methodwriter85

See: The Nostalgia over the Little Rascals Movie. I do think Frozen will probably be the Lion King for the 2010's kids. Which is actually original.

Self-obsessed former 90's kids are lambasted in this sketch about whether or not bad remakes and updates of their beloved 90's books, t.v. shows, movies ,etc really equals a "ruined" childhood. Is it wrong that I started laughing when they started ramping up the childhood traumas to include Vietnam war vets, sex slaves, and Holocaust victims? (Although come one, there is no way that woman is actually old enough to have survived the Holocaust.) Adam once blasted me about 5 or 6 years ago about what he deemed the "My Generation Annoyance", i.e. going on and on about 90's childhood references, and now that I'm pushing 30, I really get how fucking annoying it can be. Although the nostalgia seems to have morphed from just a couple of videos on YouTube to constant articles on sites like Buzzfeed and Twitter hashtags, and bitching about whenever something from our childhood gets adapted into something else. The media is so saturated with the stuff now that I'm waiting for my peers to move on and for the 2000's kids to have at it.

Fault in Our Stars actor Ansel Elgort posed for the cover of Town and Country Magazine. Check out his photos and the accompanying write-up! He just seems like such a down-to-Earth guy despite his rich New York City upbringing and his bourgeoning fame. I love how tall the guy is as well. It's interesting to see just how fast this guy's fame has come on- Divergent and the Fault in Our Stars were literally his second and third IMDB credits. I actually think he has a pretty good shot of surviving the whole "flavor of the month" deal. He has a shitload of charisma- he didn't really do it for me until I saw him in motion on the screen for The Fault in Our Stars. I'm excited to see what he does with his current momentum.

Oh man, I so want that to happen. Who HASN'T had the hot teacher fantasy? (Although none of my high school teachers did it for me...I have to go up to college for that.) Just don't make it as boring yet creepy as Aria and Ezra on Pretty Little Liars. Yuck. Tony lacking universal appeal...*wants Private Tim to go on another rant about Tony*

One thing I'm kinda surprised about is that we never did the whole "Will bangs a teacher" storyline. If we had to do the Tony storyline, I thought it might have worked if Tony had been a student teacher at Will's school or something when Will was 15 or 16. That could've been interesting, and it would have been an organic reason to have Will and Tony interact so much despite the age difference. Oh, well.

My mother found out today that her long-time companion, who lives with us, is going to die of leukemia in a few weeks. He's 83, and he's had awful health problems for the last two years, so more than anything, I feel relief for him that he's going to be released from the constant pain he's had. I just feel bad for my mother,. It's going to be hard for her. She really did depend on him. When I said it was going to be alright, she cried, "But I wanted him to live long enough to pay off his car!" At the same time, I just feel an overwhelming sense of relief, because as his health deteriorated, he had gotten increasingly verbally abusive to my mother and to myself. It's just his time. And the other thing is...it probably sounds selfish, but I've felt this obligation to stay in Delaware despite the fact that this state is such a dead-end if you're not in healthcare, chemicals, or the banking industry, because my mother needed help in caring for him. So there's that. I feel like there's a bumpy couple of months for us, but we'll be okay. Still, I do feel bad for my mother, and I hope that he manages to have as little pain as possible for the last couple weeks. Anyway.... I just feel like there's a new era about to dawn, and some transitions to be made, but I just feel like everything will be alright, no matter how they turn out.

This picture of a guy here kinda encapsulates a lot of trends I've been seeing on guys during this decade: Hipsters are just fun. I'll miss them when they go the way of the 80's yuppies. You would've looked really good in hipster gear with your skinniness, Blue. Oh, well. To make this outfit perfect, though, I would have him wearing Toms. I will say that the fashion of now just seems a lot more fun than the boring fashion of the late 90's/early '00s with everything being muted tones and baggy urban lines. I mean, I pretty much stick to just v-necks and Henleys, but it's fun to ogle the guys wearing Neon tank tops and flat-front shorts.

