methodwriter85

I'll just wait for the expansion pack.

Here's this pretty funny viral video, where two Philly reporters start laughing uncontrollably after trying to get through an interview with the hot but incredibly dumb Ryan Lochte. These two are awesome. I want them to sit around and mock all the current vapid celebrities for a talk show.

Yeah, but unfortunately for him, this video has gone viral. It's funny that more people have seen this video than the amount of people who actually live in North Dakota.

Yeah, I was thinking about it and realizing that it might have been just a local thing. I mean, "sick" was and is everywhere (I can't wait til these kids start saying things are "sick"), but I'm willing to relent on this one.

I think the thing about that situation was that even though Will at the time thought he was in love with John, it really was just a crush. Will also had to keep himself from going too insane, because as Stefan pointed out, John is his cousin and it would not do to upset his family like that. If it was someone that Will was truly into (imagine what would happen if Will found Tony with another guy), I think he'd go completely and totally ballistic. What I liked so much about this storyline is that both Will and Marie are being complete shitheads- Will for having sex with a guy he knows is in a relationship, and Marie for getting herself involved in something that was never her business to begin with. It's such high school/college bullshit, and makes me laugh about situations I remember seeing/hearing about when I was young in the early/mid-'00s. I like MJ's theory that Marie wanted to be overheard so she could ruin what Will had with Kyle.

Were California stoners in 2001-ish prone to use the word "dank" to describe particularly potent weed, or was that just an East Coast thing? I didn't smoke pot, but I had friends who did, and I remember hearing the word dank getting thrown around in the early/mid-00's, but not so much recently. Also, did "sick" replace "the bomb" yet by 2001?

Thanks for your comments. Here's another interesting article I found about it, though not nearly as in-depth: How Detroit Became The World Capital of Staring At Abandoned Old Buildings I really want to tour the ruins some day.

So, since Adam Phillips just loves to get on me for my reading habits, I thought I'd try and read something that wasn't written for 12-year olds, and looked around for something a little different. I've had this fascination for the past couple of years with the city of Detroit, and how it's accelerating depopulation has been depicted in pictures and videos. Detroit, in the course of one decade, has seen its population plunge from about 950k to just 714k- that's approximately equal to if the city of Norfolk, Virginia completely emptied out in one decade. The trend of depicting Detroit's emptying city landscape has been referred to as "ruin porn." I found this pretty interesting article that discusses the phenonmenon, and what it says about both the city and about the people that buy into "ruin porn" aspect of Detroit. Detroitism by John Patrick Leary Detroit is a histroy lesson and a cautionary tale, I think. One day I hope to explore the ruins of Detroit. For me, I find the ruins of Detroit fascinating to look at, because it was a city that was built on America's utter faith and confidence in their cars (a time before I was born), and it just never recovered from the upheaval and strife of the 1960's and 1970's and could not come up with an alternative industry to at least stabilize the city. (Pittsburgh has a simliar story, although its education/hospital sector has slowed down the population bleed. ) The story seen through these pictures suggest the massive dreams that American's industrial might were able to muscle into being...as well as the massive downfall of said American industry. We're a country that used to make things that last, and we became a country that buys goods and provides services, but doesn't really make.

I think with Mark, smoking pot would be like drinking coffee or something. I can't imagine him tripping balls off pot, even if it were totally dank. Now me? I took a hit after about a year of abstaining, and damn, I was goofy. Anyway, the deal with Hank was pretty funny. It reminded me of that joke, about how lesbians on a third date show up with the moving truck. Although to be fair, they were all "Annie on My Mind" in high school. (I knew these two girls in high school...one of them was reading this book, and then later on her ex-boyfriend told me she dumped him because she realized she was a lesbian.) It doesn't seem like Tiffany is quite like that. Sure, she settled with Jeanine for a bit, but I do wonder if maybe Tiffany got pressured a bit into having kids, which would make sense- Tiffany was about 23, Jeanine was about 36 or so. It doesn't feel like Tiffany's in the same kind of rush to get a girlfriend again, which I like...it'd be cool if she also maybe dated a few guys. I like that her sexuality, along with Matt's, is mainly "gay" but with some kinks in it.

