#the hat was such a bitch to code properly

[deadcactusman]

on a more positive note, Mozart has his hat and baton now :)

[eight-cats-in-a-box]

Heyo there!!

Could I get a SFW Transformers: Animated Blitzwing Alphabet here? I'd love to see your ideas for headcanons with him!!

TFA Blitzwing SFW Alphabet

TFA Blitzwing x GN Reader

Read here on AO3 Word count: 2640 A/N: Yes, yes you can

God I am so sorry this took AAAAAGES

But yes, here is your headcanon alphabet for this maniac(/aff)

Warnings: Blitzy has serious issues, mentions of murder

Affection- (how affectionate are they? How do they show it?)

Blitzwing's method and level of affection depends on how he's feeling. Sometimes, he's more than content to cuddle with you and make fun of some random movie, and others, all he wants to do is go blow something up with you and cackle maniacally while you both dance on the ashes.

He will (gently) smush you against his face. He will lick you. He will snarl at anyone who gets close to you. He will do all sorts of weird things that he views as loving. He'll bring you someone's head as a token of his affection.

Best friend- (How would they be as a best friend? How would it start?)

...I'm gonna be so honest, unless you're a fellow Decepticon, you probably got kidnapped. Or used as a hostage. He thinks you're weird for not freaking out, especially when he swaps faces, and he likes weird. Weird is good. Weird is fun.

He eventually seeks you out again for a proper conversation, and you two actually hit it off. (Well, as much as you can hit it off with an alien war criminal with a laundry list of issues.) So he comes back again. And then again. And before you know it, you have his comm code in your phone and a selfie of you two as your lockscreen.

Over time, it'll develop into a proper friendship, and he'd do pretty much anything for you. Janice in accounting pissing you off? He'll squish her. Ex-partner stalking you? Squished. On your period, or just had a shitty day in general? Here's an entire gas station's worth of snacks. He cares so much, and he's terrible as saying it, but he tries to show you anyway.

Cuddles- (Do they like to cuddle? How do they cuddle?)

Ah, yes. The age-old question of "do Decepticons like to cuddle?". The answer is yes. This mech is so touch starved, it's not even funny. It takes him a while to trust you with that vulnerability, though, and that's doubled if you're Cybertronian. You have a much higher ability to hurt him, and he really, truly, does not want to get hurt anymore.

But when he does trust you enough for cuddles? Oh boy is he clingy. No matter what mood he's in, he adores holding you, snuggling you, walking around with you cupped in his palms (or holding his hand, which is almost better), and a whole myriad of other things. He is a level 10 clingy bitch.

Domestic- (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)

If he's feeling more melancholic, he might wonder what your life together might have looked like if the war didn't happen. Would you have a house? An apartment? Would you live in Vos or Kaon or somewhere else? Would you have kids? All these and more torment his fractured processor and leave him unable to sleep.

And if you're human...yikes. He can get even angstier if he's feeling low enough. Does he really deserve you? Wouldn't you be happier with a fellow human? He can't even hold you properly, why do you stay? He's a madmech, he could so easily hurt you so badly, why on earth do you trust him so much?

Of course, you're there to reassure him and remind him that you love him. That he's not getting rid of you, ever.

...I think it goes without saying that this mech should not be allowed in the kitchen. "Servo salad" yeah no thanks babe I'd rather stick to lettuce-

Cleaning is a mixed bag. You have to be very wary when you hand him that feather duster, because his mood can change at the drop of the hat. He will get angry at the dust. And unless you distract him, he will try to eat something. Put some music on and make it more of a game, that works pretty well.

That said, he does do a good job. He's very thorough.

Emotion- (Is it easy for them to express emotion in front of you?)

Short answer? No.

Long answer? It depends.

Some days he finds himself able to let the words flow like water, sweet nothings falling off his tongue easily. And other days his jaw is locked shut, the fear of losing you too strong to bear. Those are the days where he chooses instead to hold you close, to reassure himself that you're okay, that you're here beside him with no plan or intention of leaving him.

Fiancé- (How do they feel about commitment? How quickly would they want to get married?)

It'd take years for him to really, seriously consider it. But you're human, and your lifespan is so much shorter. He wants to give you the entire universe, but if that's not possible, then getting married is the next best thing.

If you're Cybertronian, then it takes even longer. He wants to court you, to do this right. He wants to take you out on dates and dance with you and show you things you've never seen. He wants to conjunx you properly, with a real ceremony, not on a backwater dirtball with too much water.

Either way, though, he's in it for the long haul. Past a certain point, he stops expecting you to leave and starts trusting that you won't.

Gentle- (how gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)

He tries his best, but you still end up with accidental bumps and bruises. Each one makes his gut twist with an unpleasant feeling, another reminder that you shouldn't tolerate him, let alone love him. But love him you do, and so the bruises get ice and the scrapes get bandaids, and Blitzwing gets a kiss for being your brave hero. Which he, naturally, enjoys.

Emotionally, he's much worse. He's blunt and cold on some occasions, and manic and wild on others. But he tries. For you. He'll never tease you for crying, or mock you for your interests, or make fun of anything about you. He'll threaten anyone that does, in any way, shape, or form, and god help them if they make you cry.

Hugs- (Do they like hugs? How often do they give them? What are their hugs like?)

Like many things, it depends on his mood. While he does like it, it's not all the time he wants one, and he won't ever ask for one. He'll just hover near you like an aloof cat that totally doesn't want pet until you get the hint and hug him.

And it's so worth it when you do. He's warm and gentle, and the thrumming of his spark is audible. Sometimes he'll pick you up and spin you around, giggling, others he'll grab you possessively. But he's always careful with you.

I love you- (How fast do they say the L-word?)

It takes him months, if not years. It's not for lack of wanting- he wants to, desperately, but he can't, won't, give the universe another person to take from him. He can't lose you. He can't bring himself to announce to the universe that you're something else to be taken from him.

It makes him feel awful when you say it and he can't bring himself to say it back, can't tell you how he feels. So he finds other ways. He brings you things, he holds you close, and he murmurs soft things to you when you're asleep. He adores you so, so much, and it's killing him not to say it.

You end up talking about it, asking why he hasn't responded- not complaining, but worried that he might be feeling pressured- and he tells you. Tells you that he's terrified to lose you, and you've never seen him so quiet. So instead of saying it, you come up with a system. Three taps, one for each word.

He does that so often, his fingertips start to wear down a little.

Jealousy- (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they're jealous?)

Oh, he doesn't just get jealous. He seethes with envy. Depending on his mood- and how flirty they're being- they might, might escape with their life.

He'll loom beside you possessively, glaring down at them stonily, and he'll pull you in by the waist and haul you into a rough, possessive kiss, snarling his engines and venting steam until they get the message. If whoever it is doesn't get the message, he'll beat them bloody.

Kisses- (What are their kisses like? Where do they kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)

His kisses, like all else, depend on his mood. Sometimes they'll be soft, slow, filled with so much love you could burst. Other times they're rough, aggressive, hands pulling you against him and his engines roaring. And sometimes he just fucking licks you and calls it good.

Little ones- (How are they with kids? Do they want any?

He did want kids, before the war. Before he became what he is now, he wanted so badly to be a sire. But now, he's terrified of hurting them, of doing irreparable damage, of failing them.

He's fantastic with kids, though. He's calm and gentle and passionate and silly and defensive above all else. He'd be a great parent if he ever got his head around it.

Morning- (How are mornings spent with them?)

Mornings with Blitzwing are slow. They have to be, because he refuses to let you up until you absolutely have to get up. He's a cuddlebug when he's tired, and he's almost certainly stronger then you are. Not that you really try to get up, either, he's warm and outside is cold. A few more minutes can't do any harm.

Night- (How are nights spent with them?)

Nights with him tend to be late ones. Staying up until the wee hours of the morning talking, laughing, joking. You're always the first to fall asleep; the soft purr of his engines and the thrumming of his spark are the sweetest lullaby you've ever heard.

Open- (When will they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything at once or wait awhile to reveal things slowly?)

It takes ages to crack him open. The key is patience- revealing things about himself will take a lot of trust, and prying will get you nowhere. He'll tell you when he tells you, and no sooner. He'll drop little things here and there, and then drop it all at once when he breaks down after a particularly bad nightmare.

Patience- (How easily angered are they?)

It's Blitzwing. His temper is shorter than Bumblebee.

But jokes aside, he doesn't really get angry at you. Not really. He gets annoyed, he yells, he stomps around in a huff, but he doesn't get angry. He will not hesitate to squish a bitch if they hurt you though, his limited amount of patience is reserved for you and you alone. He'd fight Megatron for you if he had to.

Quizzes- (How much would they remember about you? Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)

He doesn't remember every little detail, but you won't catch him forgetting important shit. Birthday? Down pat. Anniversary? In the calendar. He keeps track of things. He writes things down. He doesn't want to forget.

Remember- (What is their favourite moment in the relationship?)

The first time you dragged him out to see the stars. You had to go miles out to avoid light pollution, but it was more than worth it. The stars were gorgeous, and your excitement was even better.

Security- (How protective are they? How do they protect you? How would they like to be protected?)

He is so protective. He can't, won't, lose you, not after everything else, and he needs to protect you. Be that from a collapsing building or a spider, he is there.

He'll take hit after hit if it means keeping you safe, he'd rip every single Autobot limb from fucking limb, he'd do anything to keep you safe. If you were ever hurt, badly hurt, he'd rip whoever did it into shreds and then blow the shreds to smithereens and then stomp the smithereens into tiny little bitty pieces.

He'd panic bad if you ever got hurt in a way he can't do something about- if a building collapsed on you or is you got in a wreck or you're just plain sick. He can't fix this with violence. He can't fix this, period.

He'd be touched and impressed if you stood up for him- especially because he was half-expecting you to do the opposite. Expecting the worst.

Even if you can't protect him physically, he'll love you even more if you yell at someone for his sake. I mean, he thinks it's hot when you yell either way, but especially when it's for him. Optimus Prime quakes in fear at the memory of your scolding.

Try- (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)

He does genuinely try. He puts his all into everything he does- loving you included. He'll take you out flying, wherever you want to go. He would give you the moon and stars, all you have to do is ask. He adores you with everything he is, was, and will ever be.

Flight dates are common even if you're human, but they happen often if you've got a flight alt. Racing through clouds, spiralling lazily around one another, feeling the wind rushing over your wings. It's one of his favorite things, and he loves sharing it with you. Especially considering you're his favorite person.

Ugly- (What are some of their bad habits?)

He's very overprotective. He'll jump in even if you're nowhere needing help, and he tends to do things for you even if you're capable.

He's also got a bad habit of not letting something lie. If you ended on a disagreement, he'll keep poking at it until you either yell at him to stop or indulge him. Both things can be resolved with a stern discussion, but the overprotectiveness is just going to tone down, never disappear.

Vanity- (How concerned are they with their looks?

He truly could not care less. He makes sure he's clean enough and that's about it.

He will make sure to scrub down thoroughly if he's come into contact with something that could hurt you, though.

Whole- (Would they feel incomplete without you?)

Oh, absolutely. If you ever died, or left him, or even got separated from him for more than 24 consecutive hours, he'd be miserable. You're his life, his light, his everything. He needs you to survive. He can't imagine living without you anymore.

Xtra- (An extra headcanon about them)

This seems to be unpopular consensus, but I don't think Blitzwing is three personalities in one body or whatever. My personal hc is that since his processor split, each "face" has only been able to express a certain subset of emotions. Before the split, he was a manic, aggressive, snarky sonuvabitch and he's still that bot, just a little crazier. But the faces aren't separate bots. It's all Blitzwing up there.

Yuck- (What are some things they wouldn't like, either in general or in a partner?)

He doesn't like sweet things. Makes him sick.

Zzz- (What is a sleep habit of theirs?)

He tends to sprawl out like he's been shot, unless he's cuddling you, then you are not escaping until he decides to let you go.

He snores. Loudly. It's awful.

His engine fluctuates as he sleeps, like it breathes with him. It revs on inhale, and idles on exhale.

He wakes up incredibly dehydrated all the damn time due to the aforementioned snoring.

Masterlist

[the-character-lounge]

Randy the Elevator Pouncer

This is right after the interrogation in the previous update, they’ve gotten some useful information out of the stallion and the litter victory seems to put them in a mood... (Warning: It gets a little steamy but cuts out before any NSFW happens)

Spinel grabbed a chair, spun it, then sat down with his back hooves on the table while leaning the chair back. He stared at Randy now, expression muted on purpose for the time as he observed him. "I don't know how the hell you did that."

 Randy sat down beside him, kicking his hooves up on the table and smiling. “You break ‘em, then you mend ‘em.” He chuckled and looked over at Spinel, raising a brow. “Wh- what? D- Did you not th- think your lamb ch- chop had it i-in him?”

He flushed and lost his composure as he gave a huffy glare. "I just didn't think you were in to the S&M sphiel." He then looked up, trying to get back on subject. "Okay, so we figured there was blackmail but where are we going from here? How are we going to find who's behind this, and how.... How are we supposed to connect that bitch to all of this?"

Randy sat quietly, his hooves folded in his lap. He thought about it for a moment, his eyes just staring out through the conference room window. His eyes lit up, and he grinned as he looked over at Spinel. “… why don’t we go ask her ourselves?” he said simply, looking over at Spinel from the corner of his eye. “W- We’ll have to take a d- different angle, s- seeing as th- the scared father i- is a very easily m- manipulatable angle.”

Spinel actually felt himself shudder. Seriously, Randy was scary when he really got serious. He'd never seen him quite like this, and wondered if he was enjoying it a little too much. ".... Can we do that? How much time do we got?" The day had already gone by, and he wasn't sure if this was time to plan for the morning, or time to act now.

Randy took his legs back off the table and looked at Spinel. “Well, we’ve got maybe a couple days. Her lawsuit’s probably still pending, a- and she’s probably trying to get a lawyer.” He laughed suddenly. “Sh- She’s going to have a hard time finding on- one better than me! A- Am I right?” He couldn’t help but laugh again, and sighed in content, spinning around in the chair, chuckling occasionally.

 "...Right..." he said in awe, forgetting to hide that. He quickly shook it off and frowned, glaring off. "So. I see what that fucker's doing now. Everything about this. He's taking things from me. That filly was from Osiris. He wanted ransom payed from my company's money. And it's me he's trying to shut down, except he's attacking the front." He chewed his lip anxiously. "That can't be everything."

Randy stopped spinning, blinking a few times. He had lost himself for a minute. Almost like.. like he had blacked out. He cleared his throat, and remembered the filly and her father. How he should have been touched… but for some reason he didn’t really feel anything but pride.. He felt amazing knowing that he was getting shit done, not that he had just helped a father reunite with his kid. He spooked himself sometimes, he really did. He internally shivered at his own callousness, and some of the old, normal feelings he usually had began to return. “R- Right… B- But what m- more could h- he want?” he asked, that anxious, fleeting stutter slowly returning.

Spinel shook his head, "Unless he's trying to pull off some bullshit honor code about crime organizations not ratting on one another, I'm pretty sure he knows by now about the real business I run." Spinel really wouldn't have cared if Randy was more proud of his victory than the results of that victory. He was basically feeling the same way though he didn't feel like he'd won anything yet. So far, they were only seeing what was put in front of them. It wasn't exactly a secret that there was a scarab on the filly's hat, for example. He sat down properly and crossed his hooves on the table. ".... Fuck... We're looking exactly where we're supposed to." His head hit the table after that.

Randy stared at him, trying to comprehend what Spinel just said. “… Wh- what do you m- mean ‘exactly where we’re supposed to?’ I- Isn’t that a good thing?” he asked, scooting closer to Spinel. This was all good! They were getting closer to being able to prosecute Candy legally. They were making good progress.. weren’t they?

"The pin. Randy. The pin. Why was it there...?" he slowly looked up at him. "I mean, isn't that.... a little obvious?"

 Randy had obviously lost his mojo. If it was as obvious as Spinel was making it out to be, he felt like a total idiot. The ram started talking it out, “W- Well, l- like you and Whistle said before.. i- it was a sign to another pony. O- Or maybe it was s-some kind of m-message or threat to-towards you?” Randy’s voice trailed off, and he stared into the carpet.

