter conviction and a 10 year armed robbery conviction with a plea deal, and was released to a halfway house in 1989. There, he began dating a female addict and befriended a teenage boy. The trio embarked on a nationwide robbery spree together. In Missouri, they shot and killed 59 year old Frank Merrifield and his 40 year old stepson Roy Donahue while robbing their home, and stole guns and money from them. In Oklahoma, the trio fatally shot a couple, 64 year old Virginia and 62 year old Richard Denney, while carjacking them. Their rampage ended when a woman in Texas grow suspicious of them circling a neighborhood. Knighton had a long history of theft convictions dating back to his childhood, and joined the Aryan Brotherhood in prison. Behind bars, he frequently attacked black and Native American inmates out of racial hatred for them.
64. Kenneth Charm (1993-2003, lethal injection): Charm and his teenage cousin lured a family friend, 14 year old Brandy Hill, into their car. They raped Hill and tried strangling her with a towel. When that failed, the cousins bludgeoned her to death with a sledgehammer.
65. Lewis Gilbert II (1994-2003, lethal injection): Gilbert and his teenage accomplice committed at least 4 robbery murders in Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma, but he was executed for the killing of 37 year old Roxanne Ruddell. They ambushed and kidnapped Ruddell while she was fishing alone. She was robbed of $3 and her truck, tied to a tree, and shot to death. The pair also fatally shot Ruth Loader, a 79 year old Ohioan woman, while abducting her from her residence, and gunned down a Missouri couple, 86 year old William and 76 year old Flossie Brewer, in their home. Gilbert was also sentenced to death for the Brewer murders by the state of Missouri, but was incarcerated in Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s death row.
66. Robert Duckett (~1980s-2003, lethal injection): After breaking out of prison, Duckett was picked up hitchhiking by John Howard, a 53 year old store owner. Howard agreed to let Duckett stay with him until he could find a job. The pair soon had a failing out, and Duckett was evicted by his host. He retaliated by tying Howard up with wire and then beating him to death with a fireplace poker. Duckett made off with his car after he switched the license plates, and took several bank bags from his store. He had a long violent criminal history, which included several incidents of assault and robbery. One of the incidents involved the beating of an 83 year old man. Allegedly, Duckett was previously gang-raped by other inmates, and suffered from PTSD from the incident. His attorneys claimed that Howard’s sexual advances trigged those memories, and he was killed as a result of Duckett lashing out at them. However, the prosecution shot the argument down, citing that the murder happened after Duckett was evicted from the apartment.
67. Bryan Toles (1993-2003, lethal injection): Toles and his two accomplices forced themselves into the home of the Franceschi family, and shot and killed the family patriarch, 39 year old Juan, in a struggle. Juan's son, 15 year old Lonnie, was also murdered "execution style" out of fear that he could identify Toles and his accomplices. The only survivor of the attack was Norma, Juan's wife and Lonnie's mother, who escaped by hiding in her older daughter's bedroom.
68. Jackie Willingham (1994-2003, lethal injection): Willingham was a door to door salesman selling perfume in an office building. One women, 62 year old Jayne Van Wey, he tried to solicit rejected him despite his repeated offers. Angered by her "rude behavior", Willingham attacked Van Wey when they had a chance encounter near the building's restroom. He dragged Van Wey out of a stall after following her inside, slammed her head against the bathroom wall several times, and kicked her head. Reportedly, Van Wey choked to death on her own blood.
69. Harold McElmurry III (1999-2003, lethal injection): While under the influence of meth, McElmurry and his wife Vicki broke into a home that a WW2 veteran, 80 year old Robert Pendley, shared with his wife, 75 year old Rosa. Robert and Rosa were both quickly subdued and physically restrained by the couple. McElmurry clubbed Robert to death with a pipe in front of Rosa, who was forced to watch by Vicki. Vicki then held Rosa down as McElmurry stabbed her several times with scissors. After killing the Pendleys, the McElmurrys fled with $70 in cash, a pair of guns, and the victims' car. A few days after the murders, they were captured by border agents while trying to cross into Mexico.
70. Tyrone Darks (~1990s-2004, lethal injection): Darks rammed his ex wife, 26 year old Sherry Goodlow, off the road as she was driving with their 2 year old son. After Goodlow crashed, Darks pulled their son out of the wreckage, shot her to death, and then drove away with him. Just before she succumbed to her injuries, Goodlow managed to call and notify the police about her son’s abduction. The police confronted and arrested Darks at his home, and they found the boy unharmed in their search. Darks and Goodlow’s former marriage was marred with violence, and he was arrested on numerous occasions for assaulting her. On death row, Darks was involved in a scheme to defraud a foundation for 9/11 survivors.
71. Norman Cleary (~1980s-2004, lethal injection): While burglarizing an upper class home with an accomplice, Cleary shot and killed a housekeeper, 44 year old Wanda Neafus, and took her purse and a cane that her employers purchased from the Smithsonian Institution. Cleary had a long criminal history and was previously convicted of beating an 87 year old woman in her home.
72. David Brown (~1983-2004, lethal injection): For several years, Brown violently harassed his ex wife and her family. In one incident, Brown abducted his ex wife and 11 of her customers from a beauty saloon she owned, and held them hostage until he surrendered to police. He was able to leave custody on bond and went into hiding. A few years after the hostage crisis incident, Brown broke into his ex wife's family home and gunned down her father, 47 year old Eldon McGuire.
73. Hung Thanh Le (1992-2004, lethal injection): Le crept into the apartment of another Vietnamese refugee, 34 year old Hai Nguyen, and found him watching TV on the couch. He struck Nguyen from behind with a weightlifting bar, and continued stabbing him with a meat cleaver when he screamed his wife for help. Nguyen's wife phoned the police, and Le fled with the couple's safety deposit box that contained $36,000 and their wedding ring.
74. Robert Bryan (1993-2004, lethal injection): Bryan shot and killed his estranged aunt, 69 year old Mildred, dumped her body on his parents' property, and forged a $1,800 check to himself under her name.
75. Windel Workman (~1980s(?)-2004, lethal injection): Workman beat his girlfriend's daughter, 2 year old Amanda Holman, to death while babysitting her in their home. His ex wives reported that he had a history of child abuse and often violently spanked their children during their marriages.
76. Jimmie Slaughter (1991-2005, lethal injection): Fearing that she was going to tell his wife of their affair, Slaughter stabbed and shot his ex girlfriend, 29 year old Melody Wuertz, and their daughter, 1 year old Jessica. According to court documents, Slaughter mutilated both of their bodies, and he carved an "R" on Melody's stomach. He tried pinning the murders on a black man, but the investigators and the courts dismissed his allegations.
77. George Miller Jr. (1994-2005, lethal injection): During the robbery of a hotel, Miller attacked the auditor, 25 year old Kent Dodd, with a hedge shear and paint cans, and took $122 from the register. Dodd was severely beaten, had muriatic acid shoved down his throat, and was left to die. Just before he died of his injuries, Dodd gave a description of his attacker to the police that matched Miller. A massive amount of circumstantial evidence, such as wearing shoes that resembled the bloodstained footprints next to Dodd's body, a microscopic drop of blood found on his shoes that was tentatively linked to Dodd, his wife's testimony of his unaccounted absence from their home during the murder, and what appeared to be Dodd writing Miller's alias that he knew him by in his own blood, convicted him. Miller’s friends also reported that he was broke and begging them for money a day before the murder, and his wife mentioned him giving her the same amount of money that was stolen from the robbery a day after it happened.
78. Michael Pennington (1991-2005, lethal injection): Pennington shot and killed a clerk, 20 year old Bradley Grooms, while trying to rob a 7-eleven grocery store. He left empty handed when the register failed to open.
79. Kenneth Turrentine (1994-2005, lethal injection): Under the belief that they were stealing money from him for drugs, Turrentine shot and killed his sister, 48 year old Avon Stevenson, and his girlfriend, 39 year old Anita Richardson, during confrontations in their homes. He also gunned down Anita's two children, 22 year old Tina Pennington and 13 year old Martise.
80. Richard Thornburg Jr. (1996-2006, lethal injection): A month after he was shot by an unknown assailant, Thornburg and his accomplices sought revenge by abducting 5 men that he thought was responsible from a trailer. Three of the hostages, 51 year old James Poteet, 39 year old Tery Sheppard, and 24 year old Kieth Smith, were gunned down on the spot, and Thornberg forced the fourth to shoot the fifth with the threat of killing him if he didn’t comply. They then burned down the trailer with the wounded fifth victim still trapped inside, but he managed to escape with his life. Despite being forced to put all the blame on himself in exchange for being spared, the fourth hostage still went forward to the police.
81. John Boltz (1984-2006, lethal injection): To spite his estranged wife following an argument, Boltz attacked her son, 23 year old Doug Kirby, with a knife. Kirby was stabbed a total of 11 times, and he received several fatal wounds to his chest, stomach, and neck.
82. Eric Patton (1994-2006, lethal injection): Patton forced his way into the home of 56 year old Charlene Kauer after she refused his pleading for money. After dragging her around the house as he searched for valuables, Patton stabbed Kauer several times with many different blades objects at hand such as scissors, barbecue forks, and kitchen knifes. Although he confessed to the murder, Patton blamed it on alleged demonic possession and his cocaine addiction.
83. James Malicoat (1997-2006, lethal injection): Malicoat slammed Tessa Leadford, his 13 month old daughter, against a dresser. After she died from the beating, he tucked her into bed, and waited until his daughter's mother returned from work to take her to the hospital. The doctors found that Leadford had been dead for several hours at the time of her arrival, and discovered several injuries such as broken ribs, bite marks, abdominal bleeding, and facial bruising on her body. By his own account, he had abused Leadford on a daily basis. For her role in enabling her boyfriend's treatment of their daughter, Leadford's mother was convicted of first degree murder and given a life sentence.
84. Corey Hamilton (1992-2007, lethal injection): During the robbery of a restaurant, Hamilton shot and killed 4 employees, 26 year old Sandy Lara, 24 year old Stephen Williams, 19 year old Ted Kindley, and 17 year old Joseph Gooch, and made off with $2,000.
85. Jimmy Bland (~1975-2007, lethal injection): Bland shot his boss, 62 year old Doyle Rains, in the head over an argument regarding a borrowed car and dumped the body in a creek. He was previously convicted of killing a soldier, Raymond Prentice (age unknown), and abducting the man's wife and son at the age of 19. Bland served a 20 out of 60 year sentence, and murdered Rains a year after he was released.
86. Frank Welch (~1987-2008, lethal injection): In 1987, Welch attacked 28 year old Jo Cooper, who was 4 months pregnant with her second child, in her home. She was tied up with leather straps, raped and violated with plastic toys, and strangled to death. Cooper’s body was found laying near her infant son by her husband. Another woman, 32 year old Debra Stevens, was also bound, raped, and strangled to death in her home in a near identical fashion a few months later. Although both murders went unsolved for several years, Welch abducted and raped a woman in 1994, and he received a 45 year sentence for it. His DNA samples was collected and filed after his abduction conviction, and linked to both Cooper and Stevens’ murders in a 1997 test.
87. Terry Short (1995-2008, lethal injection): In an attempt to kill his ex girlfriend, Short blew up her apartment complex with a firebomb. She and her family managed to escape, but the blast killed Ken Yamamoto, a 22 year old Japanese exchange student. Yamamoto had no connections to the targeted ex girlfriend's family beyond him having the misfortune of residing in the same apartment.
88. Jessie Cummings Jr. (1991-2009, lethal injection): Cummings was a polygamist that had married and lived with two wives. Under his orders, Cummings’ wives shot and killed his estranged half sister, 46 year old Judy Mayo, and kidnapped her daughter, 11 year old Melissa. He bound his niece to his bed with handcuffs to be raped, and stabbed her to death.
89. Darwin Brown (1995-2009, lethal injection): While robbing a grocery store with three accomplices (including Billy Alverson and Michael Wilson), Brown tied up the clerk, 30 year old Richard Yost, with handcuffs, and then bludgeoned him death with a metal baseball bat. The killing was caught by security cameras, and the footage was used by the prosecution to secure the convictions of Brown and his accomplices.
90. Donald Gilson (1995-2009, lethal injection): Gilson routinely physically abused his live in girlfriend's 5 children (who were all between the ages of 8 and 12 years old). The youngest, 8 year old Shane Coffman, was beaten to death with a board for defecating on the living room carpet. He and his girlfriend then hid the body by stuffing it in a freezer. The body was kept inside it for 6 months until it was discovered by a sheriff's deputy investigating the family's abuse allegations. Gilson's girlfriend was spared the death penalty with a plea deal, and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole for her part in her son's abuse and murder.
91. Michael DeLozier (1995-2009, lethal injection): While camping with his friends, DeLozier ambushed another pair of campers, 60 year old Orville Bullard and 54 year old Paul Morgan, and shot them to death. They stole Morgan and Bullard's generator, pick up truck, and other camping gear. To cover up their tracks, DeLozier and his friends set their victims' campsite on fire, and severely burned the bodies.
92. Julius Young (1993-2010, lethal injection): For breaking off their relationship, Young beat his ex girlfriend, 20 year old Joyland Morgan and her 6 year old son Kewan, to death with a baseball bat in their apartment.
93. Donald Wackerly II (1996-2010, lethal injection): Wackerly and his wife ambushed and gunned down Pan Sayakhoummane, a 51 year old Laotian immigrant, while he was fishing in the Arkansas River. After he placed Sayakhoummane's body in the man’s own truck, he pushed into a river, and stole his fishing gear. A few months after the murder, Wackerly’s wife turned him in to the police.
94. John Duty (~1970s-2010, lethal injection): Duty was given a life sentence for abducting, raping, and non fatally shooting a female store clerk during a robbery. While incarcerated, he tricked a fellow inmate, 22 year old Curtis Wise Jr. into allowing himself to be tied up as a part of a hostage ruse, and then strangled him to death with shoelaces. At the time of his murder, Wise was serving a conviction for burglary and contributing to the delinquency of minors. Duty's execution caused some controversy for the use of pentobarbital, a drug more commonly utilized by veterinarians to euthanize pets.
95. Billy Alverson (1995-2011, lethal injection): Alverson assisted the above mentioned Darwin Brown and Micheal Wilson in the beating death of Richard Yost while robbing a convenience store.
96. Jeffrey Matthews (1994-2011, lethal injection): Matthews and his accomplice shot and killed his great uncle, 77 year old Otis Short, while robbing the man's home. In the robbery, they stole Short's truck, his .32 calibre pistol, and $500. The pair also slit the throat of Short's wife, but she survived her injuries.
97. Gary Welch (~1993-2011, lethal injection): During a fight over a drug shipment, Welch and his partner stabbed another dealer, 32 year old Robert Hardcastle, to death with broken glass bottles. He was previously convicted of battery with a deadly weapon, and was off on probation at the time of Hardcastle's murder.
98. Timothy Stemple (1996-2012, lethal injection): Stemple conspired with his girlfriend to murder his wife, 30 year old Trisha, for her life insurance policy. With the help of his girlfriend's 16 year old nephew or cousin [sources vary], Stemple beat Trisha with a baseball bat, and rammed her to death with his truck.
99. Michael Selsor (~1975-2012, lethal injection): Selsor and his accomplice went on a crime spree and robbed several convenience stores. During their robberies, the pair shot and killed two clerks, 55 year old Clayton Chandler and 20 year old Ina Morris, and injured two others in shooting and stabbing attacks.
100. Michael Hooper (~1992-2012, lethal injection): Hooper kidnapped his ex girlfriend, 23 year old Cynthia Jarman, and her children, 5 year old Timothy and 3 year old Tonya, from her boyfriend's residence. He shot all three of them dead, and buried the bodies in a rancher's field. According to court documents, Hooper was hyper-violent towards Cynthia in their year long relationship.
101. Garry Allen (1986-2012, lethal injection): Allen shot and killed his fiancee, 24 year old Lawanna Titsworth, during an argument at a day care she worked at. He fought with the responding officers trying to arrest him in an attempt to provoke a "suicide by cop" outcome. Despite the officers' best efforts to avoid harming him, Allen lost his eye from an accidental discharge. Due to claims of him having schizophrenia, Allen's execution was a source of controversy.
102. George Ochoa (~1993-2012, lethal injection): A Southside Locos gang member, Ochoa and another hoodlum shot and killed a couple, 38 year old Francisco Morales and 35 year old Maria Yanez, while burglarizing their home. The murders were witnessed by the couple's 14 year old and 10 year old children and stepchildren, who then phoned the police after the shooters' departure.
103. Steven Thacker (~1980s-2012, lethal injection): Thacker kidnapped 25 year old Laci Hill during a botched robbery of her home, and took her to a remote cabin to be raped. She was then strangled and stabbed to death. He fled to Missouri, fatally stabbed 24 year old Forrest Boyd while carjacking him, and used his car to hide out in Tennessee. After the stolen car broke down, Thacker called a tow truck to pick him up. When the driver, 52 year old Ray Patterson, found that he was using a stolen credit card, Thacker stabbed him to death as well. As a teenager, Thacker committed several acts of auto thefts and burglaries. He also engaged in inappropriate relationships with underaged girls, and was released from a Florida prison after serving time for a bad check conviction months before his murders.
104. James DeRosa (2000-2013, lethal injection): DeRosa and his accomplice tricked a couple, 73 year old Curtis and 70 year old Gloria Plummer, that he worked for on their ranch, into letting them inside their house. After they stabbed the Plummers and slit their throats, DeRosa and his accomplice stole $73 and drove away with their truck.
105. Brian Davis (2001-2013, lethal injection): Davis went searching for his girlfriend and their daughter when he found them missing from their home, and called his girlfriend's mother, 56 year old Josephine Sanford, about their whereabouts. Sanford dropped by the couple's residence after failing to find her daughter and granddaughter. At her arrival, she was raped, beaten, and stabbed to death by Davis. He then left the body in the house, drove off with Sanford’s van, and injured himself in a car accident. As Davis was high while driving, he was arrested for being under the influence. The detaining officers weren’t aware of the murder until Davis’ girlfriend returned to the home later that night, and called 911 after finding her mother’s corpse.
106. Anthony Banks (~1978-2013, lethal injection): In 1978, while robbing a grocery store, Banks shot and killed a clerk, 22 year old David Fremin. A year later, he abducted Sun Travis, a 24 year old South Korean immigrant, from a parking lot. He then sexually assaulted Travis in his car and shot her in the head. Although he was captured and convicted for Fremin's murder, Travis' killing went unsolved until a 1997 DNA test. Banks was originally sentenced to death for Fremin's murder, but it was lifted in favor of a life sentence. He was condemned for a second time after his conviction for Travis' murder.
107. Ronald Lott (~1980s-2013, lethal injection): A sexual predator of elderly women, Lott broke into the homes of 93 year old Zelma Cutler and 83 year old Anna Fowler after cutting off their power. They were tied up with cloth, anally penetrated, beaten, and suffocated to death with pillowcases. The case attracted controversy when another man was erroneously condemned for the murders, and he spent 11 years on death row until a 1997 DNA test linked the murders to Lott. At the time of the discovery, Lott was serving time for two rape convictions.
108. Johnny Black (~1984-2013, lethal injection): Black, two of his brothers, and two other men went looking for a man they feuded with for a fight. While they were crusing on the road, the group encountered a rancher, 54 year old Bill Pogue, and mistook him for their target due to them driving similar vehicles. They forced Poque off the road, pulled him out of his car, and stabbed him a total of 10 times. Pogue's son in law was also dragged out and attacked, but he managed to escape with his life. Black was previously convicted of manslaughter for shooting 49 year old Cecil Martin dead in an argument.
109. Michael Wilson (1995-2014, lethal injection): Wilson was the third participant in the above mentioned beating death of Richard Yost to be executed.
110. Kenneth Hogan (1988-2014, lethal injection): Hogan stabbed 21 year old Lisa Stanley to death while she was babysitting his children. According to autopsy reports, she was stabbed at least 25 times. Stanley had previously accused him of sexual misconduct, and prosecutors believed that she was killed during an argument over the allegations.
111. Clayton Lockett (~1992-2014, lethal injection): Lockett, his cousin, and another accomplice kidnapped 23 year old Bobby Bornt, 18 year old Summer Hair, and Bornt's 9 month son after burglarizing a home. After tying them up with duct tape, they forced their captives to lure a friend, 19 year old Stephanie Neiman, with a phone call. Neiman was also bound and initially survived getting shot multiple times. Out of frustration, Lockett buried her alive, and she succumbed to a combination of suffocation and her injuries. Lockett and his accomplices also gang-raped Hair and beat Bornt, but spared them on the forced condition of their silence. His execution was controversial, as Lockett convulsed for 45 minutes after being injected, and then died from a heart attack. He also had a long criminal history, and was first arrested for burglary as a teenager.
112. Charles Warner (1997-2015, lethal injection): Warner raped his girlfriend's daughter, 11 month old Adriana Waller, and shook her to death. His execution sparked outcry, as the wrong fatal drug was administered by mistake, and Warner complained of "burning pain" as he was being injected. With the botched executions of Lockett and Warner back to back, the state of Oklahoma delayed further executions until 2021.
113. John Grant (~1970s-2021, lethal injection): While serving a 130 year sentence for armed robbery, Grant stabbed a prison cafeteria worker, 58 year old Gay Carter, to death. He had a long criminal history dating back to the ag e of 11, had several previous convictions of theft and armed robbery, and frequently fought with and assaulted other inmates behind bars. Due to reports of "adverse reactions" to the lethal drugs, Grant's execution was scrutinized by a number of national media outlets.
114. Bigler Stouffer II (1985-2021, lethal injection): Stouffer shot and killed his ex girlfriend, 35 year old Linda Reaves, in her boyfriend's home for breaking up with him. Reaves' boyfriend was also seriously injured in the shooting.
115. Donald Grant (2001-2022, lethal injection): During a robbery of a hotel, Grant fatally shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned two employees, 43 year old Felicia Smith and 29 year old Brenda McElyea, and ran off with $1,500. He spent $200 of the stolen on paying for his girlfriend's bail.
116. Gilbert Postelle (~1998-2022, lethal injection): Postelle’s father was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, and they suspected that 57 year old James Anderson, 56 year old Terry Smith, 49 year old Donnie Swindler, and 26 year old Amy Wright were deliberately involved. Out a desire for vengeance, he recruited Postelle, his other son, and another man to kill them. All four victims were fatally gunned down in what was described as a “blitz attack” on their trailer. He was an addict and had several arrests for drug possession and manufacturing dating back to the age of 12.
117. James Coddington (1997-2022, lethal injection): After robbing a grocery store, Coddington went to the home of a friend and co worker, 73 year old Albert Hale, to ask for money. When Hale turned him down, Coddington retaliated by beating him with a claw hammer. Coddington stole $525 and went on to rob 5 more grocery stores. Hale was left alone with his injures for nearly an entire day until he was discovered by his son, and died in the hospital a day later.
118. Benjamin Cole Sr. (2002-2022, lethal injection): Out of anger that her crying interrupted his Nintendo game, Cole beat his daughter from his second wife, 9 month old Brianna, to death. He was previously convicted of abusing his son from a different marriage in California.
119. Richard Fairchild (1996-2023, lethal injection): Fairchild got into a fight with his girlfriend’s 17 year old daughter after making drunken sexual passes at her, and was enraged that she left with a cab driver. He took his anger out on the girl’s younger brother, 3 year old Adam Broomhall, and scalded him with a wall heater. He then repeatedly hit the boy, threw him against a table, and fatally hemorrhaged his head. Bromhall received over 26 blows during the beating.
120. Scott Eizember (2003-2023, lethal injection): Eizember snuck into his ex girlfriend's house to lie in wait for her. However, her roommates, 76 year old A.J. Cantrell and his 70 year old wife Patsy, arrived home earlier then she did. He shot and beat them both to death and then fled the scene.
121. Jemaine Cannon (1995-2023, lethal injection): Cannon was put in prison for assaulting an unidentified woman. He managed to escape and stabbed his girlfriend, 20 year old Sharonda Clark, to death in her apartment.
122. Anthony Sanchez (1996-2023, lethal injection): Sanchez kidnapped 21 year old Jewell Busken from her apartment complex, and then raped and shot her to death. He amassed a following from the anti death penalty movement for claiming that his father was responsible, but such notions were debunked following a 2023 DNA test that concluded Sanchez’s guilt.
123. Phillip Hancock (~1982-2023, lethal injection): In 1982, Hancock shot a drug dealer, 27 year old Charles Warren, dead in a dispute over stolen jewelry and was given a manslaughter conviction for it. He was released after serving a 2 year term. About 17 years later, he shot and killed 58 year old James Lynch III and 37 year old Robert Jett Jr. in a drug house. Despite an eyewitness account describing Lynch and Jett begging for their lives, the case attracted scrutiny when Hancock's attorneys claimed that the shootings were done in self defense.
124. Michael Smith (~2002-2024, lethal injection): A member of the Oak Grove Posse gang, Smith was responsible for two separate fatal shootings on the same day. In one of his murders, he killed Sharath Pulluru, a 24 year old Indian immigrant that worked as a clerk, while robbing a gas station. The other murder occurred when he tried to confront a gang member that he thought was a police informant in his apartment, and gunned down the target’s mother, 40 year old Janet Miller-Moore, when she refused to give away her son’s location. Smith was also given a life sentence for delivering a gun to a shooter that carried out another gang killing.

