#I’ll have to render a scene like that if I can get a good outdoor model somewhere

[emmagail-brainrot]

Saw Into the Spiderverse and had Emmagail thoughts when I saw Miles’ many, many, drawings of Gwen.

That’s Abi, Abi’s sketchbook is filled with pages of Emma and she guards it with her life.

[earliebirb]

i’ll save you a seat

steve/tony, established relationship, canon divergence, 1673 words

(inspired by this deleted scene from the avengers [2012])

“Waiting on the big guy?”

“Ma’am?” Steve looks up from his sketchbook, eyes squinting against the sunlight. 

He meets the gaze of one of the waitresses working at the café. Her long blond hair flows down to her chest and she is dressed in the café’s signature uniform: pastel orange blouse, black skirt, and a white half apron tied around her waist. 

“Iron Man,” the waitress clarifies, lips quirked up in a knowing smile. “A lot of people eat here just to see him fly by.”

“Right,” Steve says, lips twitching at their inside joke. He opens his mouth to say something else, but a familiar silhouette in the distance catches his eye and breaks his train of thought. “Uh, actually…”

He nods at the sky. The waitress follows his gaze.

The object grows larger, approaching at a high speed. It morphs into a blur of red and gold that streaks across the blue sky right above them, sending a gust of wind that ruffles the waitress’ blond locks. The figure lands a short distance away from the café with a distinct metallic thunk — the sound of gold-titanium alloy hitting concrete. 

All around him, people begin to whisper among themselves with excitement, some even taking out their phones to document the spectacle. Although Steve can’t really say he enjoys the attention, warmth still blooms in his chest as he observes the approaching figure. He finds himself hiding an involuntary grin behind his hand.

“Always a dramatic entrance, huh?” The waitress chuckles.

“You know it.” Steve sighs with fond exasperation. All eyes are on Tony as he walks toward the outdoor area of the café, the nanotech suit peeling away from his body. The excited murmurs and whispers increase in volume.

When Tony finally arrives at the table, he bends down to plant a kiss on Steve’s cheek. “Good morning, beloved.”

“Mr. Stark-Rogers,” the kind waitress greets with a smile. “The usual?”

“Please, Beth. I told you to call me Tony.” Tony reaches up to slide his sunglasses a few inches down the bridge of his nose, giving her a disapproving look that makes her chuckle. “And yes, please. Thank you.”

“Table’s yours as long as you like,” she says before disappearing into the indoor part of the café to relay the order. Steve knows she means it, too. She’ll make sure of it, just like she always has for the past few years.

The café had been Steve’s favorite café, at first. He visited the place often, especially during his first few weeks in the twenty-first century. He developed a fondness for their sesame seed bagels and the lovely view of Stark Tower from his favorite outdoor table, although the latter is a fact Steve would never admit to Tony even on pain of death. 

However, the café quickly became Steve and Tony’s favorite café when their reluctant camaraderie bloomed into friendship all those years ago. Even before they started dating, Steve and Tony already established a weekly ritual of having brunch at the café whenever their schedules aligned. 

Tony did eventually admit to Steve that he found the café’s coffee to be subpar. He did, however, insist that the café was his favorite, albeit for reasons different from Steve’s. Not for the bagels, not for the exceptional view of Stark Tower, and definitely not for the coffee, but because the café was a place full of memories. His memories of the two of them, his memories of Steve:

“That café was where I first made you laugh. Like, really laugh. I’d seen you smile or chuckle before, but that kind of full-body laughter? That was a first. And I remember thinking that… I really, really liked the way you laughed.”

It has been seven years since Steve first sat at this very table and sketched the figure of Stark Tower looming before him. Beth is still working at the café, having made her way through the ranks. Now a co-owner of the café, she has developed a friendship of sorts with Steve and Tony — both of whom she claims to be her favorite regulars. Tony likes to joke about how she probably says that to all of her regulars, something Beth always denies vehemently. 

Steve turns his attention back to Tony, who has taken off and folded his sunglasses, letting them hang from the collar of his shirt. 

“Would it kill you to take the elevator and walk?”

“It’s not like I do this every single time. Besides, why take the elevator when you have a flying suit? That’s just ineffective.” Tony makes a face as he pulls his chair out.

“‘S good exercise.”

“I exercise plenty.” Tony sits down on the chair across from him, scooting closer to the table. Under the table, his ankle brushes Steve’s. “Besides, we just engaged in a vigorous workout session this morning.” Tony bites his lower lip, giving Steve a lascivious wink.

“Tony,” Steve reprimands, but finds himself unable to say anything further, not when the back of his neck is heating up at the memory of what they were up to just a few hours ago. While Steve immediately showered afterward and headed straight to the café, Tony decided he wanted to sleep for a few more hours, promising to join Steve later. 

Tony grins before leaning forward on his elbows to peer at Steve’s sketch.

“Which lucky building are you sketching today, honeybunch?”

He squints and frowns when instead of a building he finds a rough and nondescript sketch of a person’s face. 

It could be anyone to the untrained eye, but Steve’s pen strokes are sure and confident, having rendered the same jawline countless of times. 

Every single time, Tony’s figure never fails to fascinate him. Always so beautiful from every angle, in every light. Steve knows it well enough by now to be able to sketch him simply from an image in his mind’s eye. 

Still, nothing beats the real thing. Steve takes in the sweep of Tony’s dark lashes and his coffee brown eyes as he appraises the drawing.

“It’s not a building,” Steve says instead. 

Tony hums noncommittally, tilting his head at the sketch and giving it one last look before leaning back in his seat. “How was your morning run?”

“Uneventful.”

“Really?” Tony says distractedly, his attention on Beth who is once again approaching their table with his cup of coffee, black as midnight.

Tony engages in more small talk with Beth as she sets the cup and saucer on the table, asking after her husband and kids. There is an easy and carefree smile on his face, crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes.

All the while, his fingers are fiddling with two sugar packets Steve knows he will only use one of. He is always buzzing with energy, parts of him always in a state of perpetual motion, finding it near impossible to stay still. 

Steve also knows that he won’t finish the coffee because it wasn’t made by Steve or himself.

These little idiosyncrasies are details that make up Tony, the little quirks that only Steve knows.

The little things that make you mine, Steve thinks privately. He feels something inside him softening at the thought.

“Sorry, honey,” Tony says when Beth eventually leaves to take another table’s orders, his smile soft and affectionate. “You were saying? Running was uneventful?”

“Yeah,” Steve says quietly, “nothing really interesting.” He admires the way sunlight turns the tips of Tony’s dark hair into a lighter shade of brown. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’re still the highlight of my morning.”

Tony huffs, rolling his eyes, but his lips curve up into a pleased smile and his brown eyes are warm with affection as he meets Steve’s gaze. He reaches for Steve’s hand on the table, giving it a gentle squeeze. The band of vibranium around his husband’s ring finger gleams in the late morning sunlight.

“I better be, after waking you up with one hell of a—”

“Tony!” Steve exclaims, knocking his ankle against Tony’s in warning. “Stop it.”

“What? It’s the truth! You really did enjoy it when I—”

“There are children around,” Steve hisses, casting a furtive glance at a nearby table occupied by a family of four. 

Tony laughs softly, his shoulders shaking with it. Still holding his gaze, he brings Steve’s hand to his lips, pressing two feather-light kisses to the back of his hand. He continues holding Steve’s hand against his mouth, and when he speaks Steve feels his lips and the bristles of his goatee brushing his skin.