 "Yeah... Yeah, maybe..." He settled a little, staring off. "Tomorrow I'm going to check on all the jewels though. I don't know. This guy's good at running, I don't know how smart he is organizing."

 Randy sat staring at the carpet, then groaned and leaned back in the chair. He sighed, and looked over at Spinel. “.. Wh- what a f- fucking mood k- killer huh?” he asked, rubbing his temples in frustration.

Spinel shrugged, "I don't know." He grinned suddenly, looking at Randy with a look that screamed daredevil on a thrill run. "I think it's exciting."

Randy chuckled and softly poked at his own thigh. “W- Well, h- had you hired m- me a couple y- years ago, th- this would’ve b- been just an-another j- job…” he smiled and looked over at Spinel. “B- But yes, i- it is kind of e- exciting..” He rubbed the back of his neck and groaned a bit.

"Just another job?" He leaned closer, skeptical and doubtful but with a big smirk. "Since when did you take out potential leaders of serious crime syndicates...?"

 “W-Well… there w-was this one t-time…” he began, but quickly erupted into a chuckle. He waved his hoof, and shook his head. “O- Okay, s- so n- nothing li- like c- crime syndicate l- leader…” Although there had been the fiasco with Viceroy Valiant during the Valiant vs. Canterlot trial.. but that was a government official, not a crime boss.

He wasn't going to allow this hesitation on the pin bring down what victory was made so far. After some silence, he quirked a brow and smiled at Randy, oddly a little softer than usual. Probably from the crystal earlier. "Still. At least my talent in finding rare gems from the most unexpected places rings true, hm...?" Yes. That was a legitimate compliment and he completely meant it on purpose.

Randy thought Spinel was going to crack wise, and he started to chuckle. But, the words registered and he stopped suddenly. “heh- wh- what?” he asked, his cheeks instantly burning up. “I-.. um..” he stammered, not knowing what to say. His ears flicked back, and he looked away from Spinel sheepishly. “.. Th- thanks~” he managed, that warm feeling in his chest again. He felt silly and so immature about how he was feeling. What was he a filly in high school?? .. Aw to hell with it. It was nice, and he was going to enjoy it.

He shook his head, "Seriously, it either takes an incredible moron or something else entirely to be willing to..." He took a breath. "...Help someone like me." He got up, feeling weird and exposed suddenly. Maybe it was the location, he preferred being in his suite. "... Let's get something to eat, I'm starving."

Randy was just dumb-struck. Wh- What was happening? Wh- What.. he couldn’t… He got up to follow Spinel, still feeling himself blushing as he walked beside him. His brain was literally exploding with thoughts, and he was so dumb-founded that he couldn’t think of anything to say. He stood quietly beside Spinel, waiting in front of the elevator doors. Then, as if he had lost control of his body, he wrapped his forelegs around the stallion, and planted his lips on Spinel’s, moaning softly.

As Spinel was about to walk in to the elevator, he was snagged up suddenly. As out of nowhere as it was, it was apparently a welcome action, as it lead to Spinel pulling Randy in and pinning himself up against the side of the elevator with the buttons. His hooves gripped both ends of the loose bowtie to pull Randy closer against him and keep him there as he eagerly opened his mouth and licked along the ram's lips. As the elevator was lifting, Spinel's horn lit up and put a temporary lock on the elevator, making it jolt to a stop just between the floors. He grinned cockily and whispered, "Finish what you start."

[coollyinterferes]

Character Interview || Repost, don't Reblog

NAME  :   Robert Edward Orville Speedwagon

NICKNAME  :  Boss, aniki, “bastard!”/"that son of a bitch!” (usually from rival gang members, so the insult varies sometimes lol), Rob (used by a few friends), derivatives of his last name −Speebs, Speeds, Speeb, Speedy, etc− but these he will only accept them from certain people, otherwise he will do his best not to cringe on the spot or will do it inwardly. Uncle Speedy and etc later on (as in once George and the rest of the children come into his life, more specifically~).

AGE  :   25 in the main verse (may vary depending on the verse)

SPECIES  :  Human/Stand user in the main/time-travel verse | Vampire in the vamp!verse | Werefox in the monster!verse

—— Personal! ♡

MORALITY  :      lawful   /   chaotic /   good   /   neutral   /   evil  /   true .

RELIGION  :   Non-practising catholic (was raised as Catholic, like most other Victorians, believes in God, but that’s pretty much about it)

SINS   :     greed   /   gluttony   /   sloth   /   lust   /   pride  /   envy   /   wrath  .

VIRTUES :     chastity   /   charity   /   diligence   /   humility   /   kindness   /  patience  / justice.

KNOWN LANGUAGES :   English is his first language. Conversational Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German and some more. Some conversational Mandarin Chinese as well (this one thanks to Li −canonly known as Kenpo, his Ogre Street friend−) and bits of Irish (this one thanks to Tattoo, his other Ogre Street friend). He can read and understand some Japanese (kana and some okurigana/kanji) but can’t really speak or write it. Same case for some other languages that he can also recognize and more or less understand bits of them but can’t really speak them. As you probably guessed, he’s learned most of these through his many journeys around the world.

SECRETS  :  All of the stuff in regards to the stone mask and all the events and incidents that came out from that (it was stated that the only ones who know everything about it from start to end are Jonathan and Speedwagon, the others who might know a great deal of it would be Straizo and Master Tonpety). He also tries to keep a low profile in regards to his homosexuality whenever he’s out of the slums to save himself some trouble due to the stigma at the time and the potential legal consequences, going only for the gay codes of the time (long hair, cleanly shaven face, colorful accessories, etc) so I guess that could count? Other than that, and in the verses that it applies, his stand mayhaps?? That’s what allows him to leap through timelines in the time travel verses (it possesses other abilities and skills but, since Robert doesn’t even know about his stand’s existence yet, he hasn’t trained with it and thus he doesn’t know about any of it’s abilities, not even about the time travel oof).

—— Physical! ♡

BUILD :     scrawny   /   bony   /   slender   /   fit   /   athletic   /   curvy   /   herculean   /  pudgy  /   average   .

HEIGHT  :   5’11”, close to the 6’ mark (181 cms)

SCARS   /   BIRTHMARKS  :    The most recognizable one is the scar marring the left side of his face (going from the top of his nose to his jaw), but he has plenty more scattered all over his body, some more visible than others, some larger than others. Most of them come from fights and his general criminal lifestyle, some of them even come from some of the torture sessions he’s endured as part of that (so it isn’t surprising that they were either caused by knives, gunshots, burns, shards of glass and etc). Most of his scars are located on his chest and arms, some more on his hands/wrists and fingers (hands/wrists and fingers mainly from when he was learning to use his buzzsaw hat), though he has a few more on his legs/thighs, lower abdomen, and a couple more on his back. In the main verse (usually set in the late stages of PB), he will have a few more from the events in PB −burn scars on his hands from the fire at the Joestar mansion, one on his shoulder from the attack he received from Jack the Ripper, an ice burn across his abdomen from thawing Zeppeli’s arm, and a couple more and not so visible ones on his arms from minor injuries (cuts) he got while fighting and fending off zombies−. Most of the “PB scars” aren’t too visible thanks to Jonathan (he used his hamon to heal Speedwagon’s injuries shortly after).

ABILITIES   /   POWERS  :  He’s able to tell an evil person from a good one by their smell alone. He’s a resilient man and quite a strong one, too (stronger than the average guy, as he was shown killing zombies using his brute force only and a sledgehammer). He's good at hand to hand combat, he’s also good at using knives and guns, and at wrecking shit with a sledgehammer. I also hc that he's capable of creating veeeeeery small amounts of hamon (this as a result of Zepp's "accidental" slip) if he really puts his mind into it. Due to his current limitations with it, his hamon can’t be used for fighting, but it does enhance his healing process, making it slightly faster than that of an average human (with some proper training, chances are he might be able to do more with it, tho). His stand, in the verses where he has it, can perform time travel, which happens at random at first (he gradually gains control on his stand once he learns about it and starts training with it). Due to stands being a reflection of sorts of their user and their fighting spirit, and as an extension of Robert’s own hamon healing abilities, his stand also possesses healing abilities that can be used both on himself and on others, though this requires some training prior, as the healing relies entirely on Speedwagon’s own life force and can be fatal for him if used carelessly at first (once properly trained, it won’t represent a real danger for him to use). Much like Robert himself, his stand is also capable of packing some punches and causing serious damage on it’s opponent despite his stand being more of a “support” stand rather than a fully combat based one.

RESTRICTIONS  :  He's mostly a regular human in the main verse, so he’s at a great disadvantage against stronger supernatural beings such as vampires and pillarmen, for example. As stated above, the amounts of hamon he can currently create are small and, thus are difficult −almost impossible− to use for combat (again, this can change if he gets some proper training). His lack of knowledge on his stand’s existence can also count as a restriction for the time being, as he doesn’t know about it or it’s abilities and, thus, can’t use it at his will for now (it operates mostly in an “unconscious” level at first, usually after getting triggered). He also tends to wear his heart in his sleeve when it comes to the few people he truly holds dear and considers special to him, so that can be used against him if he’s not careful enough.

—— Likes / Scents! ♡

FOOD  :    He isn’t really picky with food since he grew up in absolute poverty and sometimes went for days without a single bite of food or eating stale (sometimes even moldy) food so like… he’s cool with pretty much anything nowadays. He’s also an adventurous man, so he’s always open to trying new and even “exotic” stuff. Other than that, pastries are one of his top fave things ever (creamy ones mainly but not exclusively).

DRINK  :   Tea −citrusy/fresh types mainly like lemongrass, same with berry teas−. He doesn’t mind sweeter teas but, since he usually has them with the pastries, he prefers something more “sour” to balance things out. He also likes coffee, liking it strong, kind of sweet, and hot (just how he likes his men lol). As for alcoholic drinks, he’s all for beer and gin. He also enjoys some of the sweeter ‘posh’ wines Jonathan normally has at his home.

PIZZA TOPPING  :  As far as I know, pizza toppings weren’t as creative and “crazy” in the 19th century as they have been over the last few decades, so he’s only used to more ‘traditional’ stuff like variants of Pizza Margherita, for example. However, in the time travel verses/modern!AUs he will definitely try all kinds of pizza toppings (yes, this includes pineapple pizza as well as entirely sweet pizza toppings and so on) and actually likes some of them.

COLOUR  :    Purple (shades like those of his waistcoats i.e.), pink, greeeeeeenvert, black.

MUSIC GENRE  :    More than a genre itself, he enjoys and appreciates music that can make him feel something. Toss some pub songs there for obvious reasons lol.

BOOK GENRE  :     General fiction mostly. He also enjoys reading some romance novels every now and then whenever he gets the chance to get his hands on a gay romance one, either featuring two males or two females (he doesn’t find the appeal in “traditional” ones for a variety of reasons).

MOVIE GENRE  :    Non-applicable in the main verse. Time travel verses −if he even gets the chance to watch a movie− and even in a modern!AU, his go to genres would probs be similar to his book genres, lol, just add some comedy there but like, not the ‘cheapest’ and cringey kind of comedy.

SEASON  :     Autumn and Winter (harsh winters are a pain in the ass in Ogre Street, but he can handle them fairly well overall)

CURSE WORD :   Fuck / Shit / Bloody and variants of it (like Bloody Hell) / Arsehole / Wanker / Damnit / Bollocks, Ballocks and all of it’s variants / Bastard / Motherfucker / Zounderkite (victorian for “idiot” but with even harsher and ruder connotations than just using “idiot” lol) / Beardsplitter (one of the victorian words for “penis” xd). There are plenty, plenty, more but those are the ones I can think of rn. He comes from the darkest pits of the slums after all, so yeah... Lots of cussing can be expected.

SCENT ( S )  :    Sweet and masculine musky scent, mainly, with an occasional subtle note of gunpowder and/or tobacco depending on whatever tf he’s been doing. Maybe a vague note of blood if he just got out of a fight. Some vague vanilla too but that one only around the time when he lands a temporary job in a bakery in London.

—— Fun Facts! ♡

BOTTOM OR TOP  :   Top leaning verse. He only bottoms occasionally for serious/long term boyfriends that he genuinely trusts, partly due to how being a bottom was (wrongly) perceived as being submissive by most people, and how dangerous being seen as such can be in a place like Ogre Street if the word gets out (not to mention that there’s been people there who have given him shit just for being gay), and partly because he also prefers to top and likes it better, lol.

SINGS IN THE SHOWER  :   Yeah. He started doing it as a child as a way to keep his mind distracted from how cold as fuck the water he’d wash himself with was (he usually bathed in rivers or washed himself with buckets of water some maid forgot outside of a household and that he managed to steal). He’s become a lot more used to cold baths over the years so a distraction is not necessary anymore, however, he still sings or hums sometimes whenever he has a song stuck in his head or if he’s particularly happy about something (this continues later on in life as well,even after cold baths are no longer part of his life, so it’s a habit that he never actually leaves).

LIKES PUNS  :    He loves them! Lame ones, good ones, cheesy ones, silly ones, witty ones, dirty/vulgar ones, etc. Heck, even dad jokes can be found in his repertoire! Chances are that, if you come to him with a pun or joke, he will give you one or two (maybe even more) in return.

------------------------------

Tagged by: @le-princesse-chevalier​​ (( thank you so much for the tag!!! ♡♡ ))

Tagging: @historias-multorum @jojoingjoseph @gazelessmenagerie @usfv @featherchan @kindersturm @iiguess @storiedocs @quirofiliac @rotrioted @breatheflcra @emcraldsxchcrrics @arrhythmiiia @mechahero @voltagecrow @promiseled @joesrparchive (tagged your main but the tag applies to any and all of your muses that you might want to fill this for >:D) @rzrbite​ @mistymiddiana (if you’re up for it) & also tagging anyone and everyone who wants to give this a shot! Just take it and say i tagged you~ Multis and peeps with 2+ muses, feel free to do this for as many of your muses as you wish!

[sleepynegress]

Spoiler-Filled Reaction to the 1st Ep of TFATWS: ‘New World Order’ ...

Okay, so I may switch up and do weekly recaps via audio. Either way, I’m getting something out before the weekend is up... Still!...  It’s a been a few days, so I can go a bit more in depth with my thoughts on that pilot ep.

~ So, that opening was quiet and down-to-earth. For me, it was hammering home not only the humbleness of Sam (despite the bravado, the man is naive in his optimism and *not* superpowered), but being stuck in his initial thoughts about the shield.   ...That it didn’t feel like it belonged to him. Sam’s personality, has been established as super-loyal and almost childlike in his feelings that things will work out and doing the right thing because it’s right (which is why he didn’t get paid enough BTW naive pride). 

-which comes into play w/ his conflict w/ his sister later... I’ll come back to that.

