lindsayellis

Nebula Original: Is There Still a Very Special Place in Hell for Matt Stone and Trey Parker?

Nebula Original - Bodycam Youtube

Nebula Original: Bluey Adults

The Sin of Empathy

Pray for me

Nebula Original: Let's Compare and Contrast Disney's Flop Eras

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Next video will be for YouTube and cover a topic that is not even a little bit controversial.

Nebula Original - Why Has Tori Amos Never Had a Hit?

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Nebula Original: Trash Disney Parks Rebrands

Here: https://heresa.video/lindsayellis-disney

Some notes:

• To access the video, you need to be subscribed to a Tier

• There is only one Tier

• We cannot change the tier without deleting/replacing it which would be a huge pain for everyone (and from what I can tell would auto-unsub everyone already subscribed to it)

• I’d go into Why It Has to Be This Way but it all comes down to the agreement I have with Nebula and the way their engineers tie in with Patreon’s system

• If this is too much of a pain, it might make more sense for you to subscribe to Nebula directly instead of my Patreon

Library of Ancient Horrors: my proto-Noumena notes from grad school and beyond

I’ve spent the better part of the last two years moving (don’t believe HGTV when they tell you how easy buying a fixer upper is, it’s lies lies lies), and only now have gotten around to the business of unpacking. In doing so I stumbled upon my old notebooks from college and grad school, in which lie the very first brainstorming notes for the story elements that would eventually, distantly become the Noumena books, and reader, the results may shock you. Or if not shock you, you might find them interesting and/or helpful in your own writing journey. I won’t show any journals from college as they are not relevant but my God, my handwriting sure got worse between 2006 and 2009. 

First, I had totally memory holed that Cora was originally a boy! The story wasn’t originally conceived as a pastiche of Beauty and the Beast tropes but of A Boy and His X tropes, such that the character(s) that would eventually become Ampersand I just called “X”. The top line is, I think, me feeling out names and their sounds? ("O'Ceúrrbhúill" is pronounced "O'Carrol", "MacCumhal" = "McCool"), until settling on Errol. This is likely after Errol Morris the documentarian as I was studying documentary at the time, but subconsciously for it’s Nightcrawler-y connotations. 

In this original concept (for this was at least a year before I came up with the “what if Wikileaks wikileaked alien stuff?” pitch), present are the basic family structure - Dad is gone (no idea where), we have the single mom (a staple of the Boy and his X genre) and three kids. Some ten years later change Ceres to Demi and Virginia to Olive, as I felt their original names were too on the nose (especially once Cora was, well, Cora, IYKYK). This idea of the broken family structure seems front and center, which is interesting because Nils Ortega was not yet in the picture. There is also a character named Saul.

Interesting here in that even its babiest infancy, before I had done even a shred of worldbuilding and a full two years before "X" would get his name, the first thing we learn about him is he’s (zhe’s?) “manipulative” and wants to train the boy to be co-dependent.

In the following page, X gets renamed “Atticus”

Other takeaways:

• Some character named Millie

• Some character named Gary 

• “Casino”? 

• Goal!

• “Saul is our Snape” girl, if you only knew 

• Similars are here already

• Caste system also in place

• Anyone know a Greg Noll, who is a surfer with jailhouse striped pants?

Here’s where it gets real messy. 

I particularly like the “How many people in the universe would put up with your shit?” line. Clearly, the thing I came up with first was a character dynamic, and everything else followed.

So, Reader, naming aliens is hard. It just is, especially when there’s a bunch of them so you need, like, a system. Yeah, you can do a Transformers and name them after their one personality trait, like “Hi, I’m Springy, the spring sprite!” but this is Serious, Hard SciFi™ folks.  Apparently somewhere in the summer of 2009 I decided to go with a Catholic Saint based naming scheme (which would follow us to the final draft… sort of), which imo is way overthinking it. To my memory there was one version where they were named after streets in LA - I think Ampersand was Normandie so we could call him Norm, and Obelus was either Hyperion or Cahuenga or Sepulveda. Probably Sepulveda. 

Here I appear to be way overthinking it with the naming scheme, and Ampersand appears to be split into 3 (?) characters a la the alien ladies from A Wrinkle in Time, I think? Alban, Dymphna and Jude. Parts of two of these stuck; The letter A just feels correct for this character in a way that I don’t feel like articulating it just does okay, and he gets his legal name “Jude” in Truth of the Divine.

So when I say overthinking it, in my experience while you do need an internal logic to your scifi/fantasy universe and try to stick to it, these things are not absolute because reality is not absolute. More importantly, while themes in names help you find the character, not everything has to be laden with ~meaning~ that provides ~internal cohesion~ across ~every single fucking character my god~. Here you have all this stuff about Saint Alban and St. Alban’s cross and the madness of St. Dymphna and… yeah I think I just wanted to go to Scotland. 

In the end, the majority of the alien group got names that were just random Esperanto words, with the exception of Ampersand and Obelus; those names just felt right, and the logic of “CIA codenames are pretty random and arbitrary anyway” felt solid enough to me. Took me a few years to give myself permission to do what felt right for the characters.

But the most interesting thing to me here is this baseline of “Morlocks vs. Eloi” is already in place as the dynamic between our two alien species a long, long time before I would figure out what the alien race names were. So I had the background for Apostles of Mercy in place long before I would figure out, like, a plot for these alien civilizations to exist in.

Also, the first design thing I came up with was the hands, apparently!

Other takeaways:

• Who the fuck is JR? 

• “Drama group ShowsToppers” this was the name of the drama club at my high school which I was not a part of, but also, what?

• “Dad lives in LA” nothing to see here, I guess

• Ceres can’t be a lawyer because it’s too similar to Daria? What?

• “Mustapha Mond”? I guess he does have a cool name but we’re ripping of The Time Machine, sweaty, not Brave New World. 

Then there’s… whatever this is!

I honestly have no clue what I was going for here. Clearly, whatever it is is epic.

Some takeaways: 

• Oh no, not JR!!! RIP in Peace

• There's some character named Pandora? The SAME year Avatar came out? Girl...

• Apparently we go to Vegas at some point

• This must be from early 2010 because I remember that being when I decided to set it in 2007, as this page mentions “recession,” but it's also before Nils came into being.

• “Humanity -> paranoia -> rest of the world ticked at Americans” So that’s already there.

• Albi, the racist dragon

I have no clue if this was actually me mapping out a plot or just doing a brainstorming tree of character motivations. Aside from being able to pick out which characters would eventually make it to the final draft, it is gibberish.

I wrote another synopsis in May of 2010

I won’t post the whole thing because I don’t want to scan it and it’s honestly pretty tedious - several pages basically to get us up to the inciting incident of meteor-ish thing landing near the Hollywood sign (I swear this isn’t Deep Commentary, it was just a cool image in my head). Instead of Nils, there is a character named Carson, who was based on a classmate of mine who went by her last name and gave off big “ask me about my alien abduction” vibes. I think this character is a distant, distant ancestor of Luciana Ortega, as she is the connection to Tha Aliens and is kind of a moon child.