“Sorry, baby, I can’t help it.” Tony hides a smile against Steve’s knuckles. “You’re just so pretty when you blush.”

Steve looks down, avoiding Tony’s eyes in favor of staring at the cookie crumbs next to his half-full cup of coffee that has long since gone cold. His cheeks are still burning, and Tony’s words are not helping.

“See?” Tony says, before planting a kiss to his knuckles. “So pretty.”

Steve shuts his eyes with a defeated sigh. “Please just drink your coffee.”

Tony chuckles again but Steve hears the clink of ceramic, a cup being lifted from its saucer. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

He only allows himself to open his eyes when Tony gets distracted by some pigeons, immediately launching into a spiel about the one time he was attacked by a pigeon who was apparently really determined to steal his sandwich.

Steve nods along dutifully, reacting at appropriate times throughout the story, but all he can think of is that sitting there, at a café’s outdoor table on Park Avenue on a bright Sunday morning, his husband sat in front of him talking a mile a minute, is that there is nowhere else he’d rather be.

His gaze falls down to where Tony’s hand is still holding his, even when his other hand is gesturing animatedly as he tells his story.

Yes. Steve thinks, smiling helplessly at the twinkle in Tony’s eyes — the one that appears whenever he gets excited. I’m home. 

[kingfakey]

hey there, i was just wondering how did u do the windows and shadows on the post uploaded on the 6th of May on render please? Looks amazeballs

hello lovely anon! do you mean this render? i've gotten a lot of questions about it and people wondering how it was done, so this feels long overdo.

buckle up!

also, if this doesn't help, or just brings up more questions than you had to begin with, please feel free to message me off anon and i'll hop into your DMs to hold your hand and help you through it!

step one: the windows.

literally any windows will work, whether they're cc or from the game themselves. apply the material/texture as usual, but when it comes to the panes of glass, the most important thing is the glass shader. the glass shader you use has a lot, lot, lot to do with how the end result you're gonna get looks. you want your glass to reflect, be transparent, allow light through, and not create a lot of blur and caustics (as glass tends to do). this is my glass shader node set up, and i'm very proud of it, and anyone is welcome to use it. i don't need credit, just think of me and blow a kiss to the sky and i'll get the energy. 💕

in the instance of this render, the windows (and the wall they're on) are at a 45 degree angle, which in this case, creates a lot more light than most windows would because of the angle. it takes some fiddling to make it stick, but angling your windows are suuuper worth it for the effect it creates.

step two: the environment.

if you're not familiar with the world shader, you're about to meet her! you can find it in your shading panel, here. for a quick run down, i recommend this tutorial to get you started, because it's something that's good to have a basic understanding of, and this should give you a little foundation to start from!

you can find a buttload of HDRI here, too, from HDRI haven.

the environment your render is using has a lot to do with what lighting will happen. some HDRI create indoor light, or outdoor light, night time, or any number of things. this all sounds really complicated, but the node set up for it is actually much more simple than the youtube men will make it out to be. it's five nodes. (i've noticed that usually when you put one in, the entire scene will be flipped upside down, so that 180 value is in the X rotiation to flip the entire world rightside up!)

see also: the strength is normally set to 1, but i like to turn it up higher to really make it bright outside, but this depends on the HDRI you're going to be using. night time scenes should probably still be a 1.

i've rendered out a few shots using the same set up, just changing out the HDRI every time to create a slightly different effect!

1. urban street 04

2. kloppenheim 02

3. blaubeuren night

[battlestar-royco]

IT'S BEEN 84 YEARS. LET'S TALK ABOUT NETFLIX'S SHADOW AND BONE.

8.7/10 ⭐️

spoilers for everythingggg under the cut! i'll be discussing its merits as an adaptation vs as a show, characters and plots, and the overall aesthetic and magic/world.

SHOW VS ADAPTATION:

i say this as someone who knows all the books very well and has been in the fandom for nearly a decade, so i'm biased. but. s&b functions better as an adaptation than as a standalone show. alina's plot moves so well, and satisfyingly renders so many iconic scenes and sites from s&b. the worldbuilding is also pretty easy to fall into, with a forgivable amount of voiceover/infodump. and, hurting budget aside, i mostly liked this visual interpretation of the gv.

(sidebar: the in-universe racism... doesn't work. i tried to view it in good faith but imo it was very heavy-handed. if it was framed like, "wow it's a SHU WOMAN saving the world!!!" it might've been better, but it's just racism without recompense. and it's a terrible look to make other characters of color racist. i just. why?)

as for the crows, however... i'm just not sure how strong they'll be for new viewers? i totally understand why they were included, and i really like certain connections the show made between the two series. it was a great decision to introduce the druskelle in the first Cut scene, and showing nina as a ravkan spy.

the new crows stuff felt in character, but i think the show is at its height when it sticks to the books. the first couple episodes switching between tgt and proto-soc gave me whiplash, but luckily it got more organic as it progressed. if i didn't know and love all the crows before going in, i wouldn't be that invested in them based on season 1. aside from a couple fantastic scenes, it really felt like the writers were trying to make fetch happen for like 4 episodes before they figured out what to do with everyone. plus, ravka is such a different vibe from ketterdam--tonally, sartorially, technologically, etc they didn't totally feel like the same world. it was pretty jarring. although i prefer the duo to the trio, s&b is alina's story and she is That Bitch who walked so the crows could fly. so i didn't hate their inclusion but the shoehorned content did at times disservice both plots, imo.

CHARACTERS:

way too many, which is yet another consequence of smushing everyone into one season.

MAL/ALINA/DARKLING: first and foremost, and i PROMISE i'm not saying this just to be a hater, but there needed to be less malina. i'll be the first to say that show!mal really has what book!mal wants. the new pre-fold scenes were so good. li and renaux have amazing chemistry, and their laughter over stolen grapes was a highlight. his stag plot was also good. THAT SAID, there were way too many keramzin flashbacks and malina parallels like.. 🤢🤢why do they want us to love mal so much. for what. they only needed the teacup scene but they clearly thought they were doing something with micro-aggressions and that meadow shot they showed like 6 times. knowing mal's original character, and how they scrubbed his show counterpart almost to the point of flawlessness, he's just never going to be my fave even though i do respect what they did with him. also, why were there like 5 fake deaths for this dude? boring.

the darkling was great. ben barnes knows what the fuck he's about, and he funneled manipulation and charisma into every scene. as for the backstory: at first i really wasn't feeling it, but i eventually did warm up to it and i'm so glad they showed it because oh god the cut and the creation of the fold were SO FUCKING ICONIC. also, love love love the baghra development. WE LOVE TO SEE OLD WOMEN/MOMS WHO AREN'T "EVIL"/"CORRUPTED" BY THEIR MAGICAL POWERS!!!!!!! BITCH! it didn't have to be 12 minutes long though.

i honestly don't have much to say on alina. jml was excellent in her role and very true to the book. without her book narration she feels much more consistently written.

TRILOGY CHARACTERS: i really felt the lack of genya and zoya. genya's character and actress are perfectly layered and effective, even though their roles are relatively minor. i'm so looking forward to her razrushost moment, but i wish they'd laid more groundwork for it. (and i hope throw out the wig and just dye her hair next season.) also like. WHY KEEP THE IRRELEVANT MEAN GIRL/DARKLING THIRST PLOT FOR ZOYA??? AFTER ALL THE EFFORT THEY PUT INTO IMPROVING MAL? they sacrificed so much for malina at the expense of other characters. finally, it was interesting how they decided to kill marie. i love the tailor magic flex. but also they clearly just did that to emotionally manipulate us and connect the crows so. hm.