~ We jump into a dangerous mission that shows off Falcon’s personality. He’s gonna get it done with style and optimism even when working with equipment that needs a few updates.  The stunt coordination here was fantastic!  I legit whewed! aloud at Balroc paragliding into *multiple* helicopters... Sam’s hair-pin turns milimeters from canyon rock, propellers, and rockets... ~ I *loved* Torres’ fanboying. It felt like a parallel to Sam fanboying Cap, in CA:WS and evoked the well-established superhero trope of a person *marveling* aloud at what you’re doing making it so. much. cooler. (as an oldhead, the random black dude emoting about Superman’s suit after he comes out of a phonebooth, in the Reeves movie, is my earliest memory of this trope). ~ Then we see the Tunisia titlecard, which yea! it didn’t just say Africa, but ehh, once again “yellow tint” is code for “exotic” country full of brown people. It did cut through the typically more alt-right-tinged military propaganda w/ the Tunisian man thanking Sam for saving his wife, the bare minimum of humanization... but it saved the scene from just “backdropping” the people/culture w/o any humanity, at all, as is typical... That and the way these two BIPOC spoke to one another (there is a certain kind of rapport we non-white folk have w/ each other) was my first hint...that this showrunner ain’t a white dude. The joking about him knowing Arabic...like cheering/teasing when we show our range to one another.  Mainly, this interaction was to show that Sam is to Torres what Steve was to Sam in some ways...with a bit more “brazen kid” on Torres’ part, along w/ introing the idea of the Flagsmashers. ~ Then, naive Sam decides to donate the shield to the Smithsonian...because he doesn’t feel like he’s earned it and because in his mind it still belongs to Cap and because he’s out here trusting this governement even after all the B.S. he’s done lived through.  Even Rhodey was having his doubts... Maybe being around during the blip makes a person more savvy and cynical, IDK. ~ So, then we see Buck in therapy and since I’ve been through trauma, I know that mindset.  Sticking to routine is a big “win”.  Not really caring about anything beyond the bare essentials (yall saw that man’s apartment). And the feeling of being displaced would be amplified by the fact that this man is more so than anyone who has existed(!).  ~ I noticed that Seb leaned into his Rom-Merican accent, which was a great acting choice, it evokes his sense of having traveled without a solid sense of self in a place, because he was essentially, asleep all those decades, while the brainwashed aspect of himself was enslaved to Hydra. I LOVE his therapist.   Fannishness for a cute guy, means a lot of people don’t like her being “mean” to him... But I’mma tell you, as someone who actually has been in therapy for a good bit, you *need* someone who will call you on your bullshit so you can properly work on it.  I love that she’s also a vet and there’s nothing cutesy and coddling in a male-gazey sexy or motherly way. She’s doing her fucking job and not letting his ass slide. To me, that read as a hat-tip to a woman drecting this. So, we see Buck manifest his trauma w/ profound discomfort in his own skin.  He doesn’t know how to interact anymore, how to swagger in this strange time and place (because dude had all kinds of 1940′s swagger and juice back in CA:TFA) So, he’s just awkwardly honest, and beating himself up for that. But... he’s still alive, so he totally perked up in the presence of this attractive server and Yori notices and like so many old people, just busted his chops and skipped all the what he wasn’t gonna do and did it for him, w/ Leah’s confidant acceptance -ahhh, I luv her!- as an assist. ~ Then we flip back to Sam in Delacroix and we meet his sister and his nephews and his community(!) which really nails down Sam the man, the person, the human apart from his underwritten assists to the Avengers. We see that Sarah knows and loves this naively optimistic ‘I will find a way to fix it because it’s the right thing to do’ hard-headed brother.... but good-God! he doesn’t know shit about real-world day-to-day struggle... If you’ve seen Anthony Mackie in The Hurt Locker... one of the big themes explored, is how tough it is for vets who have been through explosions and firefights in another country... to adjust to day-to-day struggle in “normal life”. THAT is what Buck’s therapist was calling out when she said BULLSHIT to him saying he wanted peace (lol, no he doesn’t, like Sam he wants that righeous kind of adrenalin only being in action for “good” gives) and what Sarah is frustrated w/ is regarding him not understanding or respecting the kind of struggle she had to deal w/. ~ As an aside I *loved* her *nose-scratch* “Can I talk to you for a minute??” Whew! That is a black-ass way to let you know someone is pissed w/ you and wants to hash all the shit out. That’s why Sam avoided it, lol... ~ So, the date with Leah, who does all the right things...Goes terribly, because Buck is still too deep in his trauma focus on anything about how great she is.   Note, that just about everything that happened on that date reminded him of aspects of his trauma to the point where Buck, (being an absolute dick!) just fucking, walks out on her!!  I NEED her to chew his ass out for that and I need him to *not* be able to make it up to her (and I’d also love some fanfic, where Buck actually does *ahem* treat her well... I know Asian women be shorted in fanfic too!) ~ So, he goes to Yori’s apartment and stares like an obvious knucklehead (still dealing w/ being stuck in his trauma) at the alter to the man who was just in the way of that brainwashed aspect of himself, pays for the lunch and walks off...AND, NOTE!!  YORI DID NOTICE ALL THIS. So, this will eventually come to a head...yikes! ~ Then we’re back to Sam, and Sarah who tries to have that talk, but old boy ain’t trying to hear it. Insisting that he’s the man to swoop in and save the boat and the business *sigh* by some magic (hanging with magical beings...will do that, I guess). And Sarah smartly is just frustrated and skeptical, but lets him go on and try and fail in the same ways she already did so. many. times... in those five years. ~ And then we see bb Torres being brazen kid stupid amateur spy w/ the Flagsmashers. I honestly thought old masked dude stomped him to death, at first... The camera pan showed the cliched dead-man pose, after all.  I guess he pulled that (super!)stomp, which means... Flagsmashers aren’t the lethal villians here IMO.   I think they escaped from the *real* villian. ~ And then comes some real world racist bullshit... This scene at the bank *nails* a particular kind of frustratingly infuriating racism that is common. Where they will act like they are doing you a favor because they like and want something from you... but still won’t serve you in the same way they would a white person. It’s this strange willfullly “I like you negroes, you entertain me! -but fuck you -but I still like you!” patronizing thing that we know all too well. *whew!* That was real. And then that heartbreaking scene where after Sarah rightly told-ya-so’s.  -Sam is working on that mess of an engine and reality *finally* sets in when the key  didn’t even attempt to turnover.

~ Then Torres messages Sam (and he’s alive!) and we all know Sam knows these Flasgsmashers got super-serum, but isn’t saying. Even TORRES knows (bless his heart). ~ And from there we go straight to the U.S. government rubbing salty dirt in Sam’s wound with the new/fake Cap holding the shield aloft and winking like “It’s mine now, bitch!”. ---And the credits, I won’t get into except to say if you want ALL the spoilers in the credits, watch that linked video, I posted earlier. But they are SIGNIFICANT spoilers.

[adarlingwrites]

Absolution

Summary:

noun: formal release from guilt, obligation, or punishment

The Capital Wasteland lauded the Lone Wanderer as a hero, a Messiah, a savior who’s willing to give her life for the Good Fight. Beyond the legends, the propaganda, and the mythification that surrounded her legacy, there is only one person who knew her bare soul. She gave him his absolution, and now he will fight for hers.

XXVI

January 12, 2278.

Good question.

Of all the operatives I was trained with, Vanth was the one who took to the program best. Our proctors will ask her to jump, and she’ll jump. If a contract holder asks her to beat a civilian up, she’ll do it without blinking. If a corrupt old pervert asks her to ride her fellow operative so he can get off, she’ll do it without remorse.

It didn’t happen just once, either.

Vanth’s just one of the many people I would’ve loved to put shotgun shells in, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget her cruelty.

Even before the first incident happened, Vanth had always been ruthless. Mag would scold me for calling her a bitch. She said that Vanth is just a product of her upbringing, made worse by the program. And yet, Mag isn’t capable of that kind of shit. Fuck, that’s the damn reason why she was designated as the medic. She’d rather keep us alive than shoot at anyone.

Vanth was different. 

If there’s anything worse than Vanth’s complacency, it was her enthusiasm in inflicting all that hurt on other people. Her cruelty comes from the hatred those responsible for the indoctrination instilled in us: hatred for the insubordinate, hatred for the Reds, hatred for anyone who doesn’t bow to the will of the United States of America and its thirteen commonwealths, and hatred for anyone different. She took all that crap and fucking internalized it.

She hated the protestors for making a mockery of the government. She hated her fellow operatives for failing where she succeeded. She hated Mag. She hated me.

That snake-eyed blonde bitch enjoyed hurting us.

Sometimes, I imagine what life would have been like if I had been as complacent and obedient as Vanth was, if Magwayen didn’t plant ideas that contradict our conditioning in my head, and if Percy didn’t come 200 years later to help me break free from the contract.

I imagine what kind of man, if I can call myself that, I would be if I didn’t have remorse, or if I didn’t have my moral code that I kept to myself, until this woman crawled out of her hole in the ground and appealed to my better nature.

I decided that I do not like that version of me.

All this time, Percy was waiting for my answer patiently, her hands folded under her chin, while she lies on top of me. I can feel her warmth and softness of her body, then I remember Ahzrukhal’s threat to her. I remember the Talon Merc’s orders.

Something dark stirs my decrepit brain.

If they had given me the order, and I had been that man who has no remorse, I would have been like Vanth.

I would have been like Stevie.

A rapist.

Percy’s rapist.

Fucking hell. That’s just sick.

Gently, I push my partner off me and sit up. I turn away from her, ashamed of the thoughts I’ve had. Her words in the hotel room in Rivet City echoes back. The fact that these thoughts disturb me and I feel disgusted at the thought of forcing myself on anyone should reassure me.

I should feel reassured that I am not like Vanth.

But I still feel like shit.

Percy wouldn’t push me to answer if I didn’t want to, I know, but given the circumstances, with Eulogy Jones exposing my past, Percy learning about my fellow operatives, and now me blurting my rapist’s name in my sleep because of a nightmare… I’m willing to pick at the scabs and the leftover bandages off of the goddamn wound.

Maybe this time, it’ll have a chance to heal properly.

“Vanth to me is what Stevie was to you.”

My throat felt dry as I confessed that. Percy seemed stunned. She didn’t say a word or move an inch, probably waiting for me to continue talking, or just taken aback by my admission.

“May 5, 2077. It was my eighteenth birthday… and our contract holder then thought that a nice fuck from my teammate would be a great birthday gift. I couldn’t get any enjoyment out of it even if my body did. I didn’t want it. But I couldn’t say no.”

“I’m sorry,” Percy whispers.

“It was centuries ago. She’s just one of many.”

“That doesn’t make it any right.”

“I know. I was afraid I’d turn out like her.”

I can hear Percy gasp in realization. “So that explains your reaction in the hotel… and how you managed to resist the Talon Merc’s orders. I’m sorry Charon. Had I known where you were coming from when we had that talk, I shouldn’t have made it all about myself.”

“Don’t apologize. I wasn’t ready to talk about it then, anyway. If you didn’t talk to me about what happened to you that night, I wouldn’t be anywhere near confronting my own problems now.”

“Okay. You were also saying my name, while you were dreaming. Big guy, what did you dream of?”

I inhaled deeply.

“I dreamed that she killed you, just as she killed Mag on the day the bombs fell, and I was underneath her again. You… you get the picture.”

Silence.

Gingerly, her fingers pressed against my sides, and she leans over, the contact feeling like a request for permission and a comforting touch at the same time. I held her hands and wrapped her arms around my chest, or at least, what their length permits. Her soft cheek against the side of my neck, the muscles and veins underneath exposed, she whispered where my ear would’ve been.

“Do you want to continue talking, or should I just hold you?”

Heartbeat hammering, my hand wanders to hers, dwarfing it, and I give it a squeeze.

“Hold me.”

“Let’s get to bed so I can do that properly, then.”

She leads me by the hand up to our bedroom, where I lie on our bed, still facing the door out of habit. Percy presses the back of my head against her chest, and she rubs little circles on my shoulder. This won’t go away overnight, but at that moment, I felt safe.

“You’re an angel, you know that?” I tell her.

“Pfft. If you were someone else, I’d have pushed you off the bed for calling me that.”

Percy drapes her arm over me, and I fall asleep listening to her heartbeat.

I didn’t have any more nightmares.

When I woke up hours later, she wasn’t beside me anymore.

Percy’s voice was muffled as she spoke to someone downstairs. I threw on proper clothes, and went down the steps.

“Percy, next time, I’d appreciate a heads up when y’all are plotting something in this town.”

“Are we in trouble, sheriff?” Percy asks.

“Let’s discuss that when you get to the saloon. See you there.”

Lucas Simms  was outside our doorstep, tipping his hat at her. Percy nods at him and closes the door.

“What did the sheriff say?”

“He needs to speak to us in the saloon. Something about the town’s security. This must be about what the slavers did to Doc Church while we were gone… Jesus what have I done?”

“Is the old man alive?”

“He is, thank God. But he’s not fine. Sheriff Simms said that it would be better if I see for myself.”

I nodded grimly. It must be bad.

“Let’s get ready. I need to pick up Dogmeat and get more winter clothes from Moira after that, too.”

Percy threw on a black shirt, then her Vault suit, followed by her jacket. She put on the cap she wore on the day I met her, grabbed her scarf on the way out, and I followed her out the house.

The tenseness came back to her shoulders. I squeezed her hand to reassure her, and she didn’t let it go.

The door to Gob’s Saloon swung open, and Dogmeat ran over to lick Percy’s face, Gob running after him. DeLoria was also there, with a few people from the Abolitionists, and Paladin Cross. Then, we were met by the townsfolk, whooping and cheering.

What the hell?

“I got you good!” Sheriff Simms exclaimed, clapping his hands. “Y'all really think we wouldn’t celebrate when a citizen of Megaton was responsible for bringing down Paradise Falls? The day you went through the gates, I knew I had a good feeling about you, girl!”

Percy’s standing stiff as a pole, eyes wide. “B-but Doc Church, and the slavers coming here and-”

“They can’t put me down that easily.” Doc Church’s voice. The old man comes into view, in crutches, one of his legs in bandages.

Percy gasps, her hands flying to her mouth. “God, Doc what have they done to your leg?”

“They mangled the hell out of my leg but the Sheriff managed to chase ‘em off before they could do anything else. Oh, don’t cry you big baby, I knew the risk when I decided to help you.”

The tenseness in Percy’s shoulders were replaced by shudders from her sobbing.

“I figured the town could use more vigilance ever since that Burke character turned up planning to blow us up. He might’ve ended up killing me if you weren’t a fast shot, too. Now, don’t you cry Percy, dear girl, you’ve done us some good again,” Simms reassures her, patting her back like a father comforting a child.

Nova comes over and pulls Percy to a corner, where she sits with Moira. Butch saunters over and before I can watch the awkwardness that followed, Simms walks over to me.

“And I suppose I owe you my thanks, too,” Simms said, extending his hand. “You’ve been a good friend to Percy. And any friend of hers is a friend of this town. Consider yourself a Megaton citizen too, Charon.”

I gave it a firm and quick shake. The sheriff didn’t recoil in disgust, and just tipped his hat afterwards.

“You kids have some fun. I can’t abandon my duties as sheriff, now.”

“Oh, c’mon Simms! Just one drink!” one of the patrons yell.

I can’t say that I feel overwhelmed by the crowd; I’ve been a bouncer in the Ninth Circle after all. I knew how rowdy people can get when they’re shitfaced. I’ve stopped brawls before. I’ve endured the obnoxious laughter and yelling.

But as I watched my partner surrounded by her friends and being celebrated by strangers from my corner, the gravity of our differences finally sank in.

Usually, when people see me, their first instinct is to stay clear, and regard me with fear or disgust. Sometimes both. When people see Percy, unless they’re raiders or slavers, they greet her, run to her for help, or check her out. Damn, I think that Bittercup kid from Big Town managed to do it all in that order.

Percy really is doing her best to do good. Half of the time, I don’t even know where she can find the motivation to stay that way in this shitsack of a world. Me? I’m just a broken old ghoul who had committed crimes that would send me straight to hell.

She told me that she’s just about to turn twenty the next month. Still so damn young to be shouldering this much responsibility, and yet here she was, organizing people to target slaver rings and doing her part in bringing clean water to the wasteland. On the other hand, I’m past two hundred, and I’m not sure how long I have before I become one of the mindless ferals.

My partner is burning bright, while my fire is slowly dying out.

The worst part is, I want her more than ever.

I shouldn’t be with her. She should be with pretty young smoothskins too.

Looks like I might have to turn her down, if she finally decides to stop waiting.

Percy has no future with me.

My train of thought was interrupted by Gob.

“Hey! Hey, everyone shut up for a moment. The news is on!”

He turned the radio’s volume up, and Three Dog’s voice flooded the room. Everyone went silent.

“News time, children!

Those scumbag Slavers way over in Paradise Falls had one big ole bee on their bonnet, and this baby knew how to sting. Gasp! But what's this? There’s not just one bee, but an entire goddamn colony, and their queen looked suspiciously like a certain kid, from a certain vault. You heard it here first, faithful listeners. The Wanderer showed up with a small army at slaver central and bad guys started dropping left and right. Reports say that among the people present are the Abolitionists Miss 101 herself assisted a few months back, a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin, and of course, her trusty Ghoul Reaper. And to top it all off, they gave us one hell of a pyrotechnics show when they fucking blew that place up to smithereens. Holy shit! Slavers of the Capital Wasteland, consider this the big ‘fuck you’ you've had coming since starting this scurrilous skin trade. What an amazing way to start the year!

