methodwriter85

Happy birthday!

Or the Hemsworth boys. Man, it'd be funny if Will or Travis ever ran across Liam Hemsworth given that Zach's face is supposed to look like his. LOL (His acting career doesn't start until '07, though.)

Yes. Mark has repeatedly told me that he's going to use me as his source of pop culture references because my mind is font of Gen X and Millennial pop culture up to about 2016. LOL (Except for anime. That stuff is beyond me so he's going to have to recruit people to help him with those references once the story shifts to the Gen Z characters like Riley, Maddy, and Bobby.) Gary, Fraternity Memoirs is a Nifty Archive story that started posting around 2000-2001. It follows a young man's journey being initiated into a frat at a party school on the American East Coast sometime during the early to mid-1990's. He starts off as small-minded Irish Catholic kid from a conservative middle class Brooklyn neighborhood and his mind gets "opened up", so to speak, by a snobby rich kid named Kevin who is bisexual and very experienced with gay sex. The story attracted a pretty dedicated online following, including a Yahoo group that I started participating in when I was about 17 years old in 2003. (It's where I know Mark from. When he started posting CAP and I became his beta reader, that's why I went over to here.) The author had cultivated a strong friendship with Adam Phillips, who was inspired to write the semi-autobiographical story Cross-Currents. That story was actually pretty big here. At one point, John Walsh had a breakdown and realized he couldn't continue the story because he didn't want to relive the traumatic experience of being outed in college. Adam Phillips kind of "took over", so to speak, the Fraternity Memoirs fandom and turned the focus into his own Cross-Currents story. Adam himself would have issues with keeping the fandom going (there was an online stalker who had gone to high school with him, he had a lot of issues in dealing with his own bisexuality, etc) and a few years after he finished Cross-Currents, he ended the discussion group for good and retreated off of his online persona. John Walsh has never publicly resumed his online persona, as far I know. He might have posted other stories under different names but he's never gone back to finish Fraternity Memoirs. Fraternity Memoirs (and the book Cross-Currents) is actually pretty important to genesis of CAP, because they inspired Mark to write his own semi-autobiographical story, On the Mark, which is on Nifty Archive. Mark posted about 15 chapters of this story but decided he could not continue it because he did not want to relive his traumatic experiences. If you read the story though you can see a lot of elements that go into CAP.

*paging John Walsh of Fraternity Memoirs* I mean, okay, I'm sure he probably would have eventually come out as gay/bi/whatever (during his last public chat in 2005/2006 he mentioned that he still felt attracted to women but felt it more convenient to stay gay), but I don't think it would have happened in college if he had instead attended a GDI school. Short for Goddamned Independent; essentially means Greek life is minimal or not there at all. Like UD was GDI- Greek life was there, but small enough you didn't need to do it to have an active party life before age 21. But yeah, Kevin and his fraternity experience definitely gave John the boost he needed towards his gay awakening.

Chapter 26 -When Will decides that Travis has blown him off, and not in the good way. "Don't Forget About Us" by Mariah Carey -When Austin and Will finally give into their attraction to each other and have sex in the plane. "Hung Up" by Madonna -When Travis has a panic attack as he realizes that Will was disappointed by the present he got him because he didn't put enough thought into it. "Marching Bands of Manhattan" by Death Cab For Cutie It is so fucking weird to me that we're covering time from when I was 20 years old. We're less than three years off from when Mark started writing CAP. lol

He's seriously lucky this is happening before social media and camera phones blew up everything. Remember the Hot Math Teacher Who was Also A Underwear Model? Pietro Bosselli welcomed the attention, though. The interesting thing is that Will is the ultimate extrovert but he HATES this attention because he knows it's fake, instead of his actual friendships with people that actually like him for the loveable rake that he is. Anyway, I ran across this update video of the Pacific Palisades from a plucky L.A. realtor named Shelby Church. It's interesting to see how that area will get re-developed.

Will needs an Angie to his Andy from Cross-Currents. Basically Jenny from Love Story. Mark has never really written that kind of a relationship with Will where his love interest plays hard to get and constantly calls him on his ego.

So what delusional asshole client hurt your feelings this week?

No, no, no. Jeremy is Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl. Right down to being stuck with someone who takes up all the attention. Although, as Gossip Girl would say, having Will in Jeremy's life does make it richer.

I honestly think it's so much more fun now that people seem to be joking with Will about that. He needs that.