It's been rumored for a loooooonnnngggg time that Troy Aikman is gay, and he wound up leading a 3-time football dynasty and now has an active sportscaster career. The rumors probably went back to his college days. If there has been video proof of Aikman playing hide-the-sausage with another guy, it's be a different story, but there's not and he's been pretty much able to go on with what seems to be the biggest open secret of the NFL. Yeah, I don't see a happily-ever-after here. Zach could very easily turn on Will if he decides that Will is in his way. He's at his core a pretty ruthless person.

It doesn't matter if there are rumors- what matters is if there's proof, and I don't think there would be. As an aside...it's cool you graduated in 1987! I was in the class of 2005, and that's the year most of the people in my class were born!!! I even have some senior shirt somewhere that says "Class of '05 Made in 1987" or something. 1987 in general was a pretty cool year- Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3, the rise of Debbie Gibson and her nemesis Tiffany, The Cure's Just Like Heaven, "Here I Go Again" by White Snake, "Hungry Eyes" from Dirty Dancing, and of course, my favorite tune from '87- "Don't Dream It's Over." (The guy who made Adventureland said that Don't Dream It's Over was perfect summer of '87 make-out music. )The late 80's had such a hideous aesthetic, but they also just seemed like a lot of fun. I'd rank 1987 as my third-favorite year of the 1980's, right behind 1984 and 1985. The 80's cheese was high in 1987, but in a fun way.

Yeah, it's running on Hulu. Pretty funny, and it's nice to see Latino characters being represented. If we brought Raine back...model Cara Delevingne? She has such a cool, off-beat look to her despite also being a pretty blonde girl, which is how I've always pictured Raine. Cara Delevingne is also pretty much how I pictured Lux Lisbon when I read The Virgin Suicides many years ago...I mean, Kirsten Dunst did great in the movie, but the girl I pictured for Lux resembles Cara a lot more. Cara will be appearing in the movie adaption of John Green's book Paper Towns...I liked the book but we'll see how that movie turns out.

Right, but again, we gotta factor in that Zach is a pretty ambitious guy who was zealous about keeping his secret up until he fell in love with Will, and I can't see Zach getting himself unwittingly broadcast. He wasn't a naive kid even at 14. In any event, it's pretty unlikely that any of Zach's "sponsors" were kids his own age. Although...maybe nerdy kids who couldn't get sex on their own who came from rich families? Like say Richard Crampton's nerdy gay teenaged son? I can't even remember his name. LOL. I will admit I did have a friend who would send naked pictures of himself around, but that was in 2002, not 1999. All I can say is thank god he didn't do it on a phone in a mass text message. Being a teenager these days has to be scary. Social media was around back in my day, but it wasn't like it is now.

The tech was around, but do you really think 14-year old kids from a backwards Ohio town were actually using it? They were probably still figuring out how to use message boards in 1999, and that's if they had an internet connection. Zach also doesn't strike me as someone who would have gone near a cam.

Right, but what 14-year old kid in 1999 is going to take pictures of themselves having sex? This is before camera phones, sexting and the like, and we're talking about backwards rednecks. If Zach had been 14 in 2009, we'd have a completely different story, but he really is part of that last generation of teenagers who were able to fly under the radar before the internet became this thing where people could get busted for anything.

If I'm reading this right, the guys who paid Zach to have sex with them are guilty of unlawful sexual contact with a minor, and statutory rape in Ohio has a statue of limitations period of 20-years. That means that if this happened in 1999/2000 when Zach was 14, the guys who did it could be prosecuted all the way up to 2019/2020. By that time, Zach would be 34 and towards the end of his football career anyway. I can't see that working as blackmail, because no one's going to admit they committed offenses that would get them on the Meghan's Law list, and Zach can always play "I was an innocent 14-year old who got molested by evil bad men who paid me" defense. You gotta remember most 14-year olds are still treated like children...we don't usually start seeing/treating teenagers like young adults until they're about 16/17.