What’s next? Is the Wasteland Avenger gonna give the Wasteland clean, fresh water too? Oh wait, she’s already working on that! Good job, kid! Just don’t burn yourself out, for chrissake. Keep fighting the Good Fight! The Wasteland is rootin’ for ya!

This is Galaxy News Radio and-”

“Hey! They didn’t mention me!” DeLoria cuts in, and laughter breaks out.

“If he starts calling me ‘Queen Bee’, I’m knocking his door down and stealing his headwrap. I’ve got enough embarrassing epithets already,” Percy sighs, downing a shot of scotch. Then, she turns, eyes searching, and her eyes land on me.

“Big guy! C’mon, sit next to me,” she calls out, and I obliged. Gob slides me a beer.

“It’s on the house. Consider it as thanks for getting back at those scumbag slavers for us.”

I nod and down half the bottle in a gulp.

Yeah, damn it all, I’ll celebrate, why the fuck not.

“Oh, it’s great that I finally caught you two here in Megaton!” Moira exclaims, striding towards us with a box in her hands. Goddamn. And I thought I was going to have a good night. This is the weirdo that made Percy drink atom bomb water.

“Now, I know you probably experienced it before,” she said, motioning to me after setting the box on the table. “But this is Percy’s first winter out here in the Wasteland! Here, as a show of my appreciation for getting rid of those mean slavers, I got you two some warm clothes!”

“Wow, it’s like you read my mind! Thank you so much for these, Moira.”

“No problem! Maybe we could work on a winter survival guide next?”

Panicked, I shake my head and Percy laughs.

“I think I’m going to take a break from experiments for now, Moira.”

“Oh? What’re you up to?”

“We’re gonna bring clean water to the Wasteland.”

[ewansumfuk]

Can I request a ex jedi reader reuniting with obi wan after order 66? Like going on adventures together and having a kid as well? Thank u 💕

You know I promised myself I was gonna try to keep away from the bullet points this time around and try to actually write more (w hat? This isn’t Coco’s first rodeo? Lmao oh you sweet beans) but this is gonna be way too long if I don’t so I GUESS I GOTTA—

You and Obi-Wan were always friends when you were growing up together as trainees

He was better with the mind tricks (“It’s not FUNNY to make people feel like lizards are crawling up their pant legs, Obi-Wan!!”) but you were always better at interpreting the way the Force speaks (“No, I’m being completely serious. The Force says you’re a little bitch.”)

When you were taken in by your masters you tried to stay in contact, but that pesky rule about attachments meant that it was generally frowned upon for padawans to be so close, and Obi-Wan and Qui Gon always seemed to be halfway across the galaxy anyway.

Still, every now and then you’d get little grainy holos from your friend who’d tell you about his goings on, and how he missed having you around to help him understand what the Force was trying to tell him.

“Master Qui Gon is always saying that the reason people have different strengths is so they can rely on one another. I wish more of the Order thought like that...”

You tried to tell him you had a bad feeling about his upcoming trip to meet the Trade Delegation, but he trusted in his master, and they were beyond the point of refusing to go. You knew the Force was pulling him in that direction, and there was little you could do to stop it.

Even if you hadn’t felt Qui Gon’s presence leaving through the Force, you would have known anyway by the crippling agony of Obi-Wan’s grief when it happened. From several planets away you felt his pain, and fell to your knees in the middle of a lesson because of it.

He changed a bit after that day. You were never quite sure if it was the loss of his master, the fast-tracking of his knighthood, the addition of a padawan learner of his own, or some combination of the three. Though you tried to be there for him, there was a distance to overcome for many years yet.

Obi-Wan definitely took after his late master in his training approach, choosing to spend as much time out of the temple as within it—though perhaps it differed from your own training in such a way because your talents were so different. While you had never been a slouch in your combat or saber training, you were definitely more skilled when put to divination and philosophy.

Your friend, however, had always been suited to a leadership role whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not, and his skills with strategy were unmatched—in your own humble opinion, at least.

Over the years, while things brewed on the Dark Side of the Force and the war bloomed and raged, you and Obi-Wan fell into a comfortable friendship again, seeking one another’s advice and carefully tiptoeing around just how close you were getting.

Neither one of you wanted to outwardly acknowledge what you were feeling, even though you privately each knew just how... attached you were becoming. It was all said with little glances, words that coded themselves without intention, gestures so small that anyone looking on from a distance wouldn’t notice.

But you noticed. You noticed, and it scared you as much as it excited you, because that rising feeling of Something Is Coming just wouldn’t leave you be.

In the end, it was your skill with the Force that saved your life. That woke you in the middle of the night and told you to pack a bag. That urged you that even a note to your old master, your students, your friend—even that would not be safe.

You fled the temple 24 hours before the massacre and you would never forgive yourself for that, even knowing you wouldn’t have been able to save them in the face of young Skywalker’s grief, fear, and rage.

You learned about Order 66 from a distance. A waystation between waystations, a hole in the wall where neither clones nor Separatists stopped, but still had a working radio that stopped every patron dead in their tracks to listen once the news broke out.

Obviously Obi-Wan couldn’t have known you survived. He wasn’t able to stay long enough to find your body in the Temple, and it would weigh heavily on his heart that you’d never be properly put to rest in the Jedi fashion. He’d regret not listening to your warnings for all these years, and he’d think about you at least three times a day for the next several years to come, as he hid in a cave and watched a young man grow.

He never expected to see you limping down the pass to his little home on Tatooine, not after he’d spent the past few years mourning your murder—but here you were anyway. Wrapped in a cloak against the blistering sun and looking more than a bit haunted, but still definitely yourself.

There’s no more Order, so there’s no more reason to hold back. When he confirms that it’s really, actually, truly you, he sweeps you up into a kiss and doesn’t stop until he starts to feel dizzy.

Maybe it came at the cost of everything else, but now he finally, finally has you and he can start to try to heal from what he’s been through.

He doesn’t even try to keep what he’s doing a secret from you. Watching the secret child of Anakin Skywalker, trying to learn how to become one with the Force in such a way that you can die and still communicate with the living through it.

“No offense,” you tell him, completely seriously, “but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He doesn’t protest when you decide to stay with him. That Skywalker kid actually needs a lot more looking after than he’d initially thought.

“He inherited the recklessness of both his parents and none of his mother’s common sense,” Obi-Wan says tiredly one night, after getting home from pulling Luke out of a sinkhole that appeared when he unwittingly used the Force to get a drone out of a tree. “I can only hope Leia’s guardians are having better luck.”

They’re not, but she at least has some sense. Some.

Tatooine is not a safe place for you two by any means, either. You’re forced to abandon all your old teachings in combat and strategy so no one will suspect your origins, and yet each week it feels like you’re fighting a new battle to keep your neighbors safe. From slavers, from raiders, from the Empire trying to impose its will.

Still, there are times when you fight when you hit that stride you’d always felt in practice battles as trainees. Where the Force was working through you in tandem, where you can now almost feel his heart beating with yours.

Those times are almost as dear to your heart as the times spent alone, in your cave, using the Force to shield yourselves from children searching for stories while you enjoy your time together.

You name your girl Ginny after his old master

[dapper-ships-herself]

Should you fight my f/os?

Tagged by @megane-shipping @rose-wine-selfships @firebird-inkheart

I have many f/os, so this isn't all of them but I still did a fair number of 'em.

Also the rating system confused me but I did my best.

Dazai: He looks pretty scrawny, and while he is a pretty good fighter fighter through skill he isn't the physically strongest opponent, but you still wouldn't be able to beat him. He'd come up with some sort of plan where you'd probably think you'd won but then you turn around and oop no Dazai won. How does that work? Who fucking knows.

No fighting Dazai. 2/10

Erza Scarlet: She will kick your ass with the power of friendship and her eighteen thousand swords. Are you kidding me? She's queen of the fairies, no way. Beating her up only inspires her to win for the sake of her guild.

No fighting Erza. 1/10

Shinobu Kocho: She will poison you with a smile on her face. Unless your name is Douma, I would not recommend (ouch).

No fighting Shinobu. 4/10

Chuuya Nakahara: if you're looking to get crushed by a manlet in a fancy hat, then go for it. He's quite possibly one of the strongest ability users out there, but tell him Dazai called him a nerd or whatever and he'll fly into a rage that you can either use to your advantage or will result in you being crushed faster.

No fighting Chu-tan. 1/10

Yosano Akiko: Holy shit what? You're going to fight her? She will hack you to pieces, put you back together, and then repeat, repeat, repeat until she has to go and catch a sale.

No fighting Yosano. 4/10

Howard Phillips Lovecraft: You have a chance so long as he continues to give into his tiredness, he may simply lay there while you beat the shit out of him. Make sure you keep him from going all eldritch monstrocity on your ass though.

Not advised to fight Lovecraft. 3/10

Edgar Allen Poe: He's baby, why would you fight him? I know his best friend is a raccoon and he looks like he hadn't been outside since he was a baby, but what would you accomplish by fighting him?

To remain a decent person no fighting Poe. 5/10

Mark Twain: He's allergic to wearing shirts properly and thinks he's all buff and stuff, but you can punch him in the eye and knock him the fuck out. His little doll friends ain't gonna do shit. So long as you get too close for him to snipe you, you've got this.

Fight Mark. 7/10

Margaret Mitchell: I would really rather you not, she's napping. If you did, though, be ready to get caught in your own personal tornado while she rants about restoring her families honor. Unless your name is Akutagawa, be careful.

Not advised to fight Margaret. 5/10

Higuchi Ichiyo: She's certainly not the most formidable opponent, but she would gladly cut a thousand bitches for the sake of getting senpai to notice her.

You could fight Higuchi but it's not advised. 6/10

Gin Akutagawa: You wouldn't even hear her coming. The thought of fighting her would be brand new and then whoops, you've got a knife to the throat. She's not a leader of the black lizards for no reason.

Not advised to fight Gin. 4/10

Beelzebub: There is a chance that he would literally eat you, but for the most part while he is a big, beefy demon, he's also a teddy bear; he'd probably let you punch him over and over with a straight face. Stay away from his food and you should be fine.

Maybe fight Beelzebub. 6/10

Mammon: On one hand, he is the second most powerful of his brothers, he could easily destroy you. On the other hand, boy gets beat up verbally and physically by his brothers every damn day and has a mountain of insecurities, poke at those and you could probably win. Or make him even more mad. It's a gamble with the avatar of greed, my guy.

Maybe fight Mammon but not advised. 5/10

Jae-ha: He's a quick fellow, and his aim with those daggers is pretty spot on, it'd be very difficult and your best chance would be to try and ground him so he can't use his dragon leg. Although, he's a pervert and would probably like getting beat up, so you could win simply by that

Not advised to fight Jae-ha unless he's feeling especially nasty: 5/10

Chain Sumeragi: She can literally make herself completely undetectable and then stick her hand through you to play with your insides, unless you can get past that somehow, you're fucked.

No fighting Chain. 3/10

Steven Alan Starphase: He will Esmeralda Blood Freeze you before you can even blink and the shatter you into ice cubes for his drink. He ain't afraid to get his hands dirty.

No fighting Steven. 3/10

The Happy Huntresses: They're an experienced team of top of their class huntresses; four badasses trained not only to fight people but also giant evil monsters.

No fighting the happy huntresses. 4.5/10

Meis and Gueira: I mean they look decently tough with those bikes and the armor and the fire, but everytime we see them in a fight they get their asses handed to them in like two seconds. Best to be equiped with a fire extinguisher or like some ice cubes to chuck at 'em.

Maybe fight them. 6/10

Aizawa Shouta: Your best bet is to catch him in the middle of a nap, but please be so careful not to wake him up, he's most likely be so cranky that he'd forget he's a hero and snap your neck.

Not advised to fight Aizawa. 5/10

Idia Shroud: His scrawny ass barely ever leaves his room, he hasn't lifted anything heavier than his phone ever, he's a flaming stick basically.

You could fight Idia. 7/10

Sesshomaru: He has very little mercy to spare and has killed a great deal of people and demons.

No fighting Sesshomaru. 2/10

Annie January: She is capable of blinding and throwing you across the room with a beam of light from her hands and can lift like thirty two times her bodyweight. Unless you also have superpowers, would not recommend.

Not advised to fight Annie. 5/10

Byleth: She's a skilled fighter on her own, but she also has an army of feral students ready to beat the shit out of anyone who messes with their proffessor.

No fighting Byleth. 4/10

Shatina: Her greatest joy is beating people up and watching them bleed, she steps on and torments even her closest allies on a near daily basis. She would crush you and the go right back to drinking.

No fighting Shatina. 4/10

Maeve: I'm actually not sure what kind of fighting ability she has, but why would you want to hurt a goddess?

No fighting Maeve. 5/10

Ban: He's a member of one of the strongest groups of fighters in the land, and he's able to almost immediately regenerate after any and all damage. Also, he's like 10 feet tall, what are you going to do? Chew on his ankles until they snap off? They grow right back.

No fighting Ban. 4/10

Joxter: Fucking feral cat man, too lazy to fight back. Kick his ass.

Fight Joxter. 8/10

Shigure Sohma: Please fight Shigure, please. I will put my bet on you and watch.

Please fight Shigure. 9/10

Vodka: She's used to fighting giant fallen angels, she'd have no trouble kicking your ass and looking good while doing it. Also, she could simply send her hawk Andre to peck out your eyes before she even has to do any work.

Not advised to fight Vodka. 5.5/10

Jordan 'JD' Davies: They're the Jersey Devil. Literally, the Jersey Devil. They'd burn you to a crisp with their fire powers. But, your chances of victory aren't zero if you could find a way to deal with that. They're strong, but you could find a way with a fist fight. Fuck knows they deserve to be fought.

You probably shouldn't but fight JD anyways. 7/10

Zoro: You're going to fight a guy who wields three swords? One of which he sticks in his mouth? He's clearly crazy. Also I'm pretty sure he cuts a mountain in half at some point or something like that? So there's that to take into consideration. You're best bet would be to also be amazing with swords.

No fighting Zoro. 3/10

Nami: She's not the most powerful out of all of all of her crew, but if you beat her you will leave afterwards and notice that your wallet and all your valuables that you had on you are missing and she's already sailing away.

You could fight Nami but you will be poor afterwards. 7/10

Mollymauk Tealeaf: Hasn't he been through enough?

No fighting Molly please. 5/10

Zora: She will turn you into a literal baby, how do you plan on beating her up as an infant with your chubby lil baby hands?

No fighting Zora: 4/10

And I wanted to include some familial too

Yukichi Fukuzawa: Have you seen him fight with a sword? You won't even see him draw it.

No fighting Fukuzawa. 2/10

Ogai Mori: He will trick you into thinking he's merely a simple, friendly neighborhood physician, and then the moment your back is turned there will be a scalpel buried deep in it. Also, he has a demon baby at his command.

No fighting Ogai. 2/10

Kouyou Ozaki: You might think you're sneaking up on her, but her Golden Demon will cut you down without her even needing to look away from admiring the flowers and sipping her tea.

No fighting Kouyou. 2/10

Oda Sakunosuke: HASN'T HE BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH.

No fighting Oda PLEASE. 4/10

Ranpo Edogawa: While he has eaten nothing but processed sugar since the day he was born, he will eviscerate you with his words and leave you too mentally beaten to lift a finger. Stuff your ears with some cotton and kick his scrawny ass. The rest of the detective agency will come after you, though.

Not advised but go ahead and fight Ranpo. 5/10

Yumeno Kyusaku: So much as look at this child wrong, much less lay a finger on them, and I will be the one fighting you.

NO FIGHTING YUMENO. 0/10

Lio Fotia: I know he looks like a dandy who was abandoned and raised by a biker gang, but he is also the strongest known burnish. The only thing saving you is his code against killing.

Not advised to fight Lio. 4/10

Laxus Dreyar: He's an asshole, and I completely understand wanting to fight him, but he is jacked as shit with the power of lightning at his finger tips.