Panel Show Weekly Schedule: Sun May 12 2024

Date	Show	Episode	Summary	Link
Mon May 13 2024 05:30:00 GMT	After Midnight	Season 1 Episode 55	Johnny Pemberton, Laura Ramoso, Michaela Watkins -	🔗
Mon May 13 2024 10:30:00 GMT	Have You Been Paying Attention?	Season 12 Episode 1	Episode 1 -	🔗
Mon May 13 2024 21:00:00 GMT	Rhod Gilbert's Growing Pains	Series 5 Episode 10	Episode Ten - Tonight's guests are Omid Djalili, Catherine Bohart and The Vivienne.	🔗
Tue May 14 2024 00:00:00 GMT	Game Changer	Season 6 Special	Behind the Scenes of "Beat the Buzzer" - A behind the scenes look at Game Changer's "Beat the Buzzer."	🔗
Tue May 14 2024 05:30:00 GMT	After Midnight	Season 1 Episode 56	Bert Kreischer, Jackie Tohn, Rich Eisen -	🔗
Wed May 15 2024 05:30:00 GMT	After Midnight	Season 1 Episode 57	Ana Gasteyer, Colton Dunn, Jess McKenna -	🔗
Wed May 15 2024 10:30:00 GMT	Gruen	Season 16 - Gruen: Series 16 Episode 1	Episode 1 - Episode 1	🔗
Thu May 16 2024 05:30:00 GMT	After Midnight	Season 1 Episode 58	Bassem Youssef, Jay Jurden, Todd Barry -	🔗
Thu May 16 2024 21:00:00 GMT	Taskmaster	Series 17 Episode 8	The Umbrella Wink - Greg Davies has been presented with a great many bizarre moments during his glorious reign as the Taskmaster, but this episode ups the ante in the strangeness stakes. Why has John Robins attached oars to his arms? Why does Nick Mohammed keep winking at Alex Horne? Why is Sophie Willan making a wolf beatbox? Why is Steve Pemberton skinning a mannequin? And why has Joanne McNally wilfully desecrated Greg's noble statue?	🔗
Fri May 17 2024 00:00:00 GMT	The Good, The Bad And The Unexpected	Series 17 Episode 4	Episode Four - The show where comedians work out the good from the bad, with a few unexpected twists.	🔗
Fri May 17 2024 21:00:00 GMT	Have I Got News for You	Series 67 Episode 7	Episode Seven - Glenn Moore and Jess Phillips will be the panellists in this episode, with the host TBC.	🔗
Fri May 17 2024 21:00:00 GMT	QI	Series U Special	QI VG: Part II - Another selection of the best moments from the recent series. Sandi Toksvig asks questions connected to the letter U, as Alan Davies and the guest panellists try to come up with interesting, point-worthy answers - all the while avoiding the most obvious ones.	🔗
Sat May 18 2024 17:00:00 GMT	Suurmestari	Season 5 Episode 10	Make a superhero - Contestants: Eero Ritala, Joonas Nordman, Pamela Tola, Pirjo Lonka	🔗

I am sharing this as an emotional outlet among other siblings in christ 

My Experience It was January 10, 2011. I’ll never forget that date. It was the day my life changed. Also it was the day of the college football national championship. I was and still am a big college football fan (Go Cal Bears!). Oregon was set to play auburn and i was going to watch it with my neighbor two doors down. I had been doing poorly in school, and yeah was a big pot head, still am, but am much more responsible. Anyways i told myself this semester i was going to actually try in school. I woke up at six am to get ready for my day, something that i never do. I went to put on my shoes and i noticed the laces were missing. Immediately i went to my mom and asked where are my laces? She wouldn’t give me an answer and was just acting so strange. Eventually she left the house and as she was leaving two men were walking up our walkway. I figured they were plumbers considering we had plumbing issues recently. They walked in and before I knew it they walked up to me on either side and slammed me to the ground and handcuffed me. I didn’t react as it was, I didn’t expect it for one, and for two when it began I froze, I didn’t know what to do. Once on the ground I started to squirm, I screamed “Please Help me help me I’m being kidnapped! Please!” They responded No use in screaming no one can hear you. I kept screaming. One of them said go ahead get it over with when your quiet it’ll be over sooner. After probably about ten minutes, I realized no use in fighting, they helped me up and walked me to a small suv and put me in the back and put the seat belt on me. This was the beginning. I remember on the way up to Yoncalla Oregon from Sacramento California we stopped at a burger king. They offered to get me some but food was the last thing on my mind. Looking back I wish I had taken up the offer. I remember being by the ashtray seeing a half smoked cigarette and asking to smoke it, they said I couldn’t. After a long drive we got there they walked me in. The whole way I talked about how I’d get away and run away. Well of course they told the staff at Scott Valley. By the way this is the perfect point to say I was sent to Scott Valley School in Yoncalla, Oregon. One of the many so called trouble teen schools. So being told I had threatened to run away I was put on runaway watch. For about two weeks I was forced to sleep under a light. I obviously didn’t get much sleep. Also I always had two higher phase watchers who would stand on each side of me. They had phases there was like five or six I believe. Most were 2 and 1. There were like 3 phase 3’s and 1 phase 5. There was like 20-30 of us at a time. Anyway where do I start. As I write this, with the emotions and ptsd it comes in full force and yet hazy at the same time. Maybe my head trying to protect me? So I was there seven months, thank god thats it. There were people that had been there years. Some of the people there, my god, I don’t know what to say. From a 12 year old who molested his 1 year old brother and put fish hooks in his carpet so his parents would step on it, to kids that were in there later teens who had used hard drugs, kids that had been molested and acted out as a result, kids that just were wilding out period, a lot of different walks. After I got off of runaway watch I got back on it within two weeks. I was in trouble sitting at the essay table while pe was going on. So one of the punishments was writing essays. But anyway there were two other kids at the table, the twelve year old i mentioned above and the only black kid there on the boys side. I looked at them and said if we worked together we could escape this place. They both just dead stared at me. When it was time to line up, the 12 year old went away first, the other kid looked at me and said were gonna get in trouble, that kid is a snitch and is going to tell on you. He was right. I got put on the “wall” because of that. For two weeks when not eating, sleeping, or using the bathroom, I was staring at a wall were a dot was drawn with a piece of paper on it. I would just let my imagination run wild while this happened thinking about home, friends, family, make believe countries governments politics, anything to keep the mind entertained or semi at peace! There was a green jacket my parents sent up for me that was my grandpa on my mothers side. Grandpa Applegate. It was a super cool green jacket with fake fure on the color, it looked like something you’d wear in the winter in Moscow. They said it had too many pockets and I could hide things in it. So they took it away. They put it in the Pod where all of our extra stuff was stored. Well one pod day where we could exchange stuff, there was a different staff member on duty then the one who said I couldn’t wear it. So i got it out and he didn’t know so i got to wear it for a bit. So when the other staff member got back on shift, he saw the jacket. I was banned from wearing a sweatshirt of any kind for a month. When we had outside pe everyday in Febuary to March I would get so cold. When I would put my hands in my shirt I would get another essay. This is Central Oregon, it gets cold that time of year! So some facts about the living situation, you had three minutes for showers and bathroom. You go over that you get an essay. You get more time the higher phase you get. You ever take a shit in three minutes? If done successfully I commend you. I would go five days without shitting because one of the night workers a guy named Johnny would not keep track of time when I’d get up to ask the restroom in the early morning. Johnny was an angel in a sense. Taking an uninterrupted shit was some of the most bliss I could get. Not trying to be gross but when using the restroom even was so restricted, being able to use the restroom not timed felt like hitting the lotto. When we’d wake up at seven am we only had 1 min to get up and make our bed, timed, if we didn’t make it wed get an essay. I’m naming these things as I remember different events, not necessarily in chronological order, but different events that happened. I had a peach fuzz mustache i was so proud of and long curly hair. They gave me a buzz cut and forced me to shave. My dad sent my grandpa Andrews old electric razor. That’s my dads dad. My biggest hero in my life. His name I got tatted on me at 19. I write this at 29. He died when I was 9. Most of the other kids had razors you could charge, mine needed to be plugged in to work, I didn’t understand that. I had never shaved to begin with, so I thought it was broken. I threw it away and put in a request for a new one. My father told them it was a plug in, but it was already to late so he needed to order me a new one. At a group therapy session thing, yeah we did that every day, and none of the people working there had any degrees that could go to the field they were working in. Anyway my writing is not perfect so as I was saying, at a group therapy thing, Jad one of the main guys working there brought up the razor, he said I knew it wasn’t broken, but I just wanted a new one. You don’t love your grandpa youre just a selfish little bitch. Those words still are ingrained in my mind. I know they are false but god damn they hurt. I cried. As I cried he just continued to tell me how selfish I am and im a bitch a pussy etc. William Frederick Andrews was my grandfathers name, as said I got it tatted on me at 19. He was born 1924, in 2024, my first child, a son, was born, William Frederick Andrews II. I call that a moral victory. Crazy how it worked out to be a 100 year difference. Another time it was 420, I cried because I wanted to smoke and he called me out on it in group therapy. He called me a bitch, a pussy, the usual. Weird things happened there, like one time they did a “fire drill” in the middle of the night, we had to go out into the cold in our underwear for five minutes until it was over. There were girls there but they were in a separate area. When they walked by or vice versa we had to look the other way. One of the many reasons it got shut down is there was a case of a student raping another. Apparently the girl who reported it got hounded in group therapy to the point she recanted. Now I could be wrong, but I think I know the person who did it, only one guy from the male side reached level five to the point where he became staff and could go to the girl side for group therapy. I don’t know for sure but that’s what i assume. At one point they were building a new building and they had us digging the ground around it for construction. Yeah they had us do all the cleaning indoors and out doors. If you were bad you could have your school privileges taken away. I had one kid who was a phase above me copy my work. He got caught. He got demoted, and got repromoted before I left. I never got past phase 1. So phase 1 red shirt. Phase 2 green shirt. Phase 3 Blue shirt. Phase 4 and above whatever you want. Like I said a lot of this is not in order. I am writing this in one go after years of talking about it to my loved ones. Put my thoughts to the pen, or keyboard in this case. So they did this thing were it was like a week, where it was the program or some weird name. They would break you down and “build you up” you would get a demeaning name for a week and then get an empowering name. I got the picture that if you were just a weed smoking low grade getting teen, you wouldn’t be ever seen as getting progress, you had to have “admitting to a bad act” of some sort. I made a story about how I let a girl cut me and drink my blood and how I thought about killing my dad. I know, like why would one lie and say that?!, well I figured if I had said I had done that and then shown to be turned good, it would reward me as changed and out that place. Looking back im like what the fuck. But I just wanted out and I was sure as hell willing to lie my way out. So yeah i went by like blood sucker or something like that for a week, but thats not bad. I remember so well one girl who was adopted and had relations with several boys back where she was from, she got sent there for that, and her name for the week was “Orphan Whore”. Also there were other students who weren’t going through the program that were involved with the process. Elon school or something like that where students yell at other students all sorts of insulting shit The end of it I reclaimed my name or whatever and they had me do like a ballet dance kind of weird thing to show rebirth, not that ballets weird, but in this scenario, yeah. I remember there was a day they said the world was going to end, someday in May 2011 some random wacko said, it made headlines as a joke more than anything, but i remember hearing it and hoping it happens because I wanted out. There was a gym there with rafters. I used to dream of hanging myself from them to get out. I dreamed about a car driving into the school and opening a wall up so we could run away. They used to tell us if we ran away there is bear and cougars out there, if they dont get us the cops will, and theyll put us in juvi just to have us sent back when out. They had these things called group essays. If someone did something and it no one admitted to it wed all have to write an essay about how we could have prevented it. One time a kid wiped shit on all the walls in the bathroom, the kid never admitted to it so we all had to write an essay on how we could have prevented it. I remember one time going to use the bathroom there was semen on the toilet seat, lol teen boys sex drive. I just wiped it off before I sat down. One time late at night I was masterbating in my bed. There was 20 of us sleeping in bunks in the same room, the kid who ended up copying my work i mentioned, saw me making some um, sheet movements, and looked my way giving me a dirty look, i just rolled over pretending like i was scratching, oh snap, almost caught. Not trying to be disgusting, teenage boys, find one that doesn’t masterbate, and i’ll give you some ocean beach front property in Kansas. You got weekly phone calls with your parents, you never dared to say what was going on because they were always listening. Letters same, they read them, so no use in saying something, they’ll just read it and throw it away, later my father asked me why didn’t you tell me what was going on? Well… My gf at the time ended up getting a bf after 6 months of waiting, i don’t blame her. Hey it was teenage love so im not hurt, but at the time it hurt because neither of us willingly ended it. She sent me a bookmark to have up there, it had us kissing on it, they took it from me for it being sexually explicit. They banned me from sitting up in bed and praying. I was atheist from 12 to 27 except for that time, i came back to my faith, praying for my exodus. I’m a christian again now, but only after I found a denomination that was open and affirming because I’m bisexual. Thinking about this, my mind can’t explain the pain, the rain of emotional trauma that falls in my cranium. Many times I’ve turned to cocaine, liquor, and suicidal thoughts because of the pain. It fucked my whole concept of everything in life. My emotions, my understanding of control of my own life, my ability to have healthy relationships, just so much. I still have dreams of being back there and wake up with nightmares, I was sixteen then, i turn 30 this year thirty, i have a beautiful amazing wife, a son who is the biggest blessing in my life, like i got it together now, but I don’t still, obvious by writing this. I remember one time getting to get my glasses prescription. They had to take me to town, the eye doctor, i thought about coming to him for help, but I thought if he works with these people, hell just report me to them, not them to authorities. My grandpa applegate, my moms dad, he died of suicide while I was gone, diagnosed with a terminal cancer he took it into his own hands. I never got to say good bye. When his funeral happened I wasn’t brought home for it, no, I was allowed to “write a letter to be read”. I wrote a letter, and it got read and a lot of family members said how deep it was and mature, I till this day have never watched the funeral video, I can’t. Because I should have been there. When I was on the wall, lookin towards the window could get me in trouble, because it was considered plotting an escape. I read in an english class I know where the caged bird sings, it became my favorite poem because I would watch the birds on the outside of the window and see how free they were. The joy of that. I was a juggalo, they banned me of talking anything icp related. I’d hum icp songs in protest, not like they knew them, also still a juggalo, two scoops of whoop. They day my dad came to get me, well I was peeing, and when I got out I saw him by the front door which was not far from the restroom, I ran up and hugged him saying oh my god dad! I love you! I started crying. He took to the place I always heard the workers there talk about a place called the Sugar Shack, a donut shop. Gosh dang good donuts! Then he took me to some cousins on the coast of oregon. Two days being out I was running on the beaches of the oregon coast. The sand in my feet, the breeze, the feeling of freedom. Scotts Valley School was shut down i think in 2016 for child abuse, i will link articles, but damn that place will forever haunt my head. The bats of the cave of my mind. I am married now with a family. I do my best to be a strong individual and provide, but this place has forever scared me and left me feeling weak. I couldn’t protect myself, so now I want to do everything to protect my family and be there for them. Scotts Valley school, I now live in a place called Scott Valley, the geographic area name, all come full circle? There is probably a lot more I could add to this, but for now, I just wanted to write down the bare minimum. If you have read this, thank you. I have found peace in my mind, heart, and soul as much as I can, and I hope those who have gone through similar ordeals can find some semblance of peace in their existence as well. I thank Jesus for keeping me hopeful in times I wanted to die. God bless you all.
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2015/12/14/lack-food-among-abuse-and-neglect-complaints-boarding-school/77246394/
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2015/12/hunger_vulgar_names_oregon_air.html
https://www.columbian.com/news/2016/jan/07/oregon-threatens-license-of-teen-boarding-school/
https://www.facebook.com/anorexicchild/posts/scotts-valley-boarding-school-in-yoncalla-oregon-scotts-valley-school-starved-th/368786460137878/
https://media.oregonlive.com/politics_impact/otheScotts%20Valley%20Notice%20of%20Intent%20to%20Revoke%20December%2011%202015.pdf
Ps the starved kid in the please eat post is not me

