Thorn Wilde

I have a Bachelor's degree in Popular Music. I went to school here in Oslo for two years, and then took a third year to complete my degree in England. I could never get used to the drinking culture... Most of the people I lived with in halls would go out every night, and I just can't keep up with that sort of thing. For the first semester I was okay, as I made friends with two people in my corridor and we would hang out in the kitchen with our laptops, go to the movies, make dinner together, etc. But then one of them, who was Dutch and there on an Erasmus programme, went back to Holland, and the other moved to the less expensive halls, and so I basically spent my second semester sitting alone in my room. I have mild social anxieties, but it was enough that I never really quite managed to make friends with the other people on my course. Coming in at the third year into an already established group is hard like that. So the social aspect of university for me was... limited, one might say. It was only a couple of months before the end of the semester that I made proper friends with a guy called Robin, who was a first year music student, and he started bringing me along to the pub with his friends. They were a core group of four guys, sometimes joined by a couple more, and just the right amount of people that I could relax in their company, especially in the slightly more quiet pub we used to go to to drink good ale. They had jam nights there, too, so we used to go to those as well. It was nice. But then the year ended and that was it, and the months I had spent at university had amounted to one close friend and a degree that, let's face it, doesn't actually help me get a 'proper' job. I'm going back to school in August, if I get in. I've applied to a sound technician programme. It starts as a single year diploma course but can be built up to a Bachelor if I want/can afford it. Either way, it'll teach me a craft I can actually use to make money. I mean, when I have gigs the majority of the money I earn goes to paying the sound tech. This is obviously the more sensible choice of career.

Thank you so much!! I'm so glad you're enjoying my stories, that makes me really happy. GA has a lot to offer, so I hope you stick around the site as well!

Do it!!

Today is Pi-day! 3.14, that is. So, since it's Pi-day, Magpie decided that we should have quiche for dinner. This quiche turned out to be a bona fide protein bomb and so, so tasty! You need: 300g chicken 300g smoked bacon about 4 medium sized mushrooms 1/4 of a large leek 4 eggs 1/4 litre of milk a handful of fresh thyme a handful of fresh chives salt and pepper pie crust (we cheated, because we're lazy people, and made it with pre-made buff pastry dough that we bought in the shop, but any pie crust will do) grated cheese 1. Switch the oven to 180*C. Depending on what type of pie crust you're using, you may want to dress your pie form in it and pre-bake it in the oven for about 10 minutes. 2. Chop up your chicken, bacon, mushrooms and leek. 3. Mix the eggs and milk in a bowl, adding salt, pepper, chopped thyme and chives. 4. Set a large frying pan to medium-high. Start with the mushrooms. If you're using a non-stick pan, you don't need any extra grease at all, and the mushrooms get really tasty. If you haven't got a non-stick pan, start with the bacon and you still won't need any extra grease, at least not if you haven't cut the fat away (and why would you?). When the bacon and mushrooms start to look half done, add the chicken. Add the leek last, after the chicken has started to cook, and let it all cook together until the chicken is done. 5. Put your filling in the pie crust, pour the egg and milk mix over and top with grated cheese. Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes. Serve with a side salad. We used rocket leaf, cherry tomatoes and cucumber, and made a mustard vinaigrette from olive oil, balsamic vinegar and strong mustard, salt, pepper and some fresh thyme. Happy Pi-day!

Visit this link and press play. Just make sure your speakers are on. It's like magic!