I've always pictured Chris Pratt when he was fat as Wally. Like, the formerly hot jock blond curly-haired jock who becomes a fattie after high school. After him, I could see Roy from the Office as Wally. As for Clara, Mark's said she's supposed to look like Kitty from That 70's Show, but I would swap out Kitty's hairstyle for something more like those feathered haircuts teenaged girls (and guys) were wearing in the early 1980's. Clara totally strikes me as someone who would have picked a hairstyle when she was 18 and stuck with it for the rest of her life. So I'm thinking either Kristy McNichol hair circa Little Darlings, or an 80's perm. Finally, I've been watching Jane the Virgin on Hulu right now...Justin Baldoni as Chris Mendozza? Mark did describe Chris as having a long face with dark features. Blue, have you caught it yet by the way? It's pretty good. It's a take-off on telenovelas. I love watching clips of those even though I have no clue what they're saying. LOL

It's a new year, so I guess it's time to look back on the old one. For me, the dominant theme was my continued grief process into accepting Steve's death. It wasn't every day, like the end of 2013 was, but there were moments where things would just flare up every month or every two/three months. I still don't feel like the same guy I was when Steve died, and I haven't quite let go of the idea that I was supposed to have met up one day with Steve in our 50's, at our old favorite college bars, and have a chat with him over my favorite beer. It's shaped me- I'm a little sadder, a little less of a cheerful person, but I wouldn't trade the six years I had Steve as my brother for anything. I really wouldn't. I can say that for six years, I had a friend I knew I could talk to in the middle of the night about anything, and who knew everything there was to know about me when I was 21 to 24 and still liked me anyway. There are people who never experience that, and I'm so glad that I did. We never had a "t.v." kind of friendship, you know, where there were all these crazy hijinks and big moments. It was just a bunch of little moments- which sadly I didn't really take the time to take pictures of (save for one) because I always knew that Steve would be around no matter what, even if it was just at the end of a phone call. I don't have that anymore, and I miss it a lot, but I know I've moved on. Seeing Steve's parents, seeing his old high school friends, and mourning with the people who loved him really helped me a lot. Most of the people that knew Steve aren't in Delaware anymore...so I had to give people second-hand accounts when I tallked to them. And as well-intentioned as they were, they viewed Steve through the lens of "Oh, this was some 27-year old idiot who died from a drug overdose." I needed to be around people who loved him, too. I was disappointed that I missed the formal memorial, but again...I had this whole t.v. image of how it was supposed to go, and it didn't happen, but in the end I made the connections I needed to make when I was there. There is nothing that means more to me than the moment when Steve's parents came up to me and told me they felt like they knew me, because he had talked about me so much. Ditto for when Steve 's dad said how much they loved the picture I took of Steve- so much so that they enlarged it and put it in a frame. I needed that. I really did. It helped me realize that this wasn't some bad dream, and that I wasn't just imagining this...being so far removed from the "grief hub" made it easy to feel that way. Life is absurd and strange, and it really was that weekend I went up for the memorial, but it was absurd in a way that made think about the fact that while 23-year Me as well as the person that Steve brought out of me were gone, there's still a lot to go and things to learn and do because I still have my entire life ahead of me. As for the employment stuff, I won't deny I'm still angry about my internship crashing and burning, and being demonized by people I thought I could trust. But I got through it, bit by bit...volunteering with Newark History Museum helped...working odd-end jobs helped...so I feel good. In any event, it wasn't like 2013, where I had a paying job for exactly the first week of that year. I was actually employed for the bulk of the year. I've finished my Holiday retail jobs, and I'm about to get back on the interview train...we'll see where things go. I'm getting to a point where I'm thinking seriously about going back to school- either to get a PhD in history, or maybe another master's degree, this time in urban planning. I'm going to give myself the end of 2015 to make a decision about that. I do think, and have the feeling, that I'm on the right track, but we'll see if it pays off this year.