My Experience 

It was January 10, 2011. I’ll never forget that date. It was the day my life changed. Also it was the day of the college football national championship. I was and still am a big college football fan (Go Cal Bears!). Oregon was set to play auburn and i was going to watch it with my neighbor two doors down. I had been doing poorly in school, and yeah was a big pot head, still am, but am much more responsible. Anyways i told myself this semester i was going to actually try in school. I woke up at six am to get ready for my day, something that i never do. I went to put on my shoes and i noticed the laces were missing. Immediately i went to my mom and asked where are my laces? She wouldn’t give me an answer and was just acting so strange. Eventually she left the house and as she was leaving two men were walking up our walkway. I figured they were plumbers considering we had plumbing issues recently. They walked in and before I knew it they walked up to me on either side and slammed me to the ground and handcuffed me. I didn’t react as it was, I didn’t expect it for one, and for two when it began I froze, I didn’t know what to do. Once on the ground I started to squirm, I screamed “Please Help me help me I’m being kidnapped! Please!” They responded No use in screaming no one can hear you. I kept screaming. One of them said go ahead get it over with when your quiet it’ll be over sooner. After probably about ten minutes, I realized no use in fighting, they helped me up and walked me to a small suv and put me in the back and put the seat belt on me. This was the beginning. I remember on the way up to Yoncalla Oregon from Sacramento California we stopped at a burger king. They offered to get me some but food was the last thing on my mind. Looking back I wish I had taken up the offer. I remember being by the ashtray seeing a half smoked cigarette and asking to smoke it, they said I couldn’t. After a long drive we got there they walked me in. The whole way I talked about how I’d get away and run away. Well of course they told the staff at Scott Valley. By the way this is the perfect point to say I was sent to Scott Valley School in Yoncalla, Oregon. One of the many so called trouble teen schools. So being told I had threatened to run away I was put on runaway watch. For about two weeks I was forced to sleep under a light. I obviously didn’t get much sleep. Also I always had two higher phase watchers who would stand on each side of me. They had phases there was like five or six I believe. Most were 2 and 1. There were like 3 phase 3’s and 1 phase 5. There was like 20-30 of us at a time. Anyway where do I start. As I write this, with the emotions and ptsd it comes in full force and yet hazy at the same time. Maybe my head trying to protect me? So I was there seven months, thank god thats it. There were people that had been there years. Some of the people there, my god, I don’t know what to say. From a 12 year old who molested his 1 year old brother and put fish hooks in his carpet so his parents would step on it, to kids that were in there later teens who had used hard drugs, kids that had been molested and acted out as a result, kids that just were wilding out period, a lot of different walks. After I got off of runaway watch I got back on it within two weeks. I was in trouble sitting at the essay table while pe was going on. So one of the punishments was writing essays. But anyway there were two other kids at the table, the twelve year old i mentioned above and the only black kid there on the boys side. I looked at them and said if we worked together we could escape this place. They both just dead stared at me. When it was time to line up, the 12 year old went away first, the other kid looked at me and said were gonna get in trouble, that kid is a snitch and is going to tell on you. He was right. I got put on the “wall” because of that. For two weeks when not eating, sleeping, or using the bathroom, I was staring at a wall were a dot was drawn with a piece of paper on it. I would just let my imagination run wild while this happened thinking about home, friends, family, make believe countries governments politics, anything to keep the mind entertained or semi at peace! There was a green jacket my parents sent up for me that was my grandpa on my mothers side. Grandpa Applegate. It was a super cool green jacket with fake fure on the color, it looked like something you’d wear in the winter in Moscow. They said it had too many pockets and I could hide things in it. So they took it away. They put it in the Pod where all of our extra stuff was stored. Well one pod day where we could exchange stuff, there was a different staff member on duty then the one who said I couldn’t wear it. So i got it out and he didn’t know so i got to wear it for a bit. So when the other staff member got back on shift, he saw the jacket. I was banned from wearing a sweatshirt of any kind for a month. When we had outside pe everyday in Febuary to March I would get so cold. When I would put my hands in my shirt I would get another essay. This is Central Oregon, it gets cold that time of year! So some facts about the living situation, you had three minutes for showers and bathroom. You go over that you get an essay. You get more time the higher phase you get. You ever take a shit in three minutes? If done successfully I commend you. I would go five days without shitting because one of the night workers a guy named Johnny would not keep track of time when I’d get up to ask the restroom in the early morning. Johnny was an angel in a sense. Taking an uninterrupted shit was some of the most bliss I could get. Not trying to be gross but when using the restroom even was so restricted, being able to use the restroom not timed felt like hitting the lotto. When we’d wake up at seven am we only had 1 min to get up and make our bed, timed, if we didn’t make it wed get an essay. I’m naming these things as I remember different events, not necessarily in chronological order, but different events that happened. I had a peach fuzz mustache i was so proud of and long curly hair. They gave me a buzz cut and forced me to shave. My dad sent my grandpa Andrews old electric razor. That’s my dads dad. My biggest hero in my life. His name I got tatted on me at 19. I write this at 29. He died when I was 9. Most of the other kids had razors you could charge, mine needed to be plugged in to work, I didn’t understand that. I had never shaved to begin with, so I thought it was broken. I threw it away and put in a request for a new one. My father told them it was a plug in, but it was already to late so he needed to order me a new one. At a group therapy session thing, yeah we did that every day, and none of the people working there had any degrees that could go to the field they were working in. Anyway my writing is not perfect so as I was saying, at a group therapy thing, Jad one of the main guys working there brought up the razor, he said I knew it wasn’t broken, but I just wanted a new one. You don’t love your grandpa youre just a selfish little bitch. Those words still are ingrained in my mind. I know they are false but god damn they hurt. I cried. As I cried he just continued to tell me how selfish I am and im a bitch a pussy etc. William Frederick Andrews was my grandfathers name, as said I got it tatted on me at 19. He was born 1924, in 2024, my first child, a son, was born, William Frederick Andrews II. I call that a moral victory. Crazy how it worked out to be a 100 year difference. Another time it was 420, I cried because I wanted to smoke and he called me out on it in group therapy. He called me a bitch, a pussy, the usual. Weird things happened there, like one time they did a “fire drill” in the middle of the night, we had to go out into the cold in our underwear for five minutes until it was over. There were girls there but they were in a separate area. When they walked by or vice versa we had to look the other way. One of the many reasons it got shut down is there was a case of a student raping another. Apparently the girl who reported it got hounded in group therapy to the point she recanted. Now I could be wrong, but I think I know the person who did it, only one guy from the male side reached level five to the point where he became staff and could go to the girl side for group therapy. I don’t know for sure but that’s what i assume. At one point they were building a new building and they had us digging the ground around it for construction. Yeah they had us do all the cleaning indoors and out doors. If you were bad you could have your school privileges taken away. I had one kid who was a phase above me copy my work. He got caught. He got demoted, and got repromoted before I left. I never got past phase 1. So phase 1 red shirt. Phase 2 green shirt. Phase 3 Blue shirt. Phase 4 and above whatever you want. Like I said a lot of this is not in order. I am writing this in one go after years of talking about it to my loved ones. Put my thoughts to the pen, or keyboard in this case. So they did this thing were it was like a week, where it was the program or some weird name. They would break you down and “build you up” you would get a demeaning name for a week and then get an empowering name. I got the picture that if you were just a weed smoking low grade getting teen, you wouldn’t be ever seen as getting progress, you had to have “admitting to a bad act” of some sort. I made a story about how I let a girl cut me and drink my blood and how I thought about killing my dad. I know, like why would one lie and say that?!, well I figured if I had said I had done that and then shown to be turned good, it would reward me as changed and out that place. Looking back im like what the fuck. But I just wanted out and I was sure as hell willing to lie my way out. So yeah i went by like blood sucker or something like that for a week, but thats not bad. I remember so well one girl who was adopted and had relations with several boys back where she was from, she got sent there for that, and her name for the week was “Orphan Whore”. Also there were other students who weren’t going through the program that were involved with the process. Elon school or something like that where students yell at other students all sorts of insulting shit The end of it I reclaimed my name or whatever and they had me do like a ballet dance kind of weird thing to show rebirth, not that ballets weird, but in this scenario, yeah. I remember there was a day they said the world was going to end, someday in May 2011 some random wacko said, it made headlines as a joke more than anything, but i remember hearing it and hoping it happens because I wanted out. There was a gym there with rafters. I used to dream of hanging myself from them to get out. I dreamed about a car driving into the school and opening a wall up so we could run away. They used to tell us if we ran away there is bear and cougars out there, if they dont get us the cops will, and theyll put us in juvi just to have us sent back when out. They had these things called group essays. If someone did something and it no one admitted to it wed all have to write an essay about how we could have prevented it. One time a kid wiped shit on all the walls in the bathroom, the kid never admitted to it so we all had to write an essay on how we could have prevented it. I remember one time going to use the bathroom there was semen on the toilet seat, lol teen boys sex drive. I just wiped it off before I sat down. One time late at night I was masterbating in my bed. There was 20 of us sleeping in bunks in the same room, the kid who ended up copying my work i mentioned, saw me making some um, sheet movements, and looked my way giving me a dirty look, i just rolled over pretending like i was scratching, oh snap, almost caught. Not trying to be disgusting, teenage boys, find one that doesn’t masterbate, and i’ll give you some ocean beach front property in Kansas. You got weekly phone calls with your parents, you never dared to say what was going on because they were always listening. Letters same, they read them, so no use in saying something, they’ll just read it and throw it away, later my father asked me why didn’t you tell me what was going on? Well… My gf at the time ended up getting a bf after 6 months of waiting, i don’t blame her. Hey it was teenage love so im not hurt, but at the time it hurt because neither of us willingly ended it. She sent me a bookmark to have up there, it had us kissing on it, they took it from me for it being sexually explicit. They banned me from sitting up in bed and praying. I was atheist from 12 to 27 except for that time, i came back to my faith, praying for my exodus. I’m a christian again now, but only after I found a denomination that was open and affirming because I’m bisexual. Thinking about this, my mind can’t explain the pain, the rain of emotional trauma that falls in my cranium. Many times I’ve turned to cocaine, liquor, and suicidal thoughts because of the pain. It fucked my whole concept of everything in life. My emotions, my understanding of control of my own life, my ability to have healthy relationships, just so much. I still have dreams of being back there and wake up with nightmares, I was sixteen then, i turn 30 this year thirty, i have a beautiful amazing wife, a son who is the biggest blessing in my life, like i got it together now, but I don’t still, obvious by writing this. I remember one time getting to get my glasses prescription. They had to take me to town, the eye doctor, i thought about coming to him for help, but I thought if he works with these people, hell just report me to them, not them to authorities. My grandpa applegate, my moms dad, he died of suicide while I was gone, diagnosed with a terminal cancer he took it into his own hands. I never got to say good bye. When his funeral happened I wasn’t brought home for it, no, I was allowed to “write a letter to be read”. I wrote a letter, and it got read and a lot of family members said how deep it was and mature, I till this day have never watched the funeral video, I can’t. Because I should have been there. When I was on the wall, lookin towards the window could get me in trouble, because it was considered plotting an escape. I read in an english class I know where the caged bird sings, it became my favorite poem because I would watch the birds on the outside of the window and see how free they were. The joy of that. I was a juggalo, they banned me of talking anything icp related. I’d hum icp songs in protest, not like they knew them, also still a juggalo, two scoops of whoop. They day my dad came to get me, well I was peeing, and when I got out I saw him by the front door which was not far from the restroom, I ran up and hugged him saying oh my god dad! I love you! I started crying. He took to the place I always heard the workers there talk about a place called the Sugar Shack, a donut shop. Gosh dang good donuts! Then he took me to some cousins on the coast of oregon. Two days being out I was running on the beaches of the oregon coast. The sand in my feet, the breeze, the feeling of freedom. Scotts Valley School was shut down i think in 2016 for child abuse, i will link articles, but damn that place will forever haunt my head. The bats of the cave of my mind. I am married now with a family. I do my best to be a strong individual and provide, but this place has forever scared me and left me feeling weak. I couldn’t protect myself, so now I want to do everything to protect my family and be there for them. Scotts Valley school, I now live in a place called Scott Valley, the geographic area name, all come full circle? There is probably a lot more I could add to this, but for now, I just wanted to write down the bare minimum. If you have read this, thank you. I have found peace in my mind, heart, and soul as much as I can, and I hope those who have gone through similar ordeals can find some semblance of peace in their existence as well. I thank Jesus for keeping me hopeful in times I wanted to die. God bless you all.
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2015/12/14/lack-food-among-abuse-and-neglect-complaints-boarding-school/77246394/
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2015/12/hunger_vulgar_names_oregon_air.html
https://www.columbian.com/news/2016/jan/07/oregon-threatens-license-of-teen-boarding-school/
https://www.facebook.com/anorexicchild/posts/scotts-valley-boarding-school-in-yoncalla-oregon-scotts-valley-school-starved-th/368786460137878/
https://media.oregonlive.com/politics_impact/otheScotts%20Valley%20Notice%20of%20Intent%20to%20Revoke%20December%2011%202015.pdf
Ps the starved kid in the please eat post is not me

🪞 “It's much easier to get in that it is to get out,” Emilie Autumn used to say. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.1 - Part 4.2
She was not wrong. Welcome back to the Asylum write-up!
In this installment, we're finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of the enmity between EA and her fans.
It's time for war. It's time for blood. It's time... for tea. 🎵

THE PRESENT DAY: “ASK ME ANYTHING (WELL, NOT QUITE)”

​

"Ask me anything" titles are catchy, and that’s why I’m using one. But, obviously, don’t ask me anything, by which I mean that, if you think I wouldn’t answer it, you’re probably right. Ask me something really good. I’d love to answer you. I’d love to have comments on these posts, in fact, so that I could answer questions there regularly and ask you things as well, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so Einstein is supposed to have said, and attempting to create yet another interactive online venue after every previous attempt has ended in heartbreak—forums, facebook groups, social media accounts—it would indeed be insanity to think that this time would be any different. So there are no comments. This too is heartbreaking in the sense that, and you may not realize this, but I desperately want to connect more completely with you—to be able to intelligently converse and share and exchange. We can do that in person, of course, because the wrong people never show up in person. Isn’t that funny… So, perhaps we’ll have to arrange that;). I’ll start you off with an example question I’d want to know if I were you (I can almost guarantee that you do not want to know this). Q. Hey EA, how do you keep your wireless bodypack transmitter secure when you are leaping about in skimpy costumes and doing frequent costume changes? Also, dye your roots. A. Fantastic question, EA, and I just dyed my roots thank you very much. ... (Deleted blog post followed by a year of radio silence, 2022 📝)

Sooo. For the past five-ish years, the vibe in the Asylum has been that of a protracted Christmas dinner where everyone is tensely moving their food around in their plate, bracing themselves for whatever will trigger the screaming match. Wondering what it's going to be this time. Weary old-timers make small talk about the food because no other topic feels safe. Every glance, every forced smile, is fraught with eons-old grudges and unspoken regrets; every nervous pleasantry sounds like a thinly-veiled accusation. Aunt Emilie always insists on hosting, but not-so-secretly hates having people over. Sooner or later, she finds a way to get all of these assholes out of her house. Most of the adult children are daydreaming about going no-contact.
Everyone ready for some dysfunctional family history?
CW for discussion of bullying, online harassment, mental illness stigma.

YE OLDEN DAYS: CUCKOOS OF A FEATHER NEST TOGETHER

In the beginning, it was beautiful.
EA had the excellent instinct to start banking on her online presence📝 long before MySpace was even a thing. She had a website, several online stores, an active LiveJournal and a ProBoards forum right from the turn of the millennium.
In 2004, she attached an official forum to her website; the earliest archive shows 74 registered users. By the time Opheliac came out in 2006, that number had grown tenfold. And it was, by most accounts, a pretty dope place to be! (I should specify that this write-up focuses on the anglophone side of the fandom: there were also thriving fan-run communities in at least German, French, and Spanish. Because EA doesn't speak any of those languages, the lucky bastards were mostly left alone.)
Forum users enjoyed interacting with some of EA's closest IRL friends and associates – and with the mistress of the house herself (user flair: PsychoFiddler), when she occasionally responded to comments under her own posts. But that wasn't even the main appeal for many. For a long time, on top of all EA-related topics, the official forum had very active “Off-Topic” subforums, with lively and friendly conversation on a variety of subjects. (There was even a “Filthy Libertines (18+)” sub for a while, which was closed due to preemptive concerns about minors.) Swear words (not slurs) were allowed and encouraged, and moderation was overall pretty loose beyond basic enforcement of civility. There was a lot of mutual support, creativity, and solid banter going around.