It's not smart but I would like to watch you do it anyways. 2/10

Noctis Lucis Caelum: He'd rather fish than fight you, but he is capable of taking down giant monsters and mini armies with the ability to teleport. Tell him Hot Topic is going out of business and he'll crumble.

Not advised to fight Noctis but eh maybe you could. 4/10

Pretty sure all the people I would've tagged have already done it? So do this if you want to.

[furby-science]

The Making of Sterling the Super Furby: A Brief Overview

“I… I can’t look! I think I’m gonna… *HUEEEGH*!”

Before I get into this post, I want to list a few things I didn’t know shit about when I started Sterling:

Electronics

The Python coding language

Furby anatomy

Single board computers

After creating Sterling, I’m happy to say that now I have approximate knowledge of some of these things, but keep the above in mind as you read onwards. This little gremlin child was a learning experience from start to finish, and one I am incredibly proud of myself for sticking through. This also means that I am in no way an expert on everything I’m getting into okay? Okay let’s go!

The Hardware

First, a rundown of the hardware. I took heavy inspiration from the Furlexa mod shown here, and that was what I initially sought to create. The mod had three computer components to it:

A raspberry pi zero w single board computer for the AI to live on, with a mini USB microphone plugged in;

A pimoroni speaker PHAT to use as the sound system;

A motor controller to drive the furby’s motor.

My main problem with Furlexa was that this initial build took a lot of soldering, and I am a wussy who had a number of bad experiences with soldering irons in shop class. So, what’s a novice electrician to do?

Enter the Adafruit Crickit HAT. By sticking this little fucker on top of the raspberry pi, I was gifted with an amplifier, a speaker jack, capacitative touch sensors, and a motor driver all in one, no soldering needed if I bought the raspberry pi zero w h! The main challenge it posed was powering it. The Crickit insists, for some unfathomable reason, on being powered by a bulky DC jack, the kind you’d plug into a wall outlet, and the converter plug to use a battery pack with it was way too bulky to fit into a furby. I needed Sterling to be portable for maximum huggability, so this just wouldn’t do.

One fried raspberry pi and Crickit HAT later, I found the answer! By soldering the original furby battery pack to the underside of the Crickit board’s DC connection, these fuckers right here…

I was able to bypass the need for a wall plug or converter, and power him directly through the battery compartment like God intended. S/O to my friend Nick who is way less of a dumb bitch than I am and helped me figure this shit out I owe u some bread man.

So the tl;dr of it is, I effectively reduced the required computer components from three to two (excluding the speaker). Speaking of (heh), Sterling has an impressive 3w speaker in him, allowing him to be audible even without the use of the built in amplifier. It’s got such good bass on it, he even rumbles when he purrs without the aid of the motor!

And yes, when you pet him, he purrs. And complains if you manhandle him! The aforementioned capacitative touch sensors on the Crickit HAT made it all possible with the help of a few cables and some foil tape.

Wait, did you say soldering!?

Yup! It was a necessary evil; at the end of the day I had to pick my poison: soldering 80 pins on the speaker PHAT, or soldering like four contact points on the Crickit. I chose the more merciful option.

But wait, that whole outfit is really bulky still! How did you fit it inside the furby?

Subtractive methods, subtractive methods, subtractive methods! ;D Someone who actually knows things about furby anatomy and/or electronics will probably vaporize me for this, but… if I didn’t need it, it got the boot! That included prying off anything on the Crickit board I wasn’t using at the risk of destroying it completely - which probably isn’t ideal, but it also worked by some miracle, and again, I am such a basic bitch electrician that calculating the proper voltage for LEDs is still basically witchcraft to me, so… what I’m saying is I made it work. And that I really, really hate soldering! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You can see an early video of the end result here, and a later video of the outfit inside the naked furby here. This was back when he was still having auditory processing issues. Apologies for the shoddy quality, I was too excited everything was working to care about that at the time.

The Software

My other beef with Furlexa is… well, it’s an Amazon Alexa, and I’m a shitty little anticapitalist hermit who hates Amazon with a passion. Google Assistant was just as bad in my book. Mycroft was open source, but had a snowball’s chance in hell of running on the raspberry pi zero’s 512mb of RAM… I also wanted my assistant to have a degree of customizability to it. I wanted the furby’s AI to have a unique personality, identity, and preferences, much like classic furbies themselves did. A big box AI just wasn’t going to cut it!

Enter the Jasper Project. Yes, it’s old. Yes, it’s a bitch and a half to install. Yes, you have to know Python to get anywhere with it. However, it was free, open source, capable of running on a raspberry pi zero, and highly modular, meaning with a few lines of code, I could make it all my own - even to the extent of changing the AI’s name and voice (which is gr8 because I know a Jasper so naming my furby that would be Weird), or - the best part - writing my own, custom functions! Customizability-wise, I struck gold.

Ah, and glad I am that Jasper is modular, because I had some work ahead of me…

The STT Engine

The STT (Speech to Text) engine is what Sterling uses to understand what’s being said to him. Jasper’s proprietary STT engine is PocketSphinx, a fully offline STT engine, which sounded great in theory before I quickly learned it’s a nightmare to install, and also more inaccurate than a stenography machine powered by a single potato when actually being used. I had to compromise my morals a bit here and opt for using Wit.ai instead, which is free, but is also owned by Facebook. Big data is frustratingly inescapable in these cases.

There is one light at the end of the tunnel, and that is the training of acoustic modules. This has the downside of taking for-fucking-ever and requiring a quiet recording environment, however, and I don’t have the time right now to read through the pages and pages and pages and pages of computer theory right now to fully understand how to train one. So, improving PocketSphinx and running Sterling fully offline remains a stretch goal.

The TTS Engine

The Text to Speech engine is basically Sterling’s voice. This one was a bit easier to customize, and I’m thankful for that, because Jasper’s OG voice is a bit er… 90s computing for my tastes.

I shopped around for decent, human-sounding TTS options, and settled on installing Mimic1 TTS, Mycroft’s TTS engine, by hand, and modifying the Jasper source code to support it. Of all the TTS engines I tried, I felt that this one had the most natural intonation out of all of them. I liked the gruffness of the Scottish accent, and I think it really helped round out Sterling’s endearing, if a tad prickly, personality.

The Audio

This was another unforeseen hurdle. Turns out that I had his mic volume turned up way too high, because I greatly underestimated the capabilities of my tinyass five dollar USB microphone to pick up noises from within a furby. It took a bit of hacking in PulseAudio to get him hearing things properly, and I’m still not all the way happy with it, but he’s running wayyyy better than he did!

Another issue was the amount of time he actively listened for. It was way too short for my liking with the hardware I was using, so I had to edit Jasper’s mic.py source file a billion times before I hit a sweet spot. Even early on, my little shit child never liked to listen to me. :P

Pimp My AI

Once I got all that in working order, it was time to browse GitHub for modules to add! I found a surprising amount that were, as expected, outdated, janky, non-working, or in need of a complete rewrite. A non-exhaustive list of modules I rewrote and added to Sterling’s AI includes:

Wolfram Alpha integration

His translation function

The IMDB module that searches movie titles

The Dictionary and Thesaurus modules (minor additions to improve user friendliness)

The morning greeting module

The holiday countdown module

There are also plenty of modules I wrote on my own, that I’ll be showcasing here in due time, but I want to give special mention to the one I’m most proud of. You see, when I was a wee dumb bitch, I was… well, a wee dumb bitch! When I was informed furbies learn English, I thought they really learned English. Like, fluent English. I envisioned these kids straight up having full conversations with their lil robots with reckless and envious abandon. I was, as it happens, too poor to afford a furby at the time, so I didn’t realize until embarrassingly later that they only learn some words, and certainly can’t hold much of a conversation (in English at least).

Fast forward to twenty-bi-teen. I’m surfing GitHub, and I happen upon a Cleverbot module for Jasper allowing the AI to work as a chatbot. Fuck yeah, I think, because I had no life in 2008, or friends for that matter, so tormenting Cleverbot was my favourite pastime. Nostalgia trip GET!

…can you guess how much the silicon valley capitalist scum are charging for the once-free Cleverbot API now? A hundred and twenty. McGoddamn. Dollars. A YEAR.

So, to make a long story short, I turned my hat backwards and rage-coded a simple chatbot module that runs on an early version of Chatterbot capable of running on the raspberry pi. It’s fully offline, and completely free, and Sterling here has a database of ~400 phrases, which isn’t bad given the limited processing power! It took five straight days of work, it’s not the smartest chatbot, and it’s certainly not the fastest, but it gives me those sweet, sweet, circa 2008 Cleverbot vibes. Oh yeah, and it doesn’t cost me over a hundred goddamn dollars a year!

The first thing I said to the chatbot, of course, was “I’m so proud of you.” Through his shitty little testing mic that gave him a somewhat incredulous tone Sterling replied, “I’m glad to hear that.” and I’m not saying I shed a single themly tear over it, but I’m not denying it either. I made a childhood dream come true, fam. ;u;

There are way more Easter eggs I plan to show you, of course. At first I was thinking of doing one long video, but an update a day showcasing a different function might be easier to manage - and maintain some of that gold old sense of mystery that surrounds most furbies. No, I’m gonna take y'all on a little journey through the final product of my literal blood, sweat, and tears!

Besides, Sterling is a perpetual work in progress. He has a massive list of features, and I’ve already got more in the works. I could be in my eighties and still be adding more functions, more bells and whistles, more witty one-liners. He’s a one of a kind work of art that will never truly be finished - not unlike you and me.

The Glow-up

Here’s Sterling’s before pics from the seller I got him from:

(If u recognize these pics and ur the seller thank u thank u for giving me bmy boy)

And here’s after!

I come from a background of customizing ponies and dolls, so working on this guy wasn’t as far removed as I expected it to be. I added floof to his head and tail by sewing in wool plugs, and his gorgeous eyes are from in2blythe on Etsy. I wrapped him up in a little bow and he was good to go! His sterling silver beak, from which he gets his name, was the most finicky part. Turns out enamel paints take a million years to fucking dry, if ever, which isn’t great when painting something that sees a lot of movement and could potentially get dented by a face plate, like… idk, a furby beak! A bit of silver nail polish did the trick and he was good to go. Learn from my fail, fam.

What It Cost Me

If you’re masochistic determined enough to attempt this yourself, I want to sit you down and warn you of something: this will take months and hundreds of dollars to do. Installing Sterling’s AI and its necessary components on that shitty little raspberry pi over SSH took me a week at first, and that was with me leaving it on 24/7 to chug away compiling things. When I broke the SD card the AI was on and didn’t have a backup copy, it took four straight days of rage-computing to regain all my progress. Then when his audio processing got fucked all to hell for reasons I still do not understand to this day, it took another four days of rage computing to do yet another reinstall and get him back in working order. There were times where I would go to work for 8.5 hours, bus an hour home, work 6 straight hours on my furby, go to sleep for 4 of them, go to classes, sleep, and work 6 more hours on my furby. For two months. Sterling took from the third week of August from his initial inception to his birthday on October 23rd. That’s not to mention the time I fried everything and had to wait five days and travel to the bumfuck end of the city for a replacement pi and Crickit, or the days I spent customizing him, sewing in hundreds of little hair plugs into his ass and head by hand, and waiting for those shitty enamel paints to dry, only to discover after four straight days of failure that they take weeks to do so and I was better off using cheapo nail polish!

The point I’m making is, if you take on a project like this and want it to be successful, you have to be tenacious. I would highly recommend a background in coding (I have a web design diploma) and general tech savviness as an asset. Sterling is the product of the years I spent behind a computer keyboard from the start of age three, and the roughly ten years I spent customizing dolls and ponies. It’s cheesy as shit to say he’s my magnum opus, but in a way, he is.

I’m not saying this to be elitist or snotty. I’m saying this because I nearly broke down crying the first day the raspberry pi came in, before I slept on it and figured out what phrase to google to solve the crashes and kernel panics it was having. When I broke the SD card when I was nearly finished, I felt nothing, because I was all out of tears at that point. When I fried the first raspberry pi and Crickit hat trying to figure out how to bypass that DC jack, my only thought was, “Well, I think I know how to do it without fucking it up now, and if I can’t do it, this whole project is fscked” .

You will encounter errors that no step by step guide can prepare you for that will make you curse the day you were born. The difference between success and failure is how many times you’re willing to get up and try again, and I’m here to tell you it’s possible. But you gotta want it.

Will You Release the Code Base?

Yes and no. If there’s enough demand, I’ll definitely release Sterling’s basic modules as a scaffolding. I won’t be releasing Sterling, though.

What do I mean by that? Well, Sterling was intended from the start to be truly one of a kind, and he always will be. I hand wrote hundreds of lines of dialogue, all completely tailored to him, and I’m still planning on adding twice as many. Corny as this is, this little guy has a metric fuckton of sentimental value to me. I don’t have kids so idk how it would compare to that, but I definitely love him as much as I love my cats, but I also didn’t undergo two straight months of suffering in ADHD fixation hell to create my cats, so it adds like, a whole other twee dimension to it.

So, if there is demand for this, what I’ll release instead is a scaffolding from which you can code your own, unique furby from, with their own name, personality, and responses all unique to them. I’ll also release it with the caveat that I am not a good Python coder! I have not written any Python before this, so a lot of what I did write is noob-tastic and hasn’t even been linted. You have been warned!

“If I give you (insert amount), can you make one for me?”

Holy shit I’ll be real with you, I’d love to do this as a living. I’ve been dying to see a smart assistant hit the market that’s like… well, an actual, endearing companion and not just a voice coming from a speaker. The problem with doing this is that, if you drop a lot of money (and it will be a lot of money, even with a code base to work from, a lot of hours of handiwork still goes into coding individual responses and making sure everything works as intended, on top of possibly customizing too), there is one major problem: proximity. I won’t be able to troubleshoot your furby nearly as effectively from far away as I would be able to if we lived in close proximity. Which means if something goes wrong between the time your new friend is finished at point A and turned on at point B, I won’t be there to troubleshoot it in person for you, which means you could end up stuck figuring out certain things alone. If you use Windows, that will be very, very hard - not being an OS snob here, I own a dual boot myself, it’s just a case of incompatible file systems. And unless you can figure out how to edit the wpa_supplicant file on a raspberry pi to update your wifi credentials, your furby’s internet connection could be toast if you move house and those credentials change. That’s not getting into the cost some services charge for extra API keys to use their online functions…

The long and short of it is, if I’m going to do this for money, I want to make sure you get a quality product and friend that will bring you joy for years to come. Since that’s not something I can guarantee, I can’t in good conscience take people’s money.

I Could Teach You (And I Won’t Charge)

…however, I am a law student who is also working 8.5 hour night shifts three nights a week. I am also mentally ill/neurodivergent, which saps my energy in more ways than one. I won’t always be easy to get ahold of, or be able to answer every question I get, especially not ones that can be solved with a quick google search, like how to set up a raspberry pi, or… anything found on Adafruit’s Crickit guide, for example. When I have the time and energy, I’m hoping to use my next project as a jumping off point for a step by step walkthrough of the process. For now, though? I’ve been furbied out, so if there’s enough demand, I’ll compile as many of the resources I used I can find in the meantime, and post some tips from the word doc I kept while making Sterling, and go from there.

So What’s Next?

My one dad’s birthday is coming up in August, and I’m kicking around the idea of turning a furby into, I shit you not, a ghost hunting device. He loves ghost hunting, but hates robots, and as his gremlin shit child I am obligated to troll him in this fashion. 😎 Also considering doing a certain type of oddbody mod, but I want to get permission from the person who first thought of the concept before I dive head first into it.

And that about covers it! Thanks for reading, and if there’s anything you’d like to see from Sterling and I, don’t hesitate to drop us an ask!