CROWS: speaking of! the crows storyline felt a little like filler. honestly i wish they waited to roll crows into later seasons. i'd prefer little foreshadowings about them, a la the druskelle cameo or the references to nina and matthias. introducing the crows so soon makes the ice court heist feel less special. the recruitment was super tight and pragmatic, so this felt a little fluffy/fanservicey. kaz also comes off as sooooo old again. especially without the vulnerability of his book counterpart, he just seems like a 40-year-old in a 20something body.

i was pleasantly surprised to find jesper my favorite crow. like wow.... second amendment rights for jesper fahey only!! i like all the crows but book!kanej are my faves by a long shot. they felt a bit stiff tbh, like the actors were a little uncomfy with each other and/or their exposition-heavy lines. however, the one scene that felt EXTREMELY kanej to me was when they killed that dude in the church holy fuck oh my god. WE STAN AN ANGSTY BATTLE COUPLE WHO ARE BOTH DEAD INSIDE. highlight for sure.

and i actually kinda loved helnik? i know helnik is controversial for very valid reasons, but i thoughy their dynamic was fantastic and they were among the strongest performers. it was much less overwhelming than the constantly interweaving kaz/inej/jesper imo. they need to fire their location scout though. those green screen mountains and beaches were um. interesting.

aesthetic and magic:

i really hope they get a bigger budget for costumes, cgi, and sets next season! the keftas are serviceable, but they look a little cheap at times. i will also never forgive ANY of the crows' hats. it's mostly just a personal aesthetic thing but god i fucking hate them. the darkling was best dressed, but in general i liked the ravkan look more than the kerch. why were the crows always in the most elaborate getups? why couldn't they just chill in their waistcoats??? they never seemed relaxed in the way alina and co did; the clothes never felt worn or broken in.

favorite sets: the darkling's room, the crow club, all the grisha tents, the matthias/nina ship, the church where inej killed the squaller, outdoor fountain where they told the story of the black heretic. the lighting was almost always right for each scene, and there was so much detail in every one of them.

THE MAGIC WAS SO COOL! my greatest beef is alina's light--it often looked so fake, and it washed out jml. oftentimes it was fluorescent or blue, and it was used as a forcefield or orb. it's supposed to be sunlight bro. what is so hard about that? the darkling's magic looked good, other than the fold. i've always imagined the fold more like a huge black fog rather than a literal wall. so that was a bit game of thronesy, but not terrible.

and can we talk about the amplifiers? amplifiers are my personal favorite gv lore but season 1 barely gets into them. they never mention the bear zoya slew, nor do they establish the unique strength of the stag, sea dragon, and firebird. BUT THE ANTLER COLLAR FUSED INTO ALINA'S SKIN WAS SUPER DARK AND MACABRE AND I KINDA LIKED IT? ALTHOUGH I HAVE TO WONDER HOW TF IS SHE GONNA SLEEP???

if you made it this far, thanks so much! that's all i have for today.

[aion-rsa]

The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 12 Review: Diary Queen

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This The Simpsons review contains spoilers.

The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 12

The Simpsons Season 32, episode 12, “Diary Queen,” may be the sweetest offering of the series. It’s not only sentimental and self-esteem-positive, it’s downright edumacational. At least for Bart, who certainly learns a lesson. Thankfully, as the episode explains by example, he probably won’t retain it.

“What’s the matter, Bart? I figure you’d be used to failing by now,” Edna Krabappel once consoled the spiky haired kid who seemed so determined to get through school without schooling. Marcia Wallace, who played the Springfield Elementary teacher, died unexpectedly in October 2013. Edna’s death was first acknowledged in “Four Regrettings and a Funeral,” from season 25, when Bart wrote “We’ll really miss you Mrs. K” on the chalkboard. He only wrote it once. Her death was punishment enough. Both the character and the voice actor were instrumental in the chemistry of The Simpsons, and chemistry happens to be one of the few things Bart’s ever excelled at in school, even pranking a talent show in the “Haw-Haw Land” episode. But he gets his beakers crossed in the latest installment.

“Diary Queen” opens with an inspired West Side Story song parody, “Too Nice” replacing “Tonight.”  It’s time for Ned Flanders’s annual yard sale, and he’s on a holy mission to undersell eBay. Comic Book Guy is looking for a broom to play Quidditch on, Waylen Smithers is going to score some kitsch, and Ned will finally toss those fuzzy dice Maude bought him to the bottom of an impulse item box of jokes he did not get. The Flanders family are parting with their humble possession in a public bid for humility, in case no one notices. Ned gives up Rod’s teeth. Todd consigns his toys to the auction block on the grass. “Playing is a sin that we regret,” one of the Flanders kids explains.

Ned’s bizarre outdoor bazaar is the only segment which has any meanness in it. The Springfieldians want to take advantage of Ned, and openly mock him. Carl and Lenny turn the yard sale into a yarn brawl, and Jimbo’s gang buys commemorative plates just to smash them. It’s enough to send Ned looking for the fans he always carries around in case of stress-induced hot flashes. As Patty and Selma are flicking ashes into Rod and Tod’s baby shoes, it seems Nelson, Bart, and Millhouse are the only ones worthy to buy Ned’s treasured mementos. And, of those, only Nelson’s purchase is authentic. He buys all the bad words, like “adultery” and “fornication,” which Ned cut out of his old religious texts. Nelson has a genuine use for them, you can just tell.

Bart and Millhouse buy the books. Even without the offending admonishments, they swear they’ll still find useful ways to better themselves. Their haul winds up being the fiery centerpiece for a supercool skateboarding feat which no one will ever see. It’s an old joke, but we do get to notice how big Millhouse’s nose looks when he’s picking it. One book, which gives the title to the episode, is spared the conflagration of Bart’s daredevil jump: Edna Krabappel’s diary. Bart recognizes the Ds and Fs, and Millhouse recognizes the smell of Parliament Lights 100s. It’s very telling how these are the most recognizable clues. They are each ready-made character punchlines.

The diary is a font of information. Bart and Millhouse learn all the teachers work night jobs during school hours, and the many lonely secrets of Groundskeeper Willie. But their first use of it is inspired gaggery. Bart learns Superintendent Chalmers keeps his car keys behind the visor. The two kids not only steal the car but take advantage of a free yogurt offer at a car wash. The idea that taking the yogurt and ditching the car is a “perfect crime” is great kids’ logic. It is a little odd, however, that Springfield’s Chief Wiggum sees fourth grade car thieves as inspiration for a little personal time with Officer Lou, but it works within Simpsons logic.

The central point of the episode is Bart’s relationship with his dead teacher, and his relationship with himself. He actually believes someone he thought only saw him as troublesome also considered him “smart as a whip.” It leads him to believe he actually has potential, which he translates to: all the time he was showing his butt he was showing promise. This spurs him into thinking about getting seriously educated. Not only does he try but he succeeds on his first dry run, resisting the urge to draw a skeleton head on a multiple-choice test grid, and getting an A. Not only does he finally understand how his sister Lisa doesn’t suck, but he puts himself on the same level.

Lisa goes through all the stages of jealousy, and even realizes she’s on the verge of obsession when even her imaginary comfort pony begins to look like Bart. This makes it worse, because realizing he is the only thing she can think about only makes her dwell on it. Lisa is usually the family genius, and how she reacts to Bart doing well really depends on the circumstance and need for story conflict. For instance, when Bart had to apply geometry to miniature golf in an early episode, Lisa brought a Zenlike understanding of all things which putt. Lisa does Bart a disservice tonight in the guise of doing the right thing. It’s her MO.