It wasn't just about Emilie on the forums. People could chat about almost anything with near free reign, making connections and lifelong friends. ... This community mattered SO MUCH to people. They felt included, accepted, and understood within the walls of the Asylum. People invested their time and creative energy into keeping the forums a vibrant, active community, and made sure that carried over into the real world. ... I've never seen anything like it in a fan space. I doubt I ever will again. (@Asylum_Oracle - “Fandom History” Instagram highlight 🔍📝, which contains most of the sources for this segment.)

And it did, indeed, carry over into the real world. There were numerous meet-ups – a few organized by EA, many more spontaneous. People who didn't know any other EA fans in real life, or were just excited to add new Plague Rats to their friend group, would regularly connect with other forum users from their area to meet up and hang out before EA shows. “Who else is dressing up??”
In 2008, for instance, EA held an afternoon meet-up at Lincoln Park in Chicago. 📺 The event was free to attend; it featured live acoustic music and a reading from EA's upcoming book, the intriguingly-titled Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
On the appointed day, EA rolled up in a fabulously tousled red wig, bedazzled white corset and steampunk-altered wedding dress. She had brought friends alongs. Sporting blue hair and a pink bustle and corset was her Chicago bestie, the main forum admin. Rocking a guitar and a top hat was EA's sound engineer, the soft-spoken wizard behind the Victoriandustrial sound, who was also a forum mod. The photographer from the original Opheliac cover art was there as well; he was formally introduced by EA and got his own round of applause.

People who would never normally be involved in an artist's fanbase were in EA's world. And not only were they known – they were respected and incredibly active with the fanbase. These people who managed an online message board were willing to engage in real-world meet-ups (with no security??) because of how tight-knit the community they had built was. People turned out to this event. People traveled to go to this event. It was a short reading of a book that hadn't been released yet, and wouldn't be for some time. Why? Because not only was it a chance to meet Emilie and listen to parts of the new book, but it was also a chance to hang out with their friends from the Asylum. ... The fandom really was a family for a lot of people. (@Asylum_Oracle)

“SERIOUSLY, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.”

It all started with The End.
The End Records, that is! Quick refresher: in 2009, after three years or so with Trisol, EA split from the label over allegations that the owner was embezzling money from ticket sales. A few months later, she signed with The End Records. Understandably, EA still wanted to sell the album that had made her famous, and to which she had smartly retained the rights – which meant a brand new, “Deluxe” release of Opheliac. (Remember, from part 3? The one you could pre-order as a bundle with the book? Some projects are just cursed, I guess.)
At that point, Opheliac had been released three times already, as recently as the year before, with only slight variations in format and tracklist. (Yes, that is a theme in this story.) The End Records version would feature new cover art and a handful of new tracks, but overall, it was... you know... the same album.
(The following paragraphs are largely sourced from this excellent recap 🔍📝, which also provides potato screenshots for all quotes.)
One fateful day of August 2009, a user started a thread entitled “Opheliac US edition deluxe re-release??” in the “EA News” subforum. In the thread, some people were kind of balking at the re-do, pondering whether to buy the “new” Opheliac or sit this one out. Some expressed that after three years, they were jonesing for a new album. Others shared what B-sides or dream covers they would have liked to see included on the bonus disc. Just... fans being fans, in a fan discussion space.
And then EA jumped out from behind the curtains.

Fan: Okay. Before I start, I just want you to know that I think it's very good that EA is getting more popularity, and that she can release lots of albums, but - are 5 editions of the same album really needed? You may say now “ah, it's not the same, it has 2 bonus tracks” or whatever, but I mean: it's not new material. Now don't get me wrong. I'm happy for it, maybe I'll even buy it, but I'm just wondering if she shouldn't keep herself busy with other (maybe more important) stuff? * hides * EA: Nobody's forcing you to buy it. Thanks.

Record scratch.

Fan 1: is this Opheliac release version number 4? lol If she's recording NEW tracks, then surely they deserve to be sold by themselves, otherwise people are going to have to buy an album that they may have already bought twice (like me!). But... alas, I am a fool and adore everything this woman does... im buying it lol Fan 2: exactly – if it was just reissuing the last version of Opheliac to tap into new markets that would be fine (...) but if they start adding extra bits of material to albums people already have then the true muffins are going to feel obliged to buy new copies (...) EA: How exactly are you obliged to buy anything? Nobody is forcing you to spend a fucking penny, my dears. I suppose it would make more sense to you to simply not have my records available any more as the old label I just escaped from will no longer be distributing them? Forgive me for adding extra tracks. No obligation necessary.

...Okay, so I'm pretty sure that we can see both sides of the argument here. Fans are annoyed at the idea of spending money on barely-anything-new, because they love EA and buy every single CD she releases. EA is exasperated by fans acting like she's twisting their arm and somehow resenting the inclusion of new material, when she was just ensuring that her album would remain available for purchase and trying to keep things interesting.
But maybe we can also agree that those replies should have been screamed into a pillow rather than typed out on a keyboard.
EA was getting increasingly (and, I'll just say it: disproportionately) sarcastic and defensive in her replies. Enter poor FantineDormouse.
FantineDormouse meant well, I think. Maybe she thought, she's spiraling. Maybe she thought, friends don't let friends go down that road. Granted, FantineDormouse probably should have known better than to phrase it the way she did. Or to assume that EA perceived her as a friend.
Either way, at some point, FantineDormouse jumped in and posted the comment that finally made EA lose it. THE comment which, overnight, ended the honeymoon period of the Asylum, triggering a doomsday domino effect from which the fandom would never truly recover. Are you comfortably seated?

FantineDormouse: Uhm, Emilie, love, I don't mean to sound rude or anything... but maybe you should have a cup of tea and relax a little.

...
* sound of archduke getting shot *

EA: Excuse me? You can throw this onslaught of absolute cruel bullshit at me and those I work with in my own space that I own, and I can't say anything back? How fucking patronizing. Relax? Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? FD: I'm not trying to piss you off even more, Emilie. And trust me, I have to deal with it myself, and as much as I would really love to punch the cunts I have to deal with in the face, I don't. You're pissed off, I get it. You're bipolar, which makes it 10x worse, I get that. I'm just not the person to stand around and do nothing when a fight where I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of regret is going on.

Famous last words. Literally! Immediately after EA delivered her irate closing statement – which includes one of my all-time favorite EA zingers, bolded...

EA: I cannot believe this... You just don't stop, do you? So just because I've shared the personal information with you all that I happen to be bipolar, I can't get pissed off at all of you being perfectly awful in the very space that I pay fuckloads a month to have up (has it ever occurred to you all that I pay dearly for this space you play around in?) Why not just tell me that I must be upset because it's my time of the month? Seriously, get the fuck out of my house. You are unbelievable, and your level of patronization is almost criminal. Don't make me write another book. With muffins like you, who needs enemies? Nothing I say or feel is legitimate, not ever ever ever because I'm bipolar... discredited before I begin... unbelievable...

...FantineDormouse got permabanned.
Jaws dropped. After days of infighting between white knights, detractors, and crossfire negotiators, several mod resignations, and general mayhem surrounding the ban, EA made a post entitled “In Which: I Invite You to Make a Fucking Choice.” 📝 For brevity's sake (cue laugh track), I can't reproduce it in all of its righteous splendor, but it's quite a read. It runs the gamut from fair and articulate points about how mental illness shouldn't be used to discredit someone's legitimate anger... to histrionic commands that “deserters to the cause” should “turn in their weapons” if they can't handle her way of doing things.

To those of you who appear not to understand why said posts, most especially those of the banned party, were offensive to me, I give you the option to either educate yourselves on your own time and in your own space (because please never forget that this is my space that I share with all of you at my own expense, and in which I generally give you all the freedom I would wish for myself), or to resign your posts in the Asylum Army – this is not the place for you, and I humbly suggest that you turn your attention and support towards other artists of a more placid, non-controversial, and less opinionated nature; there are more than enough of them out there, and I’m sure they all have forums of their own.

Some fans did leave. Most stuck around, whiplashed. Soon, the storm quieted down, and business as usual resumed on the forum. But something had been damaged beyond repair. The FantineDormouse fiasco had erected walls and drawn lines in the sand, both around EA and among her fans; its sad specter would haunt every Asylum crisis that spiked up forever after. “Fucking Patronizing Fucking” or “FPF” 🔍 became memetic shorthand in the fandom for overreaction and self-righteousness. 🐀
...And now you understand why, in the following years, some fans were so delicate and diplomatic in voicing their very legitimate complaints about messed-up orders, unsigned books, and puzzling lies... while unofficial platforms like Tumblr flourished with pent-up resentment and snark. 🦠

A NOTE ON HARASSMENT: “MAD GIRL, CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO YOU?”

Wouldn't they stop When you asked them to leave you alone? (“Mad Girl”, 2008 🎵)

Now, let's be clear, because it should not be minimized: EA has also been the target of genuine online harassment. Based on the simple fact that she is a woman with a public presence on the internet, I have zero doubt that EA has received (and perhaps continues to receive) more than her share of truly vile, bigoted, creepy and threatening messages – and, knowing what I know about the darker recesses of the Asylum, a terrifying amount of emotional blackmail and obsessive projection from people who hold her to punitively high standards. I'm also inclined to believe that it started way before she ever did anything that warranted any backlash. And that fucking sucks. It's repulsive and inexcusable, and the people who harass her should crawl into a hole and live among the worms.
Notwithstanding. In my decade-plus of following EA drama, the public comments on EA's own platforms (where people knew she was likely to be reading) have been, for the most part... civil and nuanced, and relatively mindful of the human? Even very confrontational comments (some clearly written from a place of anger and desire to shame) rarely resorted to outright name-calling or cruelty. When abusive or bigoted language did crop up, it was often promptly shut down by other fans as gross and uncalled for. In short: I have, with mine own two eyes, in real time, read some of the comment sections that EA described as cesspools of blind rage and odious attacks, and... I just couldn't see it.
If anything, for a long time, a lot of the angry comments directed at EA during any given controversy read more like break-up letters to an ex-best friend: harsh, curt and targeted in a way that cuts deep.... but also kind of screams how much love you still have for this person, against your better judgement.
Not that it wouldn't mess a person up to get hundred of those in a matter of hours, even if they don't individually qualify as “abusive”.
It's worth noting that prior to becoming semi-famous and regretting it, EA was also (by her own account and among other forms of abuse) a victim of intense childhood bullying. It feels like the two situations are closely connected in her mind when her focus seamlessly transitions from one to the other. 📺 I don't think that tremor in her voice is put on.
Based on her writings, I get the feeling that over the years, EA has developed a very black-and-white view of two monolithic groups of people. There's (an idealized vision of) her “real audience”, well-dressed, well-read, kind-hearted, and Asylum-savvy, who she fully trusts to “get it” – and buy it, and love it, unquestioningly, whatever “it” may be at any given time – because that is the true measure of love and loyalty. These are the people she makes art and merch for, the people she writes heart-emoji-filled newsletters to, and desperately longs to see in person again.
And then there's the lynch mob, those who really don't “get it”: the trolls, the faceless creeps, the basement-dwelling mouthbreathers, the ones who stalk her every move obsessively, waiting for any chance to spam her with vicious abuse and slander and obscenities. The latter only exist online (they are manifested into arbitrary existence by the internet itself, not by anything EA said or did), and there is zero overlap between the two sets of people. That seems to be the official narrative.

The "public eye" isn't an [enviable] place to be, and the closer I've come to it, the more horrified I've been. Because, for starters, who is "the public?" Is "the public" my audience? Hell no. My audience is special. They are not the general public. If they were the general public I would be a lot wealthier. The "public eye" means getting stalked, harassed, viscously judged, and put in danger. If I do things in the future that gain notoriety, I will do them in spite of fame, not because of it. I am out for world domination, but not fame. (Interview for The Moaning Times, 2014 📝)

In real life (well, mostly online, but I mean: on this shared plane of existence), things play out slightly differently. The Venn diagram of “true blue fans” and “people who criticize EA" and "people who know way too much about EA” is a circle. The call is 100% coming from inside the Asylum, and I think EA rationally knows that. But here's the thing: no matter how many shows and meet-and-greets you've dressed up for, how many loving and supportive comments you've left, or how many family heirlooms you once pawned to purchase a copy of the not-for-sale 2003 DJ pressing of Enchant... the instant EA feels attacked, everyone is a saboteur and a bully until proven otherwise, and suspected treason is dealt with on the spot. One strike, you're out. Unfortunately for everyone involved, her threshold for bullying seems to be “any remotely thoughtless opinion from any stranger on the internet”.
It makes for outstanding human-interest entertainment... but it also sounds an awful lot like the unhealthy patterns of a person suffering from all sorts of PTSD. 🔍 So, please bear that in mind as you read through this write-up. It's easy to make EA out to be the sole villain, a paranoid and delusional drama queen, based on her extreme reactions to things that often “weren't that bad”. Anything can, in fact, be “that bad” when you're thrown back into the very worst moments of your existence every time your brain decides that the situation is even remotely similar.
PTSD takes over your rational mind and actively distorts your perception of reality. That can be how a person ends up impulse-reacting to “a few people expressing an unfavorable opinion” as if the entire internet had just ganged up on them with knives. Which makes their audience feel unjustly accused, which makes them hostile, which gives the person actual good reason to feel attacked... and so the cycle of hurt continues.

You know the games I play And the words I say When I want my own way You know the lies I tell When you've gone through hell And I say I can't stay You know how hard it can be To keep believing in me When everything and everyone Becomes my enemy, and when There's nothing more you can do I'm gonna blame it on you – It's not the way I wanna be I only hope that in the end You will see: It's the Opheliac in me... (“Opheliac”, 2006 🎵)

And YES, it is extremely regrettable to have this as a trigger, when you're a public figure and you're bound to receive more negative feedback than the average citizen. “It's what she signed up for”, “it comes with the territory” and all that jazz. I really don't think EA was unaware of that fact when she decided to become a musician, share her personal life, and form an intense parasocial bond with her audience. But maybe she underestimated how hard it would be to process and recover from.
Just because you expect something unpleasant to happen, doesn't mean your psyche will be ready to handle it when it does – or that you'll pick the best and most effective strategy to deal with it.

A MADHOUSE UNDER MARTIAL LAW: MARCHING INTO THE FORUM WARS

There are two sides to every story... except for this one! (“If I Burn”, 2012 🎵)

You may have noted the military imagery in EA's “Make a Fucking Choice” response post – “resign your post in the Asylum Army”! What do psychiatry and the military have in common? They're both institutions of top-down social control. 🔍 EA's mixed metaphor may be a bit clunky, but it did foreshadow the evolution of the Asylum – in terms of aesthetics and power dynamics – in the years that followed the FantineDormouse incident and the release of The Book.
EA's next big release after the Asylum book came in 2012. It was a new album, an outline of the soon-to-be Asylum musical, called Fight Like a Girl (FLAG for short). As the name suggests, the main mood was bellicose. Incidentally, in the interim years, EA's communication style generally became noticeably more combative, incendiary, and (within her own spaces) controlling.📝 You remember those quirky word filters on the forum, that would change “fan” to “muffin” and “bra” to “teacup holder”? They kind of took on a Nineteen-Eighty-Four-burlesque flavor when you realized that one filter automatically changed “Fischkopf” to “Liddell” - and that circumventing the rule to address her totally real last name would get you banned, as would any discussion of her family. (“Wikipedia, random internet sites and heresay are not credible sources.” - Mod reminder of forum rules, 2010.)
Also, you try sustaining a serious, grown-up conversation among concerned fans about how Emilie Autumn should “take ratsponsibility for her mistakes out of ratspect for her muffins”. Thus, the official Asylum forum kept a tight grip on overt criticism of EA's claims and actions.

The Emilie Autumn forum is a dystopian hell. Truth be told, when I decided to leave you could not do anything but gush about Emilie. Otherwise all of her extremist arse kissing fans will be down your throat, ripping you apart in seconds, if you so much as questioned her behaviour. So much for freedom of opinion, let alone the idea of creating a harmonious community for ‘outcasts’. Hahaha. (2014 🐀)

The word filter thing really wasn't a big deal – I'm just pointing it out as one goofy expression of EA's need to control the narrative and rhetoric, which became especially noticeable in those post-book, pre-FLAG years. By that point, EA's fuse had been shortened by near on half a decade of non-stop touring / recording / writing / promoting / adjusting to the pressure and demands of an ever-growing fanbase, while also dealing with a horrorshow of personal turmoil and health issues behind the scenes. In other words: she was done taking any shit, in any form, or humoring anyone's ridiculous feedback regarding anything.
To be fair, it was never her forte to begin with. Will it come as a shock if I tell you that EA doesn't have the greatest track record for successful collaborative work? Let's do a quick-cut montage!
EA's very first corporate sponsor was her mother's “Enchant Clothing & Costume” online store 🔍; she went on to claim that her mother was dead. She sessioned for Billy Corgan, that went super well. 🎵 She liked Courtney Love for a minute, but that didn't work out because she felt that Courtney only valued her for her pee. 📝 (It probably didn't help that in early 2006, while EA was recording her post-break-up-tell-all album about Corgan, C-Love was recording her post-rehab-redemption album with Corgan. 🔍 Either way, EA didn't seem to like Courtney anymore after that. Courtney likes her, though! 📝) The one artist EA has ever approached for a duet (and by approached, I mean she recorded a demo and threw the CD on stage when he played Chicago in 2004) was, of all people, Morrissey. That never came to pass, thank mercy 🔍 – this fandom has suffered enough. In 2005, EA recorded some haunting vocals and violins for a potential collab with the frontman of Attrition. When, three years later, they were used on one track 🎵 of Attrition's All Mine Enemies Whisper, she alleged 📝 that the recordings had been obtained from her under the false pretense of a different project, then hideously altered to sound “out of tune”, and used without her permission. She enlisted her fans to boycott the album and the band, and threatened legal action. Meanwhile, on LiveJournal and Attrition's message boards, band associates were appalled: according to them, EA had been aware of the project's nature from the start... and had been completely unreachable, even through her label, during the months of its development. (Besides, Attrition is a semi-obscure English darkwave band from the 80s, whose micro-distributed albums don't even have their own Wikipedia pages... so I wonder what EA was hoping to get out of that theoretical lawsuit. These people own nothing but vintage gain pedals!) The song “Cold Hard Cash” 🎤 by Angelspit (who contributed a remix to one of her EPs in 2008) may or may not be an EA diss track. 🐀 Back when indie jewelry brand RockLove (which now has licensing deals with Disney, Marvel, and DC) was still someone's bedroom project, their first drop was an EA-inspired collection 🔍, which appears in many early Opheliac photoshoots. The partnership was terminated on bad terms, for unclear reasons; the RockLove owner shared in a statement that EA had “drunk the cool-aid” of Trisol Guy's shady business practices, and that the two of them had been spamming her with “crazed angry message[s]” for days.
Why am I talking about this? Because it was precisely one such ill-fated business partnership that triggered the Great Asylum Secession.
One fine day of spring 2010, the owner of vegan make-up brand Aromaleigh popped onto the Asylum forum to announce that they were cutting ties with EA, with damning receipts of copy-pasted emails (lost to time). Basically, the brand had been sponsoring her for half a decade, and while Aromaleigh had been actively promoting her music and tours, EA hadn't exactly been returning the favor. (Indeed, the extent of EA's sponcon seemed to have been a banner link to their website on her front page, and a single “random drunken endorsement” LiveJournal post that kind of reads like satire📝, from 2005.)
EA responded by banning the owner's account, deleting the thread, and posting this flippant statement a few days later:

Dearest Plague Rats, To be honest, I have no idea of what the hell happened with Aromaleigh, and I don't care to find out – the whole drama is a complete mystery to me, as I've been away for months touring and have not been in contact with anyone. All I know is that I've been promoting the company for ages and have not asked them for anything in years. (...) Please focus on more interesting things. I am. (“Save the Drama...” forum post, March 2010)

Posts questioning her good faith in the conflict were deleted from the forum. Shortly thereafter, citing how prolific and labor-intensive the Asylum forum had grown, EA shut down all non-EA related subforums – which, among many other topics, included a pretty active thread about Aromaleigh products.
So one Plague Rat decided to create a separate, members-only forum 📝, where users could recreate some of the now-defunct off-topic threads... and also freely voice their critical opinions of EA's behavior without fear of backlash from mods or rabid stans. Thus, “The Reform” was born. (Reform [n]: amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.)
For a few weeks, the two-state solution seemed to work fine. And then word spread among forum mods and other diehard fans that there was this horrid other forum, where obsessive haters gathered to spew disgusting lies and vitriol about EA... and soon enough, it was bedlam in the Asylum.
Any explicit mention of the Reform was forbidden on the Asylum forum. Suspicion of participation in the Reform would get you banned. The party line was that The Reform was the enemy 🐀 – even though a number of people were active on both forums, because they liked freedom of expression almost as much as they liked EA. Double agents would lurk on the forum and report back with snark material; sycophants would infiltrate the Reform to identify traitors – much to the amusement of the “haters”, who mocked them and their ilk for “licking EA's pink sparkly boots”. There was no containing the seething, or the sass, among Asylum ranks.
Pretty soon, the insubordination spread to Tumblr. There was the “Ask the Reform” Q&A blog, where questioning fans could interact with “Rebel Rats”, get more details on past drama, and make up their own minds about the people EA called bullies.
And then, there were the “confession blogs”, which published anonymous submissions about EA, positive, negative or neutral, with little censorship. Finally, you didn't even have to pick a throw-away username on a private forum to voice your hottest / strangest / most controversial EA takes. Fans could vent, rant, lament, wonder, shitpost to their heart's content, anonymously. Obviously, given the context of frustration and censorship in the fandom, a lot of the first waves of confessions were EXTREMELY negative.
EA's acolyte Veronica managed to get the first one shut down. If memory serves, she misunderstood the confession blog format, and may have believed that all the posts on “Emilie Autumn Confessions” came from one or a small group of individuals. She was genuinely devastated, and wrote the blog admin to let them know that they were a terrible person who said terrible things. The admin was mortified, apologized profusely and deleted the blog of their own initiative. (Which goes to show that the concept did not come from cruel and malicious anti-fans, as detractors often claimed.)
But a new blog sprung up almost immediately, with a different mod team, and did not surrender. And much like in EA's own book, once the Plague Rats found out that they possessed the gift of speech... well, they really took to it.
Established in 2011 and passed on through generation after generation of mod teams to the present day, Wayward Victorian Confessions would turn out to be the longest-lived institution in the EA fandom. For over a decade now, through all the bleakest nights and dankest debacles of the Asylum, and despite its initial reputation as a troll den, WVC has acted as a kind of neutral ground and vox populi for the active fanbase and anti-fanbase. (The last nominally-active EA fansite to date, She Fights Like a Girl, is actually an offshoot of WVC: one of the old admins created it as a database to answer “frequently asked questions” about EA.)
Wayward Victorian Confessions has now outlived every other EA platform, official and unofficial. Were it not for the continued existence of the “troll den”, what little fan community survives in 2024 would be non-existent, plain and simple. To quote from late 20th century Canadian philosophy: isn't it ironic?

I feel like [WVC] is the only place I feel any of that old Asylum community kind of feeling I felt before EA got so focused on the book. It sucks that it’s so full of unhappiness, and I wish she hadn’t poisoned the sanctuary she claimed to have built. It’s just kind of fallen apart, like a crumbling building. (🐀 2016)

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

Chapter 1 of Finding my Position, written by me.
[Everyone is 18+ and this is fictional]
I signed the dotted line. My full legal name, of course.
I stared up at Angie. She scowled down at me, folding her arms against her chest. Did she know how her boobs pushed back against her arms like that? They looked bigger, firmer - and they were already double D's. God damn those tits. I looked back at her face. What a bitch.
She took the forms, straightened them out and put them in the yellow envelope - A4. Angie licked the glue. I remembered the feeling on my skin, on my tongue, on the tip of my dick. My dick remembered too. I clenched my fists tight.
“Wait” I said - she was going to walk out the door just then, just now.
Angie raised an eyebrow, “What Johnny? It's done.”
“Don't you want a coffee or a beer?” I gestured.
“This is my house, they may as well be my coffee and my beer. You have nothing to offer.” Her lip curled.
I felt my chest puff, I stood, hands on the kitchen island across from her, “Fuck you, you don't pay for shit, can't you stand to be around one minute?”
She put the folder on the side and came round to point an acrylic nail at my chest, “I can't stand to be around you another SECOND you fucking idiot. Do you know what you just signed?”
I smirked, “My get out of jail free card.”
“You FUCKING asshole; careless, SELFISH BASTARD. IF ANYONE'S FREE IT'S ME, I DON'T HAVE TO LOOK AT YOUR UGLY PATHETIC FACE ONE MORE SECOND! I'M FREE FROM YOUR STUPID DICKHEAD BULLSHIT, FREE TO DO WHATEVER I WANT, WHOEVER I WANT FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!”
My dick and the adrenaline lead the way. I grabbed her by the side of the head, pushing her backwards to bump into the island, bending over till my tongue reached her throat. She pushed my chest to stop me, but seemed to be squeezing my pecs over my shirt instead.
One of my hands left to trail down her body - her fragile neck, the sides of her full boobs, her upper back. I laced my fingers under the fabric of her skirt and gripped her pantie- clad ass. She was already kissing back, but to this she moaned against herself and her arms wrapped around my back.
A finger traced her asshole and then further on her pussy opening. I grinned in her mouth - she was already slick through the underwear. I rubbed circles, teasing. She moaned again and again.
I thought about our past sex, having her mouth, pussy and ass. I thought about doggy and cowgirl and even missionary crossed my mind with bliss. That time in her parents bed, that time while I was driving, that time in a pool. My dick throbbed with nostalgia of all these memories.
Simply rubbing her over her panties while I reminisced wasn't what Angie wanted. She grabbed my ears and stopped kissing me, her face pissed. She lowered my head to her cleavage, holding my head tight. I pulled back and moved my slimy fingers so I could take off her top, and my practised hands undid the bra in one motion.
I returned to smothering myself between her tits. One hand held her back steady, the other found the front zip of her skirt. Angie undid my belt buckle and shoved my jeans and boxers down together. I bit and kissed and licked her soft flesh, giving love to the last part of her that deserved it. She held my scalp tight and ground her skirt onto my naked dick, it was fully hard and I was slick from my own sweat and precum, I like to imagine they stain the material forever. She'll never wash out the juice of my cock. Through the fabric I can still place her mound and that crevice shape, I can grind along her clit and pussy like a god fearing teen boy - protected by the fabric.
I graze a nipple with my teeth, and with force attempt to swallow her whole left boob. The flesh squishes into my mouth - I get a good amount. I wish I could choke on it, feel the distinct booby skin blocking my airway. I suck and suck and she moans my name, pleading something. In my mind I've already won before either of us have finished, here she is begging for it, she wants me so badly, her voice so whiny. It occurs to me that right now, SHE is the pathetic one.
Both of my hands go down over her skirt and under the fabric, I cup her asscheeks fully, tight with my fingers. I can’t tell if I’m spreading them, or just squeezing for all she’s worth. My hands brush her panties. I can tell, they’re those basic white pants from Target, cheap bitch. I tear them open and she swears at me - it sounds like another desperate moan though. I tear the side too, and throw the crap cotton on the ground - I look over her tits at the drenched fabric. God, remind me to put that in my pocket before she kicks me out. I spread her cheeks again, and suck on the other boob. My dick feels rubbed raw from the slightly rough skirt fabric. I groan, it’s overstimulating but if I stop pistoning my hips I’ll die. I look her in the eye, she sneers at me.
It crosses my mind that if I don’t taste her pussy now - one last time, I’ll never do it again. But my dick craves her entrance so badly, there’s a desperation in my balls, if I don’t fuck her right now my head will explode. But this is the last time. Fuck. Fuck this bitch. My internal monologue falls away, all I can think about, the only thought. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Hands on her ass and thighs, I push her further onto the island, her arm steadies but knocks a glass onto the floor - dumb bitch, dumb horny bitch - her hole is lined up, her skirt rolled up by one hand. I don’t have to guess, my dick knows her pussyhole more than I know how to breathe, I push forward and sheath in one long, wet motion.
I stay there for a second, I almost lost it, almost came in one stroke. God she’d fucking kill me, it’d be funny but tragic.
Fuck.
The overwhelm passes. One hand on her belly, one hand in her crack, my hips could do this motion dead, I roll in and out of her wet cunt. My ballsack slaps my hand, I move it, it slaps her asshole. God grant me another dick, and a third, let me fuck her everywhere all at once.
Fuuckk.
I’m so focused on my own pleasure, I didn’t notice her panting my name. Dumb bitch.
I look down at her face. Fuck. This part of me, my dick sawing her pussyhole open, keeping it shaped to me, fuck I love her. I love her face, her hair, her lips that shake and beg for me, her eyes that water, her neck, her beautiful beautiful tits bouncy with each thrust, dancing for me. I love the width of her hips, and the squishy fat that’s accumulated over the decade, that I can grip like a pillow while I plough her. I love her waist - the very top of her bikini line that’s less tanned than the rest, the last pure strip of her skintone. I love her thighs that are wrapped around my own hips, keeping me tight, trapped in her, I couldn’t pull out if I wanted to, my dick might as well be stuck here forever. I love her cute little feet, toes tensed. She must be close, just from me pounding her. Fucking whore.
While I thrust, her liquid, the physical form of her desire and desperation for my dick leaks out, down her ass. I growl, grin, and my thick thumb rubs the slick in. I push it into my thumb’s knuckle.
I remember our fifth anniversary. We were so in love, she loved and wanted me so much, she’d do anything. Since college she’d known how badly I wanted her ass, or any ass, and seen how much anal I watched. It’d been a hard no for years, I didn’t even ask anymore. But there, at that cheap swiss chateau on a single bed, I removed her lace panties with my teeth to be greeted by the base of her buttplug. She smiled at me with so much love, and bit her lip. God. I fucked her for two minutes, came, and stayed inside her tight asshole. I kissed her, and cuddled. But my boner wasn’t fading, and I grunted with the feeling coming back. The lube had dried, but we didn’t need it, my cum lubed her better than anything, and I fucked her in so many positions that by the end, when I drizzled a pathetic stream, one or two bursts, my dick went soft and raw. I passed out with not a sperm left in my balls.
That was the first and last time she ever let me in the backdoor, and even now she scowled at me for my only thumb. Warning me that her ass will never let my dick in again.
I scowled back, and picked up the pace. My balls swung steady, not betraying my fury to lust.
I fucked her like she deserved, like a whore. “Tell me you’re a whore.” I growled.
“Fuck you”, she spat, breathy, sweaty.
“Tell me you’re a cumdump slut depressed for my dick, tell me you want it, tell me you’re my bitch.” I was close again. My thighs were beating her ass, I moved my left hand to grasp her tit hard, pulling the nipple like a cow. My thumb stayed tight.
“Fuck you, you bastard. Hey, you’re gonna come already? Limp bastard.”
Godddd fuck.
“HEY! Look at me, look at my face!”, my eyes strayed from my pumping dick killing her pussy, past her - fuckkkk - past her boobs, to her spiteful, red face.
“Do not cum yet you bastard! Do not! Don’t you fucking dare cum yet, can’t you do one thing right? Don’t you fucking dare cum Johnny!”
My balls heard different. My balls heard, “Cum for me Johnny.” “Please, Johnny fuck me, cum for me!” “Johhhnny please please please.” “Cum on my tits Johnny please.” “Johnny I love you, cum for me Johnny.”
Both hands moved to hold her hips tight, she kept yelling but I couldn’t hear,
I thrust hard, and held her hips tight to mine,
“FUCKKKKK ANGIE ANGIE Angie. Angie Fuckk. God fuck.” I came in her hard, my vision blacked out, my dick spurt, I felt the cum of years exit my balls, cum from college, from our first apartment, the engagement, the wedding, cum from the two week honeymoon, cum from years and years of birthdays and christmas and new years and valentines and -
My face was in her cleavage again. There was a faint spasm around my dick, I looked up. Angie was riding the end of her own climax. I had cum so hard I hadn’t noticed her orgasm on my dick, from my cum. It’s been years since we came together.
I sucked a bit of titty in my mouth. She looked down on me, panting. My soft dick flopped out, cum splashed and dripped on the floor - both of ours.
I stood up. I looked at her dripping pussy, and at the mess on the floor of what’s her house now. I couldn’t help but grin as I pulled up my shorts and jeans, buckling the belt.
“Johhny-”
I got my coat. It was a nice denim jacket with a soft lining, no sleeves. My pal Ricky had put some neat patches on. I’d gotten it recently, as a sign I was coming back to myself. My dick was still a little wet in my boxers, but it’s fine, I’d shower at home.
At home.
I walked out the door, Angie was still on the counter. I glanced at the living room, the kitchen, and the door to the dining room. The stairwell. Her house now, or at least her house when the fucking deadbeat lawyers did their jobs.
I left my home, didn’t lock the door, I didn’t have the key anymore, not the right one.
She was on birth control, one of those long-term ones, but goddamn imagine that my cum was so potent, so angry, so ready that she got pregnant with my kid from that. Imagine after she’s just kicked me out, my little bastard grows inside her. God give my cum the strength to tell her to fuck herself. God I pray she never finds a dick that fits like mine, god give her pencil dicks and erectile dysfunction.

While Johnny Cage was once a famous action movie star, now washed up, Sonya Blade would be a successful military soldier in the Special Forces as a lieutenant.
But when she gets recruited by Liu Kang, joining the OIA, she would get demoted by her superiors Jax & Kenshi to restart her training & education as a rookie and get extra training from Li Mei, who teaches Sonya her old Umgadi ways, along with Kitana's help.
This way, we'd be able to bring back the old acrobatic Sonya Blade we've known and loved, without needing technology putting her down. Sonya would learn some magic in the best of her ability.

This may be a long one but did anyone else absolutely love Impact's insane stories? Broken Hardy's not withstanding, Rosemary became one of my favorite wrestling characters ever over the last five years or so because she was directly involved and responsible for so much of it and the way they weaved her crazy storylines together was both hilarious and amazing. I thought for anyone who missed this I'd break down some of it because it's so out there and I really wish there was a compilation of it because it was really fun to follow and the talent involved went all in on it. For those who watched all this, let me know if I miss anything.
They created an entire undead realm between the living and dead where demons and dark forces preside. Su Yung, another demon character tormented, possessed, and trapped talent. James Mitchell was keeper of the undead realm and in control of Su Yung. Allie and Rosemary formed a friendship which took a dark turn for Allie and she was eventually killed by Su Yung. At the same time it was revealed that James Mitchell was actually working under the only man that would make sense in all this, Taskmaster Kevin Sullivan. Havoc later ends up stabbing James Mitchell to death who we see meeting Abyss in the wrestling afterlife.
Then Rosemary is depressed after Allie's death leading to Taya becoming friends with her and Rosemary eventually decides she wants to be more powerful and the only way for a demon to become more powerful is by feeding on virgin blood. Taya's manager, Johnny Bravo just happens to be a virgin so she plans to seduce him by whatever it takes so traps him with half the roster in a reality show called Wrestlehouse.
She succeeds in seducing him and he proposes which leads to their wedding. Rosemary needs a minister of the dead for a demon to be able to marry a human so she finds a way to resurrect James Mitchell from the dead which depletes her powers making Johnny's virgin blood even more necessary for her.
At the wedding, the lights go out and Johnny Bravo is shot and everyone is a suspect. They have wrestlers court proceedings to try and determine who the shooter is. It is revealed the shooter was Larry D however it is then later discovered that Taya Valkarie was the mastermind due to being against Rosemary and Johnny getting married and she was sent to jail. Asked what will happen to her, Tommy Dreamer stated in one of my favorite lines, if she's lucky she'll go to Jacksonville State Prison but for what she did, I think they're gonna send her to Stanford Maximum Penitentiary for two years, maybe an option for three and that will change a person's soul forever.
Ten years ago I would have absolutely hated this stuff because I took wrestling being reality based too seriously. Somewhere along the way, possibly Lucha Underground's influence, I started looking at wrestling differently and ended up embracing this type of storytelling and just having fun with it. Impact was at a point where they weren't booking for ratings, they were just doing whatever they wanted and we got this and I'm all for it because it's different and it's fun and they contrast it with an excellent in ring product.

This post is part of a series of reviews. To see them all, click here.
Historical information found on Shannon O'Sullivan's Doctor Who website (relevant page here and the TARDIS Wiki (relevant page here)). Primary/secondary source material can be found in the source sections of O'Sullivan's website, and rarely as inline citations on the TARDIS Wiki.