Anyone other than myself and Cassie Q ever listened to this marvellously surreal and wonderful podcast? For those who haven't, Welcome To Night Vale is a podcast based around a fictional town called Night Vale, somewhere in the United States, in which every conspiracy theory and supernatural idea seems to be true. When you listen to the podcast, you're listening to Night Vale Community Radio, presented by Cecil Gershwin Palmer, who is defined almost from the first moment as gay (the voice actor who plays him, Cecil Baldwin, is also gay, I believe), as he waxes poetic about the beautiful Carlos, a scientist who has recently moved to Night Vale in order to study the strange occurrences that take place there. The description on their website goes thusly: The 'local weather' is actually music by independent artists, a new tune every week. Artists such as Jason Webley, Tom Milsom and Rachel Kann have been featured on the show. I've discovered a lot of really awesome music this way. The podcast can be subscribed to on iTunes and Stitcher, there's an RSS feed, mp3 downloads of individual episodes, and they can be streamed on Soundcloud, so there are lots of options for lots of different devices and what-not. Their website is located here.

All the stories! Well done, everyone!

I don't think I ever took the time to tell you how much I loved the beginning and the end of this story. The first line draws you in immediately, and the final line has such a beauty to it. Well done! The story turned out fantastic.

It was an honour and a privilege. The story turned out great!

I agree with everyone who's critical of the way this has been cut down and obviously highlighted the worst parts. However, quite apart from the way he's questioning the lawyer, and we can debate whether he's right or wrong there until the cows come home (don't forget that Justin's lawyer is also paid to make him look less bad), look at his body language. Look at his posture, the way he looks around, his facial expression. They all say, 'I don't give a shit about this.' He's not taking this seriously at all. It's not about what he's saying, it's how he's saying it. Most of us were done with that kind of body language when we were fifteen. He's taking this whole thing no more seriously than he would his mum telling him to clean his room. Yes, the lawyer questioning him is hostile, but you would be too if you were trying to get answers out of a kid who is so obviously telling you with his entire body that he has no fucks left to give. I'd be willing to bet that he displayed that kind of body language throughout the entire deposition, and in anyone older than 17, and especially in this kind of situation, that's the mark of a sociopath. He's looking into the camera. He thinks he's on TV.

A really great performance of an awesome song. Adele singing If It Hadn't Been for Love.

Woo! Congrats!!

I've never had problems eating meat, and I can't remember not knowing where the meat comes from or feeling uncomfortable with the idea of eating dead animals. What I feel uncomfortable with is knowing how badly animals are treated in modern farming. I'm aware that most of the supermarket meat comes from animals who have never seen sunlight, and who spent hours in tightly packed transport before being killed. That's horrible. Stressed meat doesn't taste as good, either. With that in mind, I would rather buy game and organic meat (from cows and pigs and chickens that have spent at least parts of their lives outside and who had a better time of it indoors as well) from a butcher than the stuff that's on the shelves in the supermarket. Unfortunately, I can't really afford that. I look forward to the day when I can. For now, Magpie and I eat meat for dinner only on the weekends, and fish at least twice a week, often three times, and try to stick to responsibly caught wild fish. Sadly, nearly all the salmon you get in Norway is farmed, which isn't the best thing ever, but something's gotta give, and salmon is good. We're pragmatic people. I've always loved fish. When I was 3 or 4 years old, we had a visitor from Northern Norway, a man I called uncle, though we weren't actually related. We were very close. Anyway, he went to the fish market and bought salmon heads (you could get wild salmon in those days), and came home and made salmon head soup that we had for dinner. In the middle of each bowl was the head of a salmon. So I look at my uncle and asked, 'Can I eat everything?' And he said, 'You can eat everything that's soft.' So that's what I did. Best story like that I've got is from my brother's girlfriend, Tina. When she was 3, they were showing Bambi in the cinemas again, so her mum took her. It got to the point where Bambi's mother was shot, and Tina asked, loudly, 'Mummy? What's gonna happen to Bambi's mother now?' And Tina's mother, who's never believed in lying to children, said, 'Now the hunter is gonna take Bambi's mum home with him and cook her and eat her.' There was a long pause, and then Tina spoke up again. 'Mummy? I like that kind of meat.'

A bit late, perhaps, but Happy Birthday! Hope you had a good one.

Welcome, Benedicte!

Congrats Stellar! Well deserved.