Flash forward another two years to the next notebook I found. I assume this one’s from 2012 (as there are notes for an upcoming trip to Ireland and we went in 2012) and to my great surprise Cora is still a boy! This must have been right before (s)he got genderflipped as the first mentions of “Cora” in my Google drive are from 2012.

Also, look who’s here!

There’s a Congressman named… Brody? Brady? I don’t know what happened to this guy but I don’t think he’s a distant ancestor of either Jano Miranda or Todd Julian, he either got assimilated into Nils or got cut altogether. 

Oh hey, and Nils finally exists, good for you.

  Also here:

• Ampersand finally found his name!

• Scene on Google campus

• We’ve finally settled on Esperanto (although we are calling them “Esperanto” and not “Fremda”)

• A character named Loma Prieta… I think this is an ancestor of Čefo? If so, I decided it best for this character to have died off screen before the story proper starts rather than have him being all up in Esperas’s business. 

• Esperas is here, too.

  
  

My physical notes stop around here as I decided to spare both myself and the world my handwriting and moved everything to Google Drive upon which the gender flippening did occur, but that we might explore another day…

begging your patience

Figured I should have an update since we don't yet have product available - we've had a draft of our next video done since the end of October, but doing Nebula originals takes increasingly longer each time on their end (this time because they have to run all of the copyrighted footage through their legal dept, which you can imagine takes a while). We had hoped to have two out by the end of the year but I see now that's not going to happen and if we get one out we'll be flying. This combined with my personal life being very hectic at the moment (to say nothing of gestures wildly) and the fact that I am moving soon and have noplace to work (which is why all my videos look like shit in the rare time i'm on camera), things are not going at the pace i'd planned. If it sounds like I'm making excuses, it's because I am lol. we are doing the best we can, but a lot of it is out of our hands as long as we are working with nebula.

Lindsay and Angelina Trying to Make Sense of the X-men Cinematic Universe for 90 Minutes

Experimenting with a new format because somehow the traditional "video essay" just didn't feel right for such a convoluted topic.

Edit: There may be some confusion since I haven't used a hereisa link in a while, but if you want to view the video you have to be signed up to the Nebula tier, or sign up for Nebula proper. I promise I haven't recently raised prices, because I haven't touched it since 2023 and legitimately do not know how.

The X-Men are coming!

Our new video about the X-Men movies is done and now in Nebula's hands for their sound mix and captioning and quality control. This usually takes Nebula a few days, so look out for that video to arrive in a week or so! As always, if you're not a Nebula subscriber, you'll be able to watch the video here on Patrion with the heresavideo link we'll share the same day it goes live (as long as you're subscribed to our "Nebula" tier, check your membership settings).

Speaking of which, for anyone who might have noticed that the previous heresavideo links weren't functioning the past couple days, Nebula has fixed the issue, and they're all working again. Happy watching!

--Elisa

Cut for Reasons: John Lennon's Tragic Backstory

Thankfully I haven't gotten a huge amount of "well actually" and "What about?" with the Yoko/Beatles video, but I did write a segment addressing John's tragic backstory and his alleged history of violence. It was cut before I got around to recording it because Angelina, correctly imo, talked me out of it. The main purpose of this segment wasn't to contribute to the overarching thesis of the video, but to pre-empt bad faith criticism against John, and in my old age, I have tired of trying to pre-empt bad faith criticism if it's not in service of the underlying purpose of the video.

Now, there are times when pre-emptions of bad faith interpretations are integral--HBomberguy's video on plagiarism is a good example, because of how Somerton had so successfully manipulated his audience into doing his dirty work for him that a lot of groundwork had to be laid in order to make the plagiarism accusations stick. However, this is not that; anyone who has any interest in the life of John Lennon isn't going to simply stop at "lol didn't he beat his wife" - we all contain multitudes, and Lennon was a particularly complicated public figure. He's not so "complicated" that I cannot love him as deeply as one can love any long-dead celebrity (no matter how WRONG he was about Abbey Road, smh John), but he was complicated. Even more complicated was Julian Lennon's relationship to his dead father, which evolved radically throughout Julian's life, and we could do a whole 'nother 2 hour video on that. Julian turned 61 this year, and if nothing else he does seem somewhat at peace now with his father's legacy and his relationship to it, but at the risk of going into tangent-land I didn't go into that.

Anyway, it was the right call to cut the section on John's Tragic Backstory to keep the focus more on Yoko and the work/activism he did with her, but here's that segment, in outline form, because that's how my video scripts are written (it makes them easier to read):

• Some John backstory - and I don’t want this to come across as apologia but rather context 

• Born to Alfred and Julia Lennon in 1940, his father abandoned the family not long after his birth. He came back when John was 5 years old and his parents pressed upon the five year old Lennon - you must choose. Choose between mommy and daddy, little johnny. But whoever you choose you’ll never see the other one again! This will not scar your six year old psyche. John chose his mother, and would not see his father again for 20 years, whereupon Alfred realized the son he abandoned was now a millionaire.

• Regardless, John’s aunt Mimi, who had no children of her own, gained custody of him after making several reports to social services over concerns about Julia’s lifestyle, living in sin out of wedlock with other men, that sort of thing. 

• Mimi basically raised John alongside her husband, George, who was a much warmer presence in John’s life as well as the closest thing John had to a father,. John saw his mother occasionally, increasingly often when he was a teenager. It was Julia who taught John about music, particularly her love of Elvis Presley and playing banjo. She bought him his first guitar and kept it at her house, as Mimi did not support his musical aspirations. According to Mimi,

  • "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it."

• By his late teens Julia visited John every day. John loved spending time with Julia, who was fun and free spirited and artistic, unlike his cold, emotionally unavailable trunchbull of an aunt, Mimi. One day in 1958, while walking home and visiting John, Julia was struck by a car, killing her instantly. John was 17 years old.

• This was devastating for young John, who began drinking heavily and developed a violent streak he’d struggle his whole life to control 

• John also lost his uncle George as a teenager. Then in the early days of the Beatles when they were still playing hamburg, john lost his best friend and founding Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe at 21 years old to a brain hemorrhage just hours before John, Paul and George arrived in Hamburg to visit him. Then came Brian’s death a few years after that.

• So it’s safe to say by his mid-20’s john had experienced more tragedy than most. 

• So let’s talk about all that wife-beating

• Cynthia

  • john clearly had a lot of guilt about being an abusive fuckboy that came out a lot in his Beatles lyrics

    • Examples - “getting better,” “run for your life”

    • He would go onto say this - “That was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically ― any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything’s the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster.”

  • Cynthia wouldn’t go on the record until 20 years after his death, and claims that John never hit her while they were married. Cynthia’s book - JOHN - mostly exonerates John of the majority of accusations leveled against him (even though the book itself is full of some very, very sour grapes). Apparently for most of their marriage he was a pretty good, loving husband and father, when he wasn’t working (which was most of the time). He was never emotionally abusive as many claim and their marriage didn’t start to fall apart until drugs came along, which Cynthia cites as the main factor in the disintegration of their marriage.

  • According to Cynthia he was only physically abusive once when they were teenagers, years before they were married. 