Thanks, Mark. I remember someone made fun of me for obsessing over whether or not something was said by teenagers in 2000, but...well, that's kind of what my part in your team is about. I have this strong sense of change over time, and I'm fascinated by how trends and culture evolve. It's a weird thing with me. Name me a year after about 1954 and I can tell you something about the year off the top of my head, either an event or a song, or some trend. It's been a blast, even when we've butted heads about stuff. As a history guy who bemoans the dearth of good soap operas, I'm glad that I get to read a historical one on nearly weekly(sometimes daily) installment. She's been a blast to work with. I loved her input that helped create the Tiffany/Amber Corwin scandal. I'm grinning with delight at what it'll be like when we can start having JJ butt heads with Johnny Weir. Dear god, the fur will fly. LOL.

Chapter 3 -When the gang discusses Hank, and Will deduces that someone's found their gravy train. -When we meet Hank, who's just a little too aggressive with the family and in particular, Will. -When Will gets a Happy Ending from his massage therapist that looks like Javier Bardem. You gotta love how barely-veiled hip-hop is about sexual references. LOL. Timbaland boots were soooooo popular with the urban crowd back then. It was a weird culture shock when I lived in Western PA, and Timbalands were instead being worn by white fraternity guys.

Yeah...

It just confounds me that the Baby Boomer generation, who tore down the notion of "in loco parentis" when they were in college in the 1960's and 1970's, have basically tried to re-install it for the college students of the '00's and the early '10's. I remember when the University of Delaware sent letters to parents of students who did not live on campus, warning them of the annual block party to get the whole thing shut down. And from what I understand, it's not like binge-drinking has disapeared from college campuses- they just don't do it out in the open at big ragers anymore.

Tom Welling isn't that good of an actor. Henvy Cavill, from all accounts, is and that's half the battle. I mean, last time around they picked a guy who was 6'4" and looked like the All-American superhero, and look how well that panned out.

Tiffany is the daughter of the guy that Brad slept with. Said guy went crazy in the 1980's and tried to bomb the White House in 1983 as part of the Weather Underground.

Chapter 2 -When Will thinks over the triangle with Erik and Kyle, and later on when he contronts Marie, who's not that innocent.

I do seriously wonder if Will would be so cavalier if his committed boyfriend was sleeping with somebody else. I think what Brad did to Robbie's car comes to mind immediately. That is an area that I think Will is going to be similiar to Brad in- as in all reason and logic go out the window during a break-up.

And to think, you've done it in 4 and a half years. "Worlds" is short for the World Figure Skating Championship, which took place in March in Bulgaria. The event you're referring to was the 2001 Nebelhorn Trophy. I'd just refer to it as being "there's an ISU competition in Germany in early September, and there's another in October." Although, that timeline beyond the Nebelhorn Trophy from September 4th through 7th hasn't been set. So I'm kind of confused on this, too. I like Jeanine's New Jersey roots being brought up here, and that she's from Hoboken. I can buy that Jeanine was from north New Jersey- she doesn't really have that south Jersey/Philly/Shore vibe to her.

Touching post there, Westie. I deeply regret that I did not go to Ground Zero when I visited NYC in 2002, just nine months after 9/11. I think at the time, I was more interested in tagging along like a puppy with this guy I had a massive crush on, plus at 16 I do not think I was in the emotional place to handle being at that site. When I heard from the people who had visited there, a lot of the little makeshift memorials were still there. I also had a chance to see the original run of Rent, and I turned that down, too. Ugh. Although I think that was when Joey Fatone was in the cast, so I'm not too torn up about it.

To be fair, Gale does have more of a role in Catching Fire than he did in Hunger Games. I'm impressed they kept the whipping in- I thought for sure that was going to be taken out.