This is my favourite cover of any song ever. Hellsongs' cover of Iron Maiden's Run to the Hills.

My grandmother still has an avocado green rotary phone. She's allergic to buttons. My grandparents still have three landline phones in their house, but my grandmother will always run to the rotary phone when it rings, and if she's making a call, she will always use that phone. None of their landline phones are wireless. The other two are the early 90s kind with buttons and a curly cord. I always loved my grandmother's rotary phone when I was a kid, and would use it if I ever needed to make a call from their house. I remember when we got ISDN when I was about 9 or 10, which meant that we could go on the Internet and talk on the phone at the same time. Wow! Before that we had a 56k modem. Ah, those were the days... And then we got a phone with a wireless handset a couple of years later. I didn't get a mobile phone until I was thirteen, so I was used to using landlines. Magpie and I are just about the only people my age I know who even have a landline, and that's because for some reason the mobile connection in our house is really bad. Mostly the only people who call us on the landline are our respective mothers.

Which channel?

A pair of siblings have a creepy doll war over Christmas break.

Speechless and a little dizzy. Thank you!!

Woo! Well done!

Oh, it was my thread, actually. I ended up reading a news article on it. It's all the new fad over here, apparently. The article was interesting, so I shared it. Then the bigots and the misogynists decided to turn the discussion into one about how people with body image issues are weak. It got pretty heated, actually. My Facebook is... interesting sometimes.

Interestingly, I've just been having this very conversation, sort of, on Facebook, in a comment thread for an article about women getting cosmetic labiaplasty, and I made the very point that women and gay men are so much more likely to have body image issues severe enough to make severe changes to their body. Basically, the ones with a beauty standard to live up to. Not that straight men haven't got standards that society at large expects them to live up to, but they're somehow subtler. They're not thrown in their faces every day, the moment they walk out the door, the minute they step into a supermarket and see the magazine racks. This means that straight guys don't get it. I had a guy tell me today: '[...]we CHOOSE to consume and absorb these products and images.' No, we don't. We have no choice. The images are there, wherever we look, and we can't just not look. As for the products, when all products are advertised with the same beauty standard (i.e. fashion) we haven't really got the choice of 'voting with our wallets', as they like to put it. They're almost all the same. And if you're not especially wealthy, often you haven't got that option even if there is a difference. I've been thinking a lot about why this is. Why is it that women and gay men are so exposed to these kinds of body image issues, and to objectification at large? My own pet theory puts it down to porn. In straight porn, men barely even feature. That is to say, they're not what you're supposed to look like. The only criteria for appearing in straight porn if you're a man is a reasonably big dick, and even that doesn't feature much. Almost the entire focus is on the woman, and out of pornography came trends like brazilian waxing, breast implants, and a bunch of other things that have eventually come into the mainstream beauty standard for women. In gay porn, finally the focus is on the lads (and this would probably be why straight women enjoy it so much; you get to actually see the guys and they're hot), and now there are suddenly standards. They're supposed to have muscles (lean ones if they're skinny twinks, bulky ones if they're older and more macho), well groomed, and don't get me started on anal bleaching... Now men are objectified too. Gay men, specifically. And this escapes into the mainstream as well, even among gay guys who don't watch a lot of porn, though it is encouraged in a lot of gay circles. That's what makes the pressure as ridiculously bad on gay men as it is on women, because even though the media and the advertising side of it is smaller (since gay men are a smaller demographic), the pornographic objectification is entirely in the mainstream. Not saying people shouldn't watch porn... Actually, I'm not really sure what I'm saying, other than that we should cut ourselves, and each other, some slack. It's easy to get caught up in the whole thing, to feel like we need to live up to these ridiculous expectations, and to tease others when they don't. But I think the moment we stop and think about it, we all realise how stupid that is. As long as you're healthy, it shouldn't matter whether you live up to some beauty standard or another. That kind of superficial thinking won't make you happy. Learning to love yourself will.