Serial Information

• Episodes: Season 18, Episodes 21-24
• Airdates: 31st January - 21st February 1981
• Doctor: 4th
• Companions: Adric, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton)
• Other Notable Characters: The Decayed Master (Geoffrey Beevers), The Tremas Master (Anthony Ainley, Episode 4)
• Writer: Johnny Byrne
• Director: John Black
• Producer: John Nathan-Turner
• Script Editor: Christopher H. Bidmead

Review

I thought you'd appreciate it if I gave you the impression I knew what was happening. We could panic of course, but where would that get us? – The Doctor, to Adric
In many ways, Season 18 is the slow transition away from the 4th Doctor era to the 5th. Full Circle introduced Adric. We've just seen the departure of two core characters from the Graham Williams era in Romana and K-9. And now, it's time to introduce two new characters: Nyssa, and the Tremas Master.
Funny thing is, that wasn't the original plan. For the Master, Producer John Nathan-Turner wanted to bring back an older element of the show around this time, to soften the blow of Tom Baker leaving at the end of the season. He initially contacted Elizabeth Sladen (who played Sarah Jane Smith), then Louise Jameson (who played Leela) to see if they'd be interested in returning. Sladen rejected the idea immediately. Jameson was a bit more interested, but ultimately turned Nathan-Turner down when he said he'd want her to stick around through to the end of Season 19, which she didn't want to do. Eventually, instead of bringing back a companion, JNT decided to bring back the Master instead, having him stand in for a character named Mogen as the main villain of the piece, and using a plot element called "The Source" to revitalize him. As for Nyssa, she was originally meant to be a one-off, but JNT liked the character and suggested she stick around. As such, writer Johnny Byrne retained the intellectual property rights to her character.
And so Keeper of Traken, originally meant to be a completely standard story, turns into a really important one. The introduction of a new companion (even though, like with Adric in Full Circle you wouldn't guess that Nyssa would be sticking around based on the ending of the story), and a brand new incarnation of The Master ensures this. And fortunately, it's a pretty good one.
I do have some complaints though.
For one thing, Keeper goes in really hard on a good versus evil dichotomy. I'm not talking about the way that most Doctor Who stories do. The Daleks are evil, but they are not physical manifestations of capital "E" Evil. But in Keeper of Traken we are introduced to the world of Traken by having its ruler, the titular Keeper explain that anything evil that arrives on Traken is essentially frozen in place. The main of villain of the story, known as the Melkur for most of its runtime before The Reveal, was apparently so evil that he can't evil move his head a little, and only manages to to affect his surroundings by creating a few extra weeds. And that's…fine. Not really my thing, but not something I'd complain about this early in a review if not for the fact that Keeper of Traken is also going for a sort of Garden of Eden idea. The Melkur is equivalent to the serpent in that story, who tricks a gullible woman into sin.
And those two ideas don't work great together. Kassia is presented to us, at least at first, as genuinely good woman, pillar of her society and one of the Consuls that form the core of Traken's government. She knows that Melkur is capital "E" Evil, the first lines we hear from her are an acknowledgment of this. So…how is she tricked exactly? Well, I'll get into it more when I talk about her character specifically, but suffice to say, it doesn't quite work.
I'm also not entirely sure what Traken exactly is. It's presented as a utopian society, with that utopia apparently maintained by people "being nice to each other", as the Doctor describes it. That effect seems to be somehow maintained by the Keeper, that the Keeper somehow is responsible for the general air of goodness that is maintained on the planet. It seems that as the Keeper weakens, more selfish and self-centered motivations start entering the picture. That would serve an explanation for money-focused Foster (essentially a guardsman) Neman as well as the general buffoonery of the ruling Council. It does come with the unfortunate implication of the Source and the Keeper acting as sort of behavior controlling elements, a bit like the Conscience in The Keys of Marinus. I'm not sure that that was the intention though (I think it's the most reasonable read of the story, but I'm not wholly convinced), so I'm not going to take this line down to the point that I did with Marinus, but if that is the case then there's all sort of concerns that should be raised.
But the other side of this is that the idea of Traken as a paradise planet irrevocably changed by the events of the story is a compelling one. The Eden narrative has its problems but the idea that once paradise is corrupted it can never be returned is still an interesting one. I have my problems with how Kassia is written, but I will say that the rest of the cast does pretty well. The slowly built mystery around the Melkur is effective. The Adric/Doctor duo is…weirdly enjoyable. And, while it took a bit, I found myself really getting into the drama of the story by around part three. The fight over the Source and who gets to be Keeper definitely draws you in.
Getting into that cast then, I think I actually want to start with that Adric/Doctor duo. It's worth noting that Matthew Waterhouse and Tom Baker never got along in any capacity. But you wouldn't know it from this story. In fact I'd argue this is the most energized we've seen Baker all season, possibly because, while he might have missed her, not having his turbulent relationship with Lalla Ward constantly a factor presumably made Baker more focused on the task at hand. I'm still not too keen on Adric, and while I think he's over-hated as a companion, I'll never truly grow to like the character. But I think he's at his best here where focus is put on him acting as the Doctor's pupil. Adric is a character who always thinks he knows best, but by this point has developed a healthy respect for the Doctor's greater experience, meaning that he generally listens to the Doctor. It helps keep the character's less enjoyable aspects in check. Sure, he can still be a bit arrogant, but there's a greater authority he'll concede to, while still being able to call the Doctor out on his occasional nonsense.
The Doctor meanwhile is in kind of an odd place this story. There's the return of the Master to deal with of course (more on that later) which, while it takes until episode 4 for him to discover, really energizes the Doctor at that point. And his attempts to mentor Adric really play into the 4th Doctor's strengths, since he's been busy the last 5 seasons mentoring Leela and Romana in their own ways. More than that though he feels surprisingly at home on Traken. I don't know what it is, considering typically he's the one overthrowing false utopias, he seems to be able to navigate this crumbling but still very real utopia, until the utopia crumbles to the point that it's no longer a real utopia. As the story progresses we get one of my favorite late era 4th Doctor scenes where he confronts Tremas. Tremas is holding back the plans to Traken's power source, called the Source, back because only Consuls are supposed to see them, a duty which he is sworn to. The Doctor's response is absolutely scathing: "Well, of course you swore an oath! Now you have to choose: your personal honor against the safety of all of Traken." It's a perfect line, which really underlines the kind of character the Doctor is.
And we meet a new companion this story too. Or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that we meet a new character who will become a companion next story. As mentioned up above Nyssa was not originally meant to be a companion and you can kind of tell that in this script she's not really being set up for any long term involvement with the show. The basics of her character in this story are that she's incredibly loyal to her father Tremas and that she's quite intelligent. She does mount a one-woman (or I guess one-girl, she is a teenager after all) rescue operation of the Doctor and Tremas while they're in prison, showing some pretty impressive levels of bravery and willingness to pull the trigger on a laser pistol (set to stun, I assume). If she had been a one-off character she would have been a memorable one, but not one that would have necessarily gotten the kind of love that, say, Duggan in City of Death. It's a solid enough debut for a new character, but you wouldn't know Nyssa was set to be a new companion from how this story ends as, like Adric in Full Circle there's not indication at the end of the story that she's ever going to travel with the Doctor.
And as for characters aligned with the Doctor and Adric, Tremas really gets a lot more attention than his daughter. Played by Anthony Ainley who will, as a result from this story go on to play the next incarnation of the Master, Tremas is one of the Council who at the beginning of the story is set to become the next Keeper of Traken. It is definitely odd that for almost this entire story Ainley is playing a pure as pure can be good guy. I'm so used to him as the Master that it almost reads as insincere to me, but I know for a fact that's just because I'm used to him as the Master. His performance is actually quite strong, and he has good chemistry with Tom Baker, as the two are working together for much of the story. His character is defined by nobility and a strict moral code, which ultimately does get challenged somewhat in that scene with the Doctor I mentioned up above, but does lead to him being one of the more admirable one-off characters we've had on this show in quite some time. Which may have been intentional, as showing the Master taking over the body of such an admirable man heightens the tragedy.
Oh, and his wife is very important in this story. As I kind of implied up above Kassia is definitely this story's weak link as her character just never quite makes sense. While her love for her husband is her primary motivation, they share very few scenes together after their wedding scene that opens up the story. And honestly we never get the sense that Tremas is really in love with her, which leaves that element of the story feeling very artificial. Instead the focus is on her role as the person whose role is to look after the "Melkur" frozen in the garden. We see her beginning that job as an adolescent and continuing on well into adulthood as she presumably rose in the ranks to become a Consul. The idea, I think, is that she's supposed to develop an affection for the Melkur even though intellectually she knows it's evil through this process. While I absolutely believe that could happen, as I mentioned up above I don't quite buy that it explains her actions through the story.
See, Kassia really doesn't want Tremas to become Keeper as it will take him away from her. It's a selfish thought that the Melkur exploits to get her to do his bidding. And…again that's the problem. Kassia goes way too far in this. At some point a character that is supposed to be a good person should come to understand that framing two random strangers (ie the Doctor and Adric) for murder is taking things a bit far, especially since Traken appears to have a rarely used death penalty for these occasions (of course it does, Doctor Who is pretty much incapable of not using the phrase "the penalty is death" in every other story around this time). Eventually the Melkur gives Kassia a collar that allows him to control her actions from that point on, but I would say it happens way too late in the story. Having the Melkur manipulate Kassia into putting on the collar is probably as far as this should have gone. Instead Kassia reads a lot more evil than I think she was intended. The idea seems always to have been that she was mislead but still basically good, but this doesn't really vibe with how things actually play out.
Of course, the Melkur is a master manipulator. Emphasis on the "master". Yes the "Melkur" is actually the Master, the odd "Melkur" body just being the Master's disguised TARDIS (which later also appears as a grandfather clock). Geoffrey Beevers plays the Decayed Master originally played by Peter Pratt in The Deadly Assassin. I have no idea why Pratt wasn't brought back. While I do think Beevers does a slightly better job with the part, Pratt was by no means bad, and I've never heard anything suggesting that John Nathan-Turner or anyone else working on the show disliked Pratt's performance, or that Nathan-Turner tried to get Pratt but couldn't for some reason. JNT, or course, wanted to bring in a new incarnation of the Master, which was part of the point of this story, but he clearly cared enough about maintaining some continuity that he wanted to bring in the same Master, to the point that they brought back the same costume used in Assassin.
That was supposed to include the mask Pratt had worn, but the rubber mask was in an unusable state, so instead makeup was used. And that's probably for the best. The makeup looks so much more part of Beevers' face than the mask was for Pratt. Beevers is still very much stuck working under a lot of very difficult to act through makeup, but there's at least a little more facial flexibility here. The Master's whole plan in this story is to fix all this though. He wants access to the source to rejuvenate himself. While his ultimate goal of controlling the Source doesn't go to plan he seems to have accumulated enough residual Source energy to take control of Tremas' body…and de-age it at least 20 years. Thus begins Anthony Ainley's tenure as the Master on Doctor Who which will last until the literal final episode of the Classic era.
Which is possibly why this story feels like the true start of the John Nathan-Turner era. Early JNT stories still had Romana and K-9, character that just kind of feel out of place in JNT's version of the show. That's not to say that those stories were bad, but rather that the JNT era really couldn't start in earnest until they were gone. Like the actual start of the JNT era, I would argue that this starts that era off well. Keeper of Traken is highly flawed. The story's ideas feel in conflict with each other, and Kassia, who serves as essentially the secondary villain of the story, doesn't really work. But there's a compelling plot here, and the rest of the secondary cast works quite well. Season 18 continues on a strong run of stories.
Score: 7/10

Stray Observations

• Writer Johnny Byrne was actually Producer John Nathan-Turner's first choice to be Script Editor. The two had worked together when Nathan-Turner was the production unit manager on All Creatures Great and Small – Byrne was a regular writer on that show. Byrne, however, didn't want to move from Norfolk to London to take the job.
• The story was based in part on the idea of "millennialism". That is idea, most commonly associated with Zoroastrianism, that every thousand years there is some sort of great cataclysm.
• The story was originally set in a medieval-esque society, split between the scientific "Greys" and the religious "Blacks". The Source was part of this plot. This was changed by Script Editor Christopher H. Bidmead, to avoid similarities with Meglos and its science vs. religion themes earlier in the season.
• Johnny Byrne went on holiday while the story was being rewritten, so Script Editor Christopher H. Bidmead did a lot of the heavy lifting in that department. The name Tremas and the Master's clock TARDIS were apparently Bidmead's idea, though JNT was apparently responsible for the creation of the character of Tremas, and Bidmead wasn't a fan.
• It was during the filming of this story that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward's engagement was announced to the public. You'd think that would mean their relationship was going well. You'd be wrong. Tom Baker was in a bad mood during the filming of this story, partially because the relationship wasn't going well, partially because he still missed having Ward on set. It boggles belief that either of these people ever thought it was at all a good idea to get married.
• The story was nearly upended due to a strike by the BBC's electricians. Fortunately only a day of filming was lost, and JNT was able to act quickly to replace it with a day during the filming of Logopolis, so a repeat of the Shada situation was avoided.
• In episode 2 Adric pronounces Nyssa's name as "Neessa".
• In episode 2, the Melkur refers to the Doctor as "Time Lord". Of course later we learn that he is actually the Master. Isn't it a bit odd for the Master to call the Doctor "Time Lord"?
• The Master is revealed towards the end of episode 3, by turning around in his chair to reveal his face, followed by the "Melkur" disappearing with a TARDIS noise. I do wonder how many people realized that this was the Master. The Deadly Assassin was roughly four and a half years prior and the Master hadn't been seen since. It's easy to imagine, with repeats still pretty rare and other means of rewatching nonexistent, that many, if not most, viewers would have forgotten about the Master's new appearance in the interim.
• The Master refers to his TARDIS as his "new ship" implying it's a different one from the one we saw him piloting in the 3rd Doctor era, and possibly different from the one in Deadly Assassin. Certainly, the interior is quite different.

Next Time: We learn that the universe should have ended a long time ago, but has been saved by people chanting numbers.

"He always said he wasn’t a star player, but that he played with the stars." -- Josephine Andrews, Ivy's widow

"Poison" Ivy Andrews book-ended his career with the Yankees, starting in 1931 with Babe Ruth and Earle Combs and ending in 1938 with Joe DiMaggio and Joe Gordon. In between he played for three other teams and with a total of 16 Hall of Famers!
Ivy Paul Andrews -- Poison was the nickname, Ivy was his given name, and who knows why his parents gave him that first name -- was born May 6, 1907, in the coal mining city of Dora, Alabama. His father was a coal miner, as well as at least three of his brothers.
Andrews played football, basketball, and baseball for his high school team, and the Daily Mountain Eagle called him "possibly, the greatest athlete ever produced in Walker County."
After high school, he played semi-pro baseball and was signed by a minor league team in Mobile. There, he was spotted by scout Eddie Herr, who convinced the Yankees to spend $25,000 to purchase his contract.
Andrews spent the next four years in the minors, having some good years -- he went 9-1 for Albany in 10 games in 1929 -- but also some injuries that derailed his progress. In 1931, at the age of 24, he was pitching for the Jersey City Skeeters in the International League. The manager there was former major league pitcher and Previously Forgotten Yankee Bob Shawkey, who helped turn several promising prospects into bona fide pitchers, including Red Ruffing, Lefty Gomez, Johnny Allen, and another previously Forgotten Yankee, Spud Chandler.
Ivy wasn't great for the Skeeters, 7-12 with a 4.29 ERA, but the Yankees were struggling and needed a pitcher. More impressive than his minor league numbers was a start Andrews made in an exhibition game against the Reds in Cincinnati, throwing a shutout. Five days later, Andrews was in Detroit for his major league debut against one of the worst teams in the league, the Detroit Tigers. It wasn't pretty -- he gave up four runs, three earned, on 10 hits in six innings -- and he left with the Yankees trailing 4-1. But the Yankees rallied with a three-run 8th inning to tie it up and it went to extra innings and finally won it after 16 innings. Babe Ruth homered and Tony Lazzeri went 4-for-8 with an RBI.
He stayed with the Yankees the rest of the year as a swingman, three starts and four relief appearances, and finished his debut season 2-0 with a 4.19 ERA (96 ERA+) and a 1.282 WHIP in 34.1 innings.
The following year he started the season in the same role, getting one start and three relief appearances. In 24.2 innings, he had a 1.82 ERA and 1.176 WHIP, but the Yankees -- already eyeing October after a 32-14 start -- wanted a more veteran pitcher. On June 5, the rookie was traded to the Red Sox for Danny MacFayden. Though only two years older, MacFayden was in his seventh season in the majors and had won 16 games the previous year.
MacFayden was no doubt happy to be out of last place Boston, but it wasn't a bad move for Ivy, either, as he finally earned a spot in the rotation. He went 8-6 with a 3.81 ERA (117 ERA+) in 141.2 innings with the Red Sox.
The following year Andrews went 7-13 with the Red Sox, then was traded to the St. Louis Browns for Carl Reynolds, a former Washington Senator who in 1932 was in one of the most famous brawls of the era against the Yankees' Bill Dickey.
Ivy had three pretty good years for a bad Browns team, going 24-30 with a 4.29 ERA (117 ERA+). In 1937, the Cleveland Indians acquired him from the Browns, along with former Yankee Lyn Lary and former Yankee prospect Moose Solters, for two future Yankees in Oral Hildebrand and Bill Knickerbocker, plus Joe Vosmik, who the Yankees nearly had a deal for in 1935.
Ivy made his Indians debut at home in Cleveland on April 24, 1937... and got a rude welcome! The Sporting News reported on April 29, 1937, that Andrews was booed by the home fans because he took the mound in relief of teenage sensation Bob Feller, who had been pulled from the game after six innings.

The boy's withdrawal, as already recorded, brought good-natured Andrews to the box and he went to work in a mild chorus of cat-calls, not directed at him, of course, but at the sudden disappearance of Feller.

Andrews won the crowd over with three scoreless innings of relief. The fans didn't know until later that Feller, who struck out 11 but also gave up four runs on four hits and six walks, was pulled due to elbow pain; he'd make just three more appearances over the first half, but after the All-Star Break made 17 starts and posted a 3.29 ERA.
On May 8, Andrews threw a four-hit shutout against the Yankees, out-dueling Lefty Gomez. It was, believe it or not, the first time we had been shut out that season, and we wouldn't be shut out again until the end of September.
The 1937 Yankees were indeed a powerhouse, with a double-digit lead on 1st place in the middle of August. But trouble was brewing as Spud Chandler's chronic arm troubles were flaring up again.
Five years earlier the Yankees had a big lead and were thinking of adding a veteran pitcher for October when they traded the rookie Andrews to the Red Sox. Now, in 1937, the situation was reversed. On August 14, we bought the contract of the veteran Andrews from Cleveland for $7,500 and put him back into his swingman role, and over the final six weeks of the season he went 3-2 with a 3.12 ERA (145 ERA+) in five starts and six relief appearances. In the postseason that year, he was used as a reliever in the Yankees' only loss of the series, a 7-3 defeat in Game 4. (Previously forgotten Yankee Bump Hadley was bombed for five runs on six hits in the first two innings, and Andrews pitched the next six innings, giving up two runs on six hits and four walks.) It would be the only postseason appearance of his career.
The following year, despite battling a leg injury that caused him to miss about a month, Andrews posted a 3.00 ERA (153 ERA+) and 1.417 WHIP in 48.0 innings mostly in relief. On September 28, 1938, with the Yankees coasting into the World Series with a 9.5 game lead, Ivy got his only start of the season in a game against the Washington Nationals. He gave up four runs (two earned) on seven hits and a walk, taking the 4-1 loss. No one knew at the time, but it was the 31-year-old's final major league appearance. He was on the World Series roster but not needed as the Yankees used only four pitchers in a sweep of the Chicago Cubs.
In 1939, Andrews opened the year with the Yankees' top minor league team, the Newark Bears. Used as swingman, he went 7-5 with a 3.13 ERA in eight starts and 27 relief appearances. One of Ivy's teammates on that team was prospect Marius Russo, a previously forgotten Yankee. When the Yankees needed another starter in June, it wasn't Andrews but the 24-year-old Russo -- who had a 1.97 ERA in 10 starts for the Bears -- who got the call.
After the season, Andrews was traded to the Pacific Coast League in exchange for a prospect with the intriguing name of Rugger Ardizoia. He'd play in the minors for a few more seasons, with some good games here and there -- he threw back-to-back shutouts in 1944, crediting it to a "horseshoe and two rabbit feet" -- but never got back to the Show. In 1945, almost 38 years old, he hoped for one more season in the minors with the Mobile Bears but didn't make the team out of spring training and retired.
Poison Ivy remained active as a high school football and basketball coach and referee, and in the late 1940s was the pitching coach for his hometown Birmingham Barons. But his primary occupation was as a carpenter and contractor. His wife, Josephine -- he married her in 1934 -- became a history teacher at his alma mater, Dora High School. Andrews died in 1970 at the age of 63.
In 1975, the Andrews Award was established at Dora High School in his memory. It recognizes a senior with good grades who played two or more sports, as selected by the coaches, principal, and seniors. In 1979, a baseball field at Dora Municipal Park was named in his honor.
In 1985, Andrews was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. As Andrews was being considered for posthumous induction, Joe DiMaggio and Bill Dickey wrote letters of support:

"I remember Paul as a quiet, soft spoken affable man. But, inside that quiet reserve, he had a fiery competitive spirit that made him such a valuable asset to the Yankees that it was easy for him to fit into our teams of that era." -- Joe DiMaggio
"Paul made himself a fine pitcher with hard work and determination. He was aggressive, a gentleman and an asset to every club he was with." -- Bill Dickey

A Little More Poison?

