#writty

CryptPad Document 💝✒️🌐

Open-source collaboration suite with a strong emphasis on privacy. Most instances have this word processor. Allows for real-time collaboration.

GMX Online Office 💝✒️🌐🍎🤖

Free, online word processor. The free GMX account comes with 2 GB of storage, and it does not appear that you can do real-time collaboration with this tool, but you are able to edit things via their email website or app.

Zoho Writer 💝🌐🍎🤖🍏🪟🐧

Free online word processor. Not as privacy-focused as some options, but it does allow for real-time collaboration.

Nextcloud Write 💝🌐

You can choose a provider from the link, but you should get at least 2 GB of cloud storage. There is both a simple note-taking tool, and a more advanced word processor. No real-time collaboration, unfortunately.

SSuite 💝🌐

Stored locally, but accessible online or via downloaded software, depending on which you choose. Does not allow for real-time collaboration. There are several word processors.

LibreOffice Writer 💝📵✒️🍏🪟🐧

Free, open-source word processor, similar to Microsoft Word. It does need to be downloaded to a computer, so it is not feasible for real-time collaboration.

Apache OpenOffice Writer 💝📵✒️🍏🪟🐧

Free, open-source word processor, similar to Microsoft Word. It does need to be downloaded to a computer, so it is not feasible for real-time collaboration.

Ellipsus 💝✒️🌐

Free, online writing collaboration website. Founded in/based in Germany, and vocally opposed to generative AI. It is only in the browser, and from my experience, the mobile navigation is pretty good.

Proton Docs 💝🌐🍎🤖🍏🪟

Free, online writing website and app (accessible via the Proton Drive app).

Etherpad 💝✒️🌐

An open-source project with many public instances you can use. Etherpad is more of a notetaking tool than a full word processor, but it allows for real-time collaboration.

Obsidian 💝🍎🤖🍏🪟🐧

Notetaking tool that allows you to organize many small notes in "vaults". Obsidian is stored locally, not on cloud.

HackMD 💝🌐

Notetaking tool that allows for cloud storage and real-time collaboration. It has formatting options for tables diagrams, and other useful tools. Allows for three collaborators on the free tier.

Writty 💝🌐🍏

Notetaking webapp with local document storage (no real-time collaboration). Additional features are available with the macOS app ($13 one-time purchase), but it can be used in the browser on any device.

Bean 💝📵✒️🍏

Word processor for macOS, with no real time collaboration.

Growly Write 💝📵✒️🍏

Word processor for macOS, with no real time collaboration.

Jarte 💝📵✒️🪟

Word processor for Windows, with no real time collaboration.

AbleWord 💝📵✒️🪟

Word processor for Windows, with no real time collaboration. Also can be used for PDF editing.

John asked for time to think about it: he still had work to do on his album of rock oldies, and he had committed to play acoustic guitar on David Bowie’s cover of Across the Universe on February 5. But if he left for New Orleans after the Bowie session, he could be there for Mardi Gras, on February 11—something, as he told May, he had always wanted to experience. On January 19, he mentioned the prospect in a letter to Derek Taylor:

BOWIES CUTTIN “UNIVERSE” (LET IT BEATLE). AM A GONNA BE THERE (BY REQUEST OF COURSET). THEN POSSIBLEY DOWN TO NEW ORLEONS TO SEE THE McCARTKNEES.

“I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again,” Linda later recalled. “And I know John was desperate to write . . . Desperate!”

But though they acknowledged that they would like to work together again, their relationship as songwriters was complex—as it had been even in the Beatles days. A healthy competition between the pair made them disinclined to pat each other on the back.

“I hardly ever remember it actually. There wasn’t a lot of it flying about,” Paul said of praise from his former writing partner. But he did remember one occasion when John let his guard down. “One time we were making Help! in Austria, we’d gone on location there. And I shared a room with John. More often than not, George would share a room with John, but on this particular occasion I was in with John. And we were taking our skiing boots off, and taking all the sweaty gear off, and getting ready for the evening and stuff, and we had one of our cassettes... And there were like three of my songs, [and] three of John’s songs on this one side that we were listening to. And for the first time ever, he just sort of said—he didn’t say anything definite, but he hinted—he said, ‘Oh, I probably like your songs better than mine.’ And that was it. That was the height of the praise I ever got off him, I think.”