    • Sound bite of cynthia saying she’d have left him if he did it again

    • According to Cynthia his behavior only tipped to emotional abuse and gaslighting once Yoko came along, by which point he’d checked out of the marriage anyway. But he was never physically abusive during their marriage, and was never physically abusive to his children at all.

    • Less juicy than "wife beating" - There’s just something less tantalizing about “did you know john lennon stonewalled his wife”?

  • Cynthia also vehemently denies the charge that he was forced into marriage by her pregnancy, that he resented her and Julian and was always looking to get out - according to her he was into the whole marriage and family thing until he found his new love interest - LSD. And that came into the picture years before Yoko did (though let's be clear--there is no love lost between Yoko and Cynthia).

  • Julia/Julian

    • And with time flat circling himself, John ended up doing to Julian what both of his parents did to him. He seems to have been convinced that Cynthia cheated on him and betrayed him, which she denied, and the result is that he didn’t speak to Julian for a few years at one point in the early 70’s. But over time, particularly in the last year of John’s life, he started spending more time with Julian. Julian would fly out to New York a few times a year, John would teach him about music. They’d talk on the phone. John was the artistic, free-spirited presence in Julian’s life in contrast to his mother. And then John died. Julian was 17 years old.

Signed bookplate pre-order thingy

If you follow me on Instagram you've already beheld this emoji-laden AI work of art with instructions on how to get a signed bookplate, but I'm just going to repost it here anyway, because truly, who says AI isn't capable of Art?

📚🖤✨ Introducing my latest masterpiece, “Apostles of Mercy”! 🌟 🌹 Pre-orders are now OPEN, beckoning you to descend into a realm of mystery and enchantment. 📖✨ Dare to embark on this odyssey where love and destiny collide!👽📚✨

But wait, dear readers! 📖✨You can secure your very own SIGNED bookplate with your copy of “Apostles of Mercy”! 🖋️ Here’s how:

1️⃣ Pre-order Apostles of Mercy from your favorite retailer📚✨
2️⃣ Go to the pre-order page: https://read.macmillan.com/promo/apostlesofmercypreorder 📚✨
3️⃣ Fill out the form to order your signed bookplate! 📚✨

Note: this is a bookplate like for the first book. If you want a signed book you have to hunt me down in person, presumably during the tour. Details on that coming soon.

John and Yoko - Early Access

This won't be on Nebula until Friday, so don't tell anyone.

The Ballad of John and Yoko - Teaser

Posting the first ten minutes of our next video on the anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. This one took a really long time to make and is the longest we've done... possibly ever? (At least as a single video). Should be up a week from today. I'd say "enjoy," but...

Nebula original - The Life and Death of Family Friendly Vegas

Was Las Vegas the best family destination of the 90’s? Well, they certainly tried.

Important note: as mentioned in an update from a couple months ago, anyone who wants access to my Nebula originals needs to re-subscribe at the Nebula tier. Go to memberships at the top of this page and subscribe to “Nebula”, it is the only option. If you don’t want access to Nebula originals, or you have a Nebula subscription independent from this Patreon page, then you don’t need to do anything.

Edit: okay so predictably there is some technical issue, I’m working on it to try to figure out what the problem is.

Edit: Okay, it should hopefully work now - reminder, you need to resubscribe at the new tier if you want access, you can’t change tiers or raise prices on Patreon. The tier and any money you subscribe only change if you change it.

New video on Nebula - Jurassic Park Turns 30

She's thirty, flirty and thriving!

We've got a cover and a release date for Book 3, people!

At long last, the metadata has filtered down to the retailers and I'm allowed to post it here (will make it public next week) that the release will be June 4, 2024. That means you can pre-order, which is of course very helpful for authors, and as always much appreciated.

https://read.macmillan.com/lp/apostles-of-mercy/

Transformers 7: Rise of the B-- Unicron again I guess

Transformers: Beast Wars, for you neophytes, is one of the most beloved products of the whole Transformers franchise, the first of the non-comics media that even adults could look at and go, “Wait, this is actually pretty good.” It had snappy dialogue. It had season-long plot lines. It had a much smaller set of characters with distinct personality traits and relatable motivations. It even had the first major heel-face turn* character with Blackarachnia, who over the course of the series realizes the error of her chosen faction’s ways and changes sides (yes, the face turn is a womz! And she doesn’t die!) Nostalgia for Beast Wars is much more contained to a very specific age group than the franchise at large (namely the thirty six-year-old person I married and people within about an 18-month age range of him), so while at this point it makes sense as a next step for the live action films to take, it probably needed the mainstream characters to anchor it to everyone who wasn’t an American boy born in 1986.

My first take away from Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is that the eponymous Beasts really don't need to be in their own movie--the trailer framed it like it was going to be a sort of 70's era-X-men battle where two good guy factions have a misunderstanding, battle for a single scene, then realize they're on the same side before teaming up to fight the greater evil together (this sums up Black Panther's initial meeting with pretty much everyone). This is not what happens in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. The Beasts are fairly incidental to their own plot, doing an action during the prologue and then showing up again at around the 60% mark to provide a positive example of Cybertronian/human relations. I don’t remember Rhinox and Cheetor having any lines, and fan-favorites Rattrap and Blackarachnia aren’t even here.

No, this is not a Beast Wars movie, this is… a Unicron movie, noteworthy for several reasons: 1) didn't we just do that? Like two movies ago? 2) Unicron is never so much as mentioned in the main body of the Beast Wars cartoon and 3) I thought they were doing the whole "This is a prequel to the Bay movies, totally not a reboot!" thing. As I'm explaining Unicron’s involvement in Transformers5 : The Last Knight to my husband, an avid Transformers collector who has seen maybe ten minutes of the Marky Mark era and missed out on Stanley Tucci’s Merlin and Anthony Hopkins’s “Witwickans”, imagine my confusion when Unicron shows up before any Autobots do. In the Bayverse, Unicron is… Earth. As in our Earth. The plot of Transformers 5 is basically "keep Unicron from transforming, because we are the fleas hitching a ride on this giant beast." How does this square?

Well, it doesn't. Unicron is here and he's the big bad and also he's not only not Earth, he's not even in the same galaxy. It's not only a Unicron movie, it's a Space bridge movie!** The Space bridge, a plot device used with rapturous frequency in the original cartoon, is used in this movie in much the way the Allspark is used in the 2007 film; it is our Macguffin, we have to preserve it or Cybertron is doomed/lost forever, so we spend the entire movie trying to save it. This Macguffin is even broken into two parts (in the 2007 movie the two parts are Sam’s glasses and the Allspark itself) but in the end they are left with no choice but to destroy it to save the dumb, stupid humans who are also our friends, because hey, we aren't that different after all.

This is also the first of the Transformers movies, one of the rare instances in all of Transformers media, when Optimus is not only kind of the main robot character, he also has a character arc; the Optimus of this movie starts out less "we must protect the humans" and more "fuck them kids." He's not an anti-human racist per se, he's just  not yet on board with this whole "protecting the humans" thing that defines him to the point of parody in pretty much every other version of the franchise. Earth is one of just many waypoints in their Forever War against--well, this week it's the Predacons, Decepticons are taking the week off--and the humans are just kind of a minor, if non-hostile, obstacle. Optimus Prime is battle hardened and world-weary, having lost sight of why he is fighting in the first place. It has turned him a bit, shall we say, "fuck you, got mine."