• Though fans knew him as Poison Ivy, teammates usually called him Paul, or, from his last name, Andy. Newspapers sometimes listed his name as Ivy Paul Andrews and sometimes as Paul Ivy Andrews, but Ivy really was his first name. Here's his tombstone.
  
• In the history of major league baseball, there have been just three players with the nickname Poison: Andrews and Hall of Fame brothers Paul and Lloyd Waner. Paul, though only 5'8" and 153 pounds, was known as "Big Poison" -- not because of his size, but because he was the big brother. Lloyd, 5'9" and 150 pounds, was three years younger and therefore "Little Poison."
  
• "Big Poison" actually ended his career in pinstripes. Waived by the Dodgers on September 1, 1944, Waner was signed that same day by the Yankees, who were just two games out of first place. He was told if the Yankees won the pennant, he would be on the World Series roster as a veteran pinch hitter... but the Yankees went .500 over the rest of the season and finished six games out. Waner, 1-for-7 with two walks that month, returned in 1945 but saw just one plate appearance the first month. (He drew a walk.) The Yankees released the 42-year-old outfielder on May 3 and he retired to become a batting coach.
  
• Prior to the 1937 World Series, one sportswriter gave this memorable scouting report on Andrews: “Paul dotes on slow stuff and freak deliveries. He has greater variety of stuff than any pitcher in baseball. Throws screwballs, sinkers, sailors, knucklers, has a snapping curve, a humming fast ball, control and savvy. He drives batters crazy with a meat ball they can’t carve." Contemporary sportswriters often said Andrews had the best curveball in the major leagues.
  
• Yankee manager Joe McCarthy, quoted in the New York World-Telegram in 1937 on how Andrews's soft stuff contrasted nicely to the rest of his pitching staff: “[Lefty] Gomez, [Red] Ruffing and [Monte] Pearson have the old fast one. Then along comes 'Andy'. They’ll break their backs.”
  
• Oddly enough, there are references to the screwball as Ivy's "new pitch" in both 1935 and in 1937.
  
• Andrews had a variety of unusual ailments that plagued him over his career. In 1929, Andrews was said to have "a severe cold in his right shoulder," a recurring problem that would plague him for the next two seasons. He missed time in 1932 with "lumbago and influenza" -- what we'd call today lower back pain and the flu. In 1933, The Sporting News reported that Andrews's start to spring training was delayed "as a result of playing peacemaker in a dog fight in Sarasota" -- apparently he'd been bitten on the hand! He also had a leg injury that caused him to miss games in 1938.
  
• The scout who signed Andrews, Eddie Herr, also discovered Carl Hubbell, Babe Herman, Earl Whitehill, and Heinie Manush. Among his many Yankee finds were Bill Dickey, Walter "Jumbo" Brown, George Pipgras, and previously forgotten Yankee Sammy Byrd.
  
• As noted above, the 1937 Yankees were shut out just twice all season. The first time was May 8 against Andrews, pitching for the Cleveland Indians. The second time was in game two of a doubleheader on September 29 called after seven innings. Ironically, Andrews started and lost that game for the Yankees!
  
• In four seasons with the Yankees, Andrews wore four different numbers: #22, #34, #28, and #24. The first is currently worn by Juan Soto, and prior to that, Harrison Bader. #34 was worn last year by Michael King, and before him, Justin Wilson. #28 is now worn by Austin Wells and prior to that Josh Donaldson, but we all remember it being worn by Joe Girardi from 2010 to 2017 -- he'd worn #27 his first two years as Yankee manager, then switched after we won our 27th World Series in 2009! And #24, worn from 1996 to 2005 by Tino Martinez and from 2006 to 2013 by Robinson Cano, is now worn by Alex Verdugo.
  
• Andrews's brother, Kenneth, was a minor league pitcher for several years in the 1930s. The Red Sox had him in camp with Ivy in 1933, but he never made the majors.
  
• There have been a number of Alabama-born Yankees, including Ben Chapman, Oscar Gamble, David Robertson, Joe Sewell, Virgil Trucks, Dixie Walker, and previously forgotten Yankee Andy Phillips.
  
• The Yankees were 32-14 and comfortably in first place when Andrews was traded to the Red Sox on June 5, 1932 -- and kept up that blistering pace after, going 75-33 the rest of the way. After they won the World Series that year, his former teammates generously voted to give him a cut of the World Series share. But Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis ruled that players traded within the same league couldn't get any sort of reward or compensation from their former team. I guess the thinking was a player traded to a non-contender might throw games to help his ex-teammates win the pennant if he knew he might personally benefit from it.
  
• The pitcher the Yankees got in return for Andrews in 1932, Danny MacFayden, was a 27-year-old righthander and one of the rare major leaguers to wear glasses while playing. His dour personality and chronic case of Resting Bitch Face earned him the nicknames "Deacon Danny" and "Dismal Danny" from the press. Though you couldn't blame him for looking unhappy in Boston after going 1-10 over the first two months of the season, despite a respectable 3.86 FIP. (The Red Sox were the worst team in baseball that year, losing 111 games.) He found more success in New York, going 7-5 with a 3.93 ERA (104 ERA+) in 121.1 innings over the rest of the 1932 season. He lasted another year and a half with the Yankees, earning an uninspiring -1.3 bWAR, before being released and claimed by the Boston Braves.
  
• Prior to the 1937 World Series, Andrews said he'd never seen a World Series game before. A newspaper reported Andrews "says if he can’t play in the big games, he doesn’t want to watch them."
  
• In 1938, Ivy's 3.00 ERA led the league... sort of. Under the rules of the time, you only needed 45 innings to qualify for the pitching leaderboard, so Andrews's 3.00 in 48.0 IP gave him the ERA crown. The title has since been retroactively awarded to Boston's Lefty Grove, who had a 3.08 ERA in 163.2 innings. (The current rule is one inning for every team game, or 162.0 in a 162-game season.)
  
• The prospect the Yankees got from the Hollywood Stars for Andrews after the 1939 season -- 20-year-old Rinaldo "Rugger" Ardizoia -- was born in Oleggio, Italy, and came to America as a two-year-old toddler. The family moved to San Francisco, where as a 6-year-old Rinaldo got the nickname "Rugger" because, as he explained it, he was "a rugged little bugger." Just as it seemed Ardizoia was on the cusp of making the Yankees, World War II came along and in 1942 he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He served in the Pacific theater for three years, returning in 1946. Though he'd pitch in the minors for another five seasons, he had just one appearance in the major leagues, pitching in two innings for the Yankees in 1947.
  
• Ever since I started working on this post, I've had this song in my head -- now you do, too!
  

In four seasons with the Yankees, Ivy Andrews was 8-6 with a 3.12 ERA (140 ERA+) and 1.327 WHIP in 156.0 innings. That ERA+ reveals just how good he was, albeit in limited usage, while in pinstripes. Overall, in eight seasons, he was 50-59 with a 4.14 ERA (114 ERA+).

The Holly J we all know & love is finally HERE!! Oh I just remember how these next two seasons are hers I missed my Queenie so bad 🥰🥰🥰 yall can keep that season 8 girl idk.. THIS IS NEW YORK HOLLY J BITCH!
“Hi I’m Jenna, a boyfriend stealer from backstabber high, want to be friends???” Yeah if I was Alli I’d be like hell no too?? 😩😭 and true to the fake ass intro, she took Clare man too. Sure tf did 😩 like that’s crazy asf to me.
Clare was biting people necks at one point this season like girlllll don’t piss me offffff 😭😭 that filler episode was so funny, younger Clare was a hoot girl I tell ya 🤣
Sav & Anya don’t piss me off yall are simply incompatible. Sweet people tho, and they genuinely love each other which is why it’s hard…
I do however think Anya & Peter probably would’ve been perfect. Their attachment styles are similar. Anya wants someone who’s gonna put her first and support her and be their entire world, that’s Peter hands down. He’s not the best person but he is straight up the best boyfriend out of any of these degrassi men. The only thing is Peter likes a girl with passion, someone who’s about something & Anya really isn’t that so idk but it’s just an observation and a nice thought.
Fiona is definitely troubled pls get this girl some help stat 😭
TOO BAD YOU CAN’T CURE BITCH is genuinely insane like omg?? Imagine being in that hallway just walking by and you see that outburst directly following a gay bashing and yall still wanna vote Riley degrassi’s most eligible bachelor… 😐 next!
Alli is my girl I love her downnnnn.
Tbh I think Johnny & Alli were always doomed to fail, the age difference was too big a gap at this point in their lives. I think they could’ve survived the pics thing, Johnny felt like the most vulnerable state he could be in, (without his reputation as a bad boy / people shield) was being plastered on the walls by someone he trusted more than anyone, he reacted the way he reacted (MASSIVE RED FLAG) but Alli didn’t really seem too deterred, but the moment she found out he had something?! Baby it was a WRAP. It should’ve been a wrap at the pic thing but she wasn’t gonna dump that man over that, which to me showed he was never really gonna respect her because of the difference in the way they saw the situation. Their values were just too different and they’re in vastly different stages in their lives and both very immature for different reasons. Just weren’t ready and the entire situation was just a huge mess.
Declan actually doesn’t have any social skills, if you ever listen to what he’s saying and not to his vibe or like just looking into his eyes or whatever makes him so dreamy to everyone there, they would think he’s a class A weirdo. It’s like that meme where a hot guy says something insane and it’s flirting but an ugly guy gives a basic compliment and it’s harassment. Still he’s like… ok I guess.
Peter keeps losing all his gfs to other continents id be SICK!!!
The way chantay and Danny get together is so jsjdhdjdjd ?!??!?!?!
Also unpopular opinion I think the amount of screentime/the role chantay plays is fine for her personality, they gave her character big storylines constantly yall would hate her. She’s intrusive, nosy, talks too much, does not mind her own business, which makes for a GREAT side character because it’s funny in small doses and makes for good drama. Imagine this character on a much larger and consistent scale yall never would’ve left that poor girl alone. That being said I love Chantay she’s so messy 🤣💀, also Danny was being weird as hell about her kissing PETER in the play, it’s not something to break up over but he definitely would’ve owed me a full free date, since he don’t like paying so much.
Poor KC im glad he reported Creep Carson before it escalated even more, it actually hurt watching that because this absolute pervert got to know KC, got close to him, made him trust him, rely on him, and then started to prey… just sick and twisted and calculated and the fact that he was like “I never touched you” at the end to try and discredit shows that it was like always the plan, it was just so insidious and sick like Jesus….
Spinner & Emma uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh that’s not my business…. I think they’ll be happy, I love you was a little much, I probably would’ve continued the marriage and had the wedding because I live my life for the plot but they uhhh that was a bit much. If they like it I love it tho, not mad at the pairing at all.
This is all I have to say, this season was actually mad inconsequential. A filler season akin to season 1 in a way but a little more interesting. It’s almost like
1-7 era 8 was a bridge to smoothly transition to the next era 9-13 era 14 a bridge season Next Class era
Idk if I just cracked a code or if someone’s already pointed that out but JSJDJDJ
Ranks :
3 > 2 > 8 > 9 > 6 > 5 > 4 > 7 > 1

Edit: Trying to post this again since my second column keeps disapearing.
We're a couple looking to experience Chicago through

• Art, museums, and live music,
• Neighborhood explorations on foot,
• Bookstores,
• Bakeries and cafes for short sweet bites,
• and local tasty food like: pizza, burgers, hotdogs, diners, bars, etc.

(A big thanks to all the redditors who posted in Chicago and AskChicago. They gave us a bunch of ideas before posting this.)
Below is our current plan. The hotel is inside the loop but wanting to travel outside of it. What would you change?

Wed	Details
1230	Arrive and Quick Lunch in Loop: ????
1330	Work
1500	walk Millennium Park
1800	Dinner in Fulton Market: Au Cheval No Reservations. Expect to wait
Thur
1500	The Art Institute of Chicago
1900	Dinner in River North or West Loop??? Lou Malnati's Pizzeria, Xoco, Billy Goat Tavern, etc…
2100	Millennium Park at night
Fri
900	Brown Line Kimball to Western stop
938	Walk around Lincoln Sq
1045	Walk/bus to Andersonville for antique shops, neighborhood, and Unchartered Books
1200	Lunch in Uptown Birrieria Zaragoza (Mexican), Demera (Etheopian)
1330	Walk around Lincoln Park
	N Lincoln Ave, N Halsted St, W Armitage Ave
1800	Dinner Pequod's Pizza or at Kingston Mines
1900	Kingston Mines Blues thu/fri/sat starts at 1930 onwards.
Sat
900	Green Line Harlem/Lake to Oak Park
940	Oak Park (Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, Earnest Hemingway houses). 20min bus to
1230	Lunch Johnnie’s Beef on W North Ave. 50min bus (consider cab) to
1400	Walk 606 west to east. 45min walk to
1445	Wicker Park (Milwaukee & W North Ave)?
1600	walk NW on Milwaukee (bookstores, cafe for a break?)
1900	Dinner. ???? walk 30min to
2100	Rosa’s Lounge “Vino Louden Band” Arrive prior to 9 for guaranteed seating
Sun
900	Field Museum
1200	Lunch in South Loop: Lou Malnati's Pizzeria - South Loop
1300	MOCP (Museum of Contemporary Photography)
1900	Hancock observation deck for sunset
2015	dinner Purple Pig, Billy Goat Tavern

Wednesday May1

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Brooklyn Paramount	Belle & Sebastian + The Weather Station	8pm, SOLD OUT
Baby's All Right	Porridge Radio (solo)	10pm, $15

Thursday May 2

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Baby's All Right	Lime Garden + Starcleaner Reunion	7pm, $20
Our Wicked Lady	Show Brain Punk Island benefit feat. T!LT + Abbie Roper + Caitlin Starr + Crusasis	8pm, $15
Purgatory	Puppy Angst + Trinket + Bummer Camp + Dogs on Shady Lane	8pm, $15
TV EYE	The Lemon Twigs + Thee Smashing Times	8pm, SOLD OUT
Union Pool	A Benefit for UNRWA feat. Sidney Gish + My Wonderful Boyfriend + Pearjuice	8pm, SOLD OUT

Friday May 3

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Washington Square Park	Vincent Blackshadow + Mary Shelley + Maya Lucia + Caitlin Starr	3pm, FREE
Baby's All Right	PACKS + Why Bonnie	7:30m, $20
Bowery Ballroom	SINKANE + Midnight Magic	9pm, $35
The Broadway	Pamphlets Take Your Place album release show + Colatura + Sharkswimmer	8pm, $15
Brooklyn Paramount	The Decemberists + Ratboys	8pm, $61
Brooklyn Steel	Panchiko + Weatherday	8pm, $35
Music Hall of Williamsburg	SlothrustOf Course You Do 10 yr anniversary + Weakened Friends	9pm, $25
Our Wicked Lady	Rights of Spring Day 1/3 feat. Bitterjoyride + Eevie Echoes (& The Locations) + High Waisted + Abbie Roper + Wetsuit + Avatareden + T@b Grrrl + Iceblynk	7pm, $25
Union Pool	Chastity trilogy tour - 3 records in 66.6 minutes	8pm, $15

Saturday May 4

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
18th Ward Brewing	NCF presents Summer Saturdays feat. The Answers In Between + The Overhead Bins + yael s. copeland + Rat Palace + The Fictionals	2pm, FREE
Brooklyn Steel	Ra Ra Riot + Low Hum	8pm, SOLD OUT
Forest Hills Stadium	SESSANTA: A 60th Birthday Celebration for Maynard James Keenan feat. Primus + Puscifer + A Perfect Circle	6pm, $70
Knitting Factory @ Baker Falls	Maxband record release show + Landowner + Docents	8:30pm, $15
Our Wicked Lady	Rights of Spring Day 1/3 feat. Gocco + The Canvas Collective + SORRYNOTSORRY + Debbie Dopamine + Wifeknife + The Martyr + Sex Fixx + Barnaby + Kalen	7pm, $25
The Rooftop at Pier 17	Social Distortion + Bad Religion	SOLD OUT?
Purgatory	Spite Fuxxx + NihilocerosDark Ice Balloons record release show + Two-Man Giant Squid + Brook Pridemore	7:30pm, $15
Racket	Feeble Little Horse + The Dallas Cowboys	8:30pm, $25
Terminal 5	Bayside + Finch + Armor for Sleep	8pm, $35

Sunday May 5

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Our Wicked Lady	Rights of Spring Day 2/3 feat. Gold Casio + Femcel + Shadow Monster + Frida Kill + Julia Pierce + DethRok + The Rizzos + Catty + Proprietary Energy Faggots + Just Fabulous + Majorette	4pm, $25
Arlene's Grocery	Bands do BK presents The Music Matters Day 1/3 feat. TVOD + Tetchy + A Very Special Episode + Tilden + Big Girl	7pm, $15
Brooklyn Paramount	Sum 41 + The Interrupters + Joey Valence & Brae	7pm, $70
Roulette	Long Play Festival feat. Deerhoof + The Eileen Myles, Steve Gunn and Ryan Sawyer Trio	8:30pm, SOLD OUT
Trans-Pecos	Plight + In Blue + Glimmer + The Twin	7:30pm, $15

Monday May 6

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Arlene's Grocery	Bands do BK presents The Music Matters Day 2/3 feat. Mary Shelley + Two-Man Giant Squid + partygirl + Nevva + O. Wake	7pm, $15
Brooklyn Paramount	Sum 41 + The Interrupters + Joey Valence & Brae	7pm, $70

Tuesday May 7

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Arlene's Grocery	Bands do BK presents The Music Matters Day 3/3 feat. SKORTS + Night Spins + Go Home + Jelly Kelly + Avatareden	7pm, $15
Baby's All Right	Babehoven + Knifeplay	7pm, $20
The Bowery Electric	Geoff Rickly of Thursday + Common Sage + Sharkswimmer	8pm, $15
Hart Bar	Harla + Grasping Straws + watergh0st + Rest Ashore	8pm, $15
Purgatory	Marblemouth + Options + Theadoore	8:30pm, $15
Warsaw	Chastity Belt	pm, $20

Wednesday May 8

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Baby's All Right	Rosie Tucker + Bloomsday	7pm, $20
The Rooftop at Pier 17	Social Distortion + Bad Religion	6pm, SOLD OUT
Warsaw	Fontaines D.C.	8pm, SOLD OUT

Thursday May 9

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
ALPHAVILLE	The Wants residency + S.C.A.B. + QIRL	8:30pm, $15
Bowery Ballroom	L'Rain + Fred Moten + Brandon Lopez	9pm, $25
(le) poisson rouge	Cloud Nothings + Hurry + Home Blitz	8:30pm, $30
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Sweet Pill + Equipment + Taking Meds	8pm, $17
Trans-Pecos	Trauma Ray + Kraus + Mx Lonely + Bedridden	7:30pm, $12

