#And. once again. this list is intended for beginners. something I have not been for a very very long time. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rymndsmth · 3 years

Text

querencia (jang han seo)

🎤 hello and gather around fellow himbo lovers, here is a small fic about our beloved and his life after That guy kicks the bucket. also idk how i managed to turn this into a love story? anyways lmfao, hope y’all enjoy!

Everything felt so different.

Truthfully, Han Seo never imagined what his life could be like, would be like, without the proverbial ever tightening noose around his neck. One that had been unexpectedly and disappointingly placed on him as a child by the one person that was supposed to remove such things. He was now free of that person, and the fear that stemmed from veering off the path set by them, but wasn’t entirely too certain that he was free of that feeling.

His muscles couldn’t shake it. The sudden chill to the bone, the anticipation of retaliation from an act that hadn’t yet occurred. Such an act that could never occur anymore given that his brother was dead. He knew this, but his mind had never been good at accepting possibilities that were positive.

This much was evident in the case of his relationship with Vincenzo. There was no reason why the stoic yet baby faced Mafia member would want to keep him around, at least not any that he could see. So, Han Seo spent the first few weeks asking the question both silently and aloud, will you kill me? Vincenzo had the motive, it’s not exactly like his hands were clean in his previous dealings with Babel, and he most certainly had the means.

It wasn’t until Han Seo was told that because he was trying to make amends, he wouldn’t end up in the Jang family crypt well before his time that he started to feel at ease. Still, for months after that conversation, he still had the nagging feeling that some invisible fist was lurking around every bend.

Regardless of that, Han Seo decided he would not waste his liberation however short lived it might have been. He made up his mind that he was going to do all the things that he was either too scared or outright forbidden to do before. The first thing on his list was to clean up his business. Luckily for him, the Guillotine file made it easy to weed out the snakes in the grass and allow him to steer Babel in the direction that the core of the business was about.

The hardest part was going to be restoring the public’s faith in the organization. Cha Young told him as much, and advised him not to agonize over it as there will be new corruption that will grab their attention (and hers). He intended to be the Chairman that such a company deserved, and therefore continued to study no matter how nonsensical and outdated the information seemed.

The second order of business was moving out of the place that felt more like a prison than a home to one that he liked. The realtor immediately recommended a few luxury places, but he turned them down to their surprise. Maybe it was due to the fact that he had seen what the quest for material wealth had done to his family (or more realistically because he wanted to be closer to newfound hyung and his girlfriend).

Either way, the house he settled on had its luxuries, but in a more affordable and quaint neighborhood. Han Seo even went as far as to attempt painting on his own, which went as well as expected for someone that didn’t even know the difference between a brush and a roller.

Being able to do what he wanted proved to be chaotic at times. There was no one to stop him from going on last minute trips to Jeju just for oranges and a quick dip into the ocean. Or to take away all the sweet and savory snacks that he found at these things called convenience stores.

He would stay up all night sometimes, not to binge watch all the shows he missed out on, but just to sit in silence. He didn’t know that the quiet could be so nice. That it was a space of tranquility and relaxation rather than one filled with anxiety. Of course, Han Seo more often than not regretted the choice not to sleep and ended up at the cafe a few blocks from his place.

While obviously no one had better coffee than the one at Babel, he found himself going to the cozy spot with increasing frequency because of her. The first time he saw her, she was deciding on which apple to choose from the basket beside the register. He then noticed that her canvas bag was filled with art supplies, and decided that it was a brilliant idea to draw a conclusion.

I think the one to the right would make a great subject on paper, he grinned.

She stared at him in a way that made him contemplate whether to not she was related to Vincenzo hyung before replying flatly:

I’m looking for the tartest one to go with my tea.

He was left a bumbling mess of flustered sounds and rapidly blinks, not getting the opportunity to insert some retort that undoubtably would’ve put him deeper into the realm of idiot.

The following morning he went again. No cup of coffee, not even the ridiculously overpriced espresso at Babel, would give him that jolt of electricity he felt under her gaze. And sure enough, she was there. This time her apple sat upon a folded napkin right beside her tea, and in front of them both was her sketchpad. On the page? A picture of the fruit. He couldn’t control the noise of exasperation that left him as he passed her table. On his way out he tossed over his shoulder with a grin so wide it hurt:

Nice drawing.

Their interactions continued in that same vein. Short, filled with just the right amount of bite. The balance of who had the best and last say constantly shifting, becoming somewhat of a competition.

You’re outside today, is that weed your subject?

As if there weren’t enough clowns in this neighborhood already.

You buy a lot of lattes for an artist that’s supposed to be starving.

Ironic coming from the gentrifier walking around a working class neighborhood in thousand dollar shoes.

He had look up what that g word meant after their last exchange.

There was something else he never got to do in his past. Sure, Han Seo had the occasional date or two, but commitment? That was out of the question. It wouldn’t have served his brother well if there was anyone around that would motivate him to step out from his hold. The realization that he never had a serious relationship hadn’t hit him until he started to have inconvenient thoughts during board meetings about stuff like taking a long afternoon stroll, and holding hands with her.

Han Seo could barely focus on the stack of jargon dense reading before him. He sent Vincenzo a text saying that he was coming over with soju, not waiting for a reply before making the short journey to Geumga. Cha Young’s face fell when she answered the door, muttering that she thought he was her delivery, but lit up once she saw he brought along alcohol. After poking around the rice he begged for them to share and sighing loudly for half an hour, Vincenzo ushered him out. He implored him to get a hobby so that these late night visits wouldn’t become a habit.

He was confused by that. Weren’t studying and running a company hobbies? On his walk back home he spotted a flyer that someone was offering private classes for beginners painting. The nightmare of a time he had trying to get the walls in his kitchen evenly colored popped up in his brain, instantly making him tear off one of the numbers. He didn’t exactly know how learning to paint homes was going to be a practical hobby, but hell, he would have something to show Vincenzo later.

While he was on one of his impromptu trips to the seaside, Han Seo had his assistant set up the class for him to take when he returned. As a gift for the instructor, he thought it would be nice to bring them an extra bag of oranges. If the session sucked, or if he hated it, at the very least there was going to be something to brighten the mood.

The day he got back, he even went as far as to tidy up the place on his own and put some fresh flowers around so the air was lightly scented. He practically waited at the door until the alarm sounded to let him know that his instructor arrived.

Is this a joke? She huffed.

No, I didn’t even know you were the teacher! His protest was adamant. I was on a trip and even brought back Jeju- He paused. Han Seo knew he wasn’t the brightest, but bringing up the oranges seemed like it would upset her given their previous history.

You brought back what? Her brow raised.

Mmm, good energy! Don’t you feel the vibes from the ocean? He spread his arms wide.

Han Seo waved her inside hurriedly, trying desperately to get past the awkward exchange. Of all people, he never would’ve thought it would be the neighborhood’s cute sass machine. A small noise of happiness couldn’t be stopped from escaping him as she accepted the invitation. Her eyes scanned the place without restraint, nose wrinkling when she took a look at the kitchen.

Where are your supplies? A slender finger ran across the surface of his counter.

Supplies? He thought that was included in the price for the lessons.

She sighed, placing a sketchbook, brushes, and small pots of paint onto the table. It was now very apparent to him that the advertisement did not mean what he thought it did. Thank goodness he also didn’t decide to open his mouth about that beforehand, it probably would’ve made her smack him with her bag.

Here, the materials were slid over when he sat. Paint something.

His facial expression surely mirrored what he was thinking. Han Seo had no recollection of ever trying to do this, not even during the course of his way overpriced private school education. She urged him on with a nod, only relaxing into her chair when he flipped open the book and picked up a fine brush.

There was nothing in particular he wanted to paint. Hell, he didn’t even know if he wanted to paint at all. This was simply something random that came up when he needed it.

To avoid being chastised, he dipped his brush into the light blue color and started swiping randomly across the blank page. He swapped the brush and added some dark green, then pink, and finished if off with small dots of white. At the end it looked like something a toddler would’ve considered a masterpiece. She eyed it with surprising interest.

You clearly didn’t know what you wanted to achieve with this, or why you were doing it at all.

Han Seo was about to interject with a prideful defense before she continued.

That’s good. It’s better to work with an unbiased mind. Her eyes met his. Your technique is shit though.

He laughed, like truly laughed. It was a full bellied, unashamedly loud, attack of sonic waves. She seemed to find it amusing, a hint of a smile dancing across her lips.

Alright, let’s start with how to actually hold a paintbrush.

There was no telling when their interactions had gone from less than playful banter to warm and friendly (still with a side of joking). Han Seo couldn’t put his finger on it. Did it happen during the second lesson where he mistakenly put paint on her hands, and didn’t settle for no when he said he would wash them off for her?

Or was it the time he was running late for work, but the barista already had his order prepared because she told them that he was on the way? Perhaps it was the time she had to reschedule their Saturday morning for the evening instead, and all he could think about was trying to replicate the color of her alcohol flushed cheeks onto the page before him.

Han Seo had never done the whole confession thing before, so he wasn’t sure about how it worked. An unfamiliar kind of anxiety crept up his spine as he poured glasses of wine and organized a fruit plate. Soft music played in the background accompanied by the crackle of the expensive candles he bought specifically for the occasion. Her mouth parted slightly as she took everything in once she arrived for what was supposed to be an ordinary session involving watercolors.

Wow, got a hot date later or something? Her legs seemed to automatically take her to the table.

Actually, He brought the glasses over to where she sat. It’s for you.

Oh…She gasped. A few seconds passed that felt more like minutes before she picked one up and held it high. Cheers then!

Something about it made him feel like he made a mistake. Did he misread their change in demeanor towards one another? Was she truly just being kinder to him because she considered him to only be a friend? Han Seo tried to not let the embarrassment he felt seep into the room, keeping a smile locked and loaded for when she made a witty remark about stuff like him painting in the most inappropriate white button down.

Don’t you have something to say to me? She quipped, neatly putting her things away after he finished.

Me? I- no…I... He clenched his fists. Why couldn’t he come out and say it?! This was as good as a chance as he was ever going to get. If he let this opportunity slip, he wasn’t sure if there would be one again. He had to act, he had to-

What sounded like a small growl came from her as she raked her hand through her hair. She pulled him closer by the collar of his shirt, her nose just shy of rubbing against his.

Jang Han Seo, when are you gonna stop driving me insane? She murmured, labored breaths dancing across his cupid’s bow.

If only she knew how true and reciprocated that question was to him too. From the moment he couldn’t fight against thoughts about her entering his mind, to the smile she wore when he stepped across his threshold, and the way she said his goddamned name, it was all enough to make him want to combust. To burst out of his skin, transforming into something or someone else entirely. A person that fully accepted that there were no more restraints on their lives, that they was no more fear and no more betrayal. Someone that was completely in control, and free to take what was theirs. And so he did.

It was painful, almost, the first time he kissed her. The second time even more so. By the third time, coupled with the question of her tongue prodding at his bottom lip, Han Seo had shedded the last of his previous being. He cupped her face, thumbs toying with her curled sideburns as he consumed her. Quiet whimpers made way for desperate cries, shivers were replaced by the searing heat of skin on skin.

The high he’d chased fruitlessly so many times throughout his life was finally achieved with his arms wrapped tightly around her, their bodies pressed together as she shuddered and sighed his name. He was in disbelief that what he had experienced was real, so he chased it again and again, receiving the same result each time his sweat slicked forehead bowed to meet hers.

Han Seo would learn that it could be obtained outside of that space they filled with the tangible evidence of their desire. It was also in buying melon flavored ice pops to eat in the park together on sunny days. The look on Vincenzo and Cha Young’s face when he timidly made the introduction. Her expression when she took her first bite of Hee Soo’s tteokbokki. When Mr. Nam and her had an hour long debate on which shade of red made the most realistic fake blood color. The flashing Best Chairman Ever coming from her phone when Babel secured their biggest deal yet without any dirty deals behind the scenes.

That feeling, one that outshone the other by such a long shot that it was nearly eradicated, had been there all along in the life he’d made. She just helped him see it.

#*throws this and runs to take my dog for a walk*#jang han seo #vincenzo #fics.n

43 notes · View notes

trackerhunter995 · 3 years

Text

Almost Done With Darlingtongames123 Nr2003 Designs

Darlington Designs is the leading residential design & build firm in New Jersey. Specializing in major home renovations from landscape and hardscape projects to. Nov 16, 2014 - FREEBIES - Darling Designs 4 U - Merry Christmas Tree. Nov 16, 2014 - FREEBIES - Darling Designs 4 U - Merry Christmas Tree. Craft Instructions For Kids. Saved from darlingdesigns4u.com. Saved by Brenda Liston.

Almost Done With Darlingtongames123 Nr2003 Designs For Beginners

Almost Done With Darlingtongames123 Nr2003 Designs Free

123456789colton

Senior Member

Messages

772

Reaction score

549

Well as I am almost done with the original track update, someone on this forum sent me 2 tracks asking to take a look at them. They are basically broken and useless for now. I got to thinking, maybe just MAYBE I can take my track editing to another level. I want to try and fix the 'broken' tracks of NR2003. So i wanted to see if you guys could send me tracks via links on this thread. Maybe this can bring some of the other nr2003 players back to this community or even new people to the game. I'm not sure, but I would like to try and fix these tracks! Not sure when or even if I can fix them but I am willing to try over time. Also, tracks that need graphics updates or mips and such might be last on my list. I've been wanting to learn how to do all of that and I have somewhat of an idea not am not experienced with that yet. So with that being said send me any links you have! The message I received was for Melbourne. So i am working on that track and it is a pain! Haha.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I haven’t blogged in months. It should be expected by now, lol. There’s been a ton of things that’s happened since my last blog, much too many to write about here. Basically in the end, a bunch of things went down, none of it really bad, and I just neglected the blog for a while, and I’ll end up neglecting it again. But as the title of this post suggests, I’m slowly returning to my old ways. What does that actually mean to anyone that reads this? Well, let me think here…

I’m a fan of the racing sim NASCAR Racing: 2003 Season (NR2003), this blog was intended to showcase work I do for the game, provide me a private space to share files, and allow me to blog any ongoing projects. Instead I kinda posted a lot of stuff on other topics, which I’m sure I’ll do in the future as well, but hopefully not as much. So with that said, I’ve been working on a project that is mainly intended for NR2003, but anyone can enjoy this one. I’ve been making some new Sprint Cup Series models. It’s a big project for me, 5 makes in total. I just got tired of not having something that was much more accurate to the real cars to play with. Originally I wanted to get back into painting a few cool cars I seen from the 2016 NASCAR season, and I found out the models we had, just were not accurate. It forced me to change the scheme a bit, much of which was a pain because it really was quite a intricate paint job. so much of what I recreated after using photos for reference didn’t fit on the model. This was the reason why I quit painting cars in the first place. So instead of doing a half-ass conversion and ruining the original artist’s interpretation, I decided I’d just go ahead and make my own damn model. I made the Chevy SS and was just gonna leave it at that, but I had a lot of fun that I haven’t had in a long while so I decided to make even more models. In the end, I made 5 models total, the 2016 Chevy SS, 2016 Dodge Charger, 2016 Ford Fusion, 2016 Toyota Camry, and even the 2018 Toyota Camry. The models were a blast to make, especially the Charger. Seeing Dodge pulled out of NASCAR a few years back, I had freedom to kinda freestyle how I think it would look in NASCAR trim. And I feel I nailed the look. Even if I didn’t, the model looks bad ass nonetheless.

You can’t be a NASCAR fan and not love the looks of that, lol. So far, the bodies are complete, the mapping is mainly complete, though I might have to add a couple of things before release, and I’m almost done with the chassis and interior for the Chevy. These models, once finished, will be posted online for all to enjoy. I will be including the models (3ds Max 2009, 8 formats and obj), textures, and whatever else is required. They will be free to use for non-commercial use only, so you can use them in other games, apps, or whatever as long as you’re not profiting from them in any way, shape, or form. And you can bet your ass, they work in NR2003, I’ve already tested them in there. I did this once before with the Xfinity Series cars. only difference is they did not have any textures, it was just the bodies, rollcage, and wheels. In fact, here’s the link if anyone wants them…

These weren’t perfectly modeled, but they’re pretty damn good. In fact, I’ve actually started updating the models a little because I came across some reference to help make them way more accurate. But I won’t be able to get to them all till a while after I’m done with the Sprint Cup Series models.

Almost Done With Darlingtongames123 Nr2003 Designs For Beginners

Almost Done With Darlingtongames123 Nr2003 Designs Free

So for now, this is what I’ve been doing with my time. I’ve returned to my NR2003 roots, and man I can’t wait till this project is finished and people can get a up close and personal look at these models. I hope people get to enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them. Catch ya’s later. 🙂

1 note · View note

woolandcoffee · 5 years

Text

So You Want to Knit in Quarantine

A Knitting Resource Masterpost

If you’re stuck in quarantine/lock-down/shelter-in-place during the corona pandemic of 2020 and want to learn to knit or improve your knitting skills, the following is a list of resources intended to help you do so. Whether your goal is to relieve stress or learn useful skills to survive an (the?) apocalypse, knitting is a fun activity that is relatively easy to get the hang of. Seriously, once you can knit, purl, increase, and decrease, you can make a sweater. Promise.

To Learn

If you’re just starting out, need a refresher, or want to have something to turn to when you get stuck, the following are a variety of resources for learning how to knit:

Books

My all time favorite guide for learning to knit is the classic Stitch 'n Bitch by Debbie Stoller. It's been the go-to book for years now because it includes excellent visual and written descriptions for all the necessary techniques that every knitter should know. It also includes fun patterns (some of them a little dated, looking at you, flip-phone cozy) from a basic hat to a knit bikini. Currently, this book is available on Amazon either in hard copy or digital copy. Because Amazon is currently prioritizing shipments of groceries and household goods, I recommend purchasing and downloading the digital copy. It is $10, which isn't prohibitively expensive for many folks, and is an extremely comprehensive guide for learning to knit.

Though I haven’t read it myself, PomPom Quarterly, a knitting magazine headquartered in the UK, recently released a learn-to-knit book called Knit How. The book has a variety of patterns and descriptive tutorials designed to help beginners learn to knit. It has been very well-received, and is a little more modern than Stitch ‘n Bitch (no flip-phone cozies there, but no knit bikinis either). At the moment, PomPom is only shipping once a week due to COVID-19, but I believe they offer digital downloads of their book together with purchase either through Ravelry or Pompom’s website. However, it costs about twice as much as Stitch n’ Bitch, so if cost is a concern I would avoid this copy.

YouTube/Blogs

YouTube has hundreds, if not thousands, of videos demonstrating knitting techniques for beginners. If you just type “learn how to knit” into YouTube, you’ll come up with a whole host of options. Some will be good, some will be bad, but all will be free. If you chose to go this route, I encourage you to watch a few different videos until you find some that really make sense to you. Just like with in-person learning, not every teacher is the same and you should find the person who makes the most sense to you. That said, I’m going to recommend the YouTube channel ExpressionFiberArts. Her learn to knit video is located here, and she explains this very clearly with focused, close-up shots.

Several websites and blogs also contain freely available how-to-knit information and tutorials. Purl Soho, a yarn and fabric store in NYC, has an excellent website with a variety of tutorials on beginning to advanced knitting techniques. They have been doing this for quick some time, and their materials are widely referenced. As a more advanced knitter, I often turn to Purl Soho for techniques that are new to me. The Spruce Crafts also has a blog series with photo tutorials for beginning knitters that walk them through the basics to help them get started.

Where to Get Materials

Because so many shops are closed right now, this may be the trickiest barrier to navigate during quarantine. If you have supplies on hand (needles and yarn), I strongly suggest using what you have. Doesn’t matter if it was fancy or if it isn’t what your YouTube instructor or the pattern you’re making calls for - flatten curve, stay in, use what you got.

If you don’t have anything on hand, there are still ways to get a hold of beginning knitting basics. Amazon, of course, is still an option. Again, they’re prioritizing shipments right now, so it might take a while to get to you. If you have a WalMart Super Center in your area, they may have a knitting/sewing section that will have what you need. If you choose to go into a physical store, know exactly what you want, get in, get out, stay six feet away from other people, and wash your damn hands. These things are non-negotiable.

If you have a little more money in your budget and want to support a small business, a lot of yarn stores have switched to online only or are offering curbside pick-up. Check with your local yarn store to see if what options they have. For example, Starlight Knitting Society in Portland, OR, was offering over-the-phone orders, personal shopping, and curbside pick-up (this information is from last week, if you are in Portland please check with them now that Governor Brown has issued a shelter-in-place order as their policies may have changed). When checking out your local yarn store, be sure to check their social media to see what their pandemic policies are. If you’re comfortable ordering online and waiting for shipment, Fancy Tiger Crafts is one of my personal favorite yarn shops. They have an excellent online store, and per their social media they have closed their brick-and-mortar, and all employees are practicing social distancing and enhanced cleaning measures while shipping out orders.

By the way, if you’re wondering what materials to get, I recommend the following for beginners:

US size 8 needles - Straight needles are fine if you just want to start messing around, but if you want to start on a project right away, a hat is perfect for a complete beginner. If you choose to make a hat, then you will want US size 8, 16″ circular needles. Those are the needles attached with a cord. The “size 8″ indicates the overall circumference of the needle, and the ‘16″‘ indicates the length of the circular needle from needle tip to needle tip.