So now that we're half-way done with this decade, here are the trends I associate with young guys getting into during the first half of the 2010's: 1. Tank tops in funky prints or colors...no more white or black wifebeaters. 2. The Henley shirt revival. They were popular in the late 90's/very early 00's, and they came back again. (I really like this one- it's such a flattering look as long as you have broad shoulders!) 3. Facial hair, from scruff to beards to full-on huge beards to weirdly groomed mustaches. The latter was mostly a Hipster thing, but even white-collar and preppy guys were at least getting into scruff. The carefully shaved metrosexual look was out. 4. Tattoos. Not just the whole "Oh, I'll put a barbed wire tattoo on my bicep" type that Private Tim's generation did, but doing like full-sleeves, writing messages, and what I deemed the "necklace" look." I'll admit I haven't been a fan of that one. I don't mind tats if they're subtle, but a lot of guys seem to be going overboard. I absolutely can't stand the one where guys are putting a bird with spread wings on the front of their chest- that tattoo should be on their back! 5. Flat front shorts. And of course, 6. The undercut haircut I tried to do that look, but my hair is just too coarse and wire to pull that off.

Thanks. I remember 8 Mile hitting pretty hard and fast at the closing months of 2002...there were people calling for Eminem to get an Oscar nomination. I've never seen the movie, but it hasn't really aged well, from what I understand, but the song has held up well.

Yeah. It had this kind of 80's new wave vibe to it that I liked a lot.

Has anyone gotten into this? It's a podcast where people discuss a murder that happened in 1999, of Baltimore high schooler Hae Min Lee, a South Korean immigrant. Her boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of her murder. He's maintained his innocence. It's become popular enough that SNL did a parody about it. Here's an New Yorker article about the hit podcast: What “Serial” Really Taught Us - The New Yorker What “Serial” Really Taught Us - The New Yorker The podcast gave millions of people what felt like a personal connection to the realities of criminal prosecution. View on www.newyorker.com Preview by Yahoo Here's a link to the website of the podcast. I think it's pretty interesting that we get to kind of "imagine' the case and how it unfolds, rather than just watching it on T.V.

Chapter 34 -When JJ pulls out a show-stopping performance that wins him the title of U.S. Eastern Sectionals Champ. "Lose Yourself" by Eminem I pretty much always planned on using this one for JJ. Glad we got to a point where I could use it, and it was period-appropriate. This was probably the "peak" of Eminem, so to speak. I knew so many Eminem wannabees back in the late 90's/early 2000's. Weird to think he's like 41 or 42 now.

I liked that character...I think he would have been good for Will; not so sure about JJ. Unfortunately it just doesn't make that much sense for either him or Ryan (who I liked) to show up since they're probably both busy being juniors at Harvard-Westlake while Will's going to school in Palo Alto and JJ's operating out of Boston now. JJ managed to hold on to his virginity until he was almost 17. That feels like a record for this current CAP generation, LOL. It's interesting to see how JJ makes actual skating history "diverge" a bit, as Parker Pennington was the winner of the real 2003 Eastern Sectionals. I like how Mark's blending in the real skaters with our fictional ones. I really, really, really hope we see the 2003 U.S. Nationals, because that was known as the '"Disaster" championship where Johnny Weir messed up royally and other male skaters followed. JJ's reaction to Johnny Weir would be priceless. Mark's already set up them hating each other.

Alex from Target was featured on ABC's The Year in Review. Seriously though, how does this kid go back to being a normal 11th grade kid after a whirlwind like this?

So these were the tunes that I enjoyed in 2014- give it a listen! Methodwriter85's 2014 Playlist 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. " by the Chainsmokers (This kinda felt like a modern-day take on Valley Girl by Frank Zappa.) 7. 8. 9. " 10. 11. " (I enjoyed it before it got played a million times) 12. " 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18." 20. 21." 22. " 23. The homage to Robert Palmer was so cool. She blew the hell out of Shania Twain's homage. I don't think 2014 was as good as 2011 and 2012 were, but I still enjoyed this year's music.

Let's be honest here- I think the main benefit that they're trying to go for here is appealing to developers who want to create riverfront property that people would actually want to live on. Anyway... No NFL Team for '15; Raiders Extend Lease Are there any Angelenos who actually want a football team/stadium? It doesn't seem like a big priority. Aside from college football, California in general seems like more a basketball state, followed by baseball. (Isn't the Dodgers fan-base like criminally crazy or something?) I do vaguely remember when the Raiders were in Los Angeles. I remember seeing L.A. Raiders gear somewhere. It is kind of funny though to think that the 2nd biggest city in the country doesn't have an NFL team, meanwhile a small city like Green Bay does.