Of course, Marge and Lisa don’t trust Bart’s recent good grades, but while he comes up clean to Marge, Lisa digs up the dirt. Bart correlates “cruel” with “lying” because “they’re both great.” He thinks he’s going to win a Spelling Bee just because he has the potential to do it. Would it have been less cruel for Lisa to let him see how far his belief would get him? She’s set him up for worse humiliations just for an edge at science fairs.

Millhouse gets a few good gags tonight. When Lisa starts developing a rash because of the stress of not crushing her brother’s potential, he pulls cream out of his fanny pack labeled “rash stash.” Groundskeeper Willie is a highlight of the episode. His character has one of the most interesting takes on passive aggressive behavior in comedy. It’s not that he gets it backwards, so much as he pays it forward: Terrorizing Bart with the idea of simmering a new pet into rabbit stew when all he’s thinking of is how much bunnies love stewed carrots.

Read more

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The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 11 Review: The Dad Feelings-Limited

By Tony Sokol

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The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 10 Review: A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas

By Tony Sokol

Subtle social commentary makes its way into the episode. As this is the first episode since the Trump presidency, it opens with a Bald Eagle flying a sign asking “Is it safe yet?” We learn Ned doesn’t find Bill Maher funny. A priest tells Bart and Millhouse reading someone else’s diary in church is not the worst thing you can do within the hallowed walls. Moments later we see the priest handcuffed and escorted past the pews by the police. We can only wonder what offenses are happening at Reverend Lovejoy’s competition.

Fat Tony (Tony Montagna) tells his henchmen his crime family doesn’t kill children, “We wait till they’re 18.” Lisa is kept up at night by the cold dead eyes of Mike Pence. Subtle subversive commentary can be found when Principal Skinner declares the drug-free portion of the school assembly a success because Lisa, the only one in the auditorium, tells him she doesn’t do drugs. But the scene comes shortly after we learn Dr. Hibbert is pushing kiddie-Xanax “sleepies” and “dopies” on her. The best bad side effects are “Portuguese insolence” and the “tendency to see yourself as others see you.”

The episode has quite a few sight gags which work well. The sign outside the Spelling Bee contest reads H-E-A-R, and we see one of the losing contestants ripping up a dictionary on the way to the exit. When Ned starts to preachify in the treehouse, he only stops because Bart is drawing back a trigger finger on his slingshot. Mrs. Krabappel’s beloved cat not only was not harmed during the making of the episode, but was a willing participant, according to the closing disclaimer. One of the stills in the photo montage is of Krabappel watching The Bob Newhart Show, which Marcia Wallace was a regular on.

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For the majority of The Simpsons’ run, Mrs. Krabappel was a sexually independent woman who was often “looking for a substitute to teach me a lesson I sorely need.” She began dating widower Ned in “The Ned-Liest Catch” from season 22. They married in secret and stayed together until her death in “The Man Who Grew Too Much.” The cause of Edna’s death has never been revealed, except in a non-canon, future-set episode. For this installment, Wallace’s two lines are taken from earlier episodes. “Diary Queen” will be her last appearance.

This is a different kind of arc for The Simpsons. “Diary Queen” is on an uplifting trajectory until Lisa knocks it off course, and ends in a sudden life-affirming crash. Bart’s final warning to Marge, “I’ll go over the edge if you try to make me feel better,” is wonderfully skewered, but the final twist is a dose of treacle. The episode was originally slated to premiere on Valentine’s Day, and is a sweet sendoff.

The post The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 12 Review: Diary Queen appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[ancientwastedlores]

The Support System (Ch: 7)

SUMMARY: The Avengers have managed to collect all the infinity stones across the universe, and are currently keeping them in far corners of the world, only for research and to see if they can improve the planet and its people. Reader is a researcher with Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, as well as a field agent. Loki is currently serving time for his actions in New York City in 2012.

A/N: Find this chapter on AO3 here. This chapter has less Loki, only because I want to get a sense of Y/N’s character without Loki around. But dw, the next chapter will have Loki :) 

AO3: The Support System  Tumblr: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6 

Warnings: N/A Audience: general.

______________________________________________________________

CHAPTER 7:

You do manage to arrive in Dubai at night time, and it looks every bit as breath-taking as you expected.

After landing, the door is popped open by the hostess and a man walks in with a clipboard, wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D windbreaker. You see to your surprise that it’s a familiar face. ‘Fury!’ you exclaim.

He nods at you and takes a seat. ‘Right, they’re all based in International City, which is quite a drive from here’.

‘International City?’ Clint asks. ‘Yeah, they have sectors of houses and shops within it, all built to represent different countries of the world’ you provide.

‘Looks like you got yourself a tour guide, then’ Nick points at you with his clipboard. ‘You are tourists, nothing more. You’re staying at the Premiere Inn. It’s not fancy, doesn’t have to be. It has to be close to where they are. They’re expecting visitors from London tonight, and meeting at a club in the middle of Dubai, but there will be no arms exchanges there. However, to be sure, I will be there with my team. The rest of you will be stationed in disguise in and around the China cluster, where we are expecting it to go down. Don’t go heavy on the equipment, take what’s quick, light and effective. These things happen in public there, so let’s keep casualties to a minimum’ he stands up, ‘you’ll be taking a tour bus to the hotel, I suggest you all change out of your gear, and then get your stuff in the bus. You’ll hear more from Stark later’ he salutes the group and leaves the flight.

The group, everyone except for Nat, Clint, and Thor, are in awe.

‘He is SO COOL’ one of the agents exclaim. ‘I know; he just saunters in with all that swagger…’ another agent gushes. ‘Alright then’ Clint says, rolling his eyes. ‘Change, let’s move’.

xx

You’ve laid out all the weapons you got for the mission out on your bed. A proper arsenal. Nat’s bed looks the same, knives, tazers, blasters, guns and various other things strewn across her bed.

‘Okay, when we say light… how light are we talking?’ ‘Anything we can conceal under a dress or a jacket’. ‘So these are out’ you sigh, throwing your katanas to the back of the bed, disappointed. ‘We're fighting men, not alien monsters, you can't use those' she says, chuckling.  'Let me dream, Nat'. You pick up another weapon. ‘If I wear a trench coat, I can take the Chitauri M4’. ‘I don’t know how people perceive trench coats here, but I give you my blessing’.

She grabs a small silver and blue handgun, which you recognise as being another Chitauri weapon that blasts an incapacitating screech in the direction it is pointed, rendering the victim completely helpless.

You decide on a C M4, a few knives concealed in your jeans and socks, your trusty Vibranium gloves, and two guns that Stark made which never run out of bullets.

Then you wait.

xx

Dubai sure is glamorous, but the spot you’ve all been assigned sure isn’t.

Of course, arms dealers aren’t trying to bring attention to themselves either.

You’ve stationed the ten people under you to various spots around the area, and are sitting in an outdoor coffee shop with Sam, overlooking where the exchange is expected to happen.

‘Got eyes on the entrance?’ Nat asks over the comm. ‘Yeah. I got a guy at the entrance pretending to wait for an Uber’. ‘Copy that. Nick said they’re on their way here, so any second now’.

You lean back in your chair and take a sip of your coffee.