A skein of worsted weight yarn - this indicates the thickness of the yarn. Most skeins of yarn will indicate on the label if they are worsted weight. If you are shopping online, you can search by worsted weight. If you are making a hat to start, I recommend getting 200 yards of worsted weight. Each skein of yarn is a particular yardage and the label will tell you how much is in a skein. If the skein is 100 yards, then you would need two to make a hat. If you want to try to make a classic garter stitch scarf as your first pattern, then I recommend trying to get around 400 yards.

A tapestry needle (optional) - use it to weave in your ends when you have finished your project.

Stitch markets (optional) - if you are knitting in the round (where you join your work in a circle and knit in a kind of continuous spiral), then stitch markers can be useful to mark the beginning of your row. But you can also use scraps of yarn or thread tied into loops and slipped onto your needles.

Scissors (optional) - I’m personally a slut for scissors and have a collection of wee little yarn/thread scissors. But feel free to use kitchen shears, nail clippers, or just your own magnificent brute strength to break off your thread.

Skill-Building

So you’ve got the basics down and you want some patterns. Or you’ve made a bunch of hats and feel ready for a sweater or pair of socks. The following is a selection of free patterns and resources to help you get started:

Hats

Barley by Tincanknits is a classic pattern that has topped the charts on Ravelry for years. Excellent for beginners!

Sockhead Slouch Hat by Kelly McClure uses a skein of fingering or sock weight yarn (much finer than worsted weight) to make a simple, slouchy beanie. Better for a more intermediate knitter because the finer yarn can be a little tricky for a novice.

Antler Toque by Tincanknits is an excellent project for someone who wants to take their knitting skills to the next level by learning to cable.

Scarves, Shawls, and Cowls

Honey Cowl by Anatonia Shankland is a simple slip-stitch cowl pattern that is excellent for beginners because the slip-stitch pattern makes it easy to hide fuck-ups. It’s also cute and very cozy!

Simple, Yet Effective Cowl by Tincanknits is another great pattern for knitters of any level. It lets beginners practice knit and purl stitches and is a great mindless pattern for more advanced knitters.

Irish Hiking Scarf by Adrian Bizilia is a good choice for any knitter who wants to learn to knit cables.

Tiny Tassels by Karin Fernandes is a super cute, super simple garter stitch (meaning all knits, no purls) triangle scarf with tiny tassels around the edges. Great for beginners who want to learn how to increase. Also great for playing around with color.

Boneyard Shawl by Stephen West is another classic that’s great for knitters of all levels. It can be made in varying sizes so it’s good for someone who has a skein or two of something lying around and wants to make a project with what they have.

Socks

How I Make My Socks by Susan B. Anderson is the perfect my-first-sock pattern. It’s less of a “pattern” and more of a formula walking the knitter through the steps Susan B. takes to knit her socks. As an avid sock knitter myself, it has helped me immensely to think of knitting socks as more similar to following a formula than a pattern. I’m not sure why, but it does.

Vanilla Latte Socks by Virginia Rose-Jeanes is the quintessential ribbed sock. Good for a knitter who knows how to knit and purl and is ready for their first sock.

Rye by Tincanknits is the ideal slipper-sock. It’s made with worsted weight instead of sock weight yarn, meaning it is thicker, more like a slipper than a sock. Anyone now stuck at home with hardwood floors and no rugs (because you, like me, moved into your house back in August and have not yet had time to buy area rugs because you’ve had to get a couch and a coffee table first) may want to knit a pair of these.

Sweaters

Flax by Tincanknits is a great first sweater because it is knit in one piece from the top down so you can try it on as you go. The pattern includes a variety of sizes from kids to adult. Tip: when measuring your bust size for your sweater, measure under your armpits across your upper bust rather than at the fullest point of your bust. According to designer Amy Herzog who wrote Knit to Flatter, a book all about sizing when knitting, this is the best way to ensure that the sweater will fit when selecting size according to bust measurement (which is how most sweater sizes are determined).

Harvest by Tincanknits is a cardigan, also knit in one piece and top-down, also offered in a variety of sizes, would also be a great first sweater.

Turtle Dove by Espace Tricot is a boxy, turtle neck sweater knit in one piece from the top down in bulky weight yarn. Because it is boxy, it will be more forgiving on fit which is a boon for a first-time sweater knitter who may be anxious about picking the wrong size. And because it’s made from bulky yarn, it will knit up faster than other sweaters.

Where to Find More Patterns

If you’re looking for more knitting patterns, you absolutely have to make a Ravelry account. It is free, and instantly gives you access to almost every published knitting pattern. Seriously, everyone publishes their patterns here. Everyone. Some of the patterns are free (yay!) and some are available only for purchase. But many pattern designers have recently been switching to sliding scale availability in recent months, and some even have a set up for people experiencing financial distress to access a pattern for free. Check out the designer’s social media if you’re not sure. Instagram is big in the knitting community and many designers are super engaged and love to hear from other knitters. Ravelry also lets you favorite patterns, and has a sort of “journal” feature that lets you make entries for your projects and lets you keep track of the needles and yarn you’ve purchased. It’s older internet (the interface feels at least 10 years old), but once you have the hang of it, it’s easy to use.

Purl Soho, that yarn shop in NYC, has a whole bunch of free knitting patterns that are simple, and clearly written.

Finally, I’m going to recommend browsing through the “Free Patterns” section on Karen Templer’s blog, Fringe Association. Karen has been collecting and sharing a variety of free patterns through her blog for years and there are some gems there.

And there it is! Everything you need to help you get started learning to knit or improving your skills during the 2020 quarantine. I’m also available as a resource for all knitting related questions. I’ll do my best to answer anything that gets sent my way in as timely a manner as possible.

Stay safe, stay indoors, and happy knitting!

#knitting #masterpost #resource post #knitting resources #life in the time of corona #plague posting #learn to knit #woolly rambles #fuck if I know what to tag this

28 notes · View notes

mccall-me-maurice · 4 years

Text

Hello! This is going to be less formal than yesterday, but most likely just as long. I will still be talking about roughly the same subject and what I will be doing for the next week and 2 days. Thank you all for the overwhelming support on my last post! It really means a lot to me and people have been very kind, whether I deserve it or not. I definitely do not deserve the respect people have given me. It makes me feel very appreciated. As for my involvement in this community, I will be taking a small break. It will only be 9 days, but will be something I’ve been long overdue for. After doing a little bit of self evaluation at 12 AM, I have decided that I’m overworking myself and pressuring myself too much for it to be considered healthy. Not an explanation for my actions, but an explanation as to why I haven’t posted much original content. Hopefully this break will revive my creativity and motivation, both of which I’ve been lacking. I will return to the Lord Of The Flies family on July 21st. In the meantime, I will work on personal projects and possibly fanart for this community that I will post when I return. However, I will only do what my brain wants to do. So if I don’t post breathtaking animations, or much art at all it’s because I wanted a break from that as well. And I’m still a beginner to animating, which I will work on within this break as well. As for my other projects, Nicotine will be put on hold until the end of the 9 days. Hopefully you understand, and in this week and 2 days, I hope to figure out more about myself and change what I’ve looked down upon for so long. Why am I doing this? In case I wasn’t clear, which I have a tendency to do, I just simply need a break. To detox some social media toxicity from my life and find happiness in hobbies I enjoy. I have other social media’s I am also going on break from, so tumblr is not the only one. I’ve just been stressing myself out over not being perfect that I forgot to remind myself that nobody is and sometimes we all need to step back, take deep breaths in, and tell ourselves it’ll be okay. Your support is deeply appreciated, I want to thank you all for sharing my apology post. Thank you for making me feel as welcome as possible in this community. I never intended to sexualize children, as I found this fandom through AO3, and normalized the behavior. My mistakes have been addressed and formally apologized for. You can still scroll through my tumblr, as I won’t be deleting old posts. I believe they show growth, something most people try to hide and bury. I will not being doing this because I want people to see how I’ve evolved. Once this post goes up, however, my profile and background will become black screens, just to signal my inactivity. NO I AM NOT QUITTING THE FANDOM. I AM JUST TAKING A BREAK. IF YOU TAKE ANYTHING AWAY FROM THIS POST, IT SHOULD BE THIS. While I’m gone, I encourage you to dive deep into this fandom and find the one person who you really enjoy content from. Perhaps it’s multiple people. We’re a very small community that thrives from support, so be sure to reblog their posts. Not only does it show your love for them, but speaking from personal experience, I always like to see people’s responses to the works I create. Since we’re on the topic of it, I will still be liking posts, but not reblogging. As I’ve stated probably 50 times now, I’m taking a break. You may be asking, why would I still be liking lord of the flies posts? Because these posts make my day, and this fandom is one of the most wholesome ones I’ve been apart of. When I return, I will go back to reblogging content from creators I support. Thank you for listening to my long speeches for 2 days in a row and thank you for being so kind and forgiving to me. This is a very abrupt end, but it’s 12:35 am, and my first step on my self care list and road to kindness is to take care of my horrific sleep schedule.

I love you all and I will speak again on July 21st!!!

~ (McCall-Me-Maurice)

#lotf #lord of the flies #rant part 2??#Take care of yourself #it’s the most important thing #see you again on July 21st

9 notes · View notes

rigelmejo · 4 years

Text

random notes about drawbacks/positives of mia:

My biggest incompatibility with the massive immersion approach (and in general a lot of good modern study methods) is I hate flashcards. It’s not that I dislike them as a concept - I am just super bad at concentrating on them. I am NOT good at doing the following: focusing on small bits of information, studying for short periods but Regularly, Reviewing Regularly, and sometimes I just genuinely can’t retain small concentrated reading sentences to the point it takes me 10 MINUTES a flashcard in order to understand/study it. As you can imagine, that last part is NOT efficient, and ends up making flashcards even slower for me as a study method then they’re ever meant to be. I can’t control when I’m unable to figure out/concentrate on small bits of information, so some months flashcards work as intended for me (I can review 10-20 in 10 minutes), but other months suddenly 10 flashcards takes me an hour. So I am not good at sticking to flashcards consistently - once the hard months hit, I don’t keep up with reviews, because they suddenly take way more time then they ‘should.’ However, when I can focus I try to make up the difference - and do 20-100 cards a day while I have the ability to do flashcards at a regular pace. On the upside, I’m proof you can do the SRS flashcard reviews, in a very chaotic way, and still get benefits. How I’ve done flashcards: cram 300-1000 in a couple weeks to a month, including whatever reviews I need. 2nd month - review if I can still focus, and do a few new cards (like 5-15 a day at most). By the time I can’t focus, most words are relatively-known and I only would need to review them once a week or every few weeks - if I COULD focus on reviews. However, I only actually review once a month or less at this point - and I’ll only review 20ish cards usually in that rare instance, unless I have a good day. I will not usually review the majority of those cards until my next burst of can-focus-on-flashcards usually in 2-3 more months. I have done all my flashcards THIS INCONSISTENTLY, and I’ve still retained a lot of what I studied. What I think helps: immersing in other content when you can’t do flashcards, so that you’re often still being exposed to words you studied (so they’re easier to not forget even though you stopped doing flashcards). So yeah... inconsistent flashcards, and some immersion exposure, and I was able to keep some of the gains SRS flashcards generally provide people. I can’t do flashcards consistently, and I usually have to do them in big-chunks then abandon them, but they do help me boost up how much I know when I DO use them.

More regarding my incompatibility with mia. The big thing is: I’m just not a flashcard person, not a consistent person. I have to vary what I’m doing regularly, or I burn out/struggle to focus. When I was in school, I would do the following to study: take notes/focus intently when being taught, then read the textbook/materials if I needed more help. Before tests, or to ‘review’ I would reread my notes from beginning to end of what I needed to remember. This would refresh my memory. If I still forgot/did not understand anything, I’d pinpoint that info in the book/ask my teacher/go online etc and try to just focus most of my ‘harder’ studying on those parts I was struggling with. Usually just taking notes/focusing, then reviewing everything in bulk right before I needed it (so maybe once every few weeks), was enough. When I couldn’t take notes, I would instead skim through book chapter summaries, and rewatch lecture videos if there was a digital copy - focusing most on the videos when info I forgot/sounded like key information was mentioned. Basically - notes, summaries, short cheat sheets, were all my friends. For tests like math and physics, I would read my notes AND make mini-sheets of all key formulas and how to do them/what I needed for them (usually I already had a sheet I just kept adding to over time/rereading). I could not use flashcards back then - I couldn’t focus, not consistently, not the way they’re meant to be used. It took me too long to even make them to warrant them being useful to me (I take SO long to make flashcards, its also a focus issues - also why when I do SRS flashcards I usually just grab some premade deck cause it keeps me MOVING and actually STUDYING instead of getting frozen in a task).

This has always been my go-to study method. When I started chinese, this is how I learned 400 characters/basic words. I bought a reference book with mnemonics, and would make myself read through it (as if it were notes I took). Occasionally I’d flip through old pages again, just to see if I still recognized old stuff, but mostly I just kept moving forward. So like - flip back every couple weeks to skim old pages, but read forward every day. I got through half the book before I burned out (because... reference books with their short entries of information? a lot like flashcards in structure, except thankfully I don’t regularly review afterwards like I would with flashcards). It still took me 10-20 minutes for 10 entries in the book, but unlike flashcards it was a one-time task. When I got done, I had learned them pretty well - and I didn’t do anything to review them. They were just reviewed with immersion naturally, and eventually when I started studying common words these characters came up again (so if I forgot any, I relearned them easier then). This approach is roughly how I learned all words not in my premade-flashcard decks. I’ll read a chinese book - just start reading through it, looking up words I want to learn. I don’t review them, I don’t look them up again. Sometimes, maybe once a month, I’ll reread an old chapter to see what progress I’ve made - and then lookup unknown words then, as review since I didn’t remember them the first time. It sucks in a way... that SRS flashcard style study methods just.... do not work consistently for me. They are still beneficial, because in short month bursts I can quickly learn 500-1000 things with SRS (which is faster than some classes introduce words). But overall I have to rely on other study methods. Which for me feel inconsistent in progress since I can’t measure it as easy lol! Even with no SRS, doing ‘bursts’ of this read-intensively note-like materials, then very occasionally skim old material again, does seem to work out okay for me. Back when I learned to read french, I did no flashcards. I looked up a common words list (and used my class vocabulary lists). I read through them once. Before tests (if for class), or every few weeks, I re-read/skimmed the word lists. By 3-4 months I learned the first 500 words. Then, since french has a lot of ‘similar’ sort of words, I just sort of dived into reading and then picked up words mostly that way - just checking a word list every month or so to review known words and make sure I didn’t have some big gap of missing vocabulary.

So I guess: for me the biggest positive in mia is the suggestion to immerse often, frequently, and with a variety of materials. So that you practice different skills, learn a variety of things - and so you can move to something you like, if you get bored/unable to focus on one specific type of material. With mia you can read novels for a month, then get sick of reading and just watch shows/listen to podcasts when you walk, then if you’re burnt out from that you can just browse social media and check out fanfics/manhua/friends posts in the language for a few days or weeks before picking up longer materials again. The point is just to find ways to immerse, and do it. Simple advice. SUPER simple advice. But incredibly useful - every single time I add more immersion, I notice a boost in my comprehension. I notice actual improvement over time. I can’t pinpoint ‘why’ it happens, so unfortunately I’m not sure which complementary study methods or ways of immersing are helping me precisely with improvement in which skills. But I can tell that I am improving. I would 100% agree that immersing more is worth trying, at any language learning stage, as much as you want to. I immersed in the first months in both french and chinese, and I did much better than with japanese (where I did not immerse for 2 years and so my level stayed A1 beginner for like 2 years...). My French last time it was tested was around B1, which is fine since I just wanted to read and guess where my skills are closer to A2 and dragging it down? (Yes. Yes of course its speaking ability, of course). My chinese as far as I can pinpoint it is around HSK 4, as far as material I can easily read/listen to, as far as the practice tests I can take online. (Which, again, I’d self evaluate and say my comprehension is at HSK 4 or higher - I definitely can rely on good ability to guess meanings with hanzi and my comfort following grammar easily to boost comprehension a bit higher, but my speaking/writing is lower and I definitely only feel totally comfortable discussing topics that are manageable at HSK 3 - and my production grammar-wise is understandable but SO full of ‘this is the wrong way, use this instead’ which I’m working on...). So like... I got much farther in a year with each language I immersed in - even with the limited immersion I do actually do! So more immersion - better. While I’m on the topic of immersion: if you like reading, read often and early. I am better off for telling myself “its not hard to read” and just diving in the deep end. Was it hard? ahahaha yes. ;w; But, I realize if I’d put off reading until say HSK 4 or HSK 5 knowledge in chinese, reading would be EVEN HARDER because I’d be so much worse at quickly reading through grammar/gathering context clues. Reading is a mix of actual reading skill, and vocab. I built up a lot of the actual reading skill by starting to try to read super early. So now my main struggle is generally just lack of vocabulary - and since I understand all surrounding grammar very well, its easier for me to roughly-guess at unknown words function and still follow the gist of what’s going on. Reading early also means, for words and hanzi I DO already know, I learned to recognize the many contexts/phrases they show up in and the various words they combine into earlier. So again, when I’m looking at a new text the hardest words are new vocab made of ALL unknown hanzi - if I know one hanzi in the word, it’s something I can often approximately guess the meaning of especially when I understand the entire rest of the sentence. If a new word is spelled with all known hanzi, I can look it up once or twice and generally remember it very fast - since its connected to what I already know. If I had waited to read until I’d learned more vocab, I would have less of a reading skill foundation to rely on right now. And based on what I’ve read of at least some people’s experiences on chinese-forums.com, many readers will go through a STEEP uncomfortable period when starting to read chinese. Something vocab does not totally mitigate. I think it just takes many hours, of the reading skills getting less and less hard, and then eventually things get more comfortable. There is also the issue of ‘comprehensible’ reading material - depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, chinese can be painfully incomprehensible for a long time. Generally people feel comfortable once they comprehend 98% of a material. But in chinese, even once you learn thousands of vocab, depending on your reading skills and abilities to ‘guess from context clues’, you will not be at 98% yet. Even if you can guess from context clues, that isn’t solid comprehension its still ambiguously understood material. So to get used to reading chinese as a learner, you have to start getting used to how it feels to read stuff only 80% comprehensible. Only 90% comprehensible. And if you get good and learn a lot of vocab and grammar and understand it better when you see it - 95%. Which is still not the range of ‘comfort’ yet. The quicker you learn to not be stressed by the ambiguity, the less painful reading becomes. And the more tolerable it is, the more you can read, and the quicker you can learn more, and the quicker you’ll REACH 95% to 98% comprehensibility. But if its so painful you refuse to keep reading, to keep using reading to push comprehensibility up... it is going to be a long way until you hit 98%... Graded readers are great, and give you stepping stones to transition this experience. Graded readers are MADE to be 98% comprehensible at different learning levels, so they will FEEL comfortable. And if they do feel uncomfortable (because you don’t have high enough comprehension), then they will at least drag your comprehension up - and still be more tolerable than the alternative of even LESS comprehensible native speaker chinese language materials. Basically though... find a way to force yourself through the harder ‘intolerable’ early parts. It happens whether you know 500 words or 2000. So you’ll have to do it eventually. I get demotivated if I’ve ‘studied a lot and still understand nothing’ so my foolish self dived off the deep end at 500 words, then at 1000, then at 1500, then at 2000. Cause I kept trying to read, being frustrated at its difficulty and stopping after a few weeks, then trying again once I’d learned more! But wow did that early trying pay off. Now that I DO know more words, if nothing else the comparison of how NICE it feels to read now in comparison to in the past, motivates me a ton. If I just started reading recently, and all I knew was it felt ‘this hard’ then I might want to give up. But like... when I started, and knew 500 words, my graded readers were PAINFUL. Genuinely intimidating. Once I pushed through one? They felt easy as pie, and graded readers at that vocab-level felt so easy they got boring. Now I find graded HSK 4 material and usually read through it super fast or don’t even bother. So I can 1. read more comfortably. And 2. because I’ve BUILT up a higher tolerance to ‘ambiguity discomfort’ I can allow myself to read harder materials if I do want to - because I can still TELL it feels easier than it used to.

