#mostly got plants out to reuse them in my other tank

[whywolfprincess]

That feel when you remove tons of plants from your tank and suddenly see your animals again lol

[asficdiary]

Magnum P.I || Fernando Alonso

Pairing: Fernando Alonso X Girlfriend!Reader Warning and Tags: Suggestive content, Sexual Themes, mostly fluff with some light sexual banter. AFAB!Reader, descriptions used. Safe for work Summary: Post-race celebrations take a turn when one story about a mustache-wearing ex leaves Fernando with something to prove. The next morning, you're not sure whether to laugh, blush, or kiss him senseless. Word Count: Under 1K Author's Note: Look. This is my fourth mustache fic. At this point, it's less a creative choice and more a lifestyle. I don’t know what Fernando put in that facial hair, but apparently it’s plot crack. I promise I’m normal about it (I’m not). Anyway, enjoy this unhinged little moment where he weaponizes the mustache for seduction. As he should.

It was the Tuesday night after the Spanish grand Prix and a few of Fernando's friends had invited you guys out for some drinks to congratulate Fernando on scoring points. The bar was surprisingly cozy with warm yellow light and plants everywhere. It had been a few hour since you arrived and everyone was a little tipsy. It had made the atmosphere even more relaxed. Everyone was laughing and oversharing in the best way.

"Okay, we've all had ex's obviously, but I got to know, what was your worst relationship experience?" One of the other girlfriends asked the group. The guys went first, one crazy gold digger, one slept with their dad, Fernando saying a girl who had gotten a tattoo of his name after a first date. Then the girls went, One who lived in his parents basement and would reuse his dirty underwear, one who similarly had tried sleeping with her mom.

"And you? What's your worst dating experience?" Fernando's friend had asked after the rest had gone. You think for a second.

"Okay, so in collage I dated this one guy, walking red flag looking back. Really weird actually. But he broke up with me because I joked that his dog looked like a rat. It was once, of handedly, didn't mean anything really, just a bad joke, but we broke up because of it. I will say I did get with him for one reason and one reason only" You say and a couple of them laugh.

"What was the reason you got with him?" One of the guys ask.

"He had this mustache. It was like a full-on Magnum P.I. situation. And for some reason… it worked? I don’t know why. I actually kind of hated it at first, when I met him, but eventually I was like ‘huh, maybe I have a type’. God, I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud.” You cringe and take a sip of your cocktail. Everyone laughs and a few people make jokes based off it, but when you look back at Fernando, he's hiding a smirk behind his beer.

The next morning you wake up to an empty bed. You brush it off as you look at the time. Fernando was probably in the gym around now. You climb out of bed and stumble down to the kitchen a slight hangover pounding on your head.

When you reach the kitchen you chug some water before putting on the kettle and deciding to make breakfast for you both. As your moving around the kitchen the gym door opens and Fernando walks out. He's in a tank and shorts and he's a sweaty mess, but god he's never looked better. "Morning Beautiful" He smirks walking over to you. He puts a hand on your waist, scrunching the fabric of his shirt you had stolen, and kisses you.

"I'm making breakfast? Want some coffee?" You offer and he nods.

"Yea, I just wanna go shower first" He says and you nod, before watching him walk out the kitchen towards the bathroom.

You continue with your task. And a few minutes later Fernando walks in, you see his chest and that v-line into his jeans before you look up. Your heart literally jumps out your throat. "You- Fernando- What?" You try speak but it's as if your brain short circuits.

"You said last night you liked mustaches" He shrugs.

"It was a joke! A story"

"Sounded more like a fantasy to me"

"Fernando!"

"I'm just saying you got with a man because of his beard. Why not give you another reason to stay?"

You smile and shake your head.

"I love you" You sigh and lean over the kitchen Island to kiss him. He kisses you back his hand holding your throat.