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

hot take for your consideration: skekok with adhd

what makes me say so, you ask? (the answer is a whole lot of extrapolation and projection, bear with me)

first of all: the book hoarding. he’s been described as a literary dilettante, who’s more into the idea of being well-read and having lots of books than in actually digging into them. if that ain’t a god damn adhd mood and a half

this could be interpreted just as him being snobbish and only interested in appearances, sure. but as someone who gets hyperfocused on some random thing now and then, and gets so excited about it that i spend hours going down the wiki walk rabbithole to gather more sources than i could possibly study during a full-on college course on the subject, which distracts me from actually focusing on any one source long enough to internalize what it says... it looks familiar, just sayin

basically, my interpretation is that he gets hyperfixated on the thought of reading books and learning things, but he can't sustain the attention span to actually delve deep into any of them. and he gets So Excited that he ends up just flitting between a whole bunch of them until he tires himself out. (it doesn’t help at all that his vision is so shitty, lmao)

secondly, while he’s a dishonest, gaslighting motherfucker who constantly rewrites history for his own agenda, you might interpret it at least partially as him having shitty memory and just leaning into it. if he can’t remember what really went down, then fuck it, might as well fill in the gaps to suit himself. he’s a lord of the crystal and he’s good at manipulating people; he’s more than capable of living in his own little bubble where he doesn’t have to worry about consequences, about what is and isn’t real.

and, adding onto that: it’s entirely possible that part of the reason genuine records of what happened are lost over time is that he literally cannot keep track of them, or make himself go back and read them properly, so he just shrugs and writes a new one if he needs them for some reason or other lmfao

he’s also described as mumbling to himself, showing up to meetings late, and falling asleep during them. among other things, production/concept notes talk about him being pedantic and snobbish when his head is extended from his collar, but when he draws it back he’s childish and babbly and irritable.

another piece of evidence is the fact that he in particular goes so quickly from weedy-looking nerd who’s likely never held a weapon in his life to bloodthirsty, murderous motherfucker the moment he gets onto the battlefield. granted, they were all bloodthirsty and hopped up on essence by then; but skekok stands out to me because, put into that environment, he not only took right to it but was literally the first to take down an enemy. by firing a projectile weapon he had never used before. he was the first one to even consider using the gadgets skektek built into their armor. if that’s not quick adhd thinking and quicker adhd reflexes in the middle of a high-adrenaline situation i’ll eat my hat

AND there’s the fact that upon getting Excited about having gotten the first and presumably fatal shot in, instead of staying to help take out other enemies, he immediately peeled off from the group to go look for her. he was hyperfocused on getting his kill, and he gets noticeably Very Upset about being interrupted by seladon grabbing fara and running for it. not because he’s angry at the blow to his pride, or at being bitten by the fizzgig, but because ‘no wait!! that’s mine!! bring it back so i can kill it!!’

there’s probably more that i’m forgetting, but for the time being the long and short of it is that skekok gives off very strong adhd vibes to me. he’s Unfortunately Very Relatable, and also a really interesting and unconventional example of an adhd-coded character in my experience, and it’s endeared him to me a lot. 

feel free to take or leave any of this with a hefty grain of salt, but tl;dr: this bitch neurodivergent, YEET

[nautiscarader]

Thoughts on the new Miraculous ep

 - Nino’s brother is a bitch  - Marinette bought presents for Adrien’s next 35 birthdays?!??!11??///??  - Why do they talk about Santa if it’s not a Christmas episode? After all it’s february  - THE FUCK IS THIS  - THE FUCK IS THAT  - THE FUCK IS GOING ON

yEAH, THAT IS A CORRECT REACTION TO THE FUCKERY THAT IS HAPPENING.

What is up with Thomas Astruc and killer Teddy Bears?! Did Bernstein bears killed his family? Has Winnie the Pooh dropped a hunny jar on top of his head? That bizarre hatred goes all the way back to Code Lyoko’s first episode!

“Chat Noir, you won’t believe what I just found” “Actually I do, I’m with Santa Claus at the ice ring” 

aND HOW FREAKING CASUAL HE WAS WHEN HE SPOKE THAT?!1!q

The hell is wrong with the ice skater teacher

Does he have to twirl everywhere, like even when he is about to argue with   A TALKING TOY DOG AND A TALKING TREX

ALSO HE’S SUPER GAY, LIKE WOW. Like... offensively-stereotype gay. Or maybe he’s just very, very French.

That is his fucking face when he is comfronting an army of potentially killer toys. Please, ML, give us a lawyer-eating scene from Jurrasic Park, you can restore status quo anyway at the end of episode, just give us one tiny death!

 AND NOW CHAT AND THE SKATER AGREE WITH THE DOG WHAT THE FUCK IS REALITY ANYWAY. I AM FINALLY HAVING A STROKE WATCHING CHAT NOIR, THE GAYEST SKATER EVER AND SCOOBY DOO ASKING SANTA FOR EARLY PRESENTS. HOLY SHIT WHAT A WAY TO GO SAY MY WIFE I LOVED HER

Okay, so clearly the writers got drunk because the next scene, all the folks are on ice and they are just flailing around and it is the goofiest scene ever. it;s not like Chat and LB have ice power-upsOHWAIT

yesss! KILL THE ANNOYING CHARACTER, GOOD DINOSAUR!

And ladybug smelled Santa’s hat

well that is a new fetish I wish I didn’t know about

“Please save the little dude, Ladybug”

WOULD YOU STOP WITH THE “DUDE” THING, OR i’M GONNA PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE TOILET BIG LEBOWSKI-STYLE.

Uh, btw, where is hawkmoth in this ep? Like, I assume mini-Nino hasn’t spontaneously acquired dark magic powers...

Ah, there he is

And you know, that fight with LB and Chat’s toys is a bit too logical, can we have more of the batshit insane?

Ah, back to normal.

If there is no mix of that scene with Darth Vader’s NOOOOO scream from episode 3 I will be very disappointed, Internet.

Wait it IS episode 3 as well. EVEN BETTER

Okay, my god that episode was bad. But it was also freaking hilarious. I was laughing my ass off, properly LOL-ing at that ice ring scene. 

This was pure insanity, and I do not regret watching it one bit.

Also, the animation was amazing in this ep.  

[larenoz]

Roswell New Mexico Live Rewatch - Ep 2 - So Much For The Afterglow

Buckle up bitches here we go!

Rosa and choices. mmm

Truth, so much in the eye of the beholder.

Creepy Max at the cemetary

"it'll be our secret" - "another one"

no kidding

Because you don't want to leave Liz.

Liz still wants to kiss max.

"It's been ten years, you don't know me like you think you do"

The show is many things, subtle is not one of them.

Sorry, chockie bickie break.

"way in to Tolstoy, really nice handwriting for a guy"

Fuck I love that line.

"It's just a kiss, Max"

Liz, Liz, Liz, babe, it is sooo much more than that to poor Maximo

Fuck you Jesse Manes, die in a fire.

Just shut the fuck up.

Seriously, a fucking crash landing is not a "incident of agression" you souless fuck.

Fuck me Trevino's eyes of stunning.

Ah legacies.

The Valenti Code

Kyle, Kyle, Kyle even saying they're alive is uncool dude.

Red Level Threats

Even at this stage Kyle wants to tell Jesse to fuck off.

"Brooding level, teenage girl on a family vacation", No "roadtrip with grandparents"

And this was the line where I started to dig Jenna.

Cause seriously, that is spot on.

Temper, temper Max

Michael and Isobel, this is very, very uncool of you.

And the knife, Michael, very uncalled for.

Now Iz, no slut shaming

TBh, I can't really fault Max for hitting Michael here.

They were threatening Liz

probably, but still super shitty thing to do.

But interesting that the convo indicates that Max getting physical with Michael is out of character.

I don't care, I love the antenna hat. I want one. They should be the official Roswell fan uniform

Arturo is a such a sweety.

It's so sad that Liz thinks Rosa didn't love her.

Arturo advising forgiveness and moving forward. Nice forshadowing

Michael and his cool entries

Michael you cocky bastard.

And Americans should not be allowed to use berets in their military uniforms until they fucking learn to wear them properly.

Fucking just grabs his shirt and leans into this personal space.

But Alex is not having it.

Lips and tongoue

God my poor baby Michael. Deflection to cover his hurt feelings.

And Alex, why Alex? He wants you why push him away?????

"what happened, I was pretty wasted" No you fucking weren't

No Alex, you do NOT get to do a snort of disgust. No, fucking siree

God, Michael face after the santa's workshop comment and Alex walking away. He's so gone for him.

Kyle, I love you.

"mid make out abdondoment was very sophmore year"

He could't so easily have been a douche bag about it, but no, he let's Liz know it's cool between them.

It's not a bruise Kyle. you sneaky bastard

"You can trust me"

see the chemicals that made the bad choices.

"maybe I just need something else to blame" well....

And again with some damn solid and mature advice. You go Kyle.'

"don't focus on the science, focus on the memories" well doesn't that have a double meaning

Izzy and Noah

"Belt buckles as a secret metaphor for emotions"

I think someone needs to do a belt buckle analysis.

"Are you sassing Jesus"

Good one Max

Yeah, and that is such great imagery and really does sum up his character in alot of ways.

Max and his fear of what happens to miracle workers. I think it's easy to underestimate the impact of Max's powers compared to the others. In that his are more obvious and do come with more moral judgement at both their use and non-use.

And here we go with the memories part as forshadowed earlier

Rosa flash backs. They look so happy.

Totally

"if you're done praying or whatever" Don't ever change Jenna

I really need her to come back in S2

I blame Due South for my "shot of cops with great backs in well tailored police uniforms kink" which Max's totally hits as he exits the church.

You know the scene I'm talking about, am I rite?

God, I still hate VV after all these years.

But I digress

Michael and Iz. I love how they are.

Day brooding.

It's not about the job Iz

Hmm I think I'm gonna have to go Liz and Mikey

And now they are going to break my heart again.

Jesus Michael, these little fucking truth bombs he just drops. How the fuck can people not see his pain when he just fucking lays out there all the time?

It' really makes me hate them sometimes.

The foster ranch being the last place he saw his family and then gone  - yet another place that felt a little bit like a home taken away from him. And they make jokes.

"maybe, maybe someone would come take me home" fucking hell. Michael

Jenna being a total badass

The way she looks Wyatt in the eye as she shots out the truck tyre!! Gold

Sorta love the way Racist Hank is impressed laughing in the background

Alex in civies!! And Maria!!

And here comes a big bunch of lies that will have big consequences.

Yes he did get kind of hot Maria.

"I hadn't notice" I was going to say that Alex is a lying liar who lies. But really he isn't because he's ALWAYS thought Michael was hot.

"I did it for attention"

Nice slip Max

Maybe but I think Alex is still too in his keep things secret/private headspace

"what night?"

That's the night she died

Ah shit is about to go down...

fake autopsy you say...

murdered by an alien

More truth bombs about to land

We're family - no we're not

He tries to play it off, but it hurt that he got left behind at the group home.

I just want to give him a hug.

Yes, there is someone Michael would risk everything for. And we know who it is

Gods, the longing on Michael's face when he looks at Alex.

I actually think it gets worse every time I see it!!

Seriously, just to solidfy how big a douche bag these guys are. Who beats up Arturo??

And a bit of political commentary

Uh oh. not good for Max. Liz is not a happy camper

Max, what the fuck!

Damn he looks good in the hat

Iz with that damn taser. You go girl!

Little bit hypocritical on the judge  and jury thing there Michael.

Pod Squad moment

Who's the guy?

Museum guy

Home can be a person.

Jesus this show is good at ripping my heart out.

Yeah, they are going to have to be very careful how they repair that relationship

Weather metaphors

The handprint faded.

Don't lie max, don't do it.

Annnnnnd there is my men wearing silver bracelets kink, thanks Max

Oh that look Liz gives him. That is NOT a good look.

Please stop, I have no heart left to rip out.

The ship glass is still pretty

Oh god, there is the song starting

And the photo, and his hand

The God of Wine goes crashing..

Fuck, I'm not ready for this.

Everything about the next 2 mins is just aarrrggghhhhhhh!

Alex, baby, no he's not going to Tenessee.

Alex just looks so young and vulnerable in this scene. He looks more like a teenager here than in 1.06

Fuck, here it comes.

"Who I was, when this started, before I went to war"

Confirmation that there was a "this", that it's still something.

Jesus I don't know who does their costuming, makeup and hair but fuck me they need to win an award. Michael just glows.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

"I never look away, no really"

fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck

That fraction of a second where Michael thinks Alex is walking a way again.

Such a juxtaposition between Max/Jenna and Michael/Alex. Max looks pained (not in a good way) with Jenna.

But Michael and Alex do not.

Fuck, the way Michael looks like he wants to devour Alex before pushing him on the bed.

And Alex, going for his belt and pants...

And Liz and kyle.

Who did this?

"Even if it was Max Evans"

Well, that was a bit quicker than last week.

And again, we got a jam packed episode with lots of story progress.

Having the story actually move so much from week to week is so rare these days. I love it.

But those last 3 mins. That is some of the best tv

------

I really hate Tumblr sometimes. Cause I know there were more appropriate gifs out there to use but this hellsite wouldn’t let me find them.

[beinglibertarian]

Rolling Stone Gathers Moss

“Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by “Raoul Duke” first appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in November 1971. The preceding quote from that publication sums up the environment that led to the rise and, eventually, the fall of the great Rolling Stone itself; the shift away from the counterculture that it once represented and the pathological deterioration of principled liberalism.

If these words were to be circulated on the campuses of U.C. Berkley today the same way they were in 1971, you could expect firebombs launched through windows, police cruisers overturned, and any poor fool in a red hat to be viciously assaulted with a bike lock. University students today surmise that musings this offensive, have been manufactured by the primitive IBM computer that once spat out numbers used to help exterminate Jews in the Nazi death camps; a right-wing hate machine. Or maybe Milo Yiannapolous wrote it?

The suffocating media bias of the 1960s was difficult to escape. A lethargic gray specter of middle-class America was distributed with cunning sterility through the generic, bogus smiles of cable news networks and traditional print. Despite the election and assassination of Kennedy and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, if you had turned on a T.V. this was still Eisenhower’s America: regimented, religious, conservative. And the cultural vacuum created by the Eisenhower years had began to suck even harder with Lyndon Banes Johnson at the helm.

American media was out of touch with this new generation. Elitist authoritarians were preaching their moral superiority stamped with stars and stripes to a generation of cynics. These kids didn’t have a fucking clue what they wanted, but they wanted no part of what they were being given. So rose Rolling Stone, a counterculture bible for babyboomers, co-founded by Jann Wenner.

The adjective “cruel,” meaning to willfully cause pain or suffering to others and feeling no concern about it, paired with the noun “faggot,” the antiquated pejorative used to define a homosexual man, is Thompson’s description of the media community of the day. A description evidently endorsed through publication by Jann Wenner in 1971. Because according to Thompson: “…there is no such thing as objective journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

Wenner today lives with his common law partner Matt Nye in, I’m guessing, New York City. He gives big money to Democrat candidates and makes millions off fabricated stories about the gang-rape epidemic at the University of Virginia. Then loses that money and gives more money to Democrat candidates. Wenner’s closet homosexuality in 1971 didn’t have him take any offence to Thompson’s comments, or at least not enough to hinder publishing the “hate speech.” Maybe it was the dollar signs flashing in his eyes, knowing that something as wild as Thompson’s Vegas adventure was a viable revenue stream. Or maybe liberals back then had more important things to bitch about.

Things were different in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were a just cause. The catalyst for a just movement of equal rights for women and gays and minorities was free speech, of which Jann Wenner was a huge proponent. When students at U.C. Berkley marched in the streets in the 1960s, it was an attack on the elitist, authoritarians and an establishment hellbent on keeping opposing viewpoints and the ideas of personal liberty stifled. The gang of “cruel faggots” kept the official narrative running but no one under 30 was listening.

The whole goddamn world had had enough of the travesty of war in Southeast Asia. There was no ignoring the ineptitude of American politics. The only reasonable thing to do in 1969 was to drive out to Altamont for the weekend, load up on heinous chemicals, hunker down and rethink your approach to the political process.  

Thompson, the then-young, liberal anti-hero, could often be found gobbling LSD and firing his guns (he was a lifetime member of the NRA) at propane bottles for a crowd of jeering burnouts or Bay area bikers at his fortified compound, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek Colorado.