Enter Optimus Primal, woke king and protector of the indigenous of Peru (no, really). It's never explained why the Maximals take animal form as it is in Beast Wars, a problem that could have been solved with a single line***, but whatever; the Maximals don't have a misunderstanding-fight with the Autobots a la Chris Claremont-era Marvel, but immediately team up with them after a millisecond of tension. Optimus Primal is surprised and disappointed at his namesake’s indifference to humans as he's been a protector to this indigenous tribe in Peru for thousands of years. This should in theory perhaps make Optimus Primal all too aware of human barbarity as these are, in his own words, the "last descendants" of the tribe that's been allied with the Maximals for millennia, meaning he would have borne witness to that whole conquistador thing, but best not to think about it too hard. He’s disappointed in Optimus Prime, but what can I say, never meet your heroes.

Aside from providing an example for Optimus to model himself after with regard to that whole “til’ all are one” thing, another popular franchise catchphrase that we hadn’t seen in the movies yet, the Maximals don’t really serve much plot purpose—even the discovery and use of the Macguffins are basically 90% the human characters. Instead Optimus Primal almost functions as a vector through which we correct past mistakes of the franchise; he respects the indigenous, he understands the value of life despite the short lifespans of his human buddies, hell he even goes out of his way to correct the racist ancient aliens conspiracy theory off of which Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is based. Sure, they saw some incredible feats of Mayan, Incan and Aztec engineering, but Transformers did not build the pyramids. In his words, “We cannot take credit for human ingenuity.” Truly, a woke king. We have no choice but to stan.

There are other big problems besides the too-many-characters-itis that afflicts most of the Transformers films besides Bumblebee; I don’t understand why Wheeljack, still my favorite Autobot, is in this movie. Wheeljack (who was almost sort of in Transformers 3 before he got renamed for some reason) is the crackpot inventor of the Autobots, one of the few from the original cartoon that not only serves a purpose within the ragtag group but has a distinct look and personality. He’s always been a fan favorite, so why he showed up here as a Scooby Doo van sans blinky head ornaments, “glasses” (???) and speaking with a South American Spanish accent so he can have a brief tête-à-tête with Anthony Ramos, Jr. about whether his appropriation of said accent is racist is beyond me. Wheeljack was in Bumblebee with the blinky head things, color scheme and accent; what happened here? For the love of God, can we please just put Wheeljack in a movie, dumb New York accent and all? If there was a movie for it, considering how many times someone went, “That’s for BROOKLYN, baby!” this was it. Also, Pete Davidson’s Mirage is truly awful. He is an abomination unto the Lord and I’m praying for him, but at the same time I can’t hate him, because he serves a purpose that Michael Bay never respected; this franchise is for kids, first and foremost, and kids will love Mirage (and he did get one good line which caused riotous laughter in our screening).

With that in mind I don’t mean to say that I disliked the film; I didn’t. I had a big dumb grin on my face the whole time, and find that the film is receiving mixed-to-bad reviews kind of odd, perhaps a symptom of franchise fatigue. That I empathize with; I still haven’t seen Guardians 3, that’s how sick I am of the MCU. I had worried this would have the stink of Michael Bay’s “this is what I think the Chinese market wants” approach to filmmaking: a bizarre, incoherent mess where the characters spend half the movie expositing to the camera what is happening between action scenes where someone’s going “Oh my gaaaaaahhhd!!” but it didn’t at all. No, it’s not as good as Bumblebee (few things are), but it’s better than any of the Bay films, unless your only metric is, to put it charitably, being memorable (I will forget the names and faces of my entire family before I forget about the Enemy’s Scrotum).

But like Bumblebee, this movie feels nothing like the Michael Bay films, and in that way does feel like a totally different franchise. Perhaps it’s because, as a decades-long devotee of all things Transformers, I’m used to extremely flawed product. With rare exception**** there’s always something in there that’s annoying or extraneous or taking up precious screen time just to sell toys. That’s just a part of the Transformers experience. Embrace it, or go spend your precious, finite moments on this Earth where you’d be happier.*****

These new films, despite their many flaws, still feel to me like what the franchise should have always been: The stakes are clear. The humor is there. You can actually see what’s going on. It’s short. It’s neither hateful nor proudly, gleefully racist. It embraces sincerity, a concept that Michael Bay is violently allergic to. Most importantly, it’s fun; there is a Bumblebee-involved moment in the third act that elicited a cheer from our audience louder than any I can remember since before the Plague. The audience went into the film skeptical, like the film was just something to spend their Cinemark gift cards on before they expired******, yet it ended with rapturous applause. It reminded me of the first time I saw Lord of the Rings: Return of the King or Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, all without  the benefit of an audience that had entered the theater with intense hype.

Simply put, this is a Transformers movie. Leave your ego at the door, and you will have fun. But I still feel like the franchise is tainted with the hateful stink of five Michael Bay movies, each one more hateful than the last, and it just leaves me wishing that this was the tone the live action movies had taken all along.

* Skyfire doesn’t count, he was duped

** They don’t call it that

*** It may have been there, I did go to the bathroom once

**** The IDW comics

***** Watching the MCU

****** By law in California gift cards can’t expire, but most people don’t know that

It's that time of book again - who wants to die (in a book)??

So if you were around these parts back in 2020 you may remember the last time I did this. Thing about writing epistolary novels like this is it requires a lot of names (and the disappointing truth is of the couple dozen names I used for Truth of the Divine, only about six of them died, the rest got cast as minor characters and journalists.) Good news is this time, fewer named characters die?

But because Patreon‘s terms of service says I can’t do anything that resembles a raffle, it has to be based on "merit," not chance. I thought I might try to shake it up but honestly I can't think up a better idea than what I did last time so here it is:

Leave a comment below (and ONLY below, anywhere else will be ignored) giving me your name, or a made up name that represents you (NOT any other real person, living or dead) as well as a short backstory. It can be your real life story or not, just a sentence or two. Don’t overdo it. But bonus points if, going by RuPaul rules, you make us laugh

Some notes:

Apostles of Mercy takes place at the end of 2009. 

Large portions of the book take place in the Philippines and Japan, so I need a couple Japanese names and several Filipino names.

You might be a "bad guy," but at least this time the antagonists aren't Proud Boy types. 

Level of Patronage will not play into my decisions.

Void where prohibited.

The deadline for submission is 6 PM PST on Monday May 22nd.

Still no official release date, but hopefully it will be spring of 2024--because the publishing industry is still recovering from pandemic-related printing shortages,

Also, needless to say, not reading the instructions is an instant disqualification. Have fun, you crazy kids.

Nebula or Patreon?

Let me begin by stating that you don't ever need to write to me apologizing for no longer being able to afford my or anyone's Patreon. I'm grateful for your support but I am not entitled to it, and if ever there is a YouTuber or content creator who sees their line going down and crows that they will have to stop uploading their priceless creations if they don't get more Patreon bux and tries to guilt you into giving them your money, then they are garbage and you should promptly throw them in the trash. 