‘How do you know so much about this place?’ Sam asks. ‘I used to live here’ you say. ‘Spent about five years here with my family before moving to New York three years ago’. ‘How was it?’ ‘Amazing’ you smile. ‘Gets hot as hell, but the winters are fantastic. And it’s so safe’. ‘Are you forgetting why we’re here’ he motions to the building across the street. ‘Well, I mean it’s one of those cities where women can stay alone and no harm comes to her. You can walk the streets alone at night and people don’t approach you. You can leave your laptop out in a coffee shop to visit the bathroom, and no one touches your shit’.

Sam looks sceptical.

‘You telling me no one even messes with your shit?’ ‘Yup’. ‘Are people just honest or do they assume they have more money than you anyway?’ ‘Wow, probably the latter’ you laugh. ‘Heads up, we got incoming’ you hear Clint on the comms. ‘Hey, where’s Thor?’ you ask. ‘You mean Dr. Donald Blake?’ Sam points at a guy in glasses across the street, leaning on his umbrella.

‘Pulling up at my 9 o’clock’ the guy you stationed to “wait for an Uber” says.

Three black Nissan Patrol Platinums pull up to the entrance.

‘When we moving in?’ Sam asks, ‘We can’t see past those cars’. ‘I do not have eyes on them. Clint?’ Nat says. ‘I see them' Clint replies, 'move on my signal’.

You set your coffee down and position yourself to stand up any second.

The cars drive away, and you see a group of men, dressed quite casually, cross the street and head to the coffee shop where you’re sitting.

‘Hold it’ Clint says.

They sit down and order some coffees. And you notice the other patrons of the coffee shop get up and leave as soon as they order their coffees.

‘Okay… what’s happening’ Thor says. ‘Obviously these guys know something we don’t’ you say. ‘The whole street has cleared’ Nat observes. ‘So it’s just us and them? Yeah, not suspicious at all’ Sam cracks. ‘Let’s move in now’. ‘I don’t see any weapons. We aren’t moving till we see arms’ Nat says.

Sam leans back in his chair, but you keep your position.

‘They may not take out any if they see us’ you point out.  ‘They know of four people watching them’.

You take a deep breath and stand up. ‘Send a black sedan for the agent across the street in five seconds. Thor, move out’. Sam stands up with you and you walk down the street.

You’ve left a microphone at the table where you were sitting, which is able to pick up audio from the next table.

They have a discussion in a foreign language.

‘He just asked him to check the surrounding buildings’ Nat says. ‘Are you in there?’ you ask. ‘You know you can't ask me that’.

You sigh and lean against the wall, waiting. 

After ten minutes of complete silence, Nat’s voice comes on the comms. ‘I see the weapons, we’re moving in. Two of you, move in from the east’.

‘Copy that’ you remove the C M4 you’ve been hiding under the coat and grin. ‘Finally, baby’. ‘You know; the love you have for weapons that tear people apart kinda turns me on’ Sam says. ‘I bet it does’ you wink. ‘Let’s go’.

xx

Oh, do bad guys never learn.

You take a look of the aftermath of the fight and laugh to yourself. You strap the C M4 back in and cover it with your coat. Stark foundation is already on the scene cleaning up the mess, and the cops have arrived to arrest the dealers. No casualties since the street was clear... well, except for the arms dealers themselves. 

After some negotiating between Fury and the cops, Fury manages to get full custody of the weapons to ship back to New York. Nat walks up to you. ‘Are you sure you don’t need to see a therapist?’

‘What’ ‘You were enjoying yourself a bit too much’ she points out. ‘Damn, there’s nothing wrong with that’ Sam defends you. ‘I’m fine, I just like a good fight, is that bad?’ ‘I guess not’ she looks at you up and down again, then walks back. ‘Anyone injured?’ you call out.

You get No’s as a response and officially call the mission a complete success.

xx

‘Can we not stay for a day?’ you ask Fury, on the way back to the hotel. 'We're ahead of schedule'.  ‘I would say yes, but Stark is impatient to open up his new toys, and says he promised you and Romanoff a crack at it first’. ‘Right…’ suddenly you no longer care about staying a day. ‘We’re cleaning up faster than expected’ Fury says. ‘Usually we just watch for about two days and then move in, but I got here first so this one went quick. You’re on your own in Hong Kong’. ‘Thanks Fury’ you smile at him. ‘For all your help’. ‘No problem. I’ll see you around’ he lets you off at the hotel. The rest get down and head to their rooms. ‘At least we spend the night in beds that aren’t flying’ Maria says.

Everyone agrees as they enter, say their goodnights, and retire for the night.

xx

The operations in Hong Kong, as promised by Fury, takes longer.

Nat, Clint and a few other agents were doing surveillance while you stayed in the stakeout van reading your papers for two days. No reason you can’t get ahead with the stones while you wait.

You hoped to have a breakthrough while sitting in that stuffy van with four other agents. None. You couldn’t even contact Stark to see how far he had gotten, but you suspected that it already took a lot of his energy not to pop open the crates with the weapons and go nuts, so maybe he hasn’t actually done anything about the stones.

Day 3 in Hong Kong, Day 5 of the mission: Nat enters your van.

‘They’ve already made the sale, so we have to split up’. ‘Can we do that?’ you put your papers aside. ‘Won’t we fall short?’ ‘We don’t have time to strike them separately, they can easily alert each other. It has to be tonight, and we have to split up’.

You nod, understanding.

‘I’ll go with Clint and Hill and 10 agents, Sam and you can lead the other 10. I’ll get the dealers, you get the clients’. ‘Who gets Thor?’ ‘Um…’

You can’t split Thor. And both of you need Thor, in case there is some sort of alien tech humans can’t touch.

‘You can take Thor’ you offer. ‘No, that’s fine, you take him, and we’ll wait for him to clean up with you and come to us’. ‘That’ll take too long, I have my Vibranium gloves, I’ll handle our clean-up’. ‘We don’t know if Vibranium can withstand the…’ ‘Why don’t we toss for it?’ you take out a coin. ‘Heads, you get Thor, tails, I don’t get Thor’. ‘Do you think I’m stupid’.

You grin. ‘Seriously take Thor. If it turns out I can’t use the gloves, I’ll hold the fort down till Thor comes to us’.

‘Fine’ she gives you a small salute and proceeds to leave. ‘My crew will move out in fifteen to their base, you stay here. The clients are right in this hotel…’ she points outside. ‘We strike at the exact same time’.

xx

‘We’re in position, where you at?’ Clint asks over the comms. ‘Um. Yeah, we can't move in right now’. you say. ‘What? Why?’ ‘Oh I don’t know, maybe because there’s a wedding happening!’ you roll your eyes. ‘There’s too many people in there’. ‘Do you see the clients?’ Nat asks. ‘Coffee shop. They’ve left the bags behind the counter though’.

Nat lets out an irritated sigh. ‘The dealers will move out any minute, we don’t have time to lose’. ‘Well, I can’t move in with a troop of 10 men with guns while there’s a wedding happening’ you say. ‘No worries’ Sam says. ‘I got ya’ll’ he winks at you. ‘I can practically hear Sam wink’ Nat says. ‘What is it’.

Sam removes a cylindrical object from his pocket, similar to the dealer boss in Queens.

‘You took the force field activator!’ you exclaim. ‘Sam…’ Clint warns. ‘We’re gonna discuss this later’ Nat says. ‘We’re moving in right now’.

 You wave your hand and let your crew out of the van. Your agents move out from the other surveillance vans and all enter the lobby in formation.

The clients have taken notice of the group move into the coffee shop, and they all stand up, cocking their guns.

Sam moves in before you, holding the force field activator behind his back. ‘Don’t make this difficult man’ he says.