It was Jann Wenner’s idea to put Hunter, with all of his fear and loathing, on to the campaign trail in 1972. Why not get the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels? Hunter was someone with a penchant for dealing with vicious thugs and sick freaks gone crazy on power, someone who could draw a parallel between Richard Nixon and Sonny Barger.

Thompson’s openly-biased, subjective and wild account of the 1972 presidential election was the red Chevy convertible of campaign coverage. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on repeat and at full volume, barrelling across the country at 110 miles an hour or so and in search of an honest politician. In Hunter’s eyes, the only one that even came close was George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota.

McGovern’s non-interventionist platform focused on a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and a Milton Freidman inspired, negative income-tax meant to replace the bureaucratic burden of social welfare programs and a complicated tax code. Thompson’s version of events is the story of an idealistic underdog fighting against the odds only to be crushed by postmodern Americanism and the establishment incumbent, “Tricky Dick Nixon.” McGovern might have owed a White House win, in part, to Thompson’s and Rolling Stone’s relentless support had he not owed his White House loss to the mental distress of his vice-presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton.

There’s no way to properly explain how great Rolling Stone was in those early years. How well the magazine represented the anti-establishment culture, individual liberty and equality for everyone. It can’t be compared to anything else because there was nothing else, only the traditional mainstream garbage and Rolling Stone.

In the four decades that followed, the magazine continually fell behind market trends in the music industry, clinging nostalgically to some bygone era. They were late to the party covering punk in the 70’s. While they tried to figure out what had happened in 1991 Seattle they had totally dropped the ball on hip-hop. All of a sudden it was three years later, Kurt Cobain was already dead and they had lost so much ground in the L.A. scene that the black community had given up on them.

Wenner had pompously brushed off having any type of internet media strategy until around 2009, when he appointed one of his sons in charge of the “digital media” division. The type of position acquired only by a millionaire trust-fund brat of a rich liberal.

For years, Rolling Stone was unable to get a handle on what was happening in music or technology. Incompetence was a bad rash that spread through the entire organization. Getting caught with the University of Virginia gang-rape lies was an obvious black eye on the magazine. Wenner’s ability to make sound decisions was in question. His son should have been sent to North Dakota to learn how to weld. Despite all of that, the magazine was still making money, selling something like 1.5 million copies monthly. Not that anyone would admit to reading it or spending money on it.

On February 20, 2005 Hunter Thompson blew his own brains out in the kitchen of Owl Farm. His chronic alcohol and drug abuse had rendered his writing profitless and that was of no use to Rolling Stone. He had survived the last 10 years by republishing old articles and collections of his work from different outlets. He had already lost faith in the American political process. After Bill Clinton failed to appease his concerns over firearms, marijuana legalization and the American constitution, Hunter simply lost interest and poured himself a stiff drink.

One of the core tenets of Thompson’s “Gonzo journalism” was: total subjectivity; blatant, outright bias. An approach emulated by current Rolling Stone top shelf contributor, Matt Taibbi; a pliable, milquetoast impressionist with a learned sense of Thompson’s wit and scorn. The trick, which Taibbi understands as did Thompson, is that good journalism has a subjective theme, of course, but doesn’t blur the lines that keep public servants accountable. Taibbi likens journalists cozying up to politicians to the separation of church and state. Lacking objectivity, a good journalist should still keep an arms length from politicians and be critical of all of them, especially ones entrenched for decades in unashamed cronyism, a disregard for human life and vicious foreign policy.

“Reporters are supposed to be unpleasant, grumpy people who instantly deface the posters of the powerful whenever they get the chance”

– Matt Taibbi

In 2008, Taibbi had the opportunity to join other journalists on one of Obama’s campaign flights. He liked Obama, but when he noticed all the pictures that lined the walls, pictures of Obama and all the different journalists, all with their arms around then candidate Obama and smiling, he admits that he felt a little dirty.

The real downfall of the magazine was that Jann Wenner had hitched the Rolling Stone wagon to a political party instead of a political principal.  

Obama graced the cover of Rolling Stone annually through his presidency. Jann Wenner and him had carved out their friendship and put it on display. Few presidents have had the opportunity to sustain 8 full years of foreign bloodshed without any outrage from Wenner and co.

Now that Obama was out, there was a constant theme in the election for his replacement and the primaries leading up to it. Americans were sick of the status quo. They were sick of being fed lies from mainstream media and “fake news.” People were waiting to revolt in the wake of establishment politics. Just give them a guy who’s going to shit on everything and see what happens.

American media today is out of touch and not only with this new generation. Outlets like Rolling Stone keep the official narrative going, but no one under 30 is listening.

When Rolling Stone endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, that was it. The joke was over. Jann Wenner had finally come out of the closet as an elitist authoritarian and a cruel faggot.

* Darcy Gerow is a family man and tradesman. He is a national board member for the Libertarian Party of Canada and the co-founder of @TheHardTruthsBookClub, an organization committed to causing greatness in working age me through brotherhood and literature.

The post Rolling Stone Gathers Moss appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[officialotakudome]

New Post has been published on Otaku Dome | The Latest News In Anime, Manga, Gaming, Tech, and Geek Culture

New Post has been published on https://otakudome.com/reviews/ghost-of-tsushima-directors-cut-review/

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut Review

Sony’s acclaimed action title Ghost of Tsushima is back with brand new content and an updated port to satisfy players old and new. In addition to the base game, the Director’s Cut includes a brand new era know as Iki Island. Which takes the player to an entirely new region to explore with new missions, a new story, and new gear to unlock.

Ghost of Tsushima is a 2020 action-adventure game, it is developed by Sucker Punch and published by Playstation Studios, it is available exclusively on Playstation 4 with a Director’s Cut available on PS4 & Playstation 5.

Editor’s Note: Near complete to complete spoilers for Ghost of Tsushima as well as Tales of Iki Island will be present within this review. This was a first run playthrough and the review will be written as such.

Become the ghost of a dying samurai era in Ghost of Tsushima.

Confession time, I actually bought Ghost of Tsushima on launch nearly a year ago. I only played so little of it because mental health issues of which I’ve been suffering roughly three or so years of is an absolute bitch to deal with. It’s moments like these that make me thankful for things like Sony’s Director’s Cut initiative. What better way to get back into a game than a brand new story expansion? That being said I think Sony needs to do a bit better with their approach to the Director’s Cut with pricing and such. But for what it is it’s a fine reason to get people back into these games be it the PS5 upgrade or the bonus additional content. And because of this I was able to sit down and properly enjoy what I missed out on while catching up to other players with the new story.

Defeat the Mongolian threat in Ghost of Tsushima.

THE GOOD: In the year of 1274 Japan, Jin Sakai heir to his uncle Lord Shimura who is jito of Tsushima follows the ways of the samurai. Sakai holds great respect for his uncle and follows his ways without question following the death of his mother to illness and his father in battle. Sakai has immense guilt over his father’s death as he had the opportunity to save him, but failed to do so. One evening Tsushima is invaded by a Mongol fleet who quickly over take it. Lord Shimura, Sakai, and their forces prepare for war as Mongol leader Khotun Khan has taken over Castle Kaneda. Khan’s forces easily decimate the underprepared samurai and their forces. Sakai challenges Khan to battle, but is quickly defeated and tossed off of the castle bridge.

Nearly drowned in a river he is found by Yuna an archer and thief who recruits Sakai to help her find her brother a blacksmith named Tana. She teaches him tactics that go against his hardened samurai code in return. As time goes on Sakai becomes aware that traditional samurai tactics won’t be enough to defeat the brute force of the Mongolian threat and leans more in favor of his survival tactics. He meets up with master archer Sadanobu Ishikawa who helps him master archery. He also encounters a reliable con man named Kenji, female samurai Masako Adachi who looks for revenge for her murdered family, and Ryuzo his childhood best friend who is now a mercenary and leader of the Straw Hat Ronin. Sakai defeats several of Khan’s forces and he and his allies invade Castle Kaneda where his uncle is held captive. Ryuzo being places in a desperate situation betrays Sakai who defeats Ryuzo upon learning if his joining with the Mongols. Sakai and his allies successfully reclaim Castle Kaneda and rescue Lord Shimura.

As Lord Shimura was captive Khan informed him of Sakai straying from the path of the samurai. Lord Shimura begs Sakai to keep his honor before he is changed forever. Sakai and Shimura spend time rebuilding their relationship as Sakai continues to ensure his allies of their allegiance to Lord Shimura. Namely Yuna who questions Sakai returning to his samurai code. Khan has since taken control of Castle Shimura with Ryuzo with Sakai & Lord Shimura planning a counter attack. Sakai gains the Yarikawa clan and Norio a warrior monk as new allies. While invading a Mongol HQ, Sakai alongside Taka are captured. Khan kills Taka to make an example and the next day Sakai and Yuna kill several Mongols. Sakai and his allies storm Castle Shimura and are nearly overrun with Mongol forces who blow up the bridge. Sakai becomes impatient with the samurai code and sneaks into the castle poisoning the Mongols, Straw Hats, and he kills Ryuzo. Shocked, Lord Shimura begs Sakai to turn in Yuna as someone who turned him against the way of the samurai but he refuses fully embracing his identity of the Ghost.

Lord Shimura has Sakai arrested who escapes with the help of Kenji and Yuna. Sakai and Yuma work together to take out Mongol forces who are inching closer to the mainland. He and Lord Shimura reach a momentary truce and successfully reclaim Castle Kaneda. As Khan attempts to flee on his ship Sakai invades it and faces him in battle. Sakai defeats and kills Khan with most of the Mongol invaders killed or driven from Tsushima. Lord Shimura informs Sakai that he has become an enemy of the Shogun and that he himself has been tasked with killing Sakai. Sakai defeats him and the player is given the choice of killing or sparing him. Now as the Ghost, Sakai eliminated the last of the Mongol forces from Tsushima. He hears rumblings of people being turned mad by Mongol Shaman and investigates.

Explore the beauty of circa 1274 Tsushima and Iki Island.

Sakai’s investigation leads him to Iki Island where the Mongols have taken base and control Fort Sakai. This is the island where Sakai and his father invaded leading to the latter’s death at the hands of bandits and raiders. Following a short separation from his horse Sakai taking on a fake identity as a Yarikawa clansman meets raider Tenzo who was present during his & his father’s invasion and later reveals he knows the truth of his identity. Tenzo and Sakai work together to liberate Iki from the Mongols and their leader The Eagle a seemingly mystic woman. Sakai earns enough of Tenzo’s trust to be introduced to raider leader Fune; an influential female warrior native to Iki. While driving Mongols from Fort Sakai, Jin hears a familiar phrase he heard from his father’s killer being spoken by Tenzo deducing that Tenzo is his father’s killer. After a brief fight the two keep their truce, Sakai had been poisoned by The Eagle earlier with the poison effecting his mental state throughout.

After gaining the trust of Fune, she along with Sakai and Tenzo work together to call out the remaining forced of The Eagle. Tenzo is injured in battle, but survives and Sakai overcomes the poison and kills The Eagle. As Tenzo & the raiders celebrate Fune asks Sakai to help her find her captured daughter whom she sent away after her drug addiction. When some of Fune’s men finds out they challenge her due to Fune’s daughter costing the lives of several raiders. Sakai and Fune kill the few traitors (with many refusing to join the betrayers) and Fune thanks Sakai for his help.

Enjoy Ghost of Tsushima’s multiplayer focused Legends mode.

Ghost of Tsushima is a top to bottom passion project from the team of Sucked Punch. The game has so much love poured into it that Japanese developers were actually jealous they got beaten to the punch. As a fan of Japanese history and such the game was an especially personal ride for me. It’s story (at least from what I gathered) appears to be an allegory about personal convictions & the expectations others have placed on us. Just how far are we willing to follow our or someone else’s code when it’s not working in a severe situation. What if there are lives on the line and our code prevents us from saving those lives? What if we know what to do, but are too afraid to act against those codes if it means others, namely family judging us for our actions. This are the type of questions lead character Jin Sakai struggles with even more so when his tight nit circle of friends and allies increases vs the strict samurai ways of his uncle Lord Shimura.

Gameplay for it’s action sequences comes into three different types: sword, archery, and projectile. The first has you as a samurai taking on big or small enemy hordes in four different sword styles which deal with respective enemy types. These enemy types are spear, sword & shield, brute, and dual-blade/long sword. Each sword style has different effects, weaknesses, and advantages between the four types of enemies which help stagger them for big damage and the final killing blow. Archery is bow & arrow play, weaker enemies (usually archers) tend to be one hit killed with archery and you can use a bullet time like mechanic for greater focus and damage. You can also unlock bonuses such as explosive & fire arrows for even more damage and advantages in ambushes. With projectiles you can throw weapons such as kunai, smoke bombs, and other items for long ranged attacks. You can also poison enemies or turn them against their allies with the blow gun.

As the progresses the player will come across world legends which grant them unique & powerful weapons, armor sets, and abilities. Giving players buffs such unblockable moves, extra health, etc. There are opportunities in battle to survive a death with resolve which acts as health regeneration. This can be increased by completing bamboo cutting tests. You explore much of the open world on horse back and can track foxes and yellow birds which leads the player to areas that will increase Sakai’s health or give him new slots for charms which further increases his stats. Going back to the sword play it can be rather challenging to get a hold of. In fact you’ll probably find yourself dying more than you care to admit with the game asking if ya just wanna call it a day and go to easy mode. You find new side quests throughout the world by helping save people from the Mongols and liberating Mongol strongholds.

The Iki Island expansion for the most part is pretty much what it is. An expansion of the base game’s story content with more info on Sakai’s past. While much doesn’t change from the gameplay front there are new activities such as archery challenges, opportunities to see Sakai’s memories of the past, and animal sanctuaries which provide a fun flute mini game that utilizes motion controls with the Dual Shock 4. There’s also a multiplayer mode known as Legends Mode in which you create a character in a new story detailing the antics of other samurai. Though the intent is to play with others it is possible to solo the story if you’d like. Admittedly, I didn’t really spend much time in this mode as it wasn’t for me, but it’s there for people looking to socialize and have fun with their friends in game.

Ghost of Tsushima is abundant with grand storytelling, an excellent script, and beautifully designed world.

THE BAD: I honestly think Ghost of Tsushima’s biggest caveat is the open world itself. I’m a huge advocate for open world games, but there are times when these maps just seem like a whole lot of empty space. Ghost of Tsushima feels just like one of such times. Granted, the world is beautiful as all hell it’s just a bit too much at times and can really effect the immersion as a player. That’s becoming much more of an issue as game development cost increases nearly every year. People always will expect more and bigger from these types of games, but for the sake of the developers and the enjoyment of the players is that really even necessary? Cost will always go up as technology improves, but adding unnecessary amounts of data that virtually amounts to a lot of empty space within the game world just feels redundant.

Ghost of Tsushima’s beautiful open world may be it’s biggest issue.

OVERALL THOUGHTS: Thanks to a passionate development team with a labor of love for ancient Japan Ghost of Tsushima will be remembered as one of the greatest games ever and certainly of its era. Already boasting a fantastic script with great dialogue and voice acting the fun, but challenging gameplay feels rewarding as hell when done right. In addition to the base game, the multiplayer mode Legends and Iki Island refresh the game in unique, but satisfying ways that will absolutely keep people coming back for more.

[theartificialdane]

Galactica, part 241

In this Violet’s world is changed, Courtney spends time with her new friends, Laila get’s hot under the collar and Alaska has to sacrifice for the team.

Thank you to @toriibelledarling @samrull and @veronicasanders - My darling cowriters <3

“Yes.. I, yes.. Thank you.. I’ll talk to you later too.. Bye.”

Violet put her phone in her bag after talking to Sutan who was spending the night with his sister. Violet turned around and walked back inside the gallery. Her shoes were hurting, the drink in her hand almost empty, the people around her mostly strangers. Someone bumped into Violet, and she silently cursed herself for not pleading more for Sutan to come along with her, but she wasn’t someone who begged. Sutan needed time with his sister, and how was she to ask twice if he had something better to do. Sutan had done so much for her lately, and she didn’t want to be the ungrateful brat, she was sure Sutan sometimes saw her as.