With that in mind, even with Nebula's direct support we still rely mostly on Patreon for day to day expenses, as despite the misinformation that other human trash cans have put forth that I won't link here, I do still have several full time employees who all need a) salaries b) health insurance. Problem with the Nebula integration with the single tier was that it restricted the amount people could donate, even if they wanted to do more than the minimum, they still have to choose a "tier" and as I only have one tier, suffice to say this Patreon has been on a pretty steady decline ever since the Nebula integration. Therefore, I'm raising our one and only tier from $2/month to $4/month. I understand that this might be an inconvenience to many especially in these increasingly stressful financial times, so if you feel like this is too steep to keep subscribing on a regular basis, I completely understand. 

But this brings me to another question I see a lot: Nebula is a little bit more expensive than my Patreon (4.99/month compared to $4/month) so the question is, if you want to see my video content, which should you subscribe to?

The answer this depends on what you're in it for--aside from my old videos which are are Patreon-only and bad and I do not recommend, isn't all of my video content on Nebula? Well, no--as of right now only Nebula originals that are a part of my contract go onto Nebula, and those are always going to be video essays in the traditional sense. Any other video content (like the short doc I made about researching Truth of the Divine during the pandemic) are Patreon-only--pretty much anything relating to my books and other writings are going to be exclusive to Patreon.

But if you are a fan of edutainment and video essays, Nebula is probably a better bang for your buck. While I am presently Nebula's only "exclusive" creator (meaning I don't cross post any Nebula originals to other platforms), most Nebula creators do create exclusive content for Nebula that you won't see on YouTube or elsewhere. And when it comes to price, remember that Nebula costs less than half what YouTube premium does while offering many of the same features (if Nebula had the complete Beatles catalogue as well as Miss Rachel I wouldn't need to pay for YouTube premium either, but alas). And yes, we do get a 50% cut of Nebula subscriptions in addition to payment based on monthly watch time.

So tl;dr: if you're interested in my books, writing and things associated with that in addition to our video essays, you should subscribe to my Patreon. If you're in it only for video essay content because that's your thing and you aren't interested in my other work, you should subscribe to Nebula. All of us here on Team Lindsay are grateful for your support either way.

Noumena book 3 is very close to the finish line, and we will hopefully have a release date for that soon, which means it's that time of the drafting process again: who wants their name to appear in my books by way of character death?? You do you do! Look for that update in the next day or two.

Let’s try this again - Nebula original, take 2: Guy Fieri

-_-

https://heresa.video/guyfieri

Hide your face so the world will never find you...

There were two "final" showings of Phantom of the Opera on Broadway--one was the final public show, and then there was the actual final show, which was not available to the public aside from a couple hundred seats that were raffled off via lottery. The final show was only for cast, crew and VIPs, which regrettably I did not qualify as (despite several deeply pathetic attempts through backchannels), so I snagged a ticket to the final public show on April 15th. It wasn’t exactly a secret that I was there, but I didn’t post on any socials because it was a busy weekend, and more and more I find myself just forgetting to capture moments for Instagram that don’t involve babies. It wasn't that I didn't have anything to say so much as the longer I'm away from social media and the Internet, the less I want to engage with it.

I should not have been surprised at how little regard the production had for the audience of the final public show, but honestly I am. When the curtain fell, that was it–no speeches, no “thanks for coming!”, no Lord Andy (despite the fact that he had been at the charity show the previous night), nothin’. When Beetlejuice reopened on Broadway last year, those of us who made it to opening night got commemorative pins with the date stamped on them–here? Nothin’. It really does speak to a huge difference in the cultures of the respective productions; I’ve never seen a Broadway show venerate its fans like Beetlejuice did, but with Phantom, despite it having one of the oldest, most dedicated and most consistent fandoms in all of Broadway, it was pretty clear that by final “public” show what they meant was “the plebs.”

The audience stayed on their feet for several minutes after final bows, refusing to leave, eventually chanting “one more song! One more song!” leaving the poor cast and crew to awkwardly stumble back on stage with absolutely nothing prepared. Eventually they stammered out a very uncomfortable “Happy trails to you…” before playing with the chandelier for a minute, and then eventually shuffling away. If the audience weren’t already high off of the performance, it was the sort of thing that could have turned into a riot, which in hindsight it’s a shame it didn’t–wouldn’t that have been a great NYT headline?

The majority of the audience of the final public performance were hardcore fans, as well as a few rich people who were mildly curious to see what the fuss was about and generally could not have cared less. A few even left during intermission, which while frustrating considering how many people desperately wanted to be there that night but couldn't get tickets, it did mean I got to shift down to the front row mezzanine for the second act. The energy was higher than at any performance I'd ever seen. It probably also ran a solid five to ten minutes longer than usual for how much applause every single element of the show got, from the elephant prop that's on stage for all of two minutes to Carlotta going "rrrrrp".

The cast was the same for both “final” performances, so although Lord Andy declared the final final to be the finest performance of the show he'd ever seen, I imagine they were comparable. I'd never seen Laird Macintosh as the Phantom, but while he wasn't my favorite (that probably is Ted Keegan, who had played the role during the final matinee earlier on the 15th and who was my first Phantom from 2001), he was a big improvement on the last few I'd seen. Emilie Kouatchou as Christine was the real star, however, and I was surprised to learn that this role was her Broadway debut. We've been arguing for years that it really is Christine's story, but this was the first performance I can remember where it is she, and not the Phantom, who is the most captivating presence on stage. I've never cried during a Christine song but her "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” absolutely wrecked me.

The show’s closing has people talking about it again, and yes, there have been the rote bad takes from people who don't know what they're talking about, such as the evergreen “this is a story about grooming” take (Christine is fully an adult in both the musical and the novel; the "she's a teenager who was groomed by the Phantom from childhood" thing is an invention of the 2004 film which is, and I cannot express this enough, bad). I was surprised that the show’s closing made as many headlines as it did, but more surprising is the positivity and nostalgia from outside of the core fandom–that it was so many people's first show, that it is stunning to see in the theater that was entirely rebuilt to house it, that it was a classic for a reason. The show didn't "save" Broadway, but it did reinvigorate the American theater industry at a time when it was in trouble and Times Square was a great place to visit if you wanted to get stabbed. There is a reason why it has built such a consistent and devoted fanbase (even if much of the younger generation was brought in by the movie, may we someday learn to forgive each other). The Phantom of the Opera is irony-free melodrama that in hindsight I'm surprised survived as long as it did; in that massive theater, in that iteration, and with fewer foreign tourists post-pandemic, it could not survive forever.

Minutes before curtain (Angie was around here somewhere)

It's hard to understate how important and formative the musical and the novel, both flawed in their own ways, were for me personally. Several of my best friends I met through Phantom fandom when I was in high school; two of them are still on my payroll. One of those friends has been my editor and co-writer for six years now, and another had a brother I'd eventually marry, and with whom I now have a beautiful, perfect baby. 