The JAPAGE 3 at Harry Harrison's wedding party at the Childwall Abbey Hotel in Liverpool, England | 20 December 1958 (II)

Derek [Hodkin] remembers, "They said to me, 'You can be our manager!'" He didn’t mind the suggestion at all. Along with his recording gear Derek carried an RAF notebook, and when John, Paul and George started to pitch and toss ideas for a new group name he wrote them down in pencil. He still has the book, where the ideas remain, a moment frozen in time:

THE POLECATS THE RAVENS THE BLACKBIRDS THE JACKDAWS THE JAYBIRDS

The Ravens is the only name underlined, so it was probably favourite for a while, but the last of the five evidently sparked a new mode of thinking because, above all of them – in larger letters, dominant – Hodkin wrote JAPAGE 3.

As Hodkin explains it, Japage – pronounced 'Jaypage' – came from the 'J' for John, 'pa' for Paul and 'ge' for George, and it was 3 because they were staying a trio, having no intention of keeping Mike as drummer. Playing for a recorded rehearsal was one thing, going on stage another. He wasn’t even 15 and was like a one-armed bandit.

But Japage 3’s first booking wasn’t arranged by their manager and he knew nothing of it: it was at George’s brother’s wedding party. There’s a fine photo of the trio playing here, framed in the window of Childwall Abbey Hotel: John is again without a guitar (not even bothering with the rubbish one he’d swiped in Manchester), they’re dressed in neat uniform dark suits and ties and they all have quiffs. History doesn’t record what they sang, but George would recall them being drunk, and the groom remembers John’s most singular contribution to the event, pouring his pint of ale over the head of an elderly lady pianist and wedding guest, announcing, 'I anoint thee David.' Outlandish behaviour was so typical at Liverpool parties, no one took against John for his action, not even the beer-soaked woman; she just walked off, silently but stickily, to try to dry herself.

I was, at the time, in need of money to buy drugs and pay my rent, and I had slipped back into prostitution. I hoped to find a new client or two, or perhaps an older, generous man who just liked to look. I went to a Hollywood party.

It started out like a hundred other parties I'd been to. I was high on cocaine, and I knew that at the very least there would be free drugs available. There always were. When you're young and beautiful in Hollywood, you get invited to many parties like this. The alcohol and cocaine are abundant. The host is usually someone extremely wealthy, a successful film producer, director, or actor. These people like to have as many young, hot-looking babes around as possible to impress their business associates and influential friends. Everyone likes to look at beautiful women, and better yet, fuck them.

George Harrison was sitting in the corner of the library at this particular party, playing a song on the ukulele. Though I was a child during the Beatlemania days, I can still remember watching their movie, A Hard Day's Night, on television with my older sister. I knew my mom would have been especially impressed with the fact that I had met someone as famous as he, from her era. What I didn't know was that George Harrison was married. Not that it would have mattered one bit to me at the time. But normally I would have recognized that got-to-have-it-now urgency and figured it out. Many married men attended these parties, and they were easy to spot. Their body language seemed to be shouting, "It's now or never, so hurry up. I have only so much time before I have to pick up the kids from school, so let's get on with it."

George Harrison was not one for small talk. This living legend let his needs be known early into our introduction. His first words, cockney accent and all, went something like this, "Come upstairs with me, luv, and give me a blow job." I was surprised at his frankness. But I figured, probably like a thousand women before me, When will I have another chance to blow a Beatle? I decided to comply.

It didn't take long for him to direct my lips to his "British banger." He was definitely not the most romantic man in the world, but I guess a guy like George Harrison doesn't have to be. This superstar has probably had sex with hundreds, if not thousands, of young women all over the world during his stellar career. What I found strange, however, was that the entire time I sucked him off, he kept playing that damned ukulele. My mind was racing. Should I interrupt his strum with small talk? He was acting very matter-of-fact, as if he were transfixed on a rugby match and couldn't be bothered by what I was doing. As he reached orgasm, he ended the song with a grand strum. I didn't know whether to applaud or swallow. I did both.

I have been told that I give some of the best oral sex in Beverly Hills. It was something clients expected from a high-priced call girl. Technique separates the wheat from the chaff, and it separates the sixty-dollar blow jobs from an expensive ten-grand-a-night call girl like I was. Not that I was paid for my services that night, mind you. Money was never discussed.