Friday May 10

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Bar Freda	Waterfall Strainer + Endearments + Phantom Signals + Moon Sand Land	8:30pm, $15
Brooklyn Paramount	Say Anything Is A Real Boy 20th Anniversary Tour + AJJ + Greet Death	7:30pm, SOLD OUT
Gold Sounds	Upper Wilds + Hallelujah the Hills + KATIEE	8pm, $15
(le) poisson rouge	Combo Chimbita + Pachyman + Los Èsplifs	7pm, $30
Main Drag	Mahogany vinyl release show + My Favorite + Honeycrush + Minaxi	8pm, $15
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Cheekface + yungatita	8pm, $22
Our Wicked Lady	Fish House + Stello + Laura Galindo + Big Honey	8pm, $15
Purgatory	Trace Mountains + J.R. Bohannon	8pm, $15
Saint Vitus	TWIABP&IANLATD + CTTBOTO + Burr + Common Sage	8pm, $25
Trans-Pecos	Woolbright + Cold Wrecks + Figure Eight + Anxioushum	7:30pm, $15
Webster Hall	Psychedelic Porn Crumpets + Spoon Benders	7:30pm, $25

Saturday May 11

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Brooklyn Paramount	Hot Water Music 30th anniversary tour + Quicksand + Modern Life is War + The Ergs + Be Well	6pm, $40
Brooklyn Steel	Holly Humberstone + Carol Ades	8pm, $30
Mercury Lounge	McKinley Dixon	7pm, $17
Mercury Lounge	Alex Orange Drink + Tall Juan + John Gallagher Jr. + Greensleeves	9:30pm, $18
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Bad Bad Hats + PRONOUN + OK Cowgirl	8pm, $18

Sunday May 12

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Brooklyn Steel	Holly Humberstone + Carol Ades	8pm, $30

Monday May 13

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Carnegie Hall	The Music of Crosby, Stills & Nash feat. Todd Rundgren + Grace Potter + Taylor Meier of Caamp + Iron and Wine + Rickie Lee Jones + Shawn Colvin + Real Estate et al	8pm, $60+
TV EYE	King Bug + Big Spirit + Shadow Monster	8pm, $15

Tuesday May 14

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Forest Hills Stadium	Neil Young & Crazy Horse	7:30pm, SOLD OUT
Union Pool	Climax LandersZenith No Effects record release show + Esther's Lab + Penny + Danny Christmas	8pm, $15

Wednesday May 15

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Bowery Ballroom	Helmet + Cro-Mags	8pm, $30
Brooklyn Steel	Amen Dunes + Billy Woods	8pm, $30
Forest Hills Stadium	Neil Young & Crazy Horse	7:30pm, $125+
Heaven Can Wait	The Upstart Crows + TV Moms + The Last Word	7:30pm, $12
Irving Plaza	Sunny Day Real Estate 30th Anniversary Tour + Rocket	7pm, $50
National Sawdust	Julia Jacklinresidency + Squirrel Flower	8pm, SOLD OUT
Our Wicked Lady	A Very Special Episode + Toward Space + Desert Sharks + Blood of the Bull	8pm, $15
Public Records	AdHoc presents Kara Jackson + Mei Semones	8pm, SOLD OUT
Trans-Pecos	Hills to Height + Bloodsports + Percocet + Fasting	7:30pm, $15

Thursday May 16

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
18th Ward Brewing	No Jersey + Perfect Saturday + Dan Flashes + babyfang	7pm, $15
ALPHAVILLE	The Wants residency + Terminator + Pisha	8:30pm, $15
Brooklyn Made	Loosey + Miranda and The Beat + Dog Date + Sliders	8pm, $20
Brooklyn Steel	Mannequin Pussy + SoulGlo	8pm, SOLD OUT
Elsewhere - Hall	Mk.gee	8pm, SOLD OUT
Gramercy Theatre	Orgy + Cold + Horizon Theory + I Ya Toyah	6pm, $30
Irving Plaza	Sunny Day Real Estate 30th Anniversary Tour + Rocket	7pm, $50
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Les Savy Fav + Public Practice	8pm, $25
Our Wicked Lady	QWAM + Debbie Dopamine single release show + Anna Altman + Krissanthemum	8pm, $15
Public Records	AdHoc presents Kara Jackson + Anastasia Coope	8pm, SOLD OUT
Racket	Swans + Kristof Hahn	8pm, $42
Baby's All Right	Fazerdaze (solo) + Mei Seimones	10pm, $15

Friday May 17

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Bowery Ballroom	Narrow Head + Dazy + Wishy	8pm, $25
The Broadway	O. Wake + Endearments + hiFi	9pm, $15
Brooklyn Steel	Echo & The Bunnymen	8pm, SOLD OUT
Forest Hills Stadium	The Avett Brothers + Sierra Ferrell	7pm, $60+
Irving Plaza	Mk.gee	8pm, SOLD OUT
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Swans + Kristof Hahn	8pm, $42
Union Pool	Heavy Feather & The Magic Word + Boyscoutmarie + Rat Palace	8pm, $15

Saturday May 18

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
18th Ward Brewing	NCF presents Summer Saturdays feat. The Answers In Between + The Overhead Bins + yael s. copeland + Rat Palace + The Fictionals	2pm, FREE
2 Wyckoff Avenue	Sound Mind Music Street Festival for Mental Health feat. Kevin Morby + MisterWives + SHAED + Bailen	2pm, FREE
18th Ward Brewing	Di Ivories + BEND + North by North + LEONE	7pm, $15
ALPHAVILLE	STUY + Chronic + Exit Seraphim	8:30pm, $15
Berlin	Ringo Deathstar + Ovlov + The Veldts	7pm, SOLD OUT
Main Drag	New Vision + T!LT + Spite FuXXX + Broken Demeanor	8pm, $15
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Swans + Kristof Hahn	8pm, $42
TV EYE	Theophobia + Royale Minks + OK King	8pm, $15
Union Pool	Couvo + Big Girl + Reclining Nude	8pm, $15
Unruly Collective	Ghostie Recordings presents Castle Blacksingle release + The Rizzos + Joyce + Sorry Darling	8pm, $12
The Windjammer	Jeerleader + Alphabet City + Marinara	9pm, $15
Aboard (some boat) via Skyport Marina	Rocks Off Cruises presents Ringo Deathstar + Ovlov	Boat leaves at 11:30pm, $35

Sunday May 19

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
ALPHAVILLE	King Bug + The Wizard + Shira + Onward Debacle	8:30pm, $15
Bar Freda	Dollar Signs + The Big Easy + Perennial + Good Looking Friends + Strawberry Glass	8pm, $15
Berlin	Ilithios + Project Diem + Lukka + To the Wedding	7pm, $12
Brooklyn Monarch	Beach Party feat. Drain + Madball + Terror + Scowl + Regulate + End It + Trail of Lies + Private Mind	5pm, SOLD OUT
The Sultan Room	Ron Gallo (solo)	7pm, $20
Sundown	Radiator Hospital (solo) + Noun (Marissa Paternoster solo)	8pm, SOLD OUT

Monday May 20

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Baby's All Right	GUPPY + Kenneth Takanami	7pm, $15
Bowery Ballroom	Drain + Teenage Wrist + Stand Still	8pm, $27
Sundown	Radiator Hospital (solo) + Noun (Marissa Paternoster, solo)	10pm, $25

Tuesday May 21

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
The Broadway	Gladie + Shit Present + Talking Kind + Crush Fund	8pm, $15
Purgatory	Palestine Benefit feat. Katy Kirby + Helenor + Jules Olson	8pm, $15+
Racket	CKY + Crobot	8:30pm, $30
Sony Hall	Buckethead	8pm, $45
The Sultan Room	Tredici Bacci + Ryan Power + Jolee Gordon	8pm, $20
Union Pool	Squirrel Flower (solo) + Merce Lemon	8pm, $20

Wednesday May 22

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
The Broadway	Decent Criminal + The Dracu-Las + Bummer Camp + Wifey	8pm, $15
Brooklyn Bowl	Teenage Halloween + My Son The Doctor + Tony & The Kiki + Skorts	8pm, $15
Brooklyn Paramount	Amos Lee + special guests	7:30pm, $40
Elsewhere - Zone One	Empress Of + DJ_Dave	8pm, SOLD OUT
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Saint Vitus + The Bowery Presents present Fleshwater + Modern Color + 9Million	8pm, SOLD OUT
National Sawdust	Julia Jacklinresidency + Squirrel Flower	8pm, SOLD OUT
Radio City Music Hall	Sleep Token	8pm, SOLD OUT
Sony Hall	Buckethead	8pm, $45
The Sultan Room	Another Michael + Tenci + Raavi	8pm, $20

Thursday May 23

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
ALPHAVILLE	The Wantsresidency + Activity + Nara's Room Nick Cage + CS Cleaners + QIRL + Docents	8:30pm, $15
Arlene's Grocery	Yeah Baby + Coral Grief + Brother Language	7pm, $15
Bowery Ballroom	Hairpin + Bec Lauder + Kitten	8pm,
Mercury Lounge	Ben Katzman + Colleen Green	9:30pm,
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Gustaf + Edy Modica + Dead Tooth	8pm, $17
Purgatory	Sweetbreads + Slight Of + Majorette	8pm, $12
Sleepwalk	Twin Shadow performing Forget + Wynne Bennett	8pm, SOLD OUT rescheduled from March 14
Trans-Pecos	Harvey Waters + Silvia K. + S.C.A.B. + Many Shining Windows	7:30pm, $15

Friday May 24

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
ALPHAVILLE	Strange Neighbors + Sweetbreads + Wish Queen	8:30pm, $15
Baby's All Right	Motherfolk + Kevin Devine	8pm, $30
The Broadway	Rat Motel + partygirl + This Holy Rodeo + Uncle Skunk	8pm $15
Elsewhere - Zone One	Empress Of + Petal Supply	8pm, SOLD OUT
Main Drag Music	Dad + Wifeknife + Lost Children + Other Problems + Faiders	8pm, $15
Mercury Lounge	Washer + No Lights	9:30pm, $15
Sleepwalk	Twin Shadow performing Forget + Wynne Bennett	8pm, SOLD OUT rescheduled from March 15
TV EYE	Sorry Mom debut single release show + Oolong	8pm, FREE
Union Pool	Ok Cowgirl "Little Splinters" single release show + Charlotte Rose Benjamin + Hank Heaven	8pm, $15

Saturday May 25

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
ALPHAVILLE	SKORTS + Boyscoutmarie + Genuine Connection + First Sex	8:30pm, $15
Brooklyn Made	Habibi album release show	8pm, $25
Elsewhere - Zone One	Empress Of + GIRL_IRL	8pm, SOLD OUT
Knitting Factory @ Baker Falls	Pearla + Yours Are the Only Ears	7:30pm, $16
Public Records	Salt Cathedral + NOIA	8pm, $20
Purgatory	Cardiel + Aux Blood + Laurel Canyon + Le Bang	7:30pm, $12
The Rockaway Hotel	The Heavy Heavy + Sid Simons	7pm, $30
Trans-Pecos	Leaving Time + Hollow Suns + High.	7:30pm, $15
Knockdown Center	Fatboy Slim	10pm, $30
Baby's All Right	ANTICS fundraiser feat. Shallowhalo + Kassie Krut	11pm, $20

Sunday May 26

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Sleepwalk	Twin Shadow performing Forget + Wynne Bennett	8pm, SOLD OUT rescheduled from March 15

Monday May 27 - Memorial Day

None.

Tuesday May 28

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Irving Plaza	Passion Pit	7pm, SOLD OUT

Wednesday May 29

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Bowery Ballroom	Head Automatica + Thoughtcrimes	8pm, $37
The Broadway	Shred Flintstone + Diet Lite + Pamphlets	8pm, $15
Irving Plaza	Passion Pit	7pm, SOLD OUT
National Sawdust	Julia Jacklinresidency + special guest	8pm, SOLD OUT
Our Wicked Lady	Royale Minks + LEONE + Grandeur + girlie curse	8pm, $15
TV EYE	Magick Potion single release show + Indigo Fuzz + Certain Death + Duel Ferns	7:30pm, $15
The Sultan Room	Shop Talk + Sleepies + Frida Kill	10pm, $15

Thursday May 30

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
Baby's All Right	Arooj Aftab album release show + guests tba	9pm, $40
Knitting Factory @ Baker Falls	NCF x Super Bock Stock present Lio & Steve's Colossal Birthday Bash feat. Nino Disco + Dead Tooth + Balaclava + Starcleaner Reunion + Pippy	8pm, $15
Mercury Lounge	Glom	6pm, $15
Music Hall of Williamsburg	Kacy Hill + May Rio	8pm, $22
Our Wicked Lady	Pons single release show + Wince tour kick-off show + Pop Music Fever Dream + Tea Eater	8pm, $15
Rough Trade NYC	Habibi	6pm, FREE
Trans-Pecos	Johnny Dyamite & the Bloodsuckers + Snoozer + Public Circuit + 54 Ultra	7:30pm, $15
TV EYE	Raisalka + Baked + The Zells + Dropper	8pm, $15
Union Pool	Slow Ficiton Crush EP release show + Patiently	8pm, $15
Warsaw	Shannon and the Clams + Tropa Magica	8pm, SOLD OUT

Friday May 31

VENUE	EVENT / LINE-UP	TIME / DOOR PRICE
ALPHAVILLE	Francie Moon + Tula Vera + Wetsuit + Talon	8:30pm, $15
Gold Sounds	Richard Papiercuts + Onesie + Momsomnia + The Roulettes	8pm, $15
Market Hotel	HEAVENLY + Lightheaded	8pm, SOLD OUT
The Meadows	Bad Rabbits + Proper. + Origami Button	7pm, $25
Music Hall of Williamsburg	A Place to Bury Strangers + Suuns + JJUUJJUU	8pm, $25
Our Wicked Lady	RADAR + Substitute + Heavy Lag + The Follies	8pm, $15
The Rooftop at Pier 17	Needtobreathe + Judah & the Lion	7:30pm, $50
The Sultan Room	Finom + Frances Chang	8pm, $20
Warsaw	Passion Pit	8pm, $70

​
^{last updated May 10 at 11:27am}

An old Hogwarts Professor post listed JKR’s literary influences and favorite authors. An interview is cited in which she mentions the big four of British crime fiction, but pays special attention to Margery Allingham and her Albert Campion novel The Tiger in the Smoke. As we wait for more information about THM, I decided to read it for clues as to what she considers a good crime novel. If you think you might read the book, stop now, because I reveal the entire plot.
The book is really not a who-done-it, because the police and Campion know who the culprit is early in the book. It’s the suspense of when or if they will catch up with the bad guy, and the chance more people will be hurt before they do, that creates the book’s feeling of urgency. It is also not much of a Campion book. He is connected to the action because of family ties, but it is set five years after World War II and he’s a bit less reckless than his younger self. He takes part, but doesn’t do much investigating on his own.
The tone of the book is one of dark menace, much of which comes from a heavy London fog, i.e. smoke. It darkens and obscures what should be a familiar landscape for the characters and so there is a built-in tension or uneasiness even before the villain of the book uses it to escape and disappear.
The villain, Jack Havoc, is a man who has gone by many names. The level of evil in him is such that people who have dealt with crime and the worst of humanity, such as Assistant Commissioner Oates, think he is its embodiment. Canon Avril represents goodness. He’s Albert Campion’s uncle. He is viewed as somewhat naïve in his human interactions, almost saintly, but he is actually quite aware of the worst of human nature and determined to do right. The Canon knows he risks his life to be in Jack’s presence, but he maneuvers events so that he meets Jack in his church. Despite his own fear, he feels it is his duty or calling to try stopping Havoc’s slide towards hell. What Havoc calls the Science of Luck, which is watching for opportunity and acting without compassion or softness, the Canon calls the Pursuit of Death. The Canon says Havoc’s way is Facilis descensus Averno which means the descent to hell is easy or it is easy to take the downward path (dictionary.com). The Canon doesn’t succeed in steering Jack from his evil path, but their conversation does shake him up enough that his knife misses its mark when he strikes to kill.
The action of the book is based on a search for treasure. Jack breaks out of prison by killing a doctor and then kills some more. During WWII he had been on a raid with Martin Elginbrodde, the husband of the Canon’s daughter, Meg. The raid was to what had been Martin’s childhood home on the French coast. Martin was chosen for the raid because he knew the way up the cliff of the seaside home. Havoc was chosen because he had no hesitation in killing. While there, Martin decided to check on whether the hiding place of the family treasure had been disturbed and then talked a bit too much to Havoc when their escape was delayed due to too much moonlight. He told Havoc he was leaving a letter to Meg’s future husband with information about the treasure, because he knew he might die during the war, which he did. But Havoc couldn’t act on what he knew because he ended the war in prison, and although Havoc knew where to look at the house, he didn’t know where the house was located, having arrived there by submarine. He’s forced to act when he learns Meg is ready to remarry. He needs the letter.
The book makes use of a classic mystery trope, in fact it uses two variations. From prison, Havoc tried to get Meg to believe Martin was still alive so she would call off or delay her wedding to Geoffrey Levitt. Was Martin dead or alive? And then there is the story involving the Canon’s wife who had been blackmailed to misidentify a body as Johnny Cash, the 16-year-old son of Lucy Cash. Mrs. Cash depends on a cloak of respectability to run her shady business, so when Johnny was sent to prison, she decided Johnny needed to disappear. Of course, he resurfaces as Jack Havoc. The Canon suspects Havoc’s real identity, because his wife had confessed what she’d done on her deathbed, but he’s not certain until they meet in the church. The Canon remembers him as being “of Evil”, even as a babe. He doesn’t believe Havoc is redeemable, but chooses to meet him anyway.
Havoc learns the location of the house, from the Canon no less. It’s at a place called Sainte-Odile-sur-Mer. He and a thuggish group (who had kidnapped Geoffrey at one point) escape London, steal a smack (boat), and sail off to find the treasure, which they think is one of silver and gold. Meg, Geoffrey and Albert and Amanda Campion have just arrived to retrieve it themselves. They’ve run into delays getting there, one being that it becomes an island at high tide. They leave Meg at the house while they go get what they need to free the treasure from its hiding place and, of course, this is when Havoc arrives, physically exhausted from his climb up the cliff and days on the run.
I think there is a second showdown between good and evil when the treasure is revealed. Jack and Meg work together. She doesn’t realize who he is. I found it symbolic that Jack breaks his knife in the process of freeing it from its hiding place. The treasure is a Virgin and child made of ivory (it has a real-life twin) which brings forth tears in Meg, but leaves Jack unmoved and disappointed the treasure isn’t the gold and silver of his dreams. He doesn’t believe in goodness or softness. He wants to destroy it, thinking there must be more to it. But he leaves to make his escape before doing so and his luck holds until he reaches the edge of the cliff which looks over a pool 200 feet below. This is where his life ends, in his very own Averno, the entrance to the underworld.
That’s the end of my book report. The Canon makes a couple of statements that I like, one which Strike might want to remember when thinking about Rokeby. He said to DCI Charlie Luke, “Beware of anger. It is the most difficult to remove of all the hindrances. But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions.”
And elsewhere he thought “If only anyone could tell anybody else anything. If only one could know by being told.” People need to find out things, sort through feelings, for themselves. Ilsa keeps trying to tell things to Robin and Strike, but they just won’t listen or believe.
Like a Strike mystery, it took a couple of readings to really appreciate how the plot and the people fit together. And though I don't think JKR is going to write her version of this book, in light of her emojis and headers, I like that it includes an island (at times), boat, treasure, escaped prisoner, and misidentification.