Baby (who was not at the performance but was a couple blocks away)

My pre-wedding ritual in 2018 was taking my bridesmaids to see the show on Broadway. My first novel is basically a glorified sci-fi Phantom retelling laden with mid-2000's references. The show has been running for almost my entire life. Like a friend I could visit whenever I felt like it, I took for granted that it always would be.

While Phantom is not for everybody (which as the author of a somewhat similar property I am also learning the hard way), there are many levels of appeal to the show.  There are the more obvious surface level elements that people point to–the spectacle, the chandelier, the fact that a lot of the music but especially the overture absolutely rips–but to me the biggest appeal was the character dynamics and the title character himself, with whom I felt a deep kinship when I was in high school.

The novel’s author Gaston Leroux makes it clear in the text that there was nothing inherently wrong with Erik, and indeed he could have been one of the world's greatest minds if he had been born with a normal face. When I was a teenager, feeling more and more uncomfortable and hideous in my own skin every day, trying to find ways to hide my body and go unseen, this musical and novel were a godsend. Here's the story about a guy to whom the world has been mercilessly cruel because of the way that he looks, and that cruelty turned him into the monster he became. If only he didn't look the way he did, people would have seen him for the brilliant talent that he was. No, he does not get the girl in the end, but at least he's able to make some form of amends with her before they say goodbye. Truly, this guy gets me.

People joke about outgrowing certain teenage quirks, but in our society I don't think body dysmorphia is something you ever really outgrow, especially as a woman. Even if I hadn't spent most of my adult life living under the shadow of people being intensely critical of the way I look, I'm sure that would still be the case. But Erik’s monstrousness isn't just about the way that he looks, either; Erik was ugly in the literal sense, but as Christine points out in the musical, there's far more to it than that. There are ways to feel and be ugly that go beyond the physical.

There is an inherent ableism baked into the story, but to leave any critical evaluation at that, to frame Erik's deformity only in its most literal sense, is both to sell it short and to misunderstand the deep connection people feel to this character. Yes, he is physically deformed, and he kidnaps the woman he "loved," and he is a murderer, but then he is forgiven by someone he loves, despite having done things that are unforgivable. This is, I believe, why this version of the story is far and away the most popular of the dozens and dozens of adaptations of Phantom of the Opera; compassion for the Phantom is central to its ending. He's the antagonist, but he's not just a villain.

The show will return to Broadway, and probably not before too long. It will be pared down and cheaper and in a smaller theater, probably will not run for more than a year or two, and then it will be gone for good. But it will always be around in some form, if not necessarily on Broadway. It’s far too popular not to reappear every so often, and maybe even with a wholly original production one of these days. I’m sad to see it go, but it’s not over, because this story has taken many forms.

Gone, but not forgotten, because Lord Andy needs something on his precious Great White Way. 

So I guess what I'm saying is: friendship ended with Phantom, Bad Cinderella is my new best friend.

On an unrelated note, we have completed a Nebula Original for April, so while it is done they want to release it in May now for some reason, so time permitting I may try to churn out something quick and dumb for April (otherwise expect a new Nebula original on May 12th, and 4 more in 2023).

Short doc: How to Location Scout a Novel During Lockdown

This is the short doc I screened at the Los Altos library in December about trying and failing to do research for Truth of the Divine in a time that was both yesterday and also 5000 eternities ago: 2020.

Noumena Book Sale!

If you haven't had a chance to pick up Lindsay's books yet, the eBooks of AXIOM'S END and TRUTH OF THE DIVINE are only $2.99!  

Here are the links to get them through the MacMillan site, but you can also go onto iBooks or B&N or Amazon or wherever else you buy eBooks and find them there for this price for the next 5 days only!

AE: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250256744/axiomsend
TOTD: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250274557/truthofthedivine

(no, Lindsay isn't talking in third person, this is her assistant, Elisa 😊)

We Don't Talk About E.T.

Lindsay's back with a new Nebula-exclusive video! If you are pledged to the #effort tier, use this link to watch the video without having to subscribe to Nebula.
https://heresa.video/et

Truth of the Divine - out today on paperback in the US and Canada

Here are some very authentic and not at all curated images of learning the joy of reading some age appropriate text (including several that didn't make it to Instagram)

Also if you're in the Las Vegas area I will be there with Princess Weekes this coming Saturday, with other dates in California tba soon.

Our other Nebula originals

Here they are -

Could Blazing Saddles Be Made Today? - https://heresa.video/blazingsaddles

How Tropic Thunder Exposes the Sham - https://heresa.video/tropic-thunder

Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables - https://heresa.video/lesmiserables

As before, if you subscribed previously at $10, that tier no longer exists and you have to pick a new one (ie the only one). You can still choose whatever amount you want to subscribe as long as you have a tier selected.

Video about The Lord of The Rings adaptation (the good one)

Yes, this means we kissed and made up with Nebula, except for that one guy. He knows what he did.

From here on out, anyone who subscribes to my Patreon not only gets access to my new Nebula originals, but also my Nebula backlog that you can't find on YouTube or Patreon. Just click the link and use your Patreon login to get access to this video on Nebula (edit: and only this video, sorry!)

Edit: If you're getting an error message about your tier not being eligible, it's because you didn't select a tier when you subscribed, which is an easy fix because there is only one tier, so go select it and that will give you access. 

Dawn Came Too Soon - an essay

I recently posted on Instagram about attending The Weeknd’s Friday night LA stop during the final leg of his After Hours Til Dawn Tour, mostly because he opened the show wearing a mask that was a clear reference to Lon Chaney’s mask from the 1925 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, and The Weeknd making a phantom reference was too perfect not to remark upon. Even as I was watching the concert (from a partially obstructed view no less) I was flirting with the idea of buying some tickets to the Saturday show the from someone selling last minute tickets at a discount (there are always some, that’s my pro-tip). By around 4:30 PM the next day I had talked myself into it, and talked my mom into coming with me.

She wasn’t very familiar with The Weeknd outside of what she’d heard on the Top 40 stations, and had only learned recently from me that The Weeknd was a “he” and not like a band or something. On the drive up to SoFi Stadium I gave her a quick Weeknd crash course, including the fact that the tour was meant to promote his new album Dawn FM, which I wasn’t wild about. It’s not that I have anything against the album, or even that I think it’s something he put out just to put out; it legitimately feels like a passion project. Mostly, I feel like the album would have benefited if he’d have waited. “I’m glad I got to see him on tour at least,” I said. “But mostly, I just wish he’d take a break.”

“But,” I added as we left for the concert, and my mom corroborates that I did indeed say this, “I’ve never met the guy, and I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

Having seen the show, I knew one didn’t need to be familiar with his catalog to enjoy it, so we hopped in my smart car and I hauled ass to Inglewood for the second time in 24 hours. My impulse-bought seats, while expensive, were probably less than I would have paid had I bought them the second they’d become available and were regardless much better than previous night’s. We hung out in the “SoFi Social Lounge” which was a restaurant and bar area reserved for our section (??? I think?), and then around 9:00 PM, the show started.

And then, about five minutes later, it ended.