But I wasn't prepared for what George did next. Without missing a lick (on his ukulele), he started in on another song! No "Thank you," no "That was great," nothing. I didn't have to watch him play for long, because he got up and started walking down the stairs, still fingering that ukulele. I wondered how many women he had done this to. He just took sex for granted. I was left standing there with the taste of him still in my mouth.

Naturally, George didn't even pretend he wanted to please me. I didn't care because I was on coke and wasn't feeling sexy. It says a lot, however, about George Harrison's arrogance—and the attitude toward women that he shares with many rock stars and other male celebrities—that during the whole experience, he never even asked my name.

A second concern was that Beatlemania arrested girls’ sexual development at the juvenile stage of self-abuse. The ‘mass masturbation orgy’ witnessed by Noël Coward at a Beatles concert left him ‘truly horrified and shocked’. Cambridge don David Holbrook experienced the same revulsion when attending a primary school glove-puppet show featuring ‘phallophoric’ effigies of the Beatles:

As the taped Beatle music rose to a pitch, the [children’s] jiggling became an almost indecent enactment of sexual rhythm, while the cries, sighs and shouts became those of people possessed by sexual ecstasy approaching orgasm. It became painfully clear that the Beatles are a masturbation fantasy, such as a girl presumably has during the onanistic act...

Holbrook recounted this event in a letter to the New Statesman in 1964. In the same letter, he appealed to readers to provide him with children’s accounts of fandom in order to test his hypothesis that the masturbation incited by pop music created a ‘closed circuit’ which prevented children from attaining maturity. Three teachers replied. One testified that he caught schoolboys in the act of ‘moving their pelvises rhythmically in time with each other’ while listening to the Beatles on the radio. The other two furnished Holbrook with exactly what he had requested: a bundle of their pupils’ writings about the Beatles.

Holbrook’s findings, which he published thirty years later, unsurprisingly indicated that some girls were sexually aroused by the Beatles. One girl described how ‘you clinth [sic] yourself’ when they appeared on television and another related how the band ‘makes my body fill all funney [sic]’. More remarkable was Holbrook’s conviction that all the children’s comments were not merely sexual but represented ‘a kind of deep regression to the time of total dependence on the mother’. Holbrook deployed the full array of Freudian techniques to make his case. He explained a 10-year-old’s desire to sit on McCartney’s lap as a projection of McCartney ‘becom[ing] her baby’: hence her attraction to his ‘babies [sic] face’ and ‘appealing eyes’. An 11-year-old’s account of learning to masturbate to the Beatles (‘he has a glorious voice it is so soft it makes you want to wriggle all over the plaice [sic]’) was interpreted as a ‘regression to infantile states’ rather than a prelude to adult sexuality. A 16-year-old betrayed ‘her denial of inner problems’ by disagreeing that the Beatles were masturbation material. Holbrook saw the manner in which Beatlemaniacs screamed, cried and wet themselves as further evidence of their return to infanthood. He claimed that the Beatles’ ‘jiggling... hair-flopping... [and] guitar-strumming’ produced sensations akin to dandling and sucking, that the crowd provided maniacs with ‘a symbolic womb’ and that their experience of being ‘sent’ turned them into a ‘mass polyglot baby’.

Such conclusions did not impress everyone. The music critic Deryck Cooke charged Holbrook with failing to supply evidence that the Beatles incited masturbation and with displaying a ‘puritanical disgust’ at bodily movements common to all dancing. The same behaviours which Holbrook interpreted as displays of infantile sexuality were cast as examples of girls ‘subconsciously preparing for motherhood’ by a psychologist interviewed in the News of the World. Whereas Holbrook conjectured that Beatlemaniacs screamed like infants and identified themselves with the jelly babies that they hurled at their idols, the psychologist interpreted their screams as a ‘rehearsal’ for labour and the jelly babies as symbolising their future offspring. This psychologist’s insistence on the ‘innocent and harmless’ motivations of female fans was echoed by another set of (adult male) commentators who saw ‘nothing nasty’ about Beatlemania, by which they meant it was ‘not sexual’. They favourably contrasted the Beatles’ performances with the suggestiveness of Elvis Presley’s act and surmised that girls were drawn to the Beatles’ ‘innocence’, viewing them as brothers rather than lovers.