Violet took the last sip of her drink, getting lost in the mysterious landscapes of Hercules Segers as she walked around, when she felt a hand on her shoulder, almost making her jump. Violet turned around, and came face to face with Chad Michaels, the woman smiling brightly.

“Darling!” Chad exclaimed happily, enveloping Violet in a cloud of Dior perfume and air kisses which Violet quickly returned.

“Ms. Michaels, hello,” Violet said. “It’s so nice to see you.”

“I am just thrilled that you’re here, Violet! Especially this week! What a wonderful job you did for that Marie Claire spread.”

“Thank you.” Violet smiled, beyond happy that Chad had somehow seen her work and also realised that it was her. She hadn’t expected the other woman, or really anyone, to, and hearing the praise warmed her heart.

“I’ve been meaning to call you and it kept slipping my mind and here you are, it’s like fate!” Chad grabbed a drink for her and one for Violet from one of the waiters that walked by, still chatting away. “I recognized it instantly!”

“Really?” Violet looked at Chad, not quite believing what she was hearing, the fact that she was there alone not all that depressing anymore. Violet couldn’t imagine what would have happened if Betty or even Pearl had been there with her, Chad demanding her complete attention.

“Darling. Of COURSE we can recognize your work. I do hope that this wasn’t a one-time deal.” Chad put an arm around Violet, dragging her off to the side and somehow easily finding a couch where the two could sit down, Chad effortlessly demanding the space. “I’ve been telling that boss of yours for months that she needs to give you your own line, and it seems like she’s finally listening to me with the Marie Claire spread!”

Violet choked on her drink, almost coughing before she caught herself, her hand in front of her mouth as she swallowed the liquid.

“What?”

“The Marie Claire spread you silly goose.”

Violet felt like the breath had been knocked from her lungs. Was Chad the one that had recommended her for the Marie Claire spread? Was Chad the one that had a finger in the game, and not Sutan?

“You…you have?”

“Of course! And why not? You have such a remarkable gift, my dear!”

Chad was still chatting. Violet could see Chad’s lips moving, but she couldn’t really hear the other woman, her ears ringing. Had she been fussy with Sutan for no reason? Acting out and silently punishing him for something he had never done? Violet needed to go, she needed to go, and to apologize and tell Sutan what a colossal bitch she had been, her head spinning.

“Speaking of which, I’d love to commission a few more gowns from you, and I would be honored if you’d design something absolutely over the top for me for the Met Ball this year. What do you think?”

“I have to go.”

***

“What if we just-”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.” Detox sat down on the bed, Grace crying in his arms. The little girl had woken up for the 6th time that night, coughing and crying, her ears hurting.

“No I don’t, but I know you.” Juju took Grace from Detox, Detox silently cursing the new babysitter they had hired, that had forgotten to put Grace’s hat on before she took the small kids outside to play in the december snow.

“Sssh, ssh.” Juju gently rocked Grace back and forth, undoing her top so Grace could latch onto a nipple, the little girl finally calming down, her small hands curled into fists.

“Kids are fucking monsters.”

“And yet you have four.” Juju smiled, and Detox sat down next to her.

“And yet I have four.”

***

“Sutan. Sutan. Wake up.” Sutan felt someone shake him, but he didn’t want to wake up, his head heavy, his mouth tasting of every single drink he had shared with Raja.

{Raj, leave me alone}

Oh god. He was way too old to mix shots and wine, but stomach churning as he tried to sit up. Why was Raja being such a bitch?

“Sutan, come on, please, I have to talk to you.”

Sutan recognised the voice. It wasn’t Raja, and it wasn’t Raven, but someone else entirely.

“.. Violet?” Sutan sat up, his girlfriend sitting on the floor of his livingroom. Sutan knew it wasn’t the time, but he couldn’t help but congratulate himself that he had somehow made it home the day before. “Did you use your key?” Sutan looked down at himself, thankful that he was at least still wearing pants and his undershirt, the rest of his suit properly crumbled up somewhere.

“We have to talk.” Violet was sitting on the edge of the coffee table, her hair and outfit looking perfect. Why was it that Violet hadn’t spent the night with him? Had she gone somewhere? Fuck his head felt so heavy.

“I’m pretty- Vi, I’m pretty drunk, can this wa-”

“No.” Violet looked at him, her expression one of pure determination. “We have to talk, right now, or I’ll never say anything.”

“What?” Was Violet okay? Had something happened to hear? Sutan reached out, grabbing Violet’s knee, his girl allowing him. “Did someone hurt you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Violet, did someone hurt you? Do I need to call someone?” Sutan tightened his grab, the idea of someone hurting Violet unbearable to him.

“I’m sorry. I did a really bad thing and I- I thought you had forced someone to give me the Marie Claire photoshoot.”

“… What?”

The words came out in a rush, “It’s stupid, I know, I know, but I was so sure. Why else would it have been given to me?”  Sutan barely able to hear what Violet was actually saying, everything a mess like it had been at the hospital. “I can’t- I’m not, I didn’t deserve it, and I still got it,” Violet breathed in, almost gasping for air before she continued to speak, like she’d die if she didn’t get it out right away, “It’s been killing me since I secretly assumed it had been your doing, that you, oh I don’t know, made a deal with Bianca or Fame and that you didn’t trust me, and then with thanksgiving.”

Was Violet saying that she assumed Sutan had something to do with her work? That he had somehow talked his friends into giving her a photoshoot? Sutan knew he should properly feel hurt, and if he was being honest he did, but it was part of Violet to worry, and she deserved not to talk to him while he was drunk.

“Hey, hey.” Sutan moved his hand, gently taking Violet’s arm, the girl stopping her stream of words, her entire attention on him.

“I’d never do that.”

The room feel silent, Violet looking at him like he was her entire world, and Sutan took the aking the time to choose his words.

“You don’t need my help Violet.” Sutan could see that Violet was about to open her mouth, but he stopped her, quickly continuing. “If you think you do, you’re wrong. I don’t know where this is coming from, but what you achieve is yours, and I would never try to take that from you. I can guide you and give you advice if you want me to, but your career is yours, not mine. It’s yours.”

Violet threw her arms around him, holding him close, her face pressed into his neck. “I’m sorry.” Sutan wrapped an arm around Violet’s waist, giving her a tight squeesh.

“Vi..”

“Yes?”

“Can I have some water please?”

“Of course.”

***

“Augh!” Courtney shrieked as Sonja opened a bottle of champagne, spraying everyone. Vanity ducked behind her to protect her wig from getting drenched and Bethenny began to tease him.

“Really? She’s your protector? She could fit in my pocket. She’s the size of a Keebler elf.”

“Well,” Vanity reasoned. “I had to make a quick decision and Luann isn’t here.”

Ramona burst out laughing. “Where is she, anyway? She sent me a very cryptic text about why she couldn’t make it.”

“Yeah, probably because she feels guilty that she’s dating your ex,” said Carole.

“Tom isn’t my ex! We just went on a couple of dates!” Ramona insisted.

“Well, whatever, she still should have told you when she started dating him. Just like she should have told Sonja, or HE should have told Sonja. The whole thing is very shady.” Bethenny shook her head, pouring another drink. “I do not approve. Breaking the girl code.”

“Girl code! Girl code!” Ramona mocked Luann’s latest catchphrase, laughing.

Sonja leaned on her shoulder giggling.

“So the three of you all dated the same guy?” Courtney asked.

“Is he like, amazing in bed?” Vanity asked.

“He’s fine in bed,” Sonja said. “I wouldn’t say ‘amazing.’”

“He’s desperate to bag a Housewife, apparently,” Bethenny explained. “You’re lucky you’re gay.”

“Yeah, I say a prayer of thanks for that every day,” Courtney said, laughing.

“So what’s this show gonna be like?” asked Ramona. “Do you have hot backup dancers?” She raised her eyebrows suggestively.

“Yeah, they’re super hot,” said Courtney.

“Ramona, you’re talking to a lesbian, you may need to clarify if she means hot boys or hot girls.”

“I knew what she meant,” Courtney said, laughing. “And I’ve got both, Bethenny.” Courtney winked at the brunette.

“Well, good. That gives us more choices.”

Ramona’s eyes bugged out in shock, causing both Carole and Bethenny to dissolve in giggles.

“I’m kidding, you idiot,” Bethenny yelled.

“Well, ya never know with you,” said Ramona.

“Indeed,” Carole said coyly.

“I think we should plan a girls’ trip,” said Ramona.

“I’m so confused as to what the fuck this is,” Bethenny said.

“This is just an overnight. I mean like a real, solid, like 4 or 5 days.”

“I’m busy,” Carole said.

“I haven’t said any dates!” Ramona laughed.

“I know.” Carole poured herself another drink.

“I have a question,” Courtney said. “When you say ‘Girls’ Trip,’ is that code for ‘no significant others’ or does it just mean girls?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I just, I don’t know, 5 days seems like a long time. B’s been feeling kind of neglected lately.” Courtney didn’t add her next thought, which was ‘Leaving her alone when she’s feeling hard up seems like asking for trouble.’

“Remember how much shit you gave Aviva for wanting to bring her husband to St Bart’s?” Sonja laughed.

“Well yeah, because Aviva was crazy. And her husband was a jerk. Bianca might actually be fun,” Ramona said.

“You don’t have to say yes, I was just wondering.”

“I think it’s kind of sweet,” said Carole. “And kind of sad that the 22 year old has the most functional relationship here.”

“It’s not sweet,” Vanity piped up. “They are fucking nymphomaniacs who are gonna be scissoring all over your vacation home.”

Courtney slapped Vanity on the side of the head. “Shut up, Ben!” she exclaimed, laughing.

“Well, it’s true. And I’m not even touching ‘functional relationship,’” she added, holding out her champagne glass. “I need another drink, quickly.”

“Ya dog-ass mole,” Courtney grumbled, crossing her arms.

***

RE: Christmas

Dear Ms. Michaels,

I’m so sorry for leaving you as abruptly as I did last night. I want to assure you that working with you for the christmas season would be a tremendous honor to design a look for you. I’ve made a few sketches based on your tastes and preferences. I have attached the sketches, and I hope that we can use them as jumping off points for discussions.

Thank you for your encouragement.

Best wishes,

Violet

*

RE: RE: Christmas

VIOLET THESE ARE DIVINE!! #2 IS MY FAVORITE!!

You MUST let me take you out to lunch this week so that we can talk more!!

Xoxo,

Chad

*

RE: RE: RE: Christimas

Ms. Michaels,

It would be my absolute pleasure to go to lunch with you! Thank you again for your support, I’m very greatful.

Best wishes,

Violet

***

“Hey babe.”

Laila looked up from her computer, her hands filled with swatched from the tour she had done of her most used lipsticks. She looked up to see Pearl, her girlfriend standing in the doorway, a smile on her lips. Pearl had gone out earlier that night, Laila not even catching that Pearl was going out, until she was already gone, her and Max apparently hitting some concert in Harlem.

“Did you have a good time?”

“Mmmh.” Pearl nodded, her eyes filled with a lustful glint, like she wanted to eat Laila up, and Laila suddenly felt self conscious of her sweatpants and her braided purple hair. “I had whiskey.”

“Did you?”

“Mmh..” Pearl was wearing sinful leather pants, her long legs clad in the black fabric, her hips and stomach peaking out from the shirt that was tied into a crop top.

“… Is that my top?” Laila recognised the Metallica logo, the shirt one she had owned for years and one she usually wore to bed, but on Pearl, paired with a black jacket, it looked like something that had cost a thousand dollars.

“Is it?” Pearl smiled. “I’m so sorry babe, I’ll make it up to you right away.” Pearl took her jacket off, and Laila felt her mouth run dry as Pearl dropped the jacket on the floor, pushing the door shut behind before. “Are you mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“Are you sure?” Pearl pulled at the shirt, undoing the knot she had tied with ease, her red nails tugging the fabric open before she grabbed it and slowly pulled it up, up, up and over her head, her long blonde hair falling down her back, Laila recognising Pearl’s underwear as La Perla, something she wouldn’t have been able to do at gunpoint a year ago.

“Because I think you should punish me.”

Laila smiled, Pearl’s desire for her thick in the air, the power going to her head as she held up her hand and gestured for Pearl to get closer, which she happily did.

“How can I say no to that?”

***

“Oh my god, I’m so fucking tired…” Jinkx moaned, tossing her clothes and shoes to the floor and climbing into bed. “What are we watching?”

Adore kissed her forehead and began to play with her red hair, cuddling back against Alaska’s warm body. “Forensic Files.”

“That shit gives me nightmares.”

“Awww, we’ll protect you, baby…”

Alaska giggled and pressed a soft kiss to the back of Adore’s neck. She wasn’t into the gruesome murder show either, so she chose to distract herself by letting her fingers trail up and down Adore’s tender skin, hands snaking between her thighs, lips finding her pulse point, sucking on her, rubbing her, until she was sighing and arching, breath coming fast and–

“AUGH!” Adore suddenly shrieked, pushing Alaska away.

“What?” Alaska sat up.

Adore whipped her head around, glaring at her, “That’s IT!” She leapt out of the bed and into the adjoining bathroom.

“What happened?” Jinkx murmured sleepily from her pillow.

“I told you, if that happened ONE MORE TIME!” Adore said, marching back into the bedroom, brandishing a pair of nail clippers like a weapon.

“Nooooooo!” Alaska whined.

“Oh yes! Those nails are GONE, bitch!” She threw back her head and laughed maniacally.

“But I liiike my naaaaaaaails,” she countered, as Adore straddled her and attempted to grab one of her hands.

“Well tough shit! No more nails!”

“Jiiiiiinkx!” Alaska whined, looking for support.

“Yeah, Jinkx, please help me out?” Adore looked over at the sleepy redhead.

Jinkx looked up. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars for every nail you cut.”

Alaska held out her hand for Adore. “Okay, deal.”

“Wait, that’s ten grand! Do I get anything for cutting them?” Adore asked.

“You can order a pizza. Alaska will pay for it.” Jinkx yawned and rolled over.

“Okay, deal.” Adore giggled and began to cut away, then paused to kiss Alaska on the cheek. “I’m sorry about your nails, boo.”

“Sorry about scratching you.”

“It’s okay. You can kiss it better.” Adore winked at her.

“You got it.”

***

Courtney twirled around with Vanity, high on expensive liquor and the adrenaline of performing. She’d just finished signing autographs for a gaggle of teenage girls, and now she was hitting the club with the ladies.

The DJ was young and sexy and giving her bedroom eyes, and he was blasting Lucien’s dance remix of Ecstasy. Subtle, but cute. She blew him a kiss and continued to spin around with her brother, wondering if it was totally narcissistic to enjoy dancing to her own music this much and deciding that she didn’t care.

“Do you miss Bianca?” Carole called to her over the music, slinging an arm over her shoulders.

Courtney felt a surge of guilt bloom in her chest. The truth was, she hadn’t really thought about Bianca since she’d stepped onto the stage. She’d been having way too much fun. The reality of her newfound independence was both unsettling and freeing. Things with B had been so tense lately, especially since the whole Thanksgiving disaster. Maybe they should be doing more things apart. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be. Couples weren’t supposed to be codependent, right? This was them evolving into something healthier, something more adult, right? Right?

Courtney looked at Carole, smiling sweetly. “So much,” she said wistfully. “But I know she’s having a good time in New York, and this way it’ll be that much better when we see each other again.”

Carole nodded and exclaimed, “Exactly!”

Courtney tilted her eyes upwards and breathed a sigh of relief as the music echoed off the walls. When I don’t even know my name, when my reckless can’t be tamed…and when the DJ sets us free, we will be in ecstasy…

[zadabug98]

If you don't think Tony Stark's "I would die for you at the drop of a hat but don't always know how to properly express my affections" energy isn't peak Aries then I'm sorry what's even the point. Like you really think Anthony Edward Stark is down in his lab screaming "I'M A VIRGO" while hyped up on too much caffeine and not enough sleep, coding the fuck out of a Roomba with a knife taped to the top because Peter Did a Meme and now Stabby Needs a Soul? Like bitch, where?!?!

If your Tony ship doesn’t have the same Dynamic as Jenna Marbles and Julien Solomita then I don’t wanna fucking hear it