The stadium was so loud I didn’t really notice that he’d lost his voice. I must have been singing along to the opener, “Alone Again,”, so I didn’t hear it when it dropped. But then, during “I Can’t Feel My Face,” he ran off stage for about a minute, then came back out on stage and said that he had lost his voice, and that he was very sorry, and he loved us all, but he couldn’t give us the show he wanted to give. Goodnight, everybody!

And then the house lights went up.

Reports of booing are overstated — a few people did, but most were too shocked and confused to boo. At first I didn’t believe him, and only later realized that his stated reason appeared to be 100% true, that there were audio recordings of the moment he lost his voice. That whole night I was trying to find the bright side – we did have some fun before and during the (very brief) show in the “SoFi Social Lounge.” I put the show on a credit card with money I really should not have been spending, and at least now I wouldn’t have to pay for my impulsivity as we were promised a refund. I had a much easier time that second night now that was familiar with the stadium and I knew there were nicer backstage areas to hang out in. We even got a “photo” with a computer superimposition of the LA Rams, our … Super Bowl champions? I forget if they won or not.

Pictured: us with X-Wing @Aliciousness and Hingle McCringleberry. And yes I told her to wear that shirt.

But all the same, I spent that night and the next couple of days feeling rotten. I felt bad that I had dragged my 71-year-old mother to Inglewood and made her walk a few miles over the course of a few hours for basically nothing. I felt rotten that I’d been so impulsive to throw down that money. But mostly, I was feeling rotten because I was worried about him. I wasn’t worried about The Weeknd, I was worried about Abel, and I felt guilty for having such intense feelings of worry in the first place. The guy is a 32-year-old gagillionaire dating a revolving door of supermodels, one of the most successful pop stars of the 21st century. Surely I can, well, save my tears for someone who actually needs them.

—

After Hours is a 2020 studio album by Abel Tesfaye, who goes by the stage name The Weeknd, and is his most successful album to date. It functions as a sort of negaverse response to one of my other favorite albums of the last ten years, 2016’s 24k Magic by Bruno Mars. Both focus on their relationships with women, but where 24k Magic just wants to buy you diamonds and make love to you, girl, After Hours is a breakup album, going through all of the different stages of a very bitter, very public breakup. Both rely heavily on Las Vegas, but where Bruno parties up in the executive suite of the Caesar’s Palace and rides a jetski through the Bellagio fountains (no, really), Abel gets wasted, licks literal toads and has a bad trip running through a deserted Fremont Street. Both deal with fame, but where 24k Magic revels in how much fun being rich and famous is, After Hours is a deconstruction of fame, an exploration of its destructive nature.

As much as After Hours deals with addiction to literal substances, it’s clear that fame is its own addictive substance, as several songs deal with how much being famous is harming him. I saw some people surprised that he didn’t perform “Escape From LA” during the LA show, when like… of course he didn’t. The song is not kind to LA:

This place will be the end of me

Take me out, LA

Take me out of LA

And of course a fan favorite line:

LA girls all look the same

It’s true, but then again, I live in Long Beach.

“Snowchild” is another somber reflection on fame and how it has changed his life, which I include because it feels particularly relevant now:

Going on tour is my vacation

Every month another accusation

Only thing I'm phobic of is failing

I was never blessed with any patience

Damn.

But my favorite song from After Hours is the song that leads into “Blinding Lights”, which is called “Faith.” His earlier catalog, well, I wouldn’t say it glorifies substance abuse but it certainly revels in it. In “Faith,” we get the following:

I've been sober for a year, now it's time for me

To go back to my old ways, don't you cry for me

Thought I'd be a better man, but I lied to me and to you

I take half a Xan' and I still stay awake

All my demons wanna pull me to my grave

I choose Vegas if they offer Heaven's gate

The “blinding lights” in the context of this song are accompanied by the sounds of sirens, as he sings, “I ended up in the back of a flashing car … the lights are blinding me.” 

After Hours and 24k Magic are stark contrasts with their portrayal of fame, but perhaps most significantly, both albums were the biggest hits of their respective careers, so much so that Bruno was starting to court some serious backlash after he won his eight hundredth Grammy for 24k Magic. In this respect, the major difference between these two albums were how their artists decided to follow them up, and in Bruno’s case the follow up was … nothing. He had a few small scale projects here and there, but for the next five years he didn’t release anything until reemerging not as Bruno Mars, materialistic craps-playing Bellagio fountain-skidooing superstar, but as one half of the 60’s soul pastiche duo Silk Sonic. Sharing the stage with the comparatively less famous Anderson.Paak not only lends him artistic cred but also demonstrates a level of humility – 24k Magic was just an era of Bruno Mars, but wasn’t who Bruno Mars was. Moreover, Bruno was willing to disappear for a bit, let people miss him.

Abel, conversely, was only too eager to keep the momentum going. By the time things were opening up enough again that tours were happening, Abel seemed to have moved on from After Hours, which on a personal level makes sense. That the album came out in March of 2020, just as everything was shutting down, feels like serendipity. Here everyone is as isolated as they’ve ever been in their lives, and along comes this album that is an absolute wail of pain, a perfect picture of bitterness, isolation, and the futile desire for things to go back to the way they were. But by the time he was ready to start touring, whatever demons he had meant to exorcize with After Hours were gone. He was ready to move on. He didn’t want to be the guy in the red jacket anymore.

As such, barely two years after the release of After Hours we got Dawn FM, which in tone is a steep departure from anything he had done before. He was (at least in presentation) in a different place. He was past the era of The Weeknd, breaker of hearts and doer of drugs. That was all a part of the oeuvre, of course, but he was in his 30’s now, so he wanted to evolve that image. If one thing After Hours makes clear it’s the awareness that if he keeps abusing substances as he had in his youth, it was going to kill him.

But many fans and the mainstream weren’t so eager to follow him in this new direction, but it wasn’t that the new direction was bad so much as, why now? When he released Dawn FM's first single, “Take My Breath”, “Save Your Tears” was still in the Top 10 and “Blinding Lights” was still in the Top 20. Do we need a new album when “Blinding Lights” had only just achieved its status as the most successful song of all time on the Billboard Hot 100 and was still in the Top 20? Why are we trying to introduce the next big thing when the last big thing, the biggest thing there has yet been, is still quite big?

But this was clearly what he wanted, and I think that eagerness to jump into the new era before the old was over was what led to the album underperforming. I don’t think the album was a failure (although response from the fandom was mixed), but I don’t think it pulled the numbers he wanted. A few weeks after the album’s release, my friend and music critic Todd in the Shadows observed that The Weeknd had multiple songs in the Top 20 that week, and none of them were from Dawn FM.

It’s hard to put a finger on the certain je ne c’est quoi that After Hours had that Dawn FM lacked. It certainly wasn’t a bad album, and featured some of the best production and vocals of his career. Really if anything I think it was simply that his fans and the mainstream weren’t ready to move on. The pandemic wasn’t really over. It was still after hours, dawn had not yet cracked. Maybe he was eager for the next phase, but we weren’t.