Finally, about MIA the study method as a concept. So... either because the site is long and people don’t like to finish reading, or maybe the writer is not good at summaries - but people often get confused about how to do it. Particular detail questions about how to do ‘this specific suggested activity’ make sense. But there’s a lot of people who ask “do I just turn on the language shows, and?? How do I learn?” Which, fair enough. So, as I understand it, here’s a summary: You want to learn a language. Find yourself a grammar guide - a free website, a book, whatever. Read the summary/guide, or skim it, whatever gives you a��‘preview’ of the language’s structure and what you’ll be getting used to over time. You will use this guide to reference later in the future, whenever grammar in stuff you see confuses you. You can use multiple guides later to reference. Right now, just zoom through a guide and get a general sense of the language you’re abut to learn. You can also wait to do this step until later, whenever you want. The sooner you do it, the sooner grammar will be less mysterious to you. Find yourself a pronunciation guide. Go through it, you don’t have to be a perfectionist about ANYTHING you do before or after this. Just go through, listen to it all, try to notice how its different from your own language. Notice if there’s any major differences like tones, sounds or patterns your own language doesn’t have. You don’t need to memorize, you’re just becoming aware that these aspects exists and are different. Again, this is to get you used to the language you’re about to dive into. This should probably be done early on. Look up some info about the writing system, if it is different from your own language’s. You will probably find some explanation introductory articles for beginners. If there’s any explanations about how it works, or why it’s like it is, read through it. This will help you understand the system better. You don’t need to memorize - although you may want to save a couple hundred common words, or a copy of all the letters, or a copy of a couple hundred common characters, or a copy of the radicals that combine to make characters. Read over this copied info a few times every once in a while, as you’ll see these things a TON once you start immersing. You find yourself a premade deck of SRS flashcards (use Memrise app, Anki program/website, some alternative) of common words in that language - ideally in sentences, but single-words work if that’s all you can find. Ideally with audio - but again, whatever you can find. You may also find an SRS deck of characters (like Heisig Remember the Kanji)/writing system specific info, if you want, to go through that deck early on to help you more with recognizing the writing system as you encounter it. Whatever decks you get, you will study those for 10-30 minutes a day. You can start doing this from day 1. (Or be like me and be inconsistent about it - just try to keep progressing forward and learning new material, even if you don’t always study. For me it was better always to move onto new stuff, instead of review, if I only had time to do one out of the two things.) Find yourself stuff to immerse with - shows, stories, audios, comics, social media, whatever. You will try to immerse every day, and try to immerse as much as you enjoy. Do this from day 1. When immersing: use either the language you are studying’s subtitles or else none at all. When watching/listening - look up words as desired, mainly though focus on context and trying to understand as much of the gist of what’s going on as you can. Over time you will pick things up. For reading - look up words as desired, and in the beginning you may look up a TON of words because you need to look up at least enough to follow the Bare Minimum Gist of What The Main Plot is. You NEED to understand at least basic context, with whatever your immersion material is, in order to learn new words from context. So: you might start with reading simple graded readers. You might use shows/books/audio of things you’ve already experienced in english, so the context is clearer to you. You might read summaries in english ahead of time. If you need more context in order to use immersion to learn any new things - then go ahead and give yourself more context. Immersion will feel difficult at first, the joy is watching you start to just ‘naturally’ pick up more. Audio immersion - for some of this, you do not need to attempt to ‘understand the gist of the plot’, you can just use it to attempt to pick out all the specific words in the language, the language’s rhythm, and get used to the language. If you’re only using an audio to learn the sounds of a language, you can probably use it as ‘background sound’ while doing other daily things, since it won’t require as constant focus as it would if you were trying to catch every single word you knew as you listened. There you go. You’re all set. Do this for a year and see where your progress is at. Quit doing this if you aren’t seeing some improvements, since if that’s the case a different study method may be better for you. Don’t do this method if you don’t like it - whatever gets you to study, is the right methods for you. No point doing something that doesn’t work for you. Eventually, as you make progress, you will decide on goals and notice mistakes/shortcomings in your skills. When that happens, add additional study materials/tasks as needed to focus specifically on those things as desired. For example - if you notice your pronunciation sucks, you may start using audio-focused flashcards, or go through a pronunciation guide again more carefully-thoroughly this time. Or - you realize your writing is bad, so you go through a grammar guide again and do the exercises, and get language partners and write to them regularly so that you get corrections. Eventually, you finish a common word flashcard deck - find a new deck, or make one, with new words you want to learn or need to based on your goals. The massive immersion approach is a basic plan of immerse-while-paying-attention+study new words/review words regularly, it doesn’t include every single thing you might do or want to do.

Anyway, mm. tldr: massive immersion approach suggests doing immersion of all kinds, from day 1. I couldn’t agree more, every time I add more immersion when studying a language it helps so significantly and over time. however, mia also has half of it’s study method based on SRS flashcards - if you are not a flashcard person like me, my alternative study ‘method’ above works. It’s not perfect, its probably not as effective. But it works if you can’t focus on SRS flashcards reliably. Finally, I summarize mia a little.

#rant #study method #mia #mass immersion approach

4 notes · View notes

akaruta-kaito · 5 years

Text

The Big Day

The day of the wedding was a flurry of activity. Kaito had an entire list of recipes to teach Hinan and to prepare for the reception afterwards. If he trusted anyone else to do it right, he would have just hired caterers; although after the meal C'arliani prepared the other night, his faith in the capability of others in the company to make a delicious meal was growing. On the other hand, he hadn't eaten much of it, and he didn't give it a proper analysis out of concern that it might seem rude. He'd just have to make a mental note to get together with her sometime and share meals.

Kaito had chosen a slow-roasted dodo recipe for the main course, since it would be easy just to leave it to cook while they worked on other things, along with mashed popotoes, gravy, and savory dressing. It was more of a traditional holiday meal, but the fact that it was easy to prepare and most likely something that everyone would enjoy made it an easy choice.

The majority of the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon was taken up by the two brothers preparing desserts once they'd gotten dinner started. That was a very necessary distraction from Kaito's anxiety. Having his brother there to banter and joke with while they decorated cookies and cupcakes to look like moogles was incredibly relaxing and fun. It also gave them something to bond over when before, they'd had little in common other than perhaps a crude sense of humor and a serious case of Cat Scratch Fever.

After all the desserts were prepared, the two of them packed everything away so that they could be easily set out without any additional preparation. Both were pleased with how everything turned out, even if some of the earlier attempts at stained glass moogle cookies and peeking moogle cupcakes looked a little funky. That was fine though - Hinan was brand new to baking, and the flaws gave the treats character.

"Nee, aniki," the Raen began, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly as he turned to the Xaela. "I actually have something for you, to thank you for helping me out, and--..." And to give your life purpose now that the Garleans have taken that from you like they did to me for so long... "And to, ya know, help you get better at your new hobby." Close enough.

Hinan raised a brow slightly, but gave his brother a sinister-looking smile. It wasn't intentionally sinister, of course; his face was just like that. "Oh, you didn't need to get me anything, otouto," he responded after a moment.

Even if that was the reaction he expected, Kaito was still slightly annoyed. This again. Thankfully, his expression didn't reflect it, and he simply grinned at his older sibling. "Yeah, I know, but I wanted to," he explained. The younger ducked under the bar counter where he'd hidden the gift, which he'd wrapped in shiny paper and ribbon, then handed it to Hinan.

Of course, Hinan's expression always looked annoyed-bordering-on-murdery, even as he opened his gift. Inside the paper was a handmade book with the words "Hinan's First Cookbook" written in Hingan, and the pages contained a number of different recipes that were sorted together as "Beginner," "Intermediate," and "Advanced" for a wide variety of dishes.

"I thought, ya know, if you wanted to try cooking more, this'd help," Kaito explained. "And I made sure to list out all the instructions in case I can't be right there with ya. Maru-chan and Ningyou-chan* can probably lend a hand too, I'm sure." [*Doll]

Hinan looked up from the book at Kaito and blinked a couple of times. "Ningyou-chan?" He paused, then snorted in amusement. "You mean Chakha?"

A wide grin spread across the Raen's face, and he nodded eagerly. "That's her!" he exclaimed brightly. "And, ya know, I'm happy to cook more with ya anytime I'm over here."

The Xaela looked back down at the book for a moment, then turned to his brother and enveloped the smaller Au Ra in a firm hug. Whatever Hinan thought of his gift, Kaito couldn't say, but he at least seemed gracious - if that hug told him anything - and not insulted by it.

There was still a lot that Kaito wanted his older brother to talk to him about, and a lot that he wanted to say, but fear, in whatever form that took, seemed to cripple them both when it came to discussing their traumatic experiences being in captivity. The younger sibling almost wanted to just blurt everything out, but a part of him knew that if he told Hinan outright what he'd been through, the elder would only take it as more reason not to complain about his own horrific encounter with the Garleans. Even saying something as benign as "I still have dizzy spells frequently" seemed like it wasn't likely to help Hinan feel any more solidarity with his baby brother. Walls had been built and fortified; there were probably only two people in existence who would be able to break them down, and neither of them were him.

"Well... guess I better go get myself all fancied up," Kaito said, giving his brother a lopsided grin once the hug ended.

Once again, a warm smile crossed Hinan's lips, and once again, it looked much darker and more menacing than the Xaela probably intended. "Just make sure to wear something over your speedo," he teased.

A boisterous guffaw escaped from the Raen. "Yeah yeah, wouldn't wanna do something so indecent when we're finally makin' honest men of each other!" he joked, giving Hinan's good arm a firm pat. "Thanks again for all your help, aniki... and wish me luck!"

"I would, but S'aeil's the one who's going to need it," Hinan quipped, clapping his brother on the back rather hard in return. "See you tonight, otouto!"

With that, Kaito took his leave, heading up to his room in the company house (well, Mhalv’a’s room) to grab his outfit - he'd kept it there so S'aeil wouldn't know what he'd be wearing. It wasn't anything spectacular, but they'd both wanted to surprise each other in a number of small ways.

The anxiety of what was about to happen was slowly creeping up on him, but more out of excitement than fear. He'd already decided moons ago that, in spite of his fears, he was never going to leave S'aeil's side. Getting married wouldn't have even been necessary, as far as he was concerned. They'd already made their promises to each other. The wedding was nothing more than a formality, a way for them to prove to the rest of the world that when they said they would be together forever, they meant it. Maybe we'll finally be taken seriously, he thought, snorting quietly to himself. Unlikely...

Before leaving, Kaito stood in the doorway, letting the memories of his first encounters with S'aeil flood back into his mind. Even though some of them were painful or frustrating - all due to outside sources or his own lack of foresight - they were wonderful, because all of that time brought them to this day. With a warm smile, the Raen pulled the door shut behind himself and made his way to the Black Shroud, eagerly awaiting the moment that he and S'aeil would be officially declared beloved husbands.

@saeils-ffxiv-hub @chocoblep

#ffxiv #rp story #kaito #hinan #chakha #mhalv'a #saeil

13 notes · View notes

arcticdementor · 4 years

Link

Two years ago, when reviewing “The Benedict Option”, I wrote, “Almost all Dreher’s critics accuse him of crying wolf or being a Chicken Little at best … Meanwhile, I’m saying that Dreher is underestimating his enemy, painting an overly rosy picture, and not being nearly alarmist enough.”

This is still true.

“Wait, what? Totalitarianism! Gulags!”

I know!

Let me explain; I promise hope, this will be shorter than last time.

…

First, Dreher’s critics, while still far too blasé and insouciant about the end-game-level crisis racing straight for them, have at least started to acknowledge that something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear, but that some greater degree of consternation and freak-out is now warranted.

But they are still far, far behind the power curve on this one.

As a friend of mine put it, “The single biggest problem is lag-seriousness. We are always just at best about grim enough for yesterday’s battle.”

That is where “Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility” comes from. “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” If it were possible, despite denials, and by pointing out a clear logical implication of progressive ideology – and even going so far as to supplement with the early appearances of those explicit proposals – to scare conservatives enough, early enough, to do whatever it takes to avoid it, then the impossible wouldn’t keep happening to them, over and over again.

But it’s almost never feasible to do this. It turns out this is the one impossibility. The frogs never jump out of the pot in time to avoid another scalding. The need is not to be grim enough for yesterday, but for today, so that tomorrow won’t bring your final sunset.

That puts Dreher in the position of a Cassandra.

…

In “Live Not By Lies”, Dreher seems to assume that something like faithful Christianity as we know it today is going to go through a profoundly difficult era of persecution, but still, its adherents having prepared for it, it will persist at some level despite intense suffering until, well, ‘deliverance’. Perhaps not in the Acts 12:3 sense, but then again, maybe so. How else?

…

That’s why even Dreher isn’t radicalized enough yet, because he doesn’t seem to fully grapple with the gloomy prospects for his tradition that is the clear implication of his own arguments about the overwhelming magnitude of the problem. That is: termination. Slow and steady and (mostly) gentle evaporation under the relentless heat of the sun until the last drop of water finally evaporates and the spiritual desert goes completely dry.

It would be like Travis telling the defenders of the Alamo that Santa Anna was sending a force in the morning that outnumbered them ten to one, that supplies were nearly exhausted, and reinforcements too far away to help. But with a tone of brutal optimism, “It’s going to be really rough boys, but if we’re tough enough, we’ll make it.” – “Um, rough? Well Travis, come hell or high water, I’m happy to make a stand and fight by your side. No rendirse! But to be frank, from the way you put it, I reckon it sounds like we’re all going to die.”

…

Now, before I explain why, let me get to the second piece of good news and commend Dreher for a wonderful second half of the book, which contained the inspiring and gut-wrenching stories of what it was like for people of faith behind the Iron Curtain to be the subjects of Communist anti-Christian oppression.

As I look over my notes, I see almost no comments or criticisms in that half. The testimonies speak for themselves. These harrowing and moving tales of triumphs of fidelity and perseverance in the face of the hardships and miseries of hard totalitarianism don’t need any gloss. The stories of these brave people deserve your study, and their memories your honor.

However.

What is both terrible and true is that a month later you are probably going to forget all their names, forget the details of their persecution, and come away with the same rough impression and vague understanding you already have. This is that Christians had it really bad in a place where Christianity was once all of life but had been evicted, that some of them nevertheless stayed devoted, and others gave the last full measure of devotion. Others resisted, and some of them even lasted long enough on the road through hell to make it through to the other side.

Though, in a way, it was lucky for them there was the other side: that didn’t happen everywhere. If the Soviets had then what the Chinese have now, likely there would have been no interviews or happy endings. You can’t even forget a martyr’s name if you never got the chance to hear about his martyrdom in the first place.

…

Alas, this is not really a manual at all, and regardless of whether Dreher is dropping some kind of Straussian signal with that, it’s surprising that few of his critics have noticed the problem.

An actual manual is more than just general rough guidelines; it has clear, specific, step-by-step instructions for how to accomplish some identified, well-defined task or troubleshoot typical problems. It cannot be a bunch of personal narratives, and, “Follow their lead; just be like them. Refuse to bend, like Benda.”

If one picked up, say, a survival manual, one would expect to emerge knowing how to start a fire and build a shelter. A beginner’s cookbook will at least tell you precisely how long to boil an egg.

What does Dreher tell us to do in an age of persecution? “Embrace Suffering.” “Choose a Life Apart from the Crowd.” “Reject Doublethink and Fight for Free Speech.” “Cherish Truth-Telling but Be Prudent.” “Cultivate Cultural Memory.” “See, Judge, Act.”

He doesn’t get much more specific. I think he believes he got more specific – “form small cells … read other books,” and the recitation of Solzhenitsyn’s Six Hard Rules on page 18 – but it’s not actually the case. “See, Judge, Act” is just a description of any rational decision-making process, and “Yeah, but this is Persecuted Christian decision-making,” doesn’t actually put meat on the bones. These are mostly motivation stimulants and abstract encouragements of the right general attitudes, but those do no a ‘manual’ make.

These are like ordering the military to “Be able to fight and win wars,” and then someone else develops the *actual* doctrine and writes the field manuals. These commandments, like the Decalogue itself, just raise a host of questions, “How much suffering? How far apart from the crowd? Which crowd? How do I identify doublethink? Fight for free speech how? Fight for hate speech too? Where is the line between prudence and paying so much lip-service I lose my soul?”

…

But how is some ordinary person who needs an actual manual supposed to live not by lies, if the famous, influential guy writing the admonition feels just as compelled by circumstances and prudence to live by omitting the lies?

There should have been at least one page that went like this:

You as a Christian are going to be strongly pressured to “wear the ribbon” and to say the following things which do not accord with the truths of our faith, and in order to live not by lies, you must be willing to sacrifice, suffer if necessary, and never say …

Never say what, exactly? Yes, integrity in general is a virtue, but obviously Dreher is talking about the Big Lies.

But in his book, there is a surprising paucity of actual lies. Isn’t that something? First it’s strange, then it’s puzzling, and then when you solve the puzzle, demoralizing.

My take is the answer to the puzzle of absence is Dreher’s actual manual, the one you are supposed to figure out. The most critically strategic task is to preserve precisely this kind of room for maneuver: the freedom to speak the truth and to condemn the lies. If you still can, if there is still some crack open in the window of opportunity, then you must band together and stop your opponents from being able to impose their rival orthodoxy on you, which forces that absence and omission and uses that dominance to call your lies truth and your love hate.

If you can’t do that, if you missed your chance to make that stand, then like the Alamo, it’s only a matter of time.

…

Otherwise, without the list of lies one lacks a clear idea of the threat one faces, and so vague guidelines are all that are left and there is no possibility of a manual with precise instructions. But with the lies, the enemy hears his own name like the aliens hear a scream in “A Quiet Place”, and then come down on you like a ton of bricks.

VI. From whence the cascade

Well, look, no sense getting some bricks in the face if one can avoid it, that’s just being smart and prudent. Though, inconveniently, it’s Dreher himself who quotes Milosz to argue against this kind of seductive logic.

Better logic would be to say that one can reason that the intended audience probably knows the lies already, and knows that they have been weak, acquiesced, and lived by them. They know what they are supposed to stand up for already, and they know they have failed to do so. They know who their enemies are, and they know they have failed to resist them. You don’t need to list the lies to send a signal to all these people that, by the very fact of this book existing, knowing that it is being digested by so many other people, they are not alone, and they can act differently.

But what the audience still doesn’t know is what to do about it. Dreher may not know either. Notice: a thousand Benedict Option startups have not bloomed. The Benedict Option was criticized as crazy and alarmist, but again, the ugly, gloomy truth is that it’s actually the hopeful, optimistic, and practically wishful-thinking take on things. Most likely, there is no such option.

…

The anti-audience already believes Dreher is far more of a kook and Chicken Little than his Christian critics do, and just a continuation of “The Paranoid Style In American Politics.” To them, Dreher can get in the back of the line behind the McCarthyists, “Eisenhower was a Commie!” John Birchers, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and low-status judgment-day-is-just-around-the-corner-all-the-signs-are-actually-happening prepper types. They are once again proclaiming the first half of the law, “It will never happen.”

And without the list of lies, their argument wins the day. It seems fully plausible and convincing. It sounds like this:

Oh look at these idiots going off again. Here we are, just trying to make sure love wins and hate loses. Our ‘radical ideology’ amounts to “Don’t be a bigot, help your fellow man, and keep your toxic hatefulness to yourself.” Everybody should be included, and nobody ought to be unjustly discriminated against. Simple, self-evident, human universals, really, do real, loving Christians really disagree so much with any of those? And because the white supremacist homophobes can’t think of anything else to say in response, the hide behind ‘Christianity’ as a pathetic rationalization for their simple irrational animus, and resort to inventing fantasies like gulags and torture rooms and KGB agents. Like *they’re* the victims! Delusional! What kind of creepy psychological problems do they have to really imagine that with all their wealth, comfort, freedom, privilege, and petty first world problems, that they are remotely spiritual kin with people who endured the worst suffering possible? Crazy!

Do you see the problem? It’s the ‘merited’ part of the law. Dreher wants to respond with the simple truth, “We’re not bigots, and we don’t deserve it.” The response would be, “Ok, let’s find out. What is it exactly that you are going to insist on believing or doing, that we would possibly think was worth throwing you into a gulag?”

He can’t beat around the bush with something general and evasive, “For being devout Christians.”

The response (at least from the rare one who knows anything about Christianity) would be as follows:

Look, we just think your religion is mostly a collection of mythological fantasies and superstitious prohibitions, but combined with a salvageable core of a worthy moral perspective that, like almost all ancient and traditional lines of philosophy, represents an incomplete and imperfect grasping toward the same ethical framework we now hold dear. That’s why Jefferson rewrote the bible, removing all those superfluous distractions. Following the actual bible seems kind of nutty and backward to us, but now that it’s in clear political retreat in terms of numbers and influence, and since most self-identified Christians don’t really seem to live like they take most of it seriously, we regard it as mostly harmless. So long as you keep it to yourselves.

So, nobody is going to throw you in the gulag for going to church. Or for believing Jesus is Lord, that he is the Savior of humanity and God’s only son, that he was born in Bethlehem of the Virgin Mary who in turn was immaculately conceived, that he performed miracles, made water into wine, multiplied bread and fishes, walked upon water, healed the sick, raised the dead, died for our sins, and was resurrected. That he saves his people by means of their repentance and confession to sin and commanded his followers to love each other and their neighbors and their enemies, and to spread his word and the gospel of the good news of their salvation to every soul.

Seriously now, is that not Christian enough or you? Are these not the central claims of Christianity? Is that not enough freedom to be a Christian?

And we aren’t going to do a single thing to anyone for any of that. Why would we even care? Maybe if proselytizing is done obnoxiously in an imposing manner and makes people feel unsafe and not included. But let’s face it, 99.99% of American Christians aren’t ever doing that anymore, so it’s kind of absurd to spook them, right? Now we will insist that you not discriminate against LGBTs, and not to teach people to hate them, and yes, you will indeed get merited punishment if you persist in doing so. But seriously, is Hate the hill you are choosing to die on?