‘I think it’s going to be difficult for you’ one of them say. ‘There’s a wedding happening in the hall across from this coffee shop, you wouldn’t want those many casualties, would you?’

In response, Sam smashes the activator on the ground, pushing a shield around the agents and the clients. One of the clients shoot, and Sam ducks, causing the bullet to ricochet off the shield and bounce back to hit the guy who shot it.

‘Smart move, jackass’ Sam laughs.

The clients charge, one of them yelling for someone to secure the bag with the weapons, but you’re already behind the counter.

‘Hi!’ you tell the man who tries to grab the bag, and hit his nose with the butt of your gun. He falls back, his nose bleeding.

‘Oh damn, I’m sorry, I know how much that sucks, I had a chronic nose bleed problem as a child’ you quip, dragging him behind the counter by his right leg. He kicks you in the stomach, screaming. 'But I wasn’t a little bitch about it’ you aim your gun at his head. He stops and glares at you. ‘Good boy, I’m gonna tie you up now’.

‘A little help?’ Sam yells, holding off two goons.

You stand up after having tied the guy and throw two silver balls at their torsos.

They scream and drop to the ground, sparks all over their body. ‘Oh shit no!!' you exclaim, 'I had something better, okay, next time you need a hand, call me’.

Sam gives you a thumbs up without even questioning it and runs off to help the other agents.

‘Listen, I’m gonna go help my friends’ you tell the guy tied and gagged behind the counter. ‘If you cooperate, I’ll put in a good word for… oh wait, you’re a terrible person. Never mind’ you jump over the counter, and in one swift motion, push yourself off with your hands and drop kick a goon.

‘Oy! Get this asshole’ Sam yells, motioning to a guy he’s holding by the throat. ‘You have the situation under control’ ‘Yes, but I wanna see what you got’

You grin and take out a little metallic disc from your pocket. ‘Drop him’ you say. Sam obliges.

You throw the disk at the man, and as soon as it touches him, a cage forms around his torso, extending to his arms, forcing them behind him. The metal extends to around his legs, forcing him to kneel on the floor, and finally, a slab of metal clangs around his mouth so he can’t talk.

‘DAMN what the hell is that’ Sam clearly looks impressed. ‘Little gift from Strange. He used it on Kaecilius’ you grin. ‘It used to be bigger, Stark made the whole cage sit in a tiny disc’. ‘I don’t know who the Kae dude is, but that’s dope as hell, I want one’.

Another mission wrapped up, and two days before the expected date!

xx

The flight back is relatively chill. You were expecting celebrations and drinks and singing, looking forward to it almost, but this vibe is not bad either. There’s some soft lounge music playing in the background while everyone reads, writes, is in conversation, or just looking out the window. You, as usual, sit across from Nat, who is trying to sleep before landing in New York in the morning. You can’t seem to fall asleep though, so you decide to sit with some research papers.

An hour in, and you realise your heart’s not in it, in fact you’re even a little sick of it. You take out your TV from the armrest and watch an older episode of Doctor Who, almost missing Loki sitting next to you asking questions. You had gotten into the habit of giving his palms a little massage while engrossed in the show, so you start massaging your own as you watch the shenanigans of the Doctor unfold. 

Five more hours before you land in New York. You put the TV away and look around for anyone awake to talk to. Everyone is tired out and asleep, so you pull your blanket up to your chin and try to sleep too.

______________________________________________________________

Lmk if you want to be tagged when I post new chapters, and fic requests are open. 

[lynxgriffin]

Here Comes The Sun

It’s already time for more KH3 commentary! Under the cut for anyone who wants to avoid spoilers!

All right! It’s time to move on down to Tangledtown, it looks like!

There were some terrible gummi ship messes in the way, let’s see if I can manage to get past them

Still suck at gummi missions but at least I can survive them after like…a try or two

And heck yeah we’re off to Tangledtown!! I mean Corona

Honestly the ultimate video game challenge will be rendering this super long hair

Sora: Why are we here? Who cares, it’s pretty!!

OMG Flynn

Once again, beautiful music here! And yaaay learned Aero!

Sora you giant dingleberry

Ugh this world is so dang pretty

Pretty much repeats of the movie so far

Flynn: I’m thinking exposition to myself!

You’re not quite nailing The Smoulder there, Flynn

There’s eel in this here river!

Ugh I found a lucky emblem but I can’t find a good spot to photograph it from!

Sora: First time outdoors?? Yikes…that’s dark

It’s okay Rapunzel, you got the order right, everything’s fine

That’s the fluffiest Heartless in existence

Okay heck yeah that was a fun battle type deal!

HIIIIII MAR MAR

Did Norted Marluxia just Mar Mother Gothel? HOW MANY LAYERS DOES THIS GO

Dandelions! WE FOUND ALL OF AVA’S KIDS

I think my fav attraction flows so far are the carousel and rapids ride

We have obtained: BUNNY TREASURE

You can make Sora splash in the water sooob

Oh we had Heartless flowers and now Nobody flowers!

I like how everybody’s like “Flowers? SUSPICIOUS!!!”

Gotta say that Mar’s lesser Nobodies are pretty kickass, tho

HAS-BEENS

HERE COMES THE SORA SASS

Aww Mar doesn’t want to remember getting his ass handed to him —I’m not counting data battles argh—

Well Mar that’s…not quite true honestly

Mar: And when I say “use the Keyblade to keep her safe” I mean “LOCK HER IN THE TOWER HURR HURR”

Oooh now getting into the spooky forest

Goofy: Well let’s use proper names for the terrible villain!

Sora: Well excuuuuuuuse me, evil stepmother

CALL YOUR MOM, SORA

Oh hey we finally found Maximus!

WE HAVE HORSEY SEAL OF APPROVAL

the flap-flaps are back!!

Pfff this Heartless monkey all like “EAT MY ASS, I HAVE A SIEGE TOWER”

Oh gosh this Heartless

SUPERJUMP??

I must give Rapunzel this halo of birds

I gotta agree, I think this is the prettiest world so far

I’M TAKIN ALL YOUR FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES NOW

Don’t mind me, just swimming in your water digging for shellfish

WTF the dancing part was so ridiculously cute I can’t

Funny I don’t remember them actually having the satchel at this point?

Sora: EXCUSE U FOR NOT APPRECIATING THIS MOMENT

Must’ve told her that his name was Eugene while Sora and co were out

LMAO Marmar that was the most flat delivery of that line

LOL sure Mother Gothel just beat those giant Nobodies to death with a stick

SHE DISCOVERED THE POWER OF STICKBLADE

Damn they pulling up the chess metaphor again

No one told the other Princesses that their job was finished!

Oh wow so apparently Mar can just! Do that??

I do love that moment with the sun symbol tho

Mother Gothel: I’m extra the bad guy now because of the dark darkness smoke

Oh geez they’ve been there all night

He was awakened by the kiss of true horse

Maximus: I CAN CARRY FOUR PEOPLE IT’S FINE

STABB’D

Sora: Just let me get there I’ve got a cure spell!

AND THIS WHOLE SCENE

Marluxia, please, put any emotions at all into your voice

Oh now THAT’S a freaky-ass Heartless, nice nice

That was a pretty kickass boss battle, gotta say

Sora: WTF people can’t actually die that’s not allowed!