When you lean back you shake your head. "You look like you sell Yachts in Miami for a living"

"Oh is that another fantasy? I own one you know, we can role play?" He teases and your face goes red.

"You're unbelievable"

"That's not a no?"

StacheLonso - One Shots - Master List

[leam1983]

Post-Quarantine Musings  - Hardspace: Shipbreaker

I book car showroom appointments for a living.

There’s more to it, seeing as I’m the office’s resident IT drone, proofreader and occasional copywriter, but it boils down to this. My job in these parlous times is to get you to strap on that dodgy graphene-filter mask you bought off of Wish or Alibaba and drive to your local showroom so you can socially distance yourself from a guy who really, really wants you to disregard the fact that payment delays on a 20K$ vehicle just isn’t a worthwhile deal in times like these. Money’s tight for everyone, but Honda, Nissan and everyone else’s plant workers need to put food on the plate - and that means buyback offers. Lots and lots of buyback offers, most of them being shockingly cheap and poorly thought-out.

Over the last few days, though, I’ve been poking at Blackbird Entertainment’s Hardspace: Shipbreaker, of which the basic setup uneasily mirrors the decidedly crapsack world we find ourselves living in, lately. Work is scarce for some, so blue-collar postings suddenly start to have some allure. What happens, then, when said blue-collar work takes you out of Earth’s gravity well?

The year is 2355 or thereabouts, and inflation’s made it so that a lower-middle class bloke having over nine million dollars in debt is totally normal. You’re one such average Joe, the game opening with the anxiety-inducing din of your cramped mega-building apartment. Your financial imprint is in shambles, creditors are after your ass, and your inbox varies between impassioned pleas from your mother and curt title lines coming from repo agencies.

You’re deep in it, safe to say.

Luckily for you, you’ve also applied to the LYNX Corporation’s Shipbreaker program, wherein all debts are shouldered by the company as well as all living expenses, so long as you don’t mind leaving your family and loved ones behind to spend your hours between work shifts in a pressurized habitat that’s essentially left out in the open space of your new workspace’s offered ship berth. The profile setup is presented diegetically as the world’s mortiferous take on Capitalism, wherein LYNX reserves the right to clone you, if you happen to sever the right fuel line at the wrong time. The company expects total obedience and even dictates who you should vote for, in the coming global elections. You’ll make millions of bucks per shift, but most of it will go to fruitlessly attempting to sponge off a debt not even your children’s children will have any prayer of making a dent in.

“But hey,” says Weaver, your supervisor, in his nonchalant Midwestern drawl, “work hard, and you too just might work off your debt, like Simmons did.”

In the beginning hours, it’s not hard to get the sense that Simmons might be a company-created chimera, a figment of corporate imagination - the Guy Who Made It.

In practice, your new job involves floating around in the zero-G confines of a spaceship berth, flanked by furnaces to smelt down what can be salvaged or repurpose what can be quickly reused. Everything else, from cots to pressurization units and loose personal O2 tanks, you have to fling down into the giant space barge that partially blots out your view of a brownish, detritus-covered Earth. Every work shift lasts fifteen minutes, and every shift comes with Work Orders, or tasks that need to be prioritized. Your tools of the trade include precision cutting lasers and beamsplitters, along with an energy-based grapple gun. The brunt of the work involves worming your way inside your Derelict of the Day, which another team’s already stripped down to the I-Beams and connecting points - and reducing all of the massive, yellow-marked solder points to slag. A little thruster work adds momentum to gigantic steel, aluminium or nanocarbon plates and walkways that you free from the ship’s armature, at which point you can slither out and guide all freed loose items and plates to either the Salvage, Furnace or Reclamation points.

Early on, it feels like you’re playing Operation inside the innards of some gigantic steel-borne beast - but the fifteen-minute timer soon starts to loom over you, as your Work Orders become increasingly complex. Soon enough, your safe and definitely OSHA-compliant procedures are set aside for hacky and mildly suicidal means of reaching your goals as quickly as possible.