As another friend of mine put it, “We do not want you to subtract from your faith, only to add to it. Just don’t be a jerk and you’ll be just fine.”

One simply cannot give this line of argument anything like an adequate response without getting right into the contrasts between what one believes and what one’s opponents believe, that is, between the truth and the lies. It’s a no-win situation. Without naming the lies, the progressives will suspect Dreher’s audience are closeted bigots. Naming the lies, open bigots. C’est la guerre.

Unlike in the Soviet Union, the progressives don’t see mere belief and worship as inherently threatening, and so aren’t interested in prison and torture for merely belonging to a faith, going to church, being a priest, and so forth. They look at ‘worship’ in “freedom of worship” in the same ’boutique’ manner that Fish explained as the way they look at culture in “multiculturalism”. That is, by definition, non-threatening to the imperialist program of imposing progressive orthodoxy on everyone, everywhere.

In other words, Fake Religious Tolerance, and Fake Multiculturalism. Fake, because it is precisely at the important friction points that the freedom or the multi ends. Now, as Winnifred Sullivan explained, whether genuine religious freedom is even possible in anything like our system is an interesting question, but the point is that one can’t have any coherent discourse on the subject real or fake tolerance, without identifying those points of difference.

…

Now, the approach Dreher has taken has been to say that, of course it won’t actually be ‘hard’ torture and gulags, it will be ‘soft’ totalitarianism. Dreher would have given his argument much more punch had he marshaled the parade of horribles of all the “never going to happen”s that are definitely going to happen, probably soon. Without getting into the lies, he could still have collected in one place the likely sequence of escalation of oppressive state policies and mob pressures which will be brought to bear against Christian (and other) holdouts in the mopping-up operations.

They’ll penalize or dis-accredit private school, take away homeschooling, have child protective services yank your kids away if you try, mandate offensively heretical curriculum on core moral issues, kick your kids out of athletic competitions and related chances for scholarships, boycott your businesses, commercially excommunicate you as unhireable, and ineligible to use the internet or transactions system, give your kids abortions or sex hormones behind your back, take away your guns, allow the mob to walk right up to your front door and smash your windows with impunity, and if you try to defend yourself, you’ll be the one who gets arrested.

To his Christian readers, that parade of horribles will feel closer and more plausible and real, thus helping to raise their alarm to more accurate levels. Some may reject these claims at first, but as they start coming true, one after the other, he will seem nothing less than, well, prophetic. Cassandra was cursed, but Dreher can build a track record.

The trouble is, while all these things will happen, unlike in the Soviet system, they will never need to be ubiquitous or even common, so they can always be rhetorically dismissed as rare aberrations. No one is going to publish a ‘study’ with some nice scatter plots showing the increase in the persecution index. In the contemporary media environment, one hanged admiral – a pizza shop, a cake decorator, an expelled student, a heterodox professor – encourages millions of the others, to just give in and side with the strong horse, the cool horse. You only have to hang one or two admirals a year, (only after groveling apologies of course) and soon enough, the whole Navy has surrendered, concludes that those admirals had it coming, and that they “weren’t being smart.”

…

The thing about hard totalitarianism is the fact of brutal oppression is inescapably clear to everyone. Sure, it will be rationalized and justified, but that people know it’s there if they step out of line is half the point. And if one is not enjoying being on the delivering end, the common human psychological instinct is to resent such domination.

‘Soft’ is totally different. People will still have choices, but if they choose ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the elites, then they will just be seen as weirdo losers and low-status pariahs, not martyrs. The flip-side of resenting domination is admiring, conspicuously affiliating with, and imitating the prestigious. People – your own fellow Christians too – will look at the refusal to pinch incense for Caesar the same way they look at a hermit’s refusal of all society. When you think about it, the hermit who could fit in if he wanted to is just persecuting himself.

…

The perception of dual loyalty would mean that you would be spied on, that your closest friends would be recruited to inform against you, and that you would hit an unacknowledged but hard glass ceiling in your career path, “Performance Assessment: A highly competent and reliable professional with unlimited leadership potential, but … does not adequately demonstrate he fully shares our values and commitment to progress. Pass over for promotion absent a critical personnel shortage in his field.”

And of course, you would never be told: a breeding ground for paranoia and self-doubt. Nevertheless, if you kept your head down otherwise, you could enjoy a normal life and even some measure of personal success and respect.

Sometimes, to remind people who’s boss, an ‘informant’ would be told to make up some baloney accusations and the local priest would get arrested and interrogated, maybe leaned on to make more false accusations of his colleagues. No one would hear about him for days. Then, usually, he was released with a stern warning to watch his back.

When he showed up again at services, what happened? His whole congregation would weep for joy and relief, hugs and handshakes for hours, invitations and offers of support. He would be a kind of minor hero, a kind of minor martyr, honored and dignified. There were thousands of such events in the second half the 20th century. That’s worthy suffering; inspiring, socially productive suffering.

XI. Live Hard

But what about someone who gets ‘canceled’ today? Most of the time, it’s the Big Meh, no welcoming arms and no heroic status in one’s reference social group. Without that, there is no utility in withstanding the suffering, because there is no power of example or remembrance. Today, if you are accused of ‘hate’, things are such that most of your fellows will feel obliged to act like they believe it, dump you like a bag of dirt, and avoid you like the roof over reactor number three.

Dreher and Benda like to use the example of “High Noon”. But try to imagine “Low Noon”, where, at the end, all the townspeople ganged up on the sheriff saying, “What the heck did you do that for, you psycho? Those guys didn’t deserve that! Now you’ve just gone and made trouble for the rest of us. Get the heck out of our town, monster!”

…

To throw this into even sharper relief, and to demonstrate the absence of a true ‘manual’, instead of ‘Christianity’, imagine that one is trying to preserve and propagate some even more unpopular views that, while one believes them to be perfectly true, are deeply hated by just about everyone. Any manual for dissidents necessarily works in general for any strain of persecuted dissent, and if it speaks to a particular kind of dissident, it is only because is it written in the language they are best able to comprehend.

Now, imagine a group of scattered people who were trying not to propagate Christianity and persevere as Christians, but as Confederates. Some kind of secret society that saw it all coming since Calhoun and had, against all odds, continued for two centuries to the present day, who believed in the lost cause as the right cause, hereditary racial slavery, and all the rest. What concrete advice does Dreher give that these people could use? What advice could anyone give them?

There isn’t any.

This hypothetical makes it easy for everyone to immediately grasp, at this stage in the game, that it’s an impossible task. The powers that be and 99% of society are fully committed and determined to thoroughly eradicating any remaining trace of those ideas and traditions. They can do it, they will, they are, they are almost done. Either the hypothetical Secret Confederates get nukes, or the protection of someone who has them, or (if they weren’t already extinct), their days are numbered. That’s it, game over.

XIII. Other Feet

The point is, the Soviet context is simply not the proper analogy for our situation. That ideas makes it seem like the familiar image of the Romans throwing Christians to wild beasts in some arena. But the right way to look at it is the other way around, once the Christians had won the upper hand.

The right context is something like Watts’ “The Final Pagan Generation”.

In late antiquity there were still sincere worshipers of Minerva and Apollo and Jupiter, continuing a religious tradition that went back, as it happens, about two thousand years. And then it ended. It’s a long story, and yes there was a fair amount of actual persecution as the shoe gradually moved to the other foot, but it wasn’t the key factor.

Gradually, there were fewer and fewer of these people, until there really was a last one. And when he died, the faith died with him; the chain linking 100 generations was broken, and the line went completely extinct. The last drop of water evaporated and the ground was dry. Now, no one praises Jupiter, because their great-grandparents praised Jupiter.

…

Dreher’s “Why Communism Appealed to Russians” is, unfortunately, typical progressive mythological narrative (i.e., widely-swallowed propaganda) and mushy-headed nonsense drawing a line from “poverty and oppression” to the allure of Socialism. The material circumstances of various populations simply do not constitute the proper explanation for how that particular idea – or any idea – spread and came to dominate.

…

If our own past is a foreign country, the past of foreign countries is too weird and alien to grasp without extensive immersion in its particular history. We are taught to think of tsarist-era exile in Siberia as a retroactive extension of the Soviet gulags, but it wasn’t like that. Siberia was like their Australia: a far away place you could send prisoners of all kinds with minimal supervision and the understanding that it was really hard to get back. You might even hope they would try to take a go at making a life for themselves out there like colonists, because you needed to populate the vast, mostly unpeopled wilderness.

So “exile” at that time was mockable as a kind of Siberian summer camp. Many of the Bolsheviks who experienced it were practically unguarded and made many successful and attempted escapes. Stalin wrote of his enjoyment fishing with Tunguses, horseback riding, and of fornication (and procreation!) with 13 year old locals like Lidia Pereprygia. Brutal, I tell you.

…

By page 41, Dreher admits that “Intellectuals are the Revolutionary Class,” but he might have just said ‘elites’. Major historical events and struggles between groups are always and everywhere a phenomenon of disputes between classes of elites.

But then a few pages later he goes off course, “To be sure, neither loneliness, not social atomization, not the rise of social justice radicalism among power-holding elites – none of these and other factors discussed here meant that totalitarianism is inevitable.”

Unfortunately, when you are dealing with a replacement religion on the rise, and all the elites believe either in the latest edition of it or the version of it from ten years ago, yes it does.

…

With Chapter Three Dreher gets into Progressivism as Religion, but instead of accurate anthropology, we get the enemy’s version of the story about themselves, which is, as in all similar cases, slightly less than perfectly reliable.

…

If one looks under the hood, one sees that what leftism is mostly about is “redistribution of stuff and status.” The political formula is a tacitly understood bargain to clients that offers, in exchange for political support, the use of state power to take from the enviable and give to those who envy.

…

Here’s another example of bad history:

The original American dream – the one held by the seventeenth century Puritan settles – was religion: to establish liberty as the condition that allowed them to worship and to service God as dictated by their consciences.

Actually, the Puritans immediately established a suffocatingly strict theocracy that did not tolerate heretics except by necessity, and in which ministers were public officials. Nathaniel Ward’s or Winthrop’s ‘liberty’ was the liberty to be a pious Puritan, and the lack of liberty to be anything else. If you were not a member of the church, you were officially a second-class citizen, and they would throw you out for anything. The Puritans did not give people freedom to make choices according to their consciences about living virtuously or not, see, e.g., Platform of Church Discipline (1648).

Most of this ‘liberty’ story was retconned in the late 18th century during the establishment of the popular mythology of American History. Once upon a time people like Rothbard thought that perhaps one day American society would come to be so confident and mature that it could replace the white lie mythology with the reality. No such luck. Instead we got a new religion that is just replacing it with a much more sinister and malevolent mythology. That’s how it goes. There is always a de facto state religion, and it will spread the myths it finds most useful.

…

Dreher does a good job in summarizing some of the claims of progressivism and “critical theory”, but he presents them as if they are to be taken at face value.

There is no such thing as objective truth, there is only power

Yes, you will hear this kind of rhetoric mindlessly parroted all the time, but it is by no means some kind of metaphysical principle consistently applied. It is little more than an opportunistic tactical pose and a weapon to be deployed only when convenient, just like any double standard. “Out truths are real, whereas your ‘truths’ are just useful lies you can shove down people’s throats and get them to repeat because you can intimidate and bully them into it.” The fact that one can’t tell which side is making that statement about the other is what gives that perspective its robustness.

Progressives believe in rule by (credentialed, prestigious) experts, a rule that is legitimated by appeal to superior knowledge of objective truth. Consider: “Reality-based community” or “Climate change is real. The science is settled.” None of that is compatible with the “no such thing” claim.

What about the “Myth of Progress”

It seems to flow naturally from the Myth of Progress as it has been lived out in our mass consumerist democracy, which has for generations defined progress as the liberation of human desire from limits.

No, just Christian limits. This is an important point, and I think one that Dreher resists or finds hard to appreciate, mostly because progressives usually want mandatory toleration for everything Christianity prohibits.

But progressives are not libertines and have their own comprehensive sexual morality that is in some ways even more restrictive than that of traditional religions. Is it not actually based on “live and let live,” “different strokes for different folks,” or the “anything goes with consenting adults” principle of volenti non fit iniuria, because in the progressive conception ‘true’ voluntariness and consent can only be valid in the absence of a whole host of pressures, undue influences, and power imbalances. Contra Dreher, this imposes all manner of limits on human desire, as one can witness watching any tribunal of sex bureaucrats on any American college campus.

…

XX. Woke Capitalism

At the same time, Big Business has moved steadily leftward on social issues. Standard business practice long required staying out of controversial issues on the grounds that taking sides in the culture war would be bad for business” – now not taking sides is bad for business. … A powerful coalition of corporate leaders … threatened economic retaliation against [Indiana] if it did not reverse course.

Somehow I missed the reporting about all the progressives who screamed in outrage at this corporate interference in our democracy.

Still, the reason they were able to make these threats is pretty obvious: no one was credibly threatening back. In a ‘manual’, Dreher would tell his readers what to do about this, but he presents it as a fait accompli and new normal Borg against which all resistance is futile.

…

The real issue is the surveillance, and the power of modern capabilities. Without going full ‘technological determinism’, my impression is that the reality of software eating the world coupled with the constant tracking and surveillance by all entities with the wherewithal and reach is inevitable and unavoidable. It is in the basic nature of technological change that once the capability is there, Pandora’s Box cannot remain shut for long. We are already well past the tipping point on that one.

Yes, all the big institutions constantly spying on everything you do for the rest of time is very creepy and disturbing. But if one is worried not so much about privacy in general but about persecution in particular, then from a more abstract perspective, there is really no reason to implicate ‘capitalism’ except as yet another mechanism by which powerful social coalitions can apply extralegal coercive pressure while circumventing the rules limiting direct state action.

If the state tolerates this, it is allowing an effectively collateral state to fill the power vacuum by abandoning the field of certain sovereign prerogatives. This is the real “parallel polis”, much like the mafia is a parallel government on its own turf when the official state is unable or unwilling to take it on. If the state does not protect its claim to a monopoly on all coercion, hard or soft, then someone else is going to pick up the coercion left lying around.

Then again, sometimes the state wants it that way. If the mayor needs an inconvenient opponent to disappear, he probably can’t ask his chief of police to get it done for him. But if he tolerates a Don, he can go to the Don. If the state is not technically allowed to persecute you directly, if it tolerates some persecutors, it can have them do the persecuting. In either case, when you pierce the veil, the rectified name for it is conspiracy. The tragedy is that the veil has countless defenders who will insist that if it didn’t come from behind the veil, no harm no foul.

…

Two decades ago, when we started to become aware of this problem, people guessed that a combination of (1) new cultural adaptations to avoid these hazards, (2) new generations being raised from birth to be familiar with the risks of the internet, and (3) an increasingly long track record of lots of people having their lives publicly ruined, would encourage people to “adjust trim” and be much more cautious and prudent.

Some people did just that, but, in general, it hasn’t turned out that way. It seems that psychological effect of the way we interface online – when it seems as if it’s just you and your screen in your own little virtual secret world – makes people feel too “alone and private” to keep their guard up. Unfortunately, if one assumes this isn’t going to get better any time soon, then one can only conclude that in a time of Christian persecution, ordinary people are going to slip up sooner or later if they touch networked devices at all, and if they refuse to do so, they will out themselves all the same. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

What that means is that there is no longer any possibility whatsoever of evading the notice of powerful people who are out to get you. From the perspective of any serious, capable, and determined state (cough, China) this is now a solved problem. There can be no secret meetings or clandestine samizdat printing operations or anything like that. Near the end of the book, Dreher advises, “Christians should educate themselves about the mechanics of running underground cells and networks while they are still free to do so.” As the Uyghurs would tell you, if they could, that ship has already sailed. The old mechanics are obsolete and no longer work, and there are no new mechanics.

…

Hard cases make bad law, but there is nothing but a hard choice to make about this undeniable situation. Either one embraces the principle of “they are private companies so they are free to do whatever they like and the state has nothing to do with it,” and accept, well, ‘extinction’. Or one says no, undermines the principles of free enterprise and private property, but creates a terrible state power that, eventually, can and will be used by ones enemies too.

On the other hand, all the undermining and regulation has already been done in every other possible way in every other industry and sector, especially all those rules insisting on equal treatment. Frankly, it’s bizarre to watch advocates insist on straining out the gnat of just this one thing that apparently crosses the line though it threatens half the country with political neutralization, when they are unable to summon up ten percent as much passion for having swallowed as many camels as there are pages in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Speech Is Special. You can’t argue to get it back once it’s gone. There can be genuinely free platform companies, or universally safe platform companies, but if companies are only free to the extent it is safe for our enemies to use the platforms to crush us, then crushed we will be.

…

“The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct”

He says ‘modernity’ but my impression is that he means modern, secular, leftist progressivism. But if you are not a progressive, ask yourself, do they seem like they aren’t interested in making you submit and binding your conduct? Do they lack for stories with unfalsifiable elements that explain why they are entitled to do this?

The progressives imagine that they’ve solved for objective morality. There is no “dictatorship of relativism.” The Jacobins are not libertarians “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” They have a perfectly well-defined concept, and it applies to you too, without any right to define a different one, because error has no rights.

XXV. Velvet Samizdat:

Perhaps nothing helps to highlight the contrast between Soviet-era or North Korean-style Communist oppression and the current circumstances in America than the irrelevance of ‘samizdat’. Yes, there is certainly a fair bit of purging and memory-holing, removal of items from curriculum as well as chilling, suppression, and intimidation out there for present-day writers and publishers who wish to go off-narrative.

But all of it has a mostly prospective, deterrent character. The robust strength of the current system of opinion management is perhaps in no way better demonstrated than by the fact that there is mostly no problem with actual eliminative censorship of the past, with preserving cultural memory, archives, records, and so forth. Because none of that makes any difference.

All the old books are still out there, accessible to anyone, instantaneously, in their own language, and free, and one doesn’t have to go back very far before most of them have the “currently regarded as problematic” volume knob pegged to eleven. Don’t even get me started on Greek philosophy! But almost nobody cares, and it goes unread, and even more unread than one would figure correcting for our increasingly post-literate society. The ‘soft’ system is so much stronger than the ‘hard’, it is nigh invulnerably, such that brazen, obvious, and easily-disproven falsehoods can be printed without any concern on the part of the authors or publishers whatsoever, who know they’ll win prizes anyway.

The counterarguments will be allowed to exist, just not allowed to make a difference. They will never get any attention, buzz, or amplification from prestigious, cool people, and so can be ignored just as if they had been censored. This is deeply demotivating; why even bother? In a way, it’s actually better when your enemies know you’re lying and know you can get away with it. Show’s everyone who’s boss. No need for samizdat, no point.

…

Dreher is particularly inspired by the Bendas and their commitment to turning their home into a sanctuary, place of refuge, and the ‘parallel polis’ of an alternative community.

But Vaclav Benda had advantages. The Communist takeover of his country was recent and had been widely predicted. That meant there was still a large population of people who had grown up in the old days and were formed by that previous order to be loyal to pre-existing commitments, traditions, habits, institutions, and, most importantly, to each other. That includes Benda himself. His activities depended on being able to rely on the remnants of that inheritance, along with the nationalistic perception of a brutally oppressive *foreign* occupation.

But pressure and time wears down all things, and another generation or two of persecution, combined with the psychological enervation from a fully indigenous phenomenon such as that in America, and it would have been impossible.

Benda also lived in a time and place where physical proximity was essential and common. Today it is like herding cats to bring people together, and so the internet is now where all the “private home” discussions are had. There are plenty of virtual Bendas and little digital salons out there. They are a great source of consolation and solidarity for dissidents, and the quality of gallows humor is top notch. But mostly these venues have proven to be impotent and incompetent for any other purpose. Probably the last old pagans gathered around to drink and talk about their plight, and to joke and complain about those darn Christians as they tried to figure out if there was anything else to be done. There wasn’t.

XXVII: Man and SuperBenda

If one doesn’t have a manual, perhaps one can imitate a model. But can the Bendas be models? A model provides an example that an ordinary person can feasibly replicate. But the Bendas put the extra in extraordinary. Inspiring cases of astonishing and, frankly, naturally elite people with incredibly strength of will who are one out of ten thousand are wonderful to hear. But if that’s what it takes, then any project which relies on typical people following in their footsteps is altogether hopeless. Consider:

The Benda family model requires parents to exercise discernment. For example, the Bendas didn’t ops out of popular culture but rather chose intelligently which parts of it they wanted their children to absorb.

I am somewhat less than perfectly confident in the capacity of most ordinary Christians to exercise anything approaching this level of judicious discernment, including the abilities to both choose wisely and intelligently and also to maintain the strict discipline and constant overwatch needed to keep it going, day in, day out. “Be Like Benda” is a tall order, and if we’re being honest, too tall for too many.

This is a different context from the one in which one would encourage sinners to try to live more like saints, or to imitate the lives of the holy family, as every little step in that direction is an improvement. As it is in horseshoes and hand-grenades, so it is in holiness: getting closer counts.