Sora: Told you sooooo

WHELP WE DID IT WE PLAYED THE MOVIE

Donald: “Rapunzel’s the tough one actually” HE’S NOT WRONG

Sora: EXCUSE U if I matchmake THEN I GET IN ON THE SECRETS

So yay! Finished that world! Will have to give this Keyblade a try, but I do really like the Toy Story one

Pete: WE KEEP GETTING SHAFTED

It’s Etch-A-Sketch’d

Please please let Maleficent and Pete end up being the monkey wrench in the Organization’s whole plan just because no one thought to notice what they were doing

Let Aeleus have a line!!

Oh well this looks ominous

HI SAIX

Even: Humanity is for CHUMPS

Vexen: Friendship ended with Basic Decency, GETTING NORTED is my new BFF

Oooh oh oh new worlds to choose from!!

Looks like the next spot we’re going is MONSTERS INC, YAAAY I’M EXCITE

But I’ll talk about that in the next commentary post, so this is already getting a bit long!

More very soon!!

[nikhilgraphic]

Design It Yourself: Animated Crystal Light Reflection Effect

Prismatic light reflections can add visual interest to a good range of design projects, from corporate print flat lays to animated Instagram stories. Over the last two years, we have seen the organic shadow trend delivered to life with plants, leaves, and gestures. It’s time for a replacement flavor of this effect: the magical reflections created by light crossing crystals.

The prismatic sun catcher reflection, generally , may be a combination of two opposite elements: artificially cut, polished glass crystals and natural, uncontrollable light rays. These crystal light reflections also combine the consequences of two recent trends: mystical crystal stones and natural shadows,learn how to creative brings in mind just find the best institutions which has provided the best graphic designing course in Delhi. join them and get start journey. Where does this iridescent light trend come from, is it far more than a visible Instagram trend, and can it last?

Didn’t we already see this stuff?

Remember the rainbow reflection filter on Instagram or the Bokeh effect trend in portrait and close-up photography? All of those effects come from nature, leverage light, and suggest that there’s more happening behind the scene. This layer enlargement with a sort of “natural virtual” light reflection is that the essence of prism light overlays.

Nature remastered: a futuristic trend

Many styles we have seen trending within the previous couple of months, including alchemy, well-being, spirituality, and self-care, have one thing in common: an adaptation and "digitization" of nature. Organic patterns, sustainable materials, and natural elements are the foremost influential design elements this year consistent with SNOW and Pan tone. Raw materials, surfaces, and structures like fungus, mold, bark, and sponges are redefining graphic designing patterns and galvanizing color schemes. the style and graphic design industries are applying these organic elements in response to the heightened demand for self-care and well being brands.

How to recreate this vibrant look

Everyone remembers the dark, mystic atmosphere in Pink Floyd's cover artwork for “The Dark Side of the Moon”. Prism light reflections can evoke both mystery and heat . Throughout this tutorial, I'll explain the way to achieve this look with the “Sun Catcher – Animated Crystal Light Reflection” toolkit. To achieve this trending light overlay look you will only need Photoshop or video software like Premiere Pro, Final Cut, or Davinci Resolve (which is free ).

You only got to drag the video effect into your favorite design app and play with the layer blending modes. If you're using Photoshop, "Lighten", "Screen", and "Color" will offer you the foremost natural and authentic sun reflection look.

Elevating artwork with natural overlays

Light, shadows, and reflections add an authentic look to otherwise clean graphics or motion clips, blurring the border between digital art and nature. These sorts of effects are like coincidence. Each moment is exclusive and ephemeral. There's also a meditative character to the present look: bright light has always been related to purity and well-being.

The convergence of natural and artificial

The moment when natural elements are emphasized by artificial objects describes the SunCatcher collection. Suncatchers are made from glass and break the sunshine in an unnatural way that doesn't exist in real world . this type of sunshine doesn't come from nature. it's more an adaption of nature, uncontrolled, and reflecting the instant . Exactly this characteristic makes the instant unique and real.

Where does the sunshine & shadow trend come from?

Reflecting and breaking light have always been popular creative techniques to feature depth to scenes and objects. The film era within the mid-1960s established the lens flare as a natural tool to make depth. it had been not seen as a failure in film. Creative professionals started using it as a tool to feature an authentic and natural character to their scenes. In digital design, the simulation of reality is usually an enormous concern. is that this image smooth and natural-looking or does it look fake? This effect may be a visual solution to feature warmth to all or any sorts of indoor and outdoor settings. History repeats itself. We sleep in a world branded through perfectly planned social media posts, philosophically like those indoor studios within the film industry's past. Nothing happens by coincidence and smart tools, apps, and gadgets make it possible to erase every tiny imperfection. Books and magazines do not have to be printed to be shown during a commercial. 

Cosmetics do not have to exist physically to make a three-dimensional, realistic preview of what they'd appear as if . Mockups are so neat lately , it's hard to acknowledge if we're watching a true product or a rendered image. As a designer, i really like the chances mockups give us. Visualizing a sensible design is an incredibly effective tool for client communication, but within the long-term this generated reality creates the wish for more realness and authenticity.

[ficdirectory]

The Crossing (Disuphere series #3) Chapter 11

Scene V: Decide to Stay

Life gets busy over the next week, with work and continued adjustment to living on her own.  Mom and Dad are always there if she needs something, but Dominique tries not to need anything.  The next Wednesday, she heads back to the park to hang out at the picnic table and take pictures of the trees.

If there’s one thing she loves about this place, it’s that it exists in a kind of bubble where no one asks invasive questions about each other.  No one cares that she dresses up.  While they ask questions, they don’t judge it.  It’s refreshing.  Like, she can come out here in a Hermione robe, and nobody looks twice.  She’s gotten a quick reputation for being the one who might be a different character every day, but instead of getting a hard time about it, the other residents look forward to seeing that day’s costume.

She doesn’t expect to find Jesus here again.  But he shows up about a half hour after she does.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were following me,” she ventures, putting her phone face down on the table for his benefit.

“I didn’t wanna say anything...but this...kinda used to be my spot.”

“Seriously,” Dominique says, standing up.  “Well, I’ll get out of your way.”

“No.  Wait..  I didn’t mean it like that,” Jesus objects.

“Really?  ‘Cause it kinda sounded like an invitation to vacate…” Dominique points out.

“It wasn’t.  I don’t like all company...but I don’t mind yours,” Jesus admits quietly.  “I like knowing you don’t treat me different...even knowing who I am…”

Dominique considers this - then, slowly, she sits back down.  Dudley’s under the table again, but she doesn’t mind.  Makes her think about Roberta.  Dominique’s gotta make time to hang out with her, too.

Jesus is drawing again, and Dominique is trying not to stare.  Finally, she can’t stand it anymore and gets up to take some more pictures of the park, after giving Jesus a heads up.  When she comes back, Jesus is still drawing.

“One of my sisters is like that.  Always taking pictures,” he offers.

“Hmm,” Dominique muses.  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Well, you’ve been clear about what you’re doing and why.  So it’s not a bad thing.  So far.”

“I don’t know anybody who can draw like you,” she offers.

“What do you mean?”  he asks, glancing up.

“I mean, like, my dad can draw a good stick-person.  He even did a short cartoon once of a rock falling on one of his stick people using pages of an old phone book and flipping them really fast.”

“Did it look real?” Jesus checks.

As real as a two-dimensional rock falling on a stick-person can look.  But I was seven, so…”

“So you were impressed?” Jesus checks, a small smile on his face.

“Yeah, I was.”

“You like your parents?” Jesus asks, still drawing.

“I like my parents.  Who says that?  I love my parents,” she sings, clapping a hand over her mouth too late.  She totally just injected Sincerely, Me from Dear Evan Hansen into casual conversation.  “I’m so sorry.  You were not supposed to hear that.”