Normally, creating a safe working environment involves depressurizing each wreck from within, using the provided consoles. Nevermind why, but LYNX supplies its wrecks with a remaining atmosphere and plenty of unsecured flotsam floating around. If you’re on the clock, you can also just hang onto the pilot’s cockpit with your magnetic gloves, aim your laser at the front windshield - and then hold on for dear life as all ninety-seven tons of atmosphere in the hauler you’re assigned to forces its way out into the void, through a space that has about the width of a finger. The resulting force rips through the front cockpit, turning the usually easy-to-handle ‘nano panels that line the ship’s outer plating into dozens of annoyingly small fragments you’ll later have to spent long minutes bundling together and flinging down the Reclamation chute.

The same goes for fuel lines, really. You only have a few minutes left and need the few million creds an intact thruster block sells for? Cut open a hole in the ship’s flank, near the stern, expose the fuel lines, line up your shot while going as far back as you can while still having a chance to make your target - and fire away. You’ll tear the entire back half open and even possibly kill yourself, but that’s what company-produced clones and mnemonic transfer jobs are for, right?

I mean, the ship’s half-ruined and LYNX’s just lost a few cool billions of expensive tech but, hey - the thruster block’s intact (miraculously) and that’s going to cover your equipment leases being commuted to a for-life permit! Woohoo, no more payments for my precision laser!

Of course, nothing says blue-collar tedium like Space Bluegrass, and that’s what you’ll be listening to for most of your run. Shipbreaker is still definitely barren on the audio spectrum, although a good chunk of it is by design: you’re in space, in a near-complete vaccuum, and the only clear sounds you’ll ever hear are broadcast out of your suit’s radio. Everything else is muffled and distant, with even your ship-rending occasional reactor failures only manifesting as a bright glare and a low whoosh.

The main draw quite obviously is the game’s zero-G physics engine. Fans of Space Sims like Elite: Dangerous will feel right at home, with the obviously small-scale setting being less focused on your pulling off Top Gun stunts in space and more with providing chunks of metal weighing a variable amount of tons with the ponderous floatyness to be expected - and small bits with the life-ending velocity to be expected when your non-compliant shenanigans result in your helmet cracking and your air reserves oozing out. The end result is surprising, seeing as what looks like a Homeworld-era cruiser bursting open like a beached whale barely taxes an i7 7700K, 16GB setup. The game is rather lightweight, technically speaking, which allows it to be impressively forgiving, based on the two machines I was able to fiddle with, one of them an entry-level gaming rig, and the other being more of an enthusiast setup, with an i9 and 32 GBs of memory.

If anything, you’re likely to notice that there’s a bit of a disconnect between your rough, dusty and used hand-crafted environments and the polygonal and simplistic construction of the vessels you’re tasked with decommissioning. That’s mostly a result of the game needing an efficient way to handle one interactive object splitting off into potentially dozens of physics-based objects. Keeping things sleek obviously makes sense, considering, and it also helps that Hardspace rests on the handiwork of a few ex-Relic Entertainment designers. Hiigara’s natives aren’t too far off if you look at the ship designs, with only the texture work suggesting that you’re a Blue Collar Joe or Jane working on an old tug that’s had just as rough a life as you.

The question is, however, if I’d recommend it. I would, but only if you’re the type of gamer who enjoys optimizing things. Shipbreaker is built from the ground-up to either be played like a reverse Bonzai tree simulator, or as a cool physics sandbox wherein cutting open fuel lines like a moron, rupturing power cells or letting the onboard nuke go critical all become cost-effective approaches. If you do, chances are you’ll find yourself strapping on your best or worst drawl and commenting on seat-of-your-pants escapes from technical disasters like they’re just the stuff of your average Tuesday.

You’ve got a debt to clear, after all, and enough clones to turn your grisly demise into an unfortunate bump in the road.