But when it comes to resisting overwhelming social pressures, one has to clear tall hurdles, and if one can’t, one cannot move forward. Imagine you are in the ocean near the beach and someone spots a man-eating shark. Michael Phelps is there and can out-swim the shark to shore, because he is an extraordinary man. We all admire his prowess and we can try to imitate what he does, but in our cases it won’t be enough. Phelps is going to make it, but we will be shark food.

…

Near the end of the book, Dreher writes, “The culture war is largely over— and we lost. The Grand March is, for the time being, a victory parade.” Dreher has repeated this over many years, and I have been reading a similar lines for two decades at least, and it probably goes back long before that. In a way it’s true, and, depending how you define terms, it’s been true before any of us were born. But in a way it’s not true, because there is a great deal of ruin in a culture. As much as has already been taken, there remains so much more territory left to conquer, and it’s odd to say one has lost a war when the battles never end and new fronts keep opening up all the time.

It’s more precise to say that if non-progressives keep doing what they are doing now, following the conventional rules of the game, then like the Pagan, what they are giving up is the capacity to hold ground. That means the best they can do is slow down the advance and retreat and retreat and retreat until, one day, they are on the beach, backs against the ocean.

The real trouble with “Live Not By Lies” is that the encouragement of the stories (which are inspiring) and the instructions of the manual (such as they are), are simply not remotely adequate to arrest the trend of the progressive progression, which ends in The End.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to end like that, and it is still not too late to choose a different destiny. The bad news is that it would require measures far more radical than 99.99% of Christians and other non-progressives are currently prepared to accept. The proper task of a prophet is to expand that acceptance by making them understand they don’t have any better options. At least, not if they don’t want to end up like the Pagans.

#handle #book review #rod dreher #live not by lies #read the whole thing

1 note · View note

thunder-the-ranger-wolf · 4 years

Text

Possible Excerpt from Had Enough: The Dreamsight Remix

Summary, the tag to follow

The next shop was Flourish and Blotts, where Harry would get his school books. On the list were The Standard Book of Spells, A History of Magic, Magical Theory, A Beginners' Guide to Transfiguration, One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, Magical Drafts and Potions, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection.

He knew nothing about these books or the authors. Maybe he should have paid more attention to his dreams because he knew there was something about Fantastic Beasts that helped him and his friends later on.

There were far too many books for him to go through in one day, so Harry was hoping McGonagall had a good idea of where to go. He would definitely be coming back to get more books that weren’t on this list but he’d start with these.

Harry paid for the books on the list and a few of the others that Jaime, Jack, and Amelia had picked up. McGonagall had a few books of her own that were accidentally lumped in with his. After they realized, he said that she could pay him back later if she felt like she had to. It made no sense to split up a purchase like this when they were all here for similar things and were all going to the same place next. He didn’t see the big deal she was making of it, but he also might have been missing something. Maybe it’s because he has his own money now.

The next shop was for potions supplies. Hary would need a cauldron and a set of scales to weigh ingredients and apparently a telescope. McGonagall was very no-nonsense and by-the-book about the purchases despite the awe that he felt seeing all these tools. He and Jamie made lists of everything they could come back for the next time they visited this place. McGonagall agreed on that because it would have to be another six times, one for each year.

The Apothecary reeked like rotten eggs and cabbage went bad, Harry’s dreams lied about that. Barrels almost Harry’s height stood against the wall, some of them caked in slimy goop that he wasn’t too keen on touching. Jars of shriveled herbs, dried roots, and bright powders lined the windows. Feathers bundled, wicked fangs, and snarled claws were strung up and dangled from the ceiling. Harry wasn’t sure what exactly he’d need for potions, but the surprisingly young man behind the counter seemed to expect McGonagall, so he and Jaime were free to roam around the shop and keep a listening ear out for whatever sounded most interesting. Harry would definitely be looking out during Potions. If the magical world was anything like the science teacher said chemistry was, something was bound to explode if he didn't know what he was doing.

After the apothecary came time for a wand. Harry and Jaime laughed when that came up and whipped their arms about.

“Abracadabra!” Harry shouted.

“Alakazam!” Jaime parried.

Professor McGonagall hissed and something smothered Harry’s mouth seconds later.

“Do not ever say that word!” McGonagall insisted sharply.

“But it’s just a silly trick!” Harry scoffed beneath her hand. She shook his head from side to side before lifting her hand.

“Say again?” She ordered frostily.

“It’s a silly trick. Nothing happens if you say it. To people who don’t think magic is real, it’s just sounds strung together.”

“Well, it’s not here.”

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” Amelia offered warily. “And I would very much like it if you never struck my nephew again.”

“What did you think I said?” Harry asked, coming to a realization.

“Avada Kedavra is the killing curse. If a Magician is powerful enough, it can be done without a wand. Its intended target receives an instant, painless death.”

“That’s not what I said,” He confirmed. “Similar language,” because of course it was, he almost can’t believe this! “but lacking a syllable and different vowels and consonants. I’ll keep it in mind, though. Wouldn’t want to accidentally kill someone for annoying me.” He joked.

“No, Mr. Potter.” Professor McGonagall informed him sternly. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“Jaime, stick with Harry and McGonagall, your father and I are going to have a look around, see if we missed anything and maybe get you some food. You can handle the wand part, can’t you?”

Jaime looked at his mother, eyebrows scrunched before he nodded and slung an arm around Harry.

“C’mon, Wolf, let’s go get that magic wand. I wonder if there’s anything else you’re not allowed to say around here.”

“The store is Ollivander’s.” McGonagall hurried off after Harry and Jaime and it took a lot for Harry to walk away from the Alfers. He had no clue why the Alfers sent them away or what Amelia was so upset about. Harry had committed a faux-pas here. It was only right that he was corrected.

Jaime shook his head when Harry voiced his thoughts.

“Teachers don’t put hands on their students. That stopped a few years ago and most of Britain isn’t too keen on bringing it back.”

This was all so weird that Harry figured it was best to just go along for now. It was stupid to be so upset over getting hit when he’d very obviously done something wrong and was getting corrected. What if someone’s life had actually been in danger from my words?

“We’re here,” McGonagall said stiffly.

The shop before them was narrow and shabby. Peeling gold letters over the door read Ollivanders: Makers of Fine Wands since 382 B.C.

A single wand lay on a faded purple cushion in the dusty window. A tinkling bell rang somewhere in the depths of the shop as they stepped inside. It was a tiny place, empty except for a single, spindly chair that McGonagall sat on to wait. The place had an air of silence about it similar to a very strict library. Jaime let out a noise of surprise and he instantly shushed him. Stunned by his own actions, Harry didn’t speak again.

There was so much to do with wands that Harry wasn’t sure where to start. Would Ollivander answer all his questions? Did he even know how to?

Harry shook his head to clear it and looked around instead. Each wand was nestled in soft velvet jewelry boxes, the type that would hold a necklace the long way.

The strict feeling intensified, to the point where shivers jolted up Harry’s spine and he clutched Jaime’s arm.

“Good afternoon.”

Surprisingly, Jaime was the one who jumped. Harry’s feet remained rooted to the floor, though he still clung to his new cousin.

Twin orbs glittered through the darkness and the closer the person stepped, the more of themselves they revealed.

“Hello,” Harry murmured awkwardly.

"Ah yes," said Ollivander. "Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter."

Goodness, it would take forever to get used to people automatically knowing his name.

“Wolf,” He responded on reflex. “If you don’t mind too much.”

“Of course not, dear boy. Names, somewhat like wands, are chosen and shed. If a name no longer fits the person it belongs to, much like a wand, it can be exchanged for a new one.”

“How do you know when it’s time to change?” Harry wondered. “What if a name, or a wand, is forced on you?”

“Well, well, well, cunning little magician you are. Wands are a bit more obvious when they no longer fit, but, much like a name… sometimes you just know, Wolf. I want you to keep that in mind as you accomplish your goal today.”

“Fair enough.” Harry offered warily. He doubted that the same wand dream-Harry got would fit now, but he could only hope. Having the same wand core was all that got him through his dreams. Without that protection, that luck… well. Harry was already hopeless in the real world. He didn’t want to die anytime soon.

"You have your mother's eyes,” Ollivander said conversationally as he rifled through a stack of wands on the counter nearest to him. “It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wand. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wand for charm work.”

It’s good to hear something nice about Lily Potter. Harry didn’t remember much about her that isn’t skewed by someone else’s view. Apparently, she’s good with charms. Maybe Professor Flitwick would know something about her.

“Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wand. Eleven inches. Pliable. A little more power and excellent for transfiguration.”

Ollivander got closer as he said this, and within seconds Harry could see his face reflected in the man’s off-white moon-like eyes. Ollivander reached a long unkempt finger towards Harry’s forehead and Jaime jerked Harry back before he could actually reach it. Ollivander paid no mind to the offense and Harry nudged Jaime’s arm.

Play nice! He mouthed to his new cousin.

“I’m sorry to say I sold the wand that sealed your fate, young one,” Ollivander said softly, breath barely above a whisper. “Thirteen and a half inches. Yew. Powerful wand, very much so, and in the right hands, it could have been great. If I’d known what that wand would go on to do, I’d have denied the owner, first thing.”

“Yew is poisonous,” Harry found myself saying. “And if the wand chooses the Magician, then how could you hold it back?”

Ollivander’s eyes glittered knowingly.

“You are going to do great at Hogwarts, young one. Especially once we find your wand. Now, which is your dominant hand?”

Harry held out his right arm and Jaine stepped back. The boys watched as the wand-maker pulled out a long tape measure with silver markings from his pocket. He proceeded to measure from shoulder to finger, then wrist to elbow, shoulder to floor, knee to armpit, and around Harry’s head. He explained the makeup of wands as he continued to measure.

“Every Ollivander wand has a core of a powerful magical substance. We use unicorn hairs, phoenix tail feathers, and the heartstrings of dragons. No two Ollivander wands are the same, just as no two unicorns, dragons or phoenixes are quite the same. And of course, you will never get such good results with another Magician’s wand.”

Just like in the dream, somewhere along the way the tape-measure had lifted from Ollivander’s hands and continued to measure Harry on its own. He was surprised Jaime was so quiet about this since it was taking all Harry’s strength to be perfectly still as the tape measure did its work. Mr. Ollivander appeared in front of him with four stacks of small slim boxes.

“That will do,” He said, and the tape measure crumpled to the floor like a puppet whose strings were suddenly cut. Before Harry could ask how the tape-measure did that without an incantation, he was handed a long smooth light grey stick.

“Beechwood and dragon heartstring. Nine inches. Nice and flexible. Just take it and give it a wave.”

Remembering how McGonagall had freaked out when Harry said a fake curse, he decided to keep silent as he flicked the wand. True to the dreams, Ollivander snatched it out of his hand almost immediately and gave him another one.

“Maple and phoenix feather. Seven inches. Quite whippy.”

This time Harry actually waved his hand as if he were saying hello to someone. Nothing happened with this wand either, but Olivander seemed to need it for something because he hesitated with that one.

“What are you doing?” Harry wondered as he twitched the wand between his fingers.

“Testing this one.”

“What is there to test? The wand didn’t work.”

“You reacted to the phoenix feather more than the maple, but not so much as you would with your true wand.” Ollivander informed Harry as he evaluated the wand he’d just taken back.

“I said before that no two wand cores are alike because no two magical substances are alike. But I can tell if you react to the magical core or the wood more strongly and narrow it down from there.”

“So even though the phoenix might not be my wand’s phoenix, you can see that I’ll need a phoenix feather for the core of my wand.”

Exactly, young one.” Ollivander crowed as he put the wand back in its box. “But just to be sure, we’ll test out a few more.”

A few more turned out to be about a hundred, or so it felt, and with each wand that seemed to be a dud, Harry found himself questioning his worth more. All the things that had happened in Harry’s dreams were extraordinary. He couldn’t imagine even seeing a three-headed dog, much less getting past one. The thought of getting on a broom scared him beyond belief, trolls would be at the school and he already knew he wasn’t capable of saving anyone because all the magic he’d been able to do involved talking to one snake, changing objects, and getting away from Dudley. There was no way the wand that chose Harry in the dream would match him now. If any wand chose him at all.

“What happens if none of the wands here fit me?” Harry wondered, feeling small.

“There are other wand-makers, though not many, that I could consult to have you fitted. You are not the first tricky customer I’ve had and you won’t be the last.” Ollivander assured Harry.

“Look at it this way, Wolf,” Jaime said suddenly. “You’ve got magic, that’s for sure. You have a bank account in a magic mall and you can make coins appear in a bag.”

“That’s stuff the Potters set up when-. When I was born, probably. It would work on any child they had.”

“A non-magical child would not get a letter for Hogwarts,” McGonagall informed us sternly. “Your mother comes from an Assiduan family and she got a letter. Her sister, Petunia, did not. You belong in the Magical World, Mr. Potter.”

“Wolf,” Harry said quickly, almost speaking over her. “I… I don’t like being called by my name,” He admitted. “Everyone who says it acts like I’m some bug they want to crush under their shoe. Except the Alfers and Mrs. Figg. But they don’t mind calling me Wolf either.”

“If that’s truly how you feel about your own name, then it’s no wonder the letter wrote out that moniker.”

“Holly and phoenix feather,” Ollivander cut in suddenly, handing Harry a pale green wand that sparkled red when hit by a patch of sunlight.

“You did say I’d need a phoenix feather.” Harry offered, knowing that this was the wand from the dream.

“Go on, give it a wave.” Ollivander encouraged.

Please, please, if I ever do anything right in this world, let it start here.

Harry raised the wand above his head and brought it down in a fierce arc. A blaze of red and gold sparks followed. They shot from the end like a firework, throwing dancing spots of light onto the walls.

“And indeed, you do!” Ollivander whooped eagerly. “It is… rather curious, though, young one.” He offered soberly as he took the wand back and wrapped its box in packaging paper.

“What is?” Harry asked with a knowing sense of dread. He hoped the wand-maker was about to say what he thought…

“I remember every wand I’ve ever sold, young one.” He began slowly. “Every single one. It so happens that the phoenix whose tail feather is in your wand only ever gave two feathers. It is extremely curious, young one, that this wand chose you when its brother… dear young one, its brother gave you that scar.”

Harry swallowed loudly, knowing that this was what he expected to heat but somehow, coming from people in this world, it made the news more real.

“Yew is poisonous.” The younger boy choked out. “I guess only a strong rare magical substance could make its home there.”

“That is… almost true, young one. The magical substances are all powerful enough to temper the damaging properties of the woods we use to make our wands. In fact, I’d say they temper each other. But since yew is very poisonous, not many wands can be crafted from it. You are a very insightful young student, Wolf. I look forward to great things from you.”

Harry exhaled shakily, more thrown by this experience than he would like to admit.

“How much do I owe you?” He prompted.

“Seven Galleons, young one. They’re gold and the largest.”

Harry shook the Gringotts key from around his neck and pressed it to the pouch he’d been given.

“Seven Galleons.” He croaked out, hoping the magic wouldn’t fail him now.

He felt the bag grow heavier and shook the coins into Ollivander’s hand.

“Thank you,” Harry said. “for helping me today.”

“Of course, young one, the honor is mine.”

Jaime had to lead Harry around after that. Harry was too busy trying to process the day. Nothing that anyone said reached his ears, something he vowed to change once he settled into Hogwarts. He couldn’t afford to be as unaware as he was. Harry survived in the dreams because he was observant, in his own way. He had to at least get something from those.

McGonagall led the Alfers back home with the same portkey she’d used to bring them to Diagon Alley. After a few cups of tea where McGonagall told the Alfers what to expect on the first day and how to get to Hogwarts, the older woman was gone.

Ameilia, Jack, and Jaime all turned to Harry.

“What do you want to do now?” Jack asked softly.

Harry wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. He needed to think. He needed to figure out how much of this was real and when he would wake up.

He could admit to the first part, at least.

“I’m going up to my room,” Harry said. “ I need to think about all this.”

#had enough: the dreamsight remix #harry potter #hp fanfic

1 note · View note

adapembroke · 5 years

Text

How to Evaluate Sources Like An Academic

One of the most difficult things about being a new student is knowing who to listen to. When you're more advanced, you know the big names in your field. You know where the battle lines are drawn and what the schools of thought are, and you have an idea of who you are and who you want to listen to. A beginner doesn't. Fortunately, knowing how to evaluate sources is a skill that can be learned. Once you learn it, you can apply it to any field from the very beginning of your studies.

Before I launch in, a note on biases: Everyone has biases. Ancient authors have biases. First person witnesses have biases. Scholars have biases. And people lie for lots of different reasons. When you do research, you are not looking for unbiased sources because they don't exist. You are looking for people whose biases you can see so that you can evaluate them--which is often running them by your own biases. Learning is unavoidably messy.

Before you read anything, consider who wrote it. Evaluate authors the way you would evaluate a teacher. Is this a person you want to learn from? Who are they? Do they have first hand experience of the thing they're writing about (primary source), or are they primarily a scholar (secondary source)? What are their credentials? If they are a scholarly source, how much education do they have and from where? If they are not a scholarly source, who are their teachers and influences? How much time have they spent working in the field? What type of experience do they have? Do they belong to any organizations whose beliefs and biases you can investigate?

If you're reading a book, a lot of this information can be found in the author's bio. The bio is usually found on the back cover or near the front or back of the book. The author and their publisher include the bio to establish the author's credibility, so the bio usually includes relevant information about their education and experience. But the bio will usually not include things that are controversial. Remember, the publisher is trying to sell you a book.

If you're reading something on the internet, that information might not be as easy to find. Bloggers often include an about page somewhere on their site, but access to information about authors is hit or miss on social media because people are trying to be approachable or don't want to look like they're bragging. If there's a website linked, check it. The author might be downplaying their credentials.

Consider the author's influences. Everyone who writes is standing on the shoulders of giants. Those who are honest acknowledge it somewhere. People who write are also participating in a conversation with other people in their field, and it's important to know what this conversation is because certain context (or the intended audience) may be left unspoken because the author and publisher assume you're picking up the book because you're part of the conversation. People often get unjustly offended or confused because they don't know that the author they're reading is not part of the same community as them.

The publisher of the book or article can tell you something about its contents. Journals and magazines are usually fairly self-explanatory. Witches and Pagans tells you exactly what types of articles you will find inside. Books can be a bit more difficult to parse. Academic books are usually published by mainstream publishers (Eg. Random Penguin House) or academic presses. Academic presses often have "University" in the name. Specialty subjects often have their own presses. Llewellyn and Weiser are common sources for Pagan/New Age/Occult books. Good books on obscure topics might be independently published. It's especially important in those cases to look into the author.

In an informational book, there is usually a bibliography or list of sources in the back of the book. Books that draw on primary/ancient/other language sources may include a note on translations in the front of the book that mention what texts they draw on. What types of books or articles are cited? Are they mainly academic or experiential? Do the books that are cited look like books you would either want to read yourself or have someone read and interpret for you?

If there is an index, look through it for the authors that are actually cited in the book. There is often a difference between the sources the author thinks you should read and the sources they actually drew on for their work. This isn't a sketchy thing. Authors tend to cite people they've read recently, and if they have been studying for awhile, they probably aren't still reading the texts they think beginners should read.

If there isn't an index or bibliography, the work may be primarily intended for entertainment, but an acknowledgements section is often used to credit sources in highly researched works (Eg. The Outlander books). Books that are written from experience also may not include sources. In that case, it is extra important to know who wrote the book and whether or not you trust them.

Again, on the internet, people often don't cite their sources. This isn't necessarily a sign of sloppiness. Experts in the field regularly contribute to conversations on the internet or post their work assuming you are listening to them because you know who they are. You may need to Google them. If you're new to the field, you might be surprised who's hiding in plain sight.

Consider when and where the source was written. The time period when a source was written can tell you something about the person's biases. If you are reading a book of witchcraft from the 70s by a woman, there's a fairly good chance the text was influenced by second wave feminism. A book from the 1880s that uses "men" as a universal word for humanity is participating in its culture. A book from 2019 that uses "men" as a universal word for humanity is making a political statement.

Old isn't necessarily better or worse. Everyone has a point of view, and every written account of an event is a translation of reality, filtered through a person's brain, experiences, and culture. Hesiod might know a lot about ancient Greek mythology because he's a couple thousand years closer to the time when the poets were first coming up with it, but he will never be anyone other than an ancient Greek. His view of women and slaves won't be the same as yours. Part of the discernment necessary to do research that is at all historical in nature is to learn how to recognize and work with and around beliefs and lifestyles that are different than yours. If ideological purity is essential to your health and well-being, anything written before 2018 is not for you.

Don't be a snob. This seems like a strange point to make in an article on evaluating sources like an academic, but good academics aren't snobs. A source that is more scholarly isn't necessarily a source that is better. If you want to understand your familiar, which source is better: A book by a historian from the 70s who wrote about early modern witchcraft or a witch who has been communing with their familiar alone in the woods since the 1970s? The answer depends on what you're looking for. If you want to understand the familiar in its historical context, the scholar might know more than the witch. If you want your kitty's assistance with spells, the witch will probably be more helpful. Knowing what kind of information you're looking for will help you know who to listen to. A person who is a good source of one type of information might not be a good source for other types of information.