But I didn’t notice many of Abel’s fans seeing Dawn FM being the harbinger of him falling off so much as a creative era of his that didn’t hit for everyone – after all, he has had many eras, an incredibly prolific career for his relatively young age, and everyone has some albums of his they could take or leave (my hot take is I’m not a huge fan of Kissland or Thursday). Moreover, his career wasn’t hurting; he still had plenty of collaborations with the likes of Post Malone and Doja Cat that were doing huge numbers, he had that sold out stadium tour, he was producing and starring in a new HBO show—he's fine! He's fine.

My main takeaway, both from Dawn FM and from the bigger, better stadium tour meant to replace the After Hours tour, was that a lot of this was too much, too soon. Perhaps it is the aftermath of the 2008 crash that has encouraged this elevation of “the grind”, of constant, ceaseless work being a mark of virtue, especially in the arts. Our culture is one that has terms like "quiet quitting" that describe people who merely do the job they are being paid for rather than pushing themselves above and beyond expectation. It’s taken me the better part of a year to deprogram the idea that every activity I engage in, every movie I watch, every piece of media I pass fleetingly has to be tied in with some project that I might monetize later. That he did a stadium tour instead of an arena tour isn't what gives me pause, it's that he did it in the midst of the shit billion other projects and collaborations he has going on. Every article and interview written about him in the last few years praises his intense work ethic, his dedication to his craft, that he never seems to stop, but they never question the cost.

—

As I was walking back to my car the night before the canceled show as a part of the stream of humanity leaving SoFi Stadium, I passed a homeless man unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk. Hundreds of people must have moved past him like water around a rock, not even looking down, and I was about to be one of those people before I stopped to rouse him. I don’t mean to imply that I do this all the time–living in LA means that in order to get anywhere or get anything done, you have to turn a blind eye to most of the human misery that surrounds you, and you promise yourself that you’ll vote for the correct systemic change that will help remedy the homeless blah blah blah. It’s not that I always stop when I see a homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk, it was that hundreds of twenty-somethings dressed in club attire (LA girls all look the same) had already passed him by, and I found myself gripped by the dystopian horror of the situation. I got him to his feet, and he told me his name was Jeffrey, and that he needed some water or Gatorade. The nearest open bodega was at least a twenty minute walk, and he clearly wasn’t in walking condition. He then asked if I had any cash, and I said no; I only had my phone, ID and health insurance card. He then asked if I could call his mother, giving me her phone number and telling me she lived not far down the road on Century Blvd. I called, but it being almost midnight she didn’t answer, and it being a landline I couldn’t text. He told me there was nothing more I could or should do, and so I continued to my car. At any rate at least he was ambulatory again and no longer passed out on the sidewalk.

I brought the interaction up to my mom the following night on the drive home when talking about how, well, guilty I felt that I was so worried about the gagillionare dater-of-models and (former) doer-of-drugs; was it not a moral failing that I couldn’t muster up the same worry for Jeffrey? Why was I so worried about Abel when I knew that he would have the finest medical care money could buy, and would be crying into his pillows in that 20 million dollar house he sang about in After Hours that he never even lived in?

She responded that of course I would feel more for Abel than for Jeffrey Thomas. Jeffrey was a random guy on the street that I would never see again; Abel had created music that I had spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours listening to. Maybe I didn’t know him, but I knew his art and that art had resonated with me. I had paid hundreds of dollars to see that art live, and now that art had pushed his body too far, and he was devastated that he couldn’t give his fans the show they had all spent so much money and time to see. I was far from the only person worried about Abel that night in the same way one might worry about a friend. 

I kept using this term “parasocial relationship” to describe my distress – one that gained popularity in online circles a few years ago but has largely gone unexamined since. Speaking from experience, it is an uncomfortable reality to know that there are thousands if not millions of people who feel a certain way about you, positive or negative, and you will never even know who most of them are, let alone why they feel the way they do. But while I think it’s important that people need to understand how one-sided these relationships are, especially in the context of platforms like YouTube, Twitch and OnlyFans where the illusion of friendship is a part of the product, it’s also unrealistic to expect people to engage with content creators, from Twitch streamers all the way to The Weeknd, and not form some emotional attachment.

I know how condescending it can feel when someone you don’t know says that they’re “worried” about you because a lot of the time they are completely off base. But at the same time, strangers aren’t always wrong–I saw many people saying about me in the wake of my December 2021 Patreon post, “this person is clearly not well,” and what can I say? They were right. There was the missing context of some pretty intense antenatal depression, but the underlying observation wasn’t untrue; I was not thinking clearly. When I said in “Mask Off” that “I will be fine” because I had money, privilege and a support system where others did not, and therefore I was resistant to damage where others weren’t, it wasn’t true.

Money, privilege and the love of faceless millions can’t protect you from the burden of being famous, as we see time and time again with artists dying young, from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse to Prince to the pop star Abel had been subtly emulating in style and fashion for both After Hours and Dawn FM, Michael Jackson. Being at the top of your field won’t protect you–the early deaths of Heath Ledger, Juice WRLD and Phillip Seymour Hoffman show us that. We don’t know for sure what Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins’ cause of death was, and possibly never will, but we can’t escape the fact that he did die in the midst of an absolutely grueling tour schedule. Famous people falsely project the illusion that they are in control of their lives, burn themselves out, and end up paying the ultimate price all the time.

After Hours is first and foremost a breakup album, which is why I think it resonated with me so intensely. I wasn’t going through a traditional breakup, but rather was in the process of breaking up with my old life. Try as I might to win it back, it was gone, it was time to let it go. The last song on the album, “Til I Bleed Out,” particularly speaks to this – you have to cut The Thing out of your life, from a dead relationship to a life choice that is harming you, even though it feels like it might kill you to do so. The last lines on the album, he repeats, “I keep telling myself I don’t need it anymore, I don’t need it anymore.”

No matter how well-adjusted you are, fame is both destructive and addictive, and I don’t begin to know what the solution to that is. I don’t think “no more famous people” is a helpful or realistic suggestion. I don’t know Abel, but I have been worried for a while that he’s pushing himself too hard, and I feel that now more than ever. I think he pushed things bigger and bigger because he thought it was what people wanted, and maybe there’s some truth to that. I would have preferred the arena tour, but I would be lying if I said his stadium show wasn’t one of the most spectacular things I’d ever seen a single human accomplish, while at the same time seeing how it being too much was inevitable. His set went for two straight hours. He didn't stop, didn't slow down, didn't get a breather, didn't sit down even once. I get to enjoy the fruits of his labor while that labor steadily grinds him down, causes him harm, and may end up killing him.

That’s the paradox of fame – if he wasn’t famous, we wouldn’t know there was someone to worry about, while at the same time that fame is the same thing that harms him, as it harms everyone it touches. Moreover I think it’s naive and reductive to say that even if he fully recovers soon (which I hope he will) he will “be okay.” Navigating fame requires constant vigilance. He will be, in his own words, swimming with the sharks for the rest of his life. And so that second night, stumbling through the streets of Inglewood a couple hours sooner than anticipated, in trying to lift our spirits, I found myself singing not The Weeknd, but Billy Joel:

Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?

You better cool it off before you burn it out

You got so much to do and only so many hours in a day

Slow down you crazy child

Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while

It's alright, you can afford to lose a day or two

When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?