Right. You're totally free to disregard this. I like this because I think it's fun. I've been in the fancasting game for Mark for almost 18 years at this point. Grok has been a fun tool for me because I can take actors I liked the look of for a character and make changes that make them closer to what Mark wrote in the text. I'm seeing it as taking someone that had the right foundation and making some tweaks that get things closer to book-accurate. You have NO idea how hard it is to find actors that actually fit Will's book description of being 6'2" with green eyes and thick brown hair with subtle red tint. Green eyes alone are actually really rare, making only 9 percent of the total United States population. I did actually find a young male actor who was at least 6'2" and had green eyes with brown hair, but Mark was TOTALLY disinterested in him for Will. LOL (Go figure.) Also, Mark has been using A.I. to run free with his own imagination about what characters look like and their cars, houses, etc etc. You're also free to disregard that. It's kind of hard to explain this, but I "think", as Adam Phillips once put it, very cinematically. My mind and how I process information plays out like a movie in my head with a soundtrack blaring as well. When Adam told me once that a photo he had alleged was him was actually someone else, I kind of spaced out for a bit. His reaction was something along the lines of, "You think cinematically. Your mind is now recasting the scenes as we speak." LOL If that didn't sum it up, I don't know what else would. Adam was always really great with the quick wit. LOL

I tried to Grok a Will fancast. Basically used a very cute Italian actor named Lorenzo Zurzolo as the base and made changes. Cleaner eyebrows, a slight reddish tint to the brown hair, green eyes, a smaller and sharper nose, and of course, no facial hair. Mark seemed to have approved!

Yeah, Grok is fun. Now I don't have to dismiss actors as possible fancasts because they have the wrong eye color or their nose is a little too big. LOL

I tried to Grok a Will fancast. The base is this very cute Italian actor named Lorenzo Zurzolo. I made changes like cleaner eyebrows, green eyes, very subtle red tint to brown hair, a narrower and sharper nose, and of course, no facial hair.

Connor Storrie reminds me a lot of Patrick Swayze in the sense that they don't have conventionally handsome faces but the charisma and magnetism is off the charts. Also, dancer bod.

As an aside, here's a real IT Boy: It is so cool to see an actual fresh discovery come out of nowhere who wasn't from a rich, connected family make it big. You really don't see that too often. It's actually pretty genius. Will is an It Boy because he's a blank slate everyone can project their fantasies onto. When he's not, people will shrug and move onto the next thing.

Chapter 24 -When Will is stunned after reading the hit piece on him. "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani -When Will hits his breaking point with the paparazzi following him. "Rumours" by Lindsay Lohan -When Bellona Carter runs through her plan to make Will look like a boring square. "Hip to be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News Oh, by the way, that reminds me, Mark- you can start using the term "hipster" in place of the term "yuppie" pretty much at this point in the timeline. There were "Die, Hipster Scum" shirts being worn in 2006, so 2005 feels like a reasonable year to start using that term.

Yeah, here we have spots of sand along the River and the Bay but some are questionable to actually call a "Beach."

Wait, you mean hanging out at the toxic dump formerly known as Times Beach/now known as Route 66 State Park isn't doing it for you? This would have been a pretty big story when you were in college. Kind of like Missouri's answer to Love Canal. Alright, fine, I'm going to pretend it's either Laguna Beah or Dana Point. As a side note, I don't live close to a beach, but I don't live far from one, and it's kind of sad I never go. When I lived in Western PA for a bit I realized they didn't see seagulls flying around, which is such a common experience as someone who's lived on the DelMarVa peninsula for the vast majority of my life. There are these little things about growing up coastal that you don't realize until you're not in a coastal area. Even if you're not a big beach/Shore guy.

I was scrolling on Twitter and found this and it made me laugh and think of this quote from you.

It's Los Angeles. "Upper middle class" means a family needs to be making at least a quarter of million a year to comfortably meet their bills and they live in a house that's worth at least 1.5 million. Personally I like to pretend Tim's a Val from a really good part of Encino so that's okay.

I'm going to share my initial thoughts to this chapter- "Mark, I can feel Private Tim's eyes rolling all the way from whatever upper middle class Los Angeles suburb he hails from."

Probably? He is straight so he was never a major character.

Yeah, Brad's never really been attracted to stable guys. Although Jake isn't unstable, but he does have the whole special forces thing going on to make up for the fact that he's not fucked up. LOL

Yeah, I'm trying to remember the cousin I'm thinking of. Dark hair, fixed up the El Dorado? I think he may have been Gathan's brother. There's a scene where he's smiling as he drives up in the El Dorado he fixed up. Really adorable scene.