Along the same vein, a more experienced author isn't necessarily better for you than a less experienced author. Experienced authors may have a hard time remembering what it was like to be a beginner. They might not remember things that were difficult when they were young, and they might be so concerned with making sure you don't fall into pitfalls that you'll potentially run into later down the line that they confuse your beginnings. Younger authors are closer to your experience level and remember what it was like to be you and can empathize with your experience better. They may not be experts in the field, but they may be the best teacher for you now.

Putting It Into Practice

Now that you've gotten this far, why don't you start by evaluating me as a source? What unmentioned community am I talking to? What biases do you think I have?

Here's a bio to get you started:

Bea is a New England native currently living in Portland, Oregon. She has a BA in English language and literature and an MFA in creative writing. As part of her graduate studies, she wrote a thesis on poetry in translation and spent a semester in an interdisciplinary MA program primarily focused on building academic research skills. She has been practicing divination for nearly a decade and has studied in Steven Forrest’s apprenticeship program, been mentored by Paul Richard, and taken Tarot workshops with Rachel Pollack. She is a spirit worker and channel with a rather odd, non-devotional thing going on with Odin. When she’s not slinging cards, she’s researching her 17th century historical fantasy novel Witch Wars or wandering the woods with her camera. Links to all of her various social things can be found at beamagical.com.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to @grimnirslee (tumblr) for the inspiration for this post and @magicinthestorm (tumblr) for talking through this with me while I was writing it.

This post was originally published on Patreon on 30 April 2019.

#witchblr #research #paganism #witchcraft #studyblr

120 notes · View notes

htttpjpg · 4 years

Text

Making profits in Real Estate

Making money in Real Estate is the most popular technique to build wealth. If you're not currently making money and establishing wealth in real estate you need to start. I have been making money employing four very simple strategies that are very simple to duplicate. Many of the millionaires I have learned from make money and build large choice in real estate. That's right, all of them! These real estate strategies will be able to set you free for life! If you learn and utilize them you can build a massive amount of wealth in a very little while of time. I use a system for all four of the strategies that most go hand in hand. These strategies can easily make you rich in a really short period of time. I use the first strategy to make money fast, the actual strategy for making money in chunks and the third strategy is ideal for building wealth and creating income for the rest in my life. The last strategy I use to buy real estate extremely less expensive. I use a step by step system for all of these money making products. The first strategy requires in many cases no money and no credit score. It's the strategy I use to create anywhere from three to 12-15 thousand dollars in profits per deal in a short while of time without ever even buying real estate. This strategy referred to as wholesaling. It's easy to begin making quick money. You don't need dollars to make money with this strategy! If you have bad credit won't worry, you don't need good credit to make money with this technique. My goal is for you to have a check in your hands regarding $5, 000 or more in 30 days or less! I could show you my exact system on how to do it. From suppliers is nothing more than making an offer on a piece of realty, getting that offer accepted, then simply assigning to written agreement to someone else. Don't worry, making an offer in something doesn't mean you'll be forced to buy it". Building offers on Real Estate is easy! You can do it two strategies. Through a realtor or directly to sellers who don't have his or her homes listed with a realtor. I developed a specific precise system to find listed and unlisted properties to make presents on. Most of my deals are through listed real estate. I use a realtor to make offers for me on properties which have been listed. There are a lot of realtors who won't understand what you may be trying to accomplish. I'll teach you exactly the process I use to search out my realtors as well as how to get them on the same page whilst you with what you want to accomplish. There are so many properties for sale. You ought to learn how to find the best one's to make offers on. Learning easy methods to wholesale is the first step in becoming a real estate investor and also getting out of the rat race! In all of my money making procedures I believe it is the easiest one for both beginners plus advanced investors. I use the second strategy to create larger bits of cash anywhere from twenty to sixty thousand cash in profits per deal. It takes a little longer to produce those profits than the first strategy but one put up generates much more money. This strategy is called retailing. This strategy seems to have some great advantages. It's easy to make consistent $20, 000+ regarding every deal, it can be done part time, and it can and really should be done with someone else's money! Flipping real estate is treats like buying a house; fixing it up if it needs maintenance tasks, and then selling it for a profit. Most Real estate flippers that fail don't understand the number 1 rule, Buy Low-priced! When they buy a house most of them think they're buying the software cheap but chances are they're not. The biggest mistake buyers make is they don't calculate all of their costs before individuals do the deal. There is a specific formula that's easy to go along with that will make sure you follow this very important rule. The way you purchase your real estate is the difference between winning and losing. For anybody who is new to real estate investing the first strategy you should implement is without a doubt wholesaling. The reason is with wholesaling you learn how to make extra money without risking your own money. When you accomplish that therefore move to retailing. After you learn how to earn extra money wholesaling, you may have accomplished your first step in becoming a successful flipper. That first of all step is learning how to buy cheap! The third prepare I use to build wealth and get paid forever. By doing this When i create a monthly income that will last forever. Making money through Real Estate is not just creating quick cash; it's also about building enough wealth where you can literally never have to work again! This plan is known as buying and holding. There are many ways to build a Wealth creation Machine. The best way is through real estate investing focused on making wealth. Making money now is important but creating wealth for those rest of your life is what will set you free! Selecting real estate isn't hard, but, buying real estate correctly will be where most people go wrong. Understanding what makes up a good deal is the best greatest asset with this strategy. You make money when you order; you get paid when you sell. If you're a beginner this is the most important thing that must be understood. If you buy right you will have a wide range of equity and great cash flow for the entire time you own a special investment. This is what I refer to as building a money making device. In real estate there are many strategies to make money quick. Those is the strategies you should begin with because you have to learn how to buy affordable enough to make money. After those strategies are completed that is the time to worry about building for the rest of your life. You can get multiple ways to buy cheap it's all about learning those who will work for you. Now, once you know how to buy cheap making wealth is easy! Simply make sure you have great cash flow through each deal you intend on doing and before you know it once multiple deals you will start building monthly cash flow. Continue the simple recipe over and over and in a very short period of time you may be generating enough cash flow to live on then you can focus on finding rich and wealthy! Best of all you can focus on whatever you really want because you don't have to work if you don't want to. The reason this is the most popular real estate strategy is because I love residual income. Creating one thing once that pays you for the rest of your life will be smartest thing you can do financially. All my rich guides made this lesson very clear to me. Building a money making equipment first starts with making quick money in real estate. Once you understand that you will know how to buy real estate the right way. From there in your situation to do is hold it for cash flow for the others of your life! The final strategy I use to buy real estate extremely low-priced from distressed sellers. Buying cheap through properties on pre-foreclosure is a tremendous opportunity. There are so many ways to generate income in real estate. Many people have a hard time finding which will way fit's them the best. Some people like to stick to you strategy, others like a lot of different strategies. I recommend going through some research and reading some books to learn with regards to all the different ways there are to make money before you choose one particular. I recommend the following products because they should help you decide how much real estate strategy you want to pursue. Making money in real estate travels hand and hand with all of the other best money making practices. The reason is the tax advantages you get blend very well as well as all of the other money making strategies. Real estate investing is also one among my favorites because it is the best way to build ultimate huge selection that will last forever! Learning a simple money making strategy in your own home. The hard part is where and who ever ask to teach you? This used to be my problem until finally I met some very successful mentors. I discovered for them many strategies to get rich, this one is one of the finest. Making money in real estate is all about buying cheap! By discovering and buying distressed real estate you will be able to buy extremely cheap. Whoever has a way to buy real estate extremely cheap will succeed. Pre-foreclosure investing is a great way to buy cheap from distressed owners. It's a win-win situation for you and the seller. There are a few solutions to buy real estate in distressed situations. If a seller open for pre-foreclose which means they are behind on payments but their apartment hasn't been foreclosed on yet they would probably be very enthusiastic about selling. Most of the time people end up losing their homes as well as would have been much better off if someone was right now there to help them out of that situation. Like I believed, Win-Win situation. There are two scenarios for the buyer. There may be either already sufficient equity in the property for them to order it or there isn't enough equity. Most of the time there will never be enough. There is a simple money making strategy know as quite short sales for properties that don't have enough equity. Website the bank or mortgage company that has a lien on the building will most likely accept a huge discount on what they are owed frequently for a payoff of some amount for what there're owed. For example , if a property is worth $200, 000 as well as bank has a lien of $180, 000 for a place in not great shape they will probably accept an enormous discount. The reason is the cost they have to incur to foreclose, record, and resell is huge. You make them and offer within $100, 000 as a payoff. After negotiations they recognize $120, 000. You're now able to buy a $200, 000 home for $120, 000 through your knowledge. Obtain, these four Real Estate Investing Strategies all have the advantages and disadvantages. There is a sequential order they should be implemented in. Receive this information and use it to the best of your ability and stay smart and savvy out there.

1 note · View note

zenonaa · 5 years

Photo

Read here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18720781/chapters/44402326

Comments: birthday fic for a fictional character

***

...

I recall that I was in my Tokyo office because I remember a dark auburn bookcase unit with a unique design stood to my left, the one with the circular frame at the centre. Within the circle, several shelves had been fixed to form the shape of four staircases, and right in the middle of that was a compartment where one could sit a photograph, but I had not.

Someone buzzed my intercom. When I raised my head, I could see the bookcase unit at the edge of my vision. An associate of mine, a renowned interior designer, gifted it to me years ago.

“You have a visitor,” said my receptionist through a speaker.

“Let them in,” I instructed.

A few moments later - I didn’t count the number of seconds - the door ahead of me opened and Osamu Sugawara came in. He always looked like he just raked his fingers through recently washed hair.

I had no time for pleasantries. “What is it?”

Osamu grinned and swaggered over to my desk, holding a stack of papers. Once he had crossed the room, he set them down.

“These are the results for the first task,” Osamu said.

The first task had been assigned to all one hundred and eight competitors. Simply, they were given a certain amount of money and with it, they were to try to make as much of a profit as possible within the timeframe, which was six months. He watched my face as he pushed the papers toward me. I cast my eyes toward the list of names.

At the top was one that I didn’t recognise right away.

“Byakuya Polanski?” I read aloud.

Basic facts were listed by his name, such as his date of birth and how much money he made. Reading them answered some of my queries but raised other questions.

I met Osamu’s gaze. “This one’s eleven?”

That would make him...

“... the youngest of them all,” said Osamu. He pointed to Byakuya’s name like I was some kind of idiot who hadn’t read it, but between us two, he was the idiot.

Of course, he was a successful businessman but when compared to me and many of my near equals, Osamu was a total idiot, though he was smarter than the common filth that most of the population consisted of.

“Between him and the next competitor, there’s a wide margin, and this Masanori person in second place is in his forties,” I said. While Osamu was all smile, my face was as stiff as stone. “Is all this information correct?”

“You think they were mistyped, or mixed up?” asked Osamu, raising his eyebrows, and he almost looked serious. “No, no. It’s correct. I’ve met the boy several times. He’s really a remarkable child. Very stern though, just like his mother. Doesn’t trust anyone except his butler, and he doesn’t do friends either.”

I steepled my fingers and stared at Byakuya’s name, in thought. Osamu carried on talking. When I glanced up, he was waving a hand around animatedly.

“Plays the violin beautifully and can speak multiple languages,” he said, like a commoner father boasting about their son. “His mother must push him hard.”

He nattered on. I grimaced and lowered my gaze, keeping my face tight.

“Describe his mother to me,” I said without looking up.

“Eh?” Osamu paused. He settled down. “She’s called Anastazja. Her mother is Polish and her father is French and the managing director of Polanski Business Limited.”

This Anastazja woman must have been pushing Byakuya because while every woman chosen for me was born from the elite, overall, she was rather near the bottom of the barrel. There was also the fact that this Byakuya child was the youngest person competing. A female child was a year older than him and she was significantly lower down the list. I squared my shoulders.

“Kijou?” said Osamu, more curious than cautious, but still both.

“Everyone below the fifty-fourth ranking... they’re to be removed from the competition,” I announced. “I will arrange that. Don’t bother yourself with it.”

Osamu nodded, but I doubted he planned to bother himself. He was a carefree man. No, I would be in charge of authorising their removals, as per tradition.

“Is there anything else you require me for?” I asked.

“Not on the business side of things,” he replied.

“Then that is everything,” I said. “You may leave.”

I returned my focus to the stack of papers and heard Osamu’s footsteps recede. The door then shut.

Despite this Byakuya child’s early success, it is too early to determine a winner. That is why there are to be other tasks, each one whittling away more competitors until finally only one person remains. As far as I am aware, the youngest never won. It was always someone older.

Anyone could be trained to play stocks. The next tasks will leave only genuine candidates.

***

...

For this next task, I directed that the competitors should earn money using an industry that the conglomerate doesn’t already focus on. I excluded them from various enterprises such as mining, nonferrous metals, petrochemicals, aerospace and using the stock market, to give a few examples. The conglomerate comprises of many more than those, for it branches into most sectors, but I permitted competitors to involve themselves in industries the conglomerate doesn’t concentrate on.

Of course, I couldn’t allow the task to be too simple. Everyone began with the same amount of funding. I would be judging them not just on their profits, but also their business image, connections and potential... among other things. Again, those are just a handful of examples.

On this day, I was in an office in America. Everyone had been ordered not to bother me while I worked. It didn’t matter how important they deemed something to be - I would not be available for any meetings or queries.

I started before dawn the day after the last task’s deadline. The sky was a gradient between pale blue and faded orange as I booted up my computer. Sitting in a silent room, I sifted through my emails, stuffed with attachments, and spreadsheets soon dominated all my monitors.

Some names stood out to me from previous tasks. Only the ones who ranked highly, of course. Anyone who performed below my expectations were already dead to me. Ultimately, I came across a certain name. Byakuya Polanski. I rearranged the windows on my monitors so that his efforts filled every screen.

He opted for the pharmaceutical industry, which included medical devices. A quick glance informed me that Polanski Pharma Co Limited had made massive profits. Not as much as certain other competitors, but so far, enough to put him in the top ten.

Even so, I wasn’t judging them solely on their profits, though that would certainly have a significant influence on how I ranked them overall.

The logo consisted of a ten point star with ‘Polanski’ written next to it, sleek and professional. According to his head butler, who had been authorised to write up in detail about Byakuya’s venture, employees exhibited high satisfaction in all areas, which other than limiting turnover and ensuring greater work performance meant nothing to me. If a worker did excellent work and they were miserable, that wasn’t of my concern. His report incorporated graphs and questionnaire responses with contact details should I wish for them to confirm the information shown to me.

I cupped my chin as I perused. As stated in the butler’s report, Byakuya played a large role in designing and developing the technology, which included robotic limbs and implants, and he also heavily involved himself in the medicine side of things. The technological aspect was more groundbreaking, using scientific knowledge that an ordinary person could only imagine, yet this was a child on the verge of becoming a teenager.

This went beyond being a businessman. This was being an inventor. A genius. I noted that the technology wasn’t ridiculously expensive to produce, even quite cheap compared to the rest of the industry without having a detrimental effect on the quality. After I read the tests done on his products and the results of said tests, I delved into the breakdowns of his costs and found a startling beginner’s error.

He undersold his products. Other companies offering the equivalent sold them at a far greater price, and theirs were inferior to what he had available. Had he increased his prices, he would have made a far greater profit. Yes, he had many customers right now, and the female child in a photo was smiling at the camera as she showed off her new arm, but Byakuya could have easily increased the prices by a vast amount and still had customers.

Did he intend to appeal to a lower class of people, even though they had less money?

That loss of profit could have cost him the competition. I had half a mind to score him poorly so he would be eliminated, but he performed adequately regardless. I decided to rank him nineth, and by evening, he had dropped to twelfth.

By night time, I finished my initial readover, and I pressed a button.

“Luwak coffee now,” I said.

My personal assistant brought some through within the next ten minutes. She bowed then left, only speaking to address me once, and I remained deep in thought.

This will take some time.

***

...

I decided on my final rankings for the previous task. Thirty people remained in the competition at that stage, including Byakuya Polanski.

Only when a victor emerged did that person receive the coveted Togami name. The same happened to me - I had always been Kijou, but I wasn’t Kijou Togami until I proved myself in the final round. My superior genetics and elite upbringing ensured my victory. There, I showed that only I was worthy and no one who battled against me deserved to be a Togami. Not while I existed.

The next round had a much tighter budget. I relocated them all to different countries and tasked them all with creating a home business, forbidding them from partnering up with any companies already affiliated with the conglomerate and I made them use aliases.

They could only work with local businesses and six months after I set this task, I had thick folders physically in my office, one for each remaining competitor.

Halfway through my evaluations, I came across Byakuya’s folder. He started an automobile business, repairing, taking in used cars and reselling them or reusing the parts. In addition to that, he trained not just employees but customers too, as well as gave out advice.

“He’s a bright one, isn’t he?” said Osamu, slouched forward and resting an arm on a corner of my desk. Other than the occasional comment, he had mostly been quiet for once. “Did you know that he can pilot a helicopter?”

I elevated my gaze.

“You know him well, Sugawara?” I said.

Osamu tilted his head a little.

“I’ve been keeping tabs on several of your bastard children,” said Osamu, which didn’t surprise me. He smirked. “He’s the cutest of the bunch.”

A lot of my senior employees did the same. I could remember some visiting me in my teenage years and for some time after. Activity picked up as the competition drew closer. For me, the competition officially began when I was in my late twenties. Soon after I became the sole heir, I supplied sperm to private clinics as had been tradition.

Anyway, the reason these visits took place was so business associates could try to suck up to someone likely to become the future head... but the youngest never won. No teenager had ever won. The oldest competitor in this competition had been a male called Masanori, who had fared poorly in the second challenge and was struck off then. He had been in his forties during this competition, and those like him stood a better chance of winning than a child.

So I didn’t understand why Osamu acquainted himself with someone who had no hope of winning.

I didn’t like not understanding things. Osamu’s lips still curved.

“Sugawara, what made you seek him out? There were more than one hundred competitors older than him,” I told him.

“Just a hunch,” said Osamu. He shifted a bit, still with that slit of a smile on his face.

My interest extended no further. Osamu was a valuable colleague, so I didn’t wish to start unnecessary strife or bother him with more questions. That would be inconvenient for me. I continued to sift through Byakuya’s folder. His young age would have put him at a disadvantage as few people would take a twelve year old boy seriously, especially as he didn’t have his family names to fall back on, but apparently he had been accompanied by his head butler.

Clients must have assumed that the old man with him was the one they were dealing with, not the child, and I said as such. Osamu shrugged a shoulder.

“Probably. But by having a handsome young boy with him, they probably thought Pennyworth was his grandfather or something. A combination like that will appeal to many customers,” Osamu explained.

I read on, and then I quietly considered what I had read. Osamu didn’t rush me for an answer, watching the process on my face.

“Overall, he has done adequately,” I announced. “Byakuya made some interesting decisions. He offers free consultations, giving advice on reasonable prices so that customers can see if they’re being overcharged at other places. This will make customers go to him, as his prices seem cheaper and fairer, but by doing that, he is limiting his profits. Something similar happened in the previous trial. He’s offering free healthcare and childcare to the employees... an unnecessary undertaking.”

Osamu didn’t say anything. I read some more, regardless of the onset of a headache, and then glanced up. For some reason, or more likely, for no reason, Osamu was still there. In my personal space. And he had been for the past several hours, all the while contributing very little. My lips pursed.

“You don’t have to be here,” I said, restraining a sneer, and Osamu straightened up casually.

The reason I fought my annoyance down wasn’t so I didn’t offend him. I simply didn’t want to betray any emotion. If I showed a sign of weakness, then anyone could chisel away at the chink in my defences that it made.

“Until next time, my dear friend,” Osamu said, and he strode away, raising a hand briefly as he headed to the door.

But he didn’t leave when he got there. He paused, then looked at me over his shoulder.

“I heard about what happened to Masanori-kun. A plane crash... I suppose there was no getting around the pilot’s death,” he remarked in a light tone.

I didn’t reply. Osamu finally left, and I finally had some peace.

Now I could concentrate fully, and I finished going through the rest of the folders. Afterwards, I massaged my temples and heaved a sigh.

It will be a few days before I came to a final decision, I expect.

***

...

While I was seated at a desk in one of my many offices, going over my list of the fifteen competitors set to participate in the final task, I was disturbed by the sound of my phone ringing. I picked it up off my desk and checked the caller ID. Unknown. Only a few people knew my personal number, but the caller may have retrieved it by other means, such as by finding it in someone else’s phone directory or by misdialing it.

As I had important business to attend to, and because I had no desire to know who it was, I hung up. Even if it was someone I knew like my doctor, I would have declined the call. After much solitary deliberation, I had painstakingly narrowed down thirty competitors to fifteen based on their performances in previous tasks and information provided by a large number of trusted and verified sources. The reason why I had needed two weeks to go over the data again and again and so on was because one of these fifteen would take over for me once I retired. A single mistake could doom everything.

I read over the names, even though I could recite them off by heart at this point. One of them was Byakuya Polanski. If I’m honest, I didn’t expect him to win but he had done well in every task, despite his age and the mediocrity of the maternal side of his family. Though I had my doubts, if he wasn’t suited to being the new head of the conglomerate then he would lose and the individual who was the most qualified would become it. His presence wouldn’t matter.