More to the point though, I hope Will eventually becomes the guy who WANTS to genuinely help those less fortunate than him beyond just buying a hot guy three Abercrombie polos. I think he will, especially if he's meant to be the next Tonto. And you've written Will as someone who's genuinely into school and genuinely interested in academic competition- would it really make sense that Will would be okay with getting into a school because of his Grandpa and not because he actually deserved to get in there? Remember his reaction to Darius not going to Anapolis because he realized that he didn't deserve that spot? It'd be serious hypocrisy if Will was in the same situation but decided to take that spot anyway, after applauding Darius so much for that choice. There's a happy medium between either being an Adderall-popping academic zombie who put themselves on a ton of extracurriculars to pad their CV's, and being a slacker who figured his connections would get him into whatever school he wanted to go to. Will strikes me as someone who'd take on a few extracurriculars that he was genuinely interested in and had the added bonus of looking good on his college resume. I don't see him going into heart palpatations over college admissions, but I also can't see him just completely lying back while ignoring the extracurriculars expectation and expecting J.P. and Brad's connections to do all the work for him. Plus, you gotta remember that Menlo does actually require community service. I know that public high schools are moving to require that now; it figures that private schools were the first do this. This is what Will is required to do for his sophomore year at Menlo: So Will has to do community service, although I actually think he'd be pretty keen to do it. This requirement screams "Habitat for Humanity" to me. I'd like for him to get into a volunteer opportunity where he didn't exploit the people he was supposed to be helping like he did with the Shelter. (I'm sorry, but rendering the services of the shelter kids to get fake I.D.'s and roofies IS exploitation, point blank.) Mark does bring up an interesting point about legacy admissions...here's a pretty cool article from M.I.T. that explains why they refuse to have them. I did speak to a friend who worked as a high school counselor in this era who said that the whole "Bush got into Yale with his horrible GPA" legacy admission deal started to become less of a factor in this time period, likely because of how competitive schools got once the Baby Boomers started sending their kids off to college. I mean, don't get me wrong- I get that it happens. Just...why exactly would Will depend on it if we've already seen that he's willing to go the extra mile to procure good grades? Wouldn't it stand to reason that he'd also take the advice of his guidance counselor and take on a few activities that speak of character building and leadership? Of course, he's still a sophomore...he hasn't even taken his PSAT's yet, so yeah, at this point, he wouldn't be worried about putting extracurriculars on his CV yet. At the same time, Will can't exactly disregard it, since his school requires him to do a sophomore retreat and put in 20 hours of community service.

I honestly thought he'd get that when he started volunteering at the homeless shelter, but I don't think that lesson really came through to him. I think part of it was because his main connections there had been with guys he either wanted to sleep with, or guys that he used to get roofies and licenses from. Maybe if Will did a Habitat for Humanity project for his spring break? I did one, and it was a pretty eye-opening experience. This is the 2000's when college competition became really cutthroat, and that's the kind of thing that people wanted to have on their college apps, so I figure something like that should be somewhere in Will's future. I'm pretty sure Menlo has the same kind of emphasis on humanitarian causes that HW has, so I'm hoping that Will absorbs that. Otherwise, I'm not really seeing how Will's the next Tonto Incarnate, because social activism and humanitarian causes were a big part of who Tonto was. We got a little glimpse of that when Will naievely tried to make things better for openly gay people in figure skating, but I hope we see more of that the older Will gets and the more aware he gets of the inequalities in life. I mean, he IS only 14. Not everybody is Matt Price at 14. I'm also pretty sure there's a trip to Africa that upperclassmen Menlo students can do, so that could be an interesting way for Will to gain some perspective, too. Plus, Mark could hook Will up with some hot black guys. Will hasn't been with a black guy yet, right?

What's bizarre is that you've missed the times Mark has explicitly said this is a soap opera. I would love to see the kind of journey you're talking about here, but the likelihood of having a protagonist even dabbling in religion seems zero to nil. Even Gathan, who should have grown up in a religious household given the vibes that Wally and Clara gave off, seemed oddly not all that into relgion. Religion and philosphy just don't seem like things that Mark wants to put into his writing all that much.

You're expecting a journey of morality, philosophy, and ethics on a gay soap opera? Seriously?

Mark has kind of ignored what classes specific to his school that Will would taking(he's kept it vague and general like English and math), so I'm not sure we're ever going to see Will in a philosophy class or a religion class, even though I think both are required at Menlo. I'm not sure religion is ever going to play that much of a thought in Will's daily actions. Mark's atheist, therefore Brad's atheist and it looks like Will is probably going to take after him with that. Darius is probably somewhat open to the existence of God because he went to Santa Clara...I'm not sure about JJ. He'd certaintly never say publically that he's an atheist, that's for sure. I think JJ would be more along the lines of an agnostic...believing in a god, but not really being tied into any kind of organized religion. Although...wouldn't Will being an atheist actually be somewhat of a problem with Catholic Tony, at least down the road when they're talking about how they're going to raise the twins they procured courtesy of a three-some with a lesbian? Not being on the same page religion-wise can sometimes be a big dealbreaker. It would be interesting if Mark tapped into the rush towards religion and God that happened for a subset of young people after 9/11 (my older sisters were part of this), but I'd be surprised if he did.