Every challenge helped sculpt my views on each person, bit by bit, and I feel confident in every choice.

Still... I eyed Byakuya’s name.

My phone rang again.

The same number as before.

Not only that, but I had been sent text message saying, ‘I would pick up if I was you.’

I could have blocked the number, or rejected the call again. However, I was curious though mostly annoyed, so I clicked to accept the call.

“Who is this? How did you get my number?” I demanded in a professional tone, so curt and sharp.

Laughter, lazy and young, crackled disrespectfully. My face grew hot.

“As your heir apparent, I of course have your direct number,” said the person.

“What is your name?” I asked, gritting my teeth.

“Ah, I don’t have a name. I’m Nameless. See, when I was very young, a murderer came to my town and slaughtered everyone except me because he missed my hiding place, and he burnt everything to the ground. Therefore I am Nameless now.”

Any retort that I had prepared disintegrated in my mouth, and my mind didn’t prepare any others. I was silent and I could barely breathe.

The person was not put off by my silence. They carried on talking in a bright voice.

“You’re silent. You must remember. This town... was a mining town. It had access to very valuable minerals. The conglomerate wished to acquire some, but no matter how much money you offered them, they declined. The less people who knew, the better, so you hired a hitman and he killed everyone. Almost everyone. Suzuhiko... do you remember him?”

Of course. He was in the final fifteen.

“Suzuhiko did it, and you covered it up. It has been a cold case ever since. Did you know my father delivered the post and my mother would always get real mad if we trekked in mud? She would spank me when I did, and I would keep doing it just to elicit a response from her. His sister found me, and she convinced him to let me live and they adopted me. Now... what do I want? It’s simple. As I’m Nameless, I wasn’t entered in this little game, so I think it’s only fair I’m entered now.”

“You’re not a Togami.”

“But what am I if not that? I’m nobody now, because of you.”

They couldn’t see my hands tremble.

“I’ve already chosen fifteen,” I said. “It has to be fifteen competitors. That’s tradition.”

“I can be whoever you want me to be. If you won’t listen to me, I’m sure the press will. I’d like to see you quash that, Father.”

My whole body stiffened and I dragged my gaze to the list of names. All of these had very important and influential families. To take off almost any one of them would draw too much attention, raise too many questions. Most of them knew each other. Most.

Therefore, I said...

“... you are now Byakuya Polanski.”

“Awesome! Don’t worry, I bet my sister or my brother are still in the competition, so they will give me a lift. We’ll chat real soon. Bye.”

The person hung up.

I put down my phone.

I thought long and hard, for a long time.

I decided I will have to make some adjustments for the final round.

***

...

The final round didn’t go as planned, I must admit.

Suzuhiko was supposed to kill this invader. It didn’t matter, as I have since found out, that the traitor was a male child around the same age as Byakuya. If he posed a threat to the integrity of the Togami Conglomerate, he had to be eliminated even if he was a child.

For this final task, I had every remaining competitor kidnapped and taken to an island. The only people that I did not kidnap were Suzuhiko and his two siblings, and I let that be known. This created some tension and animosity, as desired.

Then they were all given a simple task. On the island, I had set up a scavenger hunt filled with challenges. A few of them referred to it as a game. Whoever completed it first would prove themselves to be the rightful heir. They were allowed to work together but only the individual who keyed in a password revealed when the tasks were all completed would become the heir, so it would be unwise to trust or depend on anyone else. It wasn’t a password that one could guess - it was a string of numbers and letters that had no connection to any of the others.

But one competitor had a secret, second objective. Suzuhiko was to murder the invader. The parasite.

Everything went as I anticipated for the first few weeks. Sometimes several of them grouped together to solve certain puzzles while others remained lone wolves. They slept little, smoked during intervals and nosed around the premises. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I expected Suzuhiko to murder the invader but I didn’t, however, expect everyone to start killing each other before Suzuhiko had the chance to complete his mission.

The invader died. Suzuhiko died. By the end, there were fourteen corpses and a body that was young and almost dead. They stabbed, bludgeoned, crushed and set each other on fire. Other than the female, there was a detective and his assistant who both appeared as the killings commenced. I arrived at the end, having seen it all play out on whatever cameras they didn’t break during the bloodshed, but I had someone explain it to me in detail over a game of chess.

We sat in my private plane, opposite each other with a chessboard resting on a table between us. By ‘we’, I mean me and Byakuya. He is tall, but he has a young face so I can see how he succeeded in disguising himself as the female assistant of a detective. His alias was Polaris Polanski. The surname was his own, while the forename was the name of a star but also based on ‘Pola’, the name of his mother’s mother. This disguise fooled everyone not colluding with him, and the long hair he had before he cut it off had helped.

Byakuya must take after his mother, because his hair is blond and his eyes are blue, unlike mine. I will meet her when we register our marriage.

After all, her son had won.

“My butler only killed one of them. Shinobu wasn’t in a state to tell me his name, but with some digging around, I found out he was her adopted brother, Kazuo,” said Byakuya. He moved his bishop to H6.

I used one of my bishops to take the bishop he relocated.

“It’s no more than a corpse now,” I stated, referring to the invader.

Byakuya examined the board with a furrowed brow, then he dragged his queen diagonally across most of it to take my bishop. His queen couldn’t be immediately displaced, and I stared at the board as I weighed my options.

Earlier, Byakuya had told me how he, his butler and the detective got here. He hired the detective, found out where one of the competitors lived and stalked them. Then, when the competitor was being kidnapped, Byakuya’s butler made a distraction nearby so Byakuya and the detective could plant a tracker discreetly onto the transporter.

We used more than one transporter for each individual and Byakuya’s group had to follow with a delay, so they missed the private plane that took the competitor to the island. They reached the island weeks after the task properly began. While this may seem late, only a couple of people knew about the location. To find out about it at all required more than a detective with a high ranking.

Not only that, but Byakuya solved the island’s puzzles within days.

And that is why I chose Byakuya to be my successor. I moved my rook forward and leaned back in my chair.

“You’re the youngest that has ever won, but don’t take it as a compliment. Just because you are a child, that doesn’t mean I will show you any leniency or kindness,” I warned him.

Byakuya moved his rook to an adjacent square, but while mine had stepped toward him, his shifted once to the side, claiming none of my pieces. He looked up, stony-faced.

“I wouldn��t want you to,” he said, and I hitched my other rook across the board.

The game continued in silence for a while. It progressed slowly but neither of us were bored or distracted. We took our time contemplating our moves and studying our opponent. When Byakuya snuck to the island, he thought to bring a change of clothes, so he no longer wore a pinafore dress but a crisp suit. As he pondered his next move, I regarded him coolly, and when his eyes met mine, though his pair differed in colour to mine, I found them not so different otherwise.

“What will happen to Shinobu?” he asked, reminding me that he was a child.

“She will be expelled like the others,” I said with my arms folded over my chest. “That one is unfit to have the Togami name.”

He didn’t answer right away. In the meantime, I moved my queen forward. Some thought absorbed him, and as his eyes drilled into space, I could tell that he was not as focused on the game of chess as he should have been.

“The others seem to be falling into unfortunate accidents,” said Byakuya, and his gaze flitted to my face. He tipped his head slightly to one side. Though his features were smooth and blank, it was not due to a lack of thought. They were deliberately so.

I didn’t correct him. For them, it was a curse. A curse that came as a result of falling from greatness to the worst possible fate - becoming part of the 99%. But for me, it was a burden, though a necessary one.

Byakuya blinked. After he did, a shadow seemed to fall over his face.

“I will have her be my secretary,” said Byakuya, and I scoffed.

“Are you soft in the head? Or worse... the heart?” I asked him, and I jerked a hand through the air. “She would steal your place in a heartbeat. You would have to sleep with your eyes open from now on if you did that.”

He didn’t falter.

“I can’t be killed,” said Byakuya simply, and he finally moved one of his pieces. “Don’t mistake it for me being emotional. I have no interest in making friends with her, or anyone. I only trust my butler, as he is employed to be trusted. I won because I am intelligent and unaffected by feelings and bonds and other nonsense. If I couldn’t survive by myself, or cracked under pressure, I wouldn’t be here.”

Byakuya sat back.

“You have not seen my full potential yet, Father,” he added. “I will show you I am worth more than a talking cow.”

That was what I told him. I told him that I had been bribed, and that was why the invader usurped Byakuya’s place.

“You are to address me as Togami-sama,” I said, and I took his silence as acknowledgement.

We continued in near silence, gradually losing more and more pieces. Soon I had a king, queen and pawn left, and he had his king, queen and three pawns left. As I waited for him to make his next move, a thought gnawed at me until I could barely tolerate it and I curled my lips.

“I’ve been wondering about something for some time,” I said, peering at him. “Tell me... I noticed that in your tasks, you undercharged your customers and had unnecessary expenses. Why?”

Byakuya nudged up his glasses.

“You mean the free healthcare? I was making a profit, and I am already very rich. I can easily afford it,” he said.

“But why?” I pressed.

“Why not? It’s barely a dent in my pocket and yet for some people, it’s life-changing. If they’re doing business with me or providing labour, then why not? I’m not a person who takes pleasure in the misfortune of others, and they can’t help it if they’re not as brilliant as I am. Besides, I don’t need the world’s wealth to know that I’m a genius and better than everyone else, Togami-sama.”

He was a strange child. While he didn’t trust others and severed all emotional ties with everyone else, he seemed to have no qualms about providing support for them... to an extent. We would have to work on that, but for now, we continued to play.

The game seemed to be approaching a stalemate.

But then,

“Checkmate,” said Byakuya, thirteen years old, and I knew that for better or for worse, he would take the conglomerate where it had never gone before.

***

“Father.”

On hearing that voice, Byakuya looks up and swivels his chair around. In the doorway of his home office stands his son, around eleven years old, with pale grey eyes and purple hair, but he has his father’s nose and his father’s frown.

“Yes?” says Byakuya.

His son, Aloysius, raises the book in his hands.

“I was wondering if there are more diary entries other than these?” he says.

Byakuya’s eyes flicker, and his lips pinch together.

“Those were the only parts I could salvage. The place was almost entirely destroyed,” says Byakuya.

He still remembers the ruins and how the pages were singed as he cradled the book in his hands. His father’s former mansion still smelled like death when he entered, and Makoto voice’s calling to him had sounded like the wind outside.

‘Shut up. I’m busy. Go bother Kirigiri for another ten minutes.’

‘Togami-kun...’

‘I said leave me alone. You’re more annoying than usual.’

‘All right, Togami-kun. We’ll be waiting for you outside. Come out when you’re ready.’

“Then can you tell me what happens next?” asks Aloysius, breaking through the walls that had started to set around Byakuya.

Memories from so many years ago partially resurface, and they run down imaginary walls like crayon melting on a radiator. The scene crumbles away as he returns to the present. Byakuya fixes his eyes on Aloysius. He’s the same age that Byakuya had been when the competition started.

Those don’t exist anymore. In fact, the conglomerate doesn’t even exist, but Byakuya has something more valuable. A family that loves him and a family he loves back, as hard as it is to voice at times.

Byakuya stands up. His chair creaks.

“Let’s go to the living room,” he says. “And get your mother... she’s in the bedroom.”

Aloysius’s face lights up and he darts out of the room. Byakuya stares out of his window at a blue sky. His parents married for formalities, but him... he married a person full of love, someone brilliant and loyal, and importantly, someone he chose for himself and who chose him, even when the Togami name didn’t mean anything to the rest of the world anymore.

He turns away and leaves the room, shutting the door behind himself.

In the living room, Aloysius tugs his mother’s arm, and as Touko sits down on the couch, looking around in confusion, Byakuya recalls his father’s last entry and decides this is definitely for the better.

#byakuya togami #danganronpa #fanfiction #one shot #kijou togami #touko fukawa #but she's right at the end #togafuka

14 notes · View notes

justaramblingromantic · 6 years

Text

test drive

Characters/Pairing: Kinokuni Nene and Kuga Terunori/TeruNene

Type: Canon-divergent AU, Post-series, Passive Aggressive-verse, Roommates AU, Fake Dating AU, Freestyle

Word Count: 1856

A/N #01: Wahaha, I wanted to give some love to this rarepair, and so I did~ For additional context for this AU, see here.

“I still cannot believe that you never learned how to drive,” he was muttering in the passenger seat beside her.

“How does that even work in this day and age? Aren’t you the one who learned all the nonsense skills like artistically sticking a bunch of flowers together while stuck in the most physically uncomfortable position possible as well as five hundred and sixty different ways how to poke a man with a sharp pointy stick, but you never learned how to drive?”

She sent him a long, flat stare, irritated by his bitching. This was going to be a long, unbearable session, she could tell already.

“I never asked you to teach me in the first place so if you’re going to be like this, you can get out and I’ll ask someone else to help.”

Terunori crossed his arms before his chest and glowered at the unappreciative woman. She was seriously very uncute; sometimes he wondered why he found her oddly fascinating all the same. She was like that weird, maddening itch he couldn’t quite make go away; it was immensely aggravating at times. Luckily he knew to keep his unflattering opinion to himself, or else he would have been even more peeved to learn that she pretty much found him just as annoying, too.

“Ask someone else? Who? Your kind and considerate ex-husband?”

She continued to stare at him in a rather unimpressed manner. Everything about him was loud and flashy and unnecessarily confrontational. He was also full of swagger, capricious and temperamental; she disliked noisy, hotblooded men like that.

“You’re the cattiest little man I’ve ever met,” she announced in that aggravating, passive tone of hers, and then they were glaring daggers at each other.

“And you’re dating this catty little man so I wonder what that says about you, anesan,” he sniped back. They glared at each other some more, now both utterly cross after this mandatory daily gratuitous mashing of each other’s grumpy buttons.

“So, are we still gonna do this, or what?”

She wanted to glower at him some more, but stoically turned her gaze forward instead, recomposing herself with admirable effort and schooling her features. He was infuriating in the way that he always breached her barriers with his sheer obnoxiousness whether she wanted him to or not. All those years of self-cultivation and learning how to remain calm and tranquil from chado and calligraphy sure were coming in handy now, dealing with this childish brat.

“I’m doing it with or without you.”

“Seeing that it’s my car we’re sitting in, obviously I’m coming along for the ride. Guess that makes me a driving instructor, now.” He gestured vaguely at the dashboard and the various controls of the Maserati. “You know what all these are and what they do, right?”

She shot him a brief side glance, before slowly setting her hands on the steering wheel.

“Yes. I read the orientation booklet.”

He leaned over, reached across her, grabbed her seatbelt and clipped it on for her.

“Then you should know that the first step is to wear your seatbelt, lady.”

She continued to watch him with that uninspired poker face, her expression not changing even when she had been startled by his sudden proximity.

“…I could have done that on my own.”

He looked at her from behind his bangs and smirked a fanged, feline smirk. “And where’s the fun in that? I personally like my learning to be very hands-on.”

She finally reacted to his teasing drawl, and pinched the insides of his wrist before he could start putting his hands elsewhere. He swore and jerked back, hissing like a scalded cat.

“Ow!”

She pointed at him primly. “Keep your hands to yourself.”

He shook out his stinging appendage and scowled disgruntledly at her. This was not the first time she had warded him off like that.

“Oi, what do you think you’re doing to your driving instructor? I demand respect!”

“Perhaps this driving instructor should respectfully stop flirting and start instructing.”

“Who says that I’m flirting with you? I’m just that friendly with everyone I meet, don’t ya know?”

She caught herself almost scoffing, which amused him to no end because that was how he knew he had her.

He lounged back in his seat and put on his own seatbelt as well.

“Let’s start. Is your foot already on the brake pedal? Keep it there when you switch on the engine. Once you’re ready, release the handbrake and put your hand on the gearstick-”

His instructions were clear enough, and between the two of them, they soon managed to get the car moving.

“Hey. Don’t stamp on the accelerator like that. Don’t stomp on the brakes abruptly too, come to think of it. Your passengers, namely me, will not appreciate it.”

“Stop glancing at your feet. It’s an automatic transmission so it’s not like you need to clutch in or anything. Keep your eyes on the road. And you’re too tense. Relax.”

She had expected a lot of snarking and snideness from him, but surprisingly enough, that was not the case. He tapped the back of her hand.

“You’re listing off to one side, lady. Use your spatial awareness to correct yourself.”

She was driving very slowly, easing the vehicle forward around the empty training circuit as she got her bearings. The luxury coupe was an extremely responsive machine, which in turn made it considerably difficult for a beginner like her to control. Her nervousness grew too, having to be responsible for such an expensive car.

“Kuga.”

“Hm?”

“How angry will you be if I damage this car?”

She kept her eyes firmly peeled on the road, but she could sense him turning his head to stare at her, all the same.

“Why? Are you intending to crash us straight into a divider or something?”

“No.”

“Then it depends.”

“On?”

“How willing you’re gonna be to use your body to repay me.”

She jammed on the brakes. Thankfully, she wasn’t driving very fast in the first place and he had his seatbelt on. If not, he might have smushed face first onto the windscreen.

“Oi, what the heck?! I told you not to jump on the brakes like that!”

She glowered at him, righteously offended. “I’m not sleeping with you in exchange for driving lessons.”

He scoffed. “Who’s sleeping with who? I never asked you to do that.” He sounded almost insulted, indignant, even.

As if he needed to stoop to bargaining to trade for sexual favors. Who did she think he was? The number of exes he had was enough to line a city block!

She turned her head mechanically and stared at him. Silently demanding an explanation. She was very good at that, he was quickly realizing. Probably due to all that extreme weirdass formal etiquette training she received as a kid.

He rubbed the back of his neck, exasperated.

“My parents are flying in to spend Christmas, so I need you to do that thing you did the last time my mom came.”

Her brow silently lifted. “That thing I did? You mean, continue to pretend to be your doting girlfriend?”

He shot her an ‘are you shitting me’ look. “Really? That was you being doting back then? I sprained my wrist and you also nearly threw out my back. Please be less doting this time, I don’t think I’ll survive your tenderness, darlin’.”

She frowned at him, doing her level best to ignore his sarcastic endearment.

“You think you’re in any position to make demands?”

“I know I am. Do this for me and I’ll personally guarantee that you earn your driving license, dammit.”

Her gaze grew even sharper, from behind the warning glint of her prudish glasses. Her voice was light, cool, crisp. “What did I say about swearing, Kuga Terunori?”

For fuck’s sake, she was such a schoolmarm. Ever since she became his ad hoc housemate, he found himself involuntarily transforming into an upstanding, model citizen, much to his bewildered horror. No more swearing, no more late-night drinking and raucous partying - it was early to bed and early to rise. The apartment was fastidiously spick and span at any given time of the day, somehow he had also learned to sort the laundry by color for the first time in his life, and even the trash was neatly separated into their various categories by the time garbage collection day rolled around; what even was going on.

Coincidentally, that was also probably why his mom liked her so much.

He leaned towards her again. Bringing his face up to hers. Meeting her crimson gaze with his own catlike cognac gold ones.

“Why? Are you going to pull me out of the car and pin me to the floor again? Tsk, you really are such a violent woman, despite that demure appearance indicating otherwise.”

She was also kind of…interesting, he had to reluctantly admit. She seemed plain and passive at first glance, but there was something about that unyielding, steel backbone, that implacable resolve sitting unwaveringly firm on that elegantly aristocratic, doll-like face that was not like any other women he had met. She had also never tried to be deliberately charming or coquettish or appealing ever, and he didn’t think he had seen her attempt to make herself more palatable in order to please anyone. That quietly defiant side of her was probably her only charm point, as far as he was concerned, anyway. Other than that, she was bossy, forceful, irritating, and always had to be right. It was immensely aggravating, that righteous level of rightness she always insisted to be on.

Nene blinked, slowly. Was he trying to intimidate her?

“My actions are a direct consequence of your incredible insufferableness,” she replied with serene dignity.

She lifted one hand from the steering wheel and calmly met his forehead with her palm, pushing him back onto his seat.

“And stop breathing on me, you buffoon. I’ll agree to do as you asked, on the additional condition that you drive me wherever I need to go for the next one month.”

There was a promising ryokan that had just been listed and looking for a new buyer, but it was a bit out of the way in the mountains and she needed transport. He would be just as good as any, with the additional advantage of being incredibly business savvy and experienced to deal with this sort of transaction.

“Buff-” he spluttered in disbelief. Was that any way for anyone to ask for a favor? “Excuse me; do I look like your personal Uber chauffeur?” he demanded. “Have you any idea how busy I am with the number of restaurants I’m currently managing?”

“You’ve worryingly short legs for a chauffeur,” she retorted blandly, and just like that, his eyes flashed like those of a bull that had just caught sight of a matador’s furiously red cape. He also looked like he was seriously considering reaching over to throttle her, it was strangely amusing.

It was also almost cute, how he quickly puffed up.

“WHO ARE YOU CALLING SHORT-”

A/N #02: Anesan refers to ‘older sister,’ because technically Nene is a good five months older than Terunori, though I doubt she appreciates being addressed as such by him...which is probably why he does it to irritate her, lol. (Anesan is also apparently a common term for the yakuza to address their Boss’s wife...which is fitting considering my hc for Terunori’s family!)

Also, I always wondered why the usually levelheaded and pokerfaced Nene takes such glee in poking at Terunori about his height in canon. I like to think that she finds his reactions amusing...possibly even cute~

#Food Wars: Shokugeki no Souma #Shokugeki no Soma #Kuga Terunori #Kinokuni Nene #TeruNene #TeruNene: Passive Aggressive AU #freestyle #my fics

16 notes · View notes

fueledbysprite · 6 years

Text

Part I II III

No, I have not seen The Seven Deadly Sins anime but it is somewhere (waves vaguely) on my anime to-watch list. I am still a beginner, and I sincerely apologize for using the name of the first popular ongoing anime series I found.

Chat squinted at the tiny screen, moving the baton from window to window to identify the one that belonged to Nathaniel himself. He zoomed in to peek through each glass pane, struggling to figure out how he would be able to recognize the redhead’s own bedroom. In Adrien’s head, he pictured a small room, walls covered in artwork, and a bulletin board on one wall, lined by lengths of red yarn, connecting pieces of some mystery that the artist was bound to be involved in.

Instead he found Nathaniel hunched over a desk, right next to a window at the top of the building. Chat leaned over the edge of the rooftop to try and get a view of something more, but that would be mostly impossible without being perched next to the window itself. And Chat couldn’t risk being caught.

At the same time, though, he needed to see what Nathaniel was doing on his desk. It might have been homework, but he wasn’t about to give the redhead the benefit of the doubt just yet. If Nathaniel could only move his head just the tiniest bit…

Luckily for Chat, the redhead held the book up in front of him just then, and if Chat found just the right angle, he could clearly see what was on the page...until he leaned so far out over the rooftop that he teetered off. His baton extended without command, keeping him from crashing onto the ground, but then it pivoted him onto the opposite plane. Which just so happened to mean that Chat slammed against the wall, nearly crashing into the window he was looking through, and balanced himself onto a tiny extension of protruding brick to prevent himself from falling off.

Then he glanced to the side and cursed inwardly. There was no way Nathaniel would have missed that, and, sure enough, the redhead peeked his head out a moment later. For a few seconds, the two teens simply stared at each other, blinking, before Nathaniel broke the silence.

“Chat?! What are you doing here?”

Chat did some very quick thinking.

“I was out for an evening stroll!” he replied innocently. “The air is very nice and fresh in this part of the city!”

“O...kay? You okay there?” Nathaniel asked, gesturing to Chat’s struggle maintaining balance.

“Of course! Excellent balance exercise,” Chat assured him, crossing his arms and swooping one leg over the other in a casual pose. However, the movement caused his feet to give way, and he let out a shriek, hastily regaining his place.

“That doesn’t look very safe...” the redhead said skeptically. “Maybe you should come inside...”

Chat froze. Nathaniel was literally inviting him into his own house. It was far too convenient to be plausible.

“Well, if you wouldn’t mind..” Chat relented, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

Nathaniel shrugged.

“It’s better than leaving you there hanging,” he said, then winced. “No pun intended.”

Chat smirked.

“I, for one, think your puns are pawsitively on point,” he told the artist.

“Please don’t,” Nathaniel said, a pained expression on his face.

Chat ignored him and hopped in through the window. He landed lightly on the floor and straightened to take a look around.

***

Apparently he had been wrong about expecting an artsy theme. Nathaniel didn’t have a single original work up.

His room was, however, covered from top to bottom with fan merchandise and fan art. Posters of anime serials and excerpts from manga, as well as promotional products and prints, occupied every square inch of wall and door. There were even pillows and plushies of Ghibli movie characters on the bed.

Chat stared long and hard, taking in the whole room. It was breathtaking.

Of course, what kind of devoted otaku would Adrien be if he didn’t have a shrine to Japanese media? However, his own consisted more of cleverly hidden goods and the unnoticeable poster here and there, but his father would have never let him get away with this.

“...Chat?” Nathaniel’s voice was hesitant, but it jerked the superhero back to the moment nonetheless.

“Yes?” Chat turned around to see Nathaniel looking back at him awkwardly. “Oh, sorry, I was admiring your room decor.”

“Oh, you like anime?”

Chat gaped at him.

“I don’t like anime, I love anime,” he corrected quietly.

“Oh,” Nathaniel understood. “Me too.”

Chat looked around the room for another few minutes before his eye fell upon a card of Japanese calligraphy that reminded him of…

“What time is it?” he asked suddenly.

Nathaniel jumped, subtly closing the book on the desk behind him.

“It’s, uh, 7, why?”

“I have to go,” Chat said. “Thanks for showing me the bedroom, gotta split, bye!”

“I...didn’t?” Nathaniel asked dubiously, but Chat was already gone. The redhead shrugged and went back to work.

***

Chat may have been interrupted because of Chinese lessons yesterday, but he vowed to get to the bottom of the Nathaniel enigma as soon as he could.

Unfortunately, there was another akuma. One that Nathaniel wasn’t involved in. Chat wasn’t sure if that was good for him or an inconvenience at this point.

By the time Ladybug had purified the akuma, it was too late to stalk civilians with a half-justifiable excuse.

Adrien was growing impatient, but he waited.

***

The next evening, Chat strode into Nathaniel’s room by himself, scaring the daylights out of the inhabitant artist, before getting a stern telling off about walking into people’s houses uninvited.

“What do you want, anyway?” Nathaniel asked, still regaining his composure.

Chat shrugged.

“Nothing-oh! Look, look- there!” He eagerly pointed to a random spot outside the window.

Nathaniel turned and Chat tried to get a quick glance of his sketchbook before Nath caught on.

“Ooh, wow, you’re right,” Nathaniel said interestedly, leaning out the window.

Chat turned too, surprised. It had been intended as a joke…

“What is it?” he asked, quickly putting the sketchbook back on the desk. He walked over to join the redhead at the window.

“Oh, nevermind, it’s gone now,” Nathaniel said disappointedly, turning back.

“What was it, though?” Chat asked.

Nathaniel shrugged, sliding onto his chair. He opened the book and leaned over it, bangs falling to cover whatever was on the page. Chat looked at him, confused. Oh, whatever. There were more pressing concerns at the moment. Like what was in The Sketchbook of Secrets.

“Sooo, Nathaniel...” Chat started in an attempt to distract him. “Whatcha doin’....?”

Nathaniel didn’t respond, busy shading something in. Chat groaned and occupied himself with the wonderful decoration.

“Hey, uh, why isn’t any of your art up here?” Chat asked, genuinely curious. “I thought you’d put your paintings and stuff on full display...”

“It’s not really that important...”

“Well, you should,” Chat recommended. “Your stuff is good enough that you should put it up. I mean...it’s not like I’ve ever seen it or anything...”

“I’m really not that good,” Nathaniel mumbled, flushing slightly.

Chat suddenly had a brilliant idea.

“Maybe if you could show me your sketchbook I might have a better idea of your skill...” the superhero suggested, extended his hand in expectation and leaning over to see.

Nathaniel frowned, closing the object of Chat’s burning curiosity.

“I don’t really like showing my stuff to other people...” he said, glancing at Chat slightly suspiciously. “Why do you want to see it, anyway?”

“Er...” Chat laughed casually, searching desperately for an excuse. “No reason...”

Nathaniel was scrutinizing him the same way he had scrutinized his alter ego. Chat needed a distraction before the artist caught onto something.

“You look like a strawberry,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“I said you look like a strawberry,” Chat repeated, eternally thankful that he had semi-successfully diverted from the pressing topic. “Even the shape of your face, when you’re blushing like that, you look just like a strawberry.”

“I’m not blushing...” Nathaniel said, flaming cheeks giving him away.

“See, told you you look like a strawberry,” Chat confirmed, low-key smug that he had fully succeeded in avoiding a disaster. “I’ll just see myself out, now,” he waved.

“Well, just so you know,” Nathaniel retorted, sticking his head out the window to yell at the leaving visitor. “There was nothing outside. I was bluffing you, only you’re clearly too dense to notice!” Then he snapped the blinds down.

Chat shrugged.

“Still a strawberry,” he said to himself triumphantly.

But his small victory dissipated by the time he was back in his room.

“It’s been almost a week and I still don’t know what he knows or is hiding,” he sighed, collapsing onto his bed.

“You’re probably not welcome at his house again, either,” Plagg added dryly. “But who cares? I want my camembert!”

Adrien glared.

“Can’t you see I’m trying to come up with a strategy? Go bother someone else for your camembert!”

“Given that I’m supposed to be a secret, who am I supposed to bother?”

“Ughh,” Adrien groaned, pushing himself back up. “Fine, I’ll get you your cursed camembert...”

He granted the kwami one wheel, securely locking the rest in a vault that Plagg supposedly could not access. He was fairly sure, anyway, since Plagg had to hide his eyes when Adrien was opening it, and he hadn’t managed to phase through once despite the temptation. The blond made sure to spray himself down and the area around him with the perfume he’d bought a few days ago.

“Y’know,” Plagg mentioned thoughtfully, nibbling on his cheese. “That redhead kid could be a strawberry, but you look a lot like a banana.”

Adrien frowned, looking at him.

“...is that supposed to be implying something…?” he asked suspiciously.

“Of course not,” Plagg dismissed. “Get your mind out of the gutter. But, now that I think about it, your hair does look like it’s made up of a whole bunch of little bananas.”

Adrien rolled his eyes.

“How does anyone’s hair look like it’s made of fruit?”

Plagg shrugged.

“Could just be the visuals,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” the kwami quickly waved off. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Uh, huh..” Adrien nodded warily, narrowing his eyes still.

“What’re you staring at me for, Bananadrien? Go watch your anime and let me finish my camembert in peace!”

Adrien’s eyes widened in shocked panic.

“I forgot! The new episode of The Seven Deadly Sins season 2 was supposed to come out! Oh, I’ve been so caught up with Nath, it completely slipped my mind!”

Adrien didn’t waste a second in turning on his TV and finding the latest episode to stream.

Plagg rolled his eyes from his place on the foosball table.

“If he keeps this obsession going with that redhead, they’ll be dating before long,” he mumbled to himself, then shrugged. “I totally called it.”

22 notes · View notes

shawol9196 · 6 years

Text

Rebel Rebel (Oneshot; Het!Minkey)

Uhhh this is just a oneshot, based on David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” where Gwiboon meets Minho at a bar.

For @lockandminkey and @minhoinator

Gwiboon isn’t sure what she expected. The club she’s arrived at -- listed as a ‘fun and casual place for 80s punk beginners’ -- is still a little frightening. She’d worn the wildest dress she owned, a well bleached overalls dress, but she still felt more than a little out of place looking around at everyone else. She wanders around for a while, checking out all the odd posters on the wall. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots a man sitting at the far end of the bar who also looks like too much of a goody two shoes to be there: he’s got a backpack on his lap and he’s the only person there with seemingly naturally colored hair. He’s by far the most approachable looking person out of everyone so she makes her way over to him. Most of the bar is filled, but there’s a seat on his left seemingly open.

“Is this stool taken?” she asks.

“No, it’s all yours.” he says back with a smile.

She quickly sits, somehow afraid he’ll change his mind, and looks over the drink menu.

“I like your hair.” the man says.

Gwiboon reaches up to her newly cropped hair. After having near waist-length hair for most of her life, she was still having trouble getting used to her new ‘boy cut’.

“Thanks my mom hates it. She says it make me look like a boy.”

“Is that what you were going for?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t want to be a long haired princess anymore.”

“Well, boy or girl, it’s a cute look on you. Granted I haven’t seen you with princess hair, but from what I can imagine this looks much cuter.”

Gwiboon thanks him shyly, trying to hide her blush.

The man laughs. “What color is it? All these lights make it hard to tell. Well, that and my color blindness.”

“It’s mostly orange due to an unfortunate accident.”

“Accident as in you tried to dye it red and washed it out too quick in hot water or accident as in you tried to bleach it with hydrogen peroxide?”

“Uhhh both.”

He laughs again. “My friend has had every hair color under the sun and used every method imaginable to do it.”

“Can you see the color?” she asks.

“I could if we weren’t covered in blue lights. I’m Minho, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Minho. I’m...my name is Gwiboon.”

“Is Gwiboon your given name or the name you want me to call you?”

“It’s...it’s uhh...my given name.”

“Is that what you’d like to be called, or would you rather something else?”

No one had ever bothered to ask her if Gwiboon was what she wanted to be called before and the gesture takes her pleasantly by surprise.

“I...I uhh...would you call me Ki?”

“If that’s what you want me to call you. To be clear, you’re saying it Ki, like the thing that goes into locks, right?”

“Yeah...I know it sounds dumb I’m still trying to work on my name.”

“I don’t think it’s dumb. It sounds enough like your given name that you want to respond to it but also has a neutral feel to it. Simple, clean, recognizable.”

“That’s what I was hoping for.”

“Is this your first time out?”

“Yeah. Does it show?”

“Just a little. Are you old enough? I’ll buy you a drink if it’s ok.”

“Yeah, I’m 23 so that’s a thing we can do.”

Minho smiles and waves the bartender over. “I’ll have a whiskey neat and whatever my friend Ki here would like.”

Ki quickly tries to look through the drink menu again. She’s tries to think of what might be good to have but doesn’t have enough of an understanding of alcohol to really make a choice.

“Beginner with alcohol I take it?” Minho asks.

“Yeah, a bit. I’ve had beer once but that’s really it. Do you have something you’d recommend?”

“Do you like soda?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, a whiskey neat for me and then a jack and coke for them.” Minho says, turning back to the bartender. When their glasses are set in front of them, Ki hesitates. She watches Minho take a sip of his glass and is unsure how much she’s supposed to drink.

“If it’s your first time, just sip on it. If you decide you don’t like it, I’ll finish it, no worries. What’s your plan for going home?”

“Why?” Ki asks, mildly panicked by the question.

“I mean like are you going to be driving home or taking a taxi or what? I just want to make sure you’re going to be able to get home okay if you don’t handle the drink well.”

“Oh. My friend is supposed to pick me up but I have taxi money if they flake out.”

Minho reaches out, grabs a drink coaster from the edge of the bar.

“Write your address on here, and then keep it in your pocket.”

��Why?”

“That way you don’t drunkenly forget where you live if you have to take a taxi and get stuck here.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I learned that one the hard way the first time I went out by myself.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m 23 too.”

They both sit there a while, sipping at their drinks and commenting on the songs that come on. As she gets further and further into her drink, Ki’s nerves start to subside and she finds herself opening up more and more to Minho. The lights start getting brighter, club getting louder as more and more people pack in. It’s not quite unpleasant but it’s starting to reach that level. She checks her phone to see that it’s close to 10pm.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” Minho asks, seemingly noticing her discomfort.

“What’s....upstairs?”

“There’s seating and stuff up on the roof. It’s quieter up there, it’d be easier for us to keep talking. I promise I’m not trying to pull anything. There’s a smaller bar up there too so there’s guaranteed to be at least a few people up there.”

“Oh. That sounds nice, I guess. Yeah, that’s fine.”

Minho stands and slings his bag over one shoulder. He’s taller than Gwiboon expected him to be. He holds a hand out to her.

“Do you want to hold my hand? The stairs are on the far side and the floor is getting pretty crowded, I’d hate for you to get lost in the sea. I’ll let go once we get to the stairs, unless you don’t want me to.”

Ki shyly takes his hand and they slowly make their way through the throng of people. When they’re almost through, the hem of Ki’s dress catches on the spikes of someone’s bracelet and rips. Though she’d intended to be less conventional today, to be daring, it’s a little too short for her liking. She holds Minho’s hand tighter, and he brings her to a darker spot besides the stairs.

“Are you okay?” he asks, letting go of her hand.

“Yeah, I just...it caught...” she explains, trying to pull her dress down as far as she can without exposing her chest.

“I have a change of clothes, a spare shirt and jeans, if you want them. It’s chilly out and you don’t seem quite ready for a mini skirt just yet.”

Ki struggles for a minute, torn between not wanting to wear a mostly stranger’s clothes and not wanting to feel so exposed. In the end, she accepts the jeans and shirt and ducks into the bathroom to change. Though his niceness is a little nerve wracking, she’s having a good time with Minho so far. She smells what she assumes is his cologne when she pulls the shirt over her head. It’s nice, very nice, and she considers asking him for the name of it so she can buy some for herself. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Finally out of a dress for the first time in a long time, there’s something exciting about her boyish appearance. She can already hear her mother yelling about it. She goes back out and finds Minho still waiting where she left him. He smiles.

“All good?”

“Yup. Thanks for letting me borrow them.”

“No problem. I always bring a spare change of clothes. There’s always something that happens. Something gets torn, someone pukes all over your shoes, people are a mess. Still wanting to go to the roof?”

Ki nods and they head up the staircase and out onto the roof. True to Minho’s word, it’s much quieter and much less populated. There’s a few couches out and an attempted bar in one corner. There’s string lights strung all about and a few small speakers playing somewhat softer music than downstairs. They make their way to a empty couch and Minho puts his backpack in between them to maintain space between them.

“So are you a rebel with or without a cause?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“You said your mom hates your hair. You’re 23 and this is your first time out, first time drinking, and you’re alone. Forgive me for guessing, but it seems like you haven’t had much experience with freedom.”

“Oh. Both I guess? I’m trying to distance myself from my mom and her image of me but I’m also trying to figure out who I am.”

“Makes sense. My friend Junghee -- the one whose dyed their hair a lot -- went through a similar thing. Their parents were very...controlling and conservative. We grew up together, went all the way through school together. When they started experimenting and exploring, I tried to keep up with them, in terms of like understanding concepts and terminology and stuff, to try and help support them.”

“That’s so sweet.”

“I mean, I think it should be standard, but I guess it is sweet with how little people do that. That’s why I asked about what you wanted me to call you. Junghee isn’t their given name, but it’s what they prefer. It took me a little while to get used to it, after 12 years of calling them by their old name, but it’s the least I could do.”

Ki reaches out and holds Minho’s hand, surprised by her own boldness. She blushes a bit and he laughs.

“If you’re being both shy and forward, what am I supposed to do?”

Ki laughs and he smiles more. They talk more, about their backgrounds, their dreams, their self discovery journeys, their future plans. It’s been a while since Ki’s had the chance to open up to someone and it feels nice. Eventually the conversation dies down and they sit there silently, holding hands. Ki sits up, suddenly, feeling another burst of confidence. She stands, pulling Minho up with her.

“Let’s dance.” she suggests.

The song playing ends and they wait for the next song to start. It’s a slow song and the lyrics are gloomy but the melody is pretty and its enough for them to be able to dance. Minho puts his free arm around her waist and Ki puts her hand on his shoulder and they sway around, trying their best to slow dance to the song. There’s something nice about being in Minho’s arms and between the warmth and his sweet cologne and the soft lighting and the little bit of alcohol in her system, she thinks she might be in love. The song ends but another slow song plays so they keep dancing. Halfway through, Ki’s phone rings. Minho waits patiently as she takes the call.

“That was my friend,” she explains when she hangs up. “They’re not going to be able to pick me up.”

“That’s too bad. Whenever you’re ready to go, I’ll help you hail a taxi.”

“Thanks. Sorry I’m such a mess.”

“It’s alright. I kinda like it.”

They dance a while longer and soon their foreheads are resting against each other.

“Ki, may I kiss you?”

Ki’s never been kissed before, but she’s also never drank before, never been to a club before, never danced before, never cut her hair like this before, so she figures what’s one more first for this night and says yes. Minho leans in, softly pressing his lips to hers. He pulls away after a moment and Ki unwittingly follows. He smiles and laughs a little before kissing her again. While Ki didn’t have any expectations about tonight, making out with a guy she’d just met was definitely not on the list of possibilities she had considered. Yet here she was, enjoying Minho’s plush lips under the stars. All too soon, the bartender’s calling out that they’re closing in five minutes. Minho pulls away reluctantly.

“Come on, I’ll help you hail a taxi.” he says, voice horcer than before.

“Do you want your clothes back?” Ki asks.

“No, you keep them. A, you don’t really have anything else to wear, and B, they look cute on you.”

He stands and shoulders his backpack, leading Ki back downstairs and outside. He waves out and manages to catch a driver’s attention rather quickly. He opens the door for Ki to get in. Ki reaches up for his chin and gives him one last kiss.

“Thank you for tonight. It was really wonderful. You made it great.” she says, getting into the taxi.

“It was my pleasure, Ki. Be careful going home.”

He waits outside as Ki gives the driver her address, waving as they leave. It’s not until the taxi pulls back into traffic that Ki realizes she should’ve asked for Minho’s number. She turns around, but they’re already too far away for her to see him. She sighs, holding the coaster in her hand. She looks down at it, expecting to see her address, but instead, there’s a note.

I had a nice time with you tonight. I know I’m not that wild of a guy, but I’d love to take you for a date. Stay rebellious, it looks good on you.

Minho (867-5309)

#gwi/ki is a mess but its ok because theyre cute #she texts minho and they go on a date and it ends happily ever after probably #shout out to true good guy minho #minkey #het!minkey #minho #gwiboon #1 shot 2 shot just for 1

35 notes · View notes