“It’s okay,” he says easily.  

“Just...kind of a strange question…” she allows.  “Why?  Do you get along with yours?”

“Used to,” he sighs.  “It’s been kinda rocky lately...well, for years, I guess.  We went on this trip to Minnesota all together, and it kind of undid a lot of the trust I feel for them.  We’ve never really gotten that back.  Not all the way.”

“Yeah, trust is hard,” she nods.

Jesus puts the sketchbook down on the table between them and turns it so she can see it.  This time, it’s a drawing of their picnic table.  A perfect rendering.  But beside it, in the ground, where none exists, Jesus has added a sign in his picture.  It’s wooden - reminds her of one of those in the old Winnie the Pooh cartoons.  This one says AVOIDANCE.  

Dominique considers it.  “What are you avoiding?”

“Laundry,” he admits.

“Can’t Val help with that?”

“She can, but I want to work on being able to deal with it myself.  And it’s hard.”  He’s silent a while.  “Did you mean what you said about that I come on too strong?”

Dominique nods, and then feels her breath catch.  “I mean…”

“No, it’s okay.  I was just curious.  No one’s ever used those words to describe me before...but they make sense.”

“They do?” she asks, still wary.

“Yeah.  I lived a big part of my life trying to make sure the other person in it was always...whatever…  So I guess I am kinda sensitive to moods.”

“You’re saying I’m moody?”

“You’re dressed like a wizard…” he points out.

“You’ve never read Harry Potter?” she asks, incredulous.

“Not much time for reading, no…”

“Huh.  So...this is awkward, but you wanna go to Starbucks?” she asks.

“The one in the Target?  Not really,” he allows.

“There are other Starbucks,” she clarifies, wondering if Target was the trigger for him.

“There’s actually a coffee shop right near here.  It’s not a big one - not a Starbucks - but I always wanted to check it out.” Jesus offers.

“I’m not getting in a car with you,” she says bluntly.

“I’m not getting in a car with you.” he returns, just as serious as she is.  “It’s walking distance from the apartment.”

“Fine,” she agrees.

It’s a nice day to be out.  Clear sky.  Not too hot.  But Dominique’s still on edge.  Glancing at everything.  Jesus seems the same, but at least he has Dudley.  Dominique wishes Roberta were here.  But she’s too fancy for the outdoors.

The coffee shop is close.  Small.  Homey.  Looks new.  Like she and Jesus are the first two to discover it.  They approach the counter, and Dominique immediately spots the lemon poppyseed muffins.  She picks one out and a bottle of water, while Jesus stares at all the food in the lighted case.

“You okay?” she asks.

“I want everything,” he whispers.  “But I don’t actually have money...so…”

“I got it.  Pick out what you want.”

“You don’t understand.  I literally want every single thing inside there.”

She takes a breath.  “So what do you need right now?”

“I can’t choose.”

“Is it okay if I do?  Do you trust me enough to do that?”

“Yeah...I mean, I guess…”

Dominique cracks a smile.  “Well, with that resounding show of support, I think you can try...this cinnamon swirl coffee cake.  Some water...assuming you’re not a coffee guy?  Are you?”

Jesus shakes his head.

“Okay, water.  And this cookie.  ‘Cause cookies help everything.  Oh, which reminds me…” She turns to the barista: “Can we have two frozen hot chocolates, please?”

“Sure,” the barista answers.  He tells Dominique the total, and when she holds the money out, he pretends not to see her scarred hand.  Dominique feels heat flood her face.

“Dude, she’s a wizard.  You should be freakin’ honored to accept money from her,” Jesus insists, his eyes flashing.

“Oh, sorry.  I didn’t see…” the barista stutters.

“Yeah, I bet…” Dominique comments under her breath.  “Let’s go.”

They’re outside again, carrying their stuff back to the park.  It’s quiet for several minutes.  Until Jesus sips his frozen hot chocolate.

“Damn,” he says sounding disappointed.

“What?” she asks.  “Is it awful?  Please tell me it’s awful so I can go back in there and cast a spell on him, Hermione-style.”

“No.  It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my twenties.  I hate that that asshat makes such good drinks.”

“We are going back to Avoidance, aren’t we?” Dominique asks, in a light but measured tone.  “In Avoidance, we don’t have to think about asshats who make perfect frozen hot chocolates.  We can think about friends who make amazing hot chocolate cookies…”

“Wait.  We’re friends?” Jesus asks.

“Well, I was hoping…” Dominique ventures.

“Friends heading back to Avoidance together…” Jesus tries out.  “I like it.”

Dominique smiles.  “And with a wizard, no less.”

Jesus does too.  “Yeah, looks like I lucked out.”

[austinpanda]

Dad Letter 011020

10 January, 2021

Dear Dad--

So! Again we’re gifted with the ill fortune of having to live through interesting times. I won’t dwell too much upon the political events of the past week, out of my usual desire to talk about sweeter stuff, and not make bad things even worse. But that was quite a horror show, was it not? All they had to do was count the electoral votes, and now we’re going to get long thought pieces, and murals with metaphors. And the coronavirus cases are surging enormously here! This has been, without a doubt, the most fucked-up year I’ve ever seen. I shall be very pleased in the future if I can look back on 2021 and think of it simply as that boring year that was so boringly free from incident. I guess they’ll have plenty to talk about on the Sunday morning TV news shows today! I don’t have cable, so I get to avoid that particular delicacy. 

Zach and I just had our 7 year anniversary. We checked last year, and 6 years is the candy anniversary (whooptie shit) and 7 years is the copper and wool anniversary. (Guess I’ll get him a wheat penny with a little sweater on it.) We didn’t do much to celebrate, since we’re increasing our frugality, and there are no restaurants to go to, but Zach made one of our favorite dishes, which is red wine spaghetti. You add a bunch of wine to the pasta water when you boil the spaghetti. The pasta ends up purple, and tastes really good. The only downside is having to grapple with the visuals of it, marking a solemn occasion with a plate of purple spaghetti. (Might as well be the Watermelon Jolly Rancher anniversary, except we’d already passed the candy anniversary.)

I’m trying to think of what else I’ve done over the past week, but it hasn’t been much. I’ve been glued to the TV and to my phone, watching and reading the news almost constantly. I have begun looking in earnest for a job, with the only condition that it not be a call center job. I think I’d rather dig ditches in South America than ever work in a call center again. This means that my professional needs are going to be modest. Not like fast food-modest, but maybe more like...working in a hardware store modest, or working for Door Dash, just making deliveries with my car. I like that idea, because I could make my own hours, I wouldn’t have a boss, and I could listen to whatever I want on the radio while I work. I just want a job where I won’t have to kiss customer’s asses too much or spend the whole day talking on the phone and having meetings. 

Something we’ve had to adjust to, living, as we do, in the great white north, is occasional loud crunching sounds. The sun is out, and we all have metal roofs here in the trailer park, and as they warm up, huge blobs of snow begin to slide languidly off our roofs and onto the ground. We’ll just be living our lives indoors, and then CRUNCH!, and we check to make sure no one’s front door just got blocked by a Volkswagen-sized blob of snow. They sell snow rakes here! I didn’t know what those were, until my plant scientist friend sent me a picture of the one he uses to rake snow off his roof. And apparently this is necessary because deep snow on your roof can get heavy enough to squish your house, or otherwise cause damage, or just fall off the roof at the wrong time, like when you’re walking under it while holding your baby, or your wedding cake.

You know, speaking of snow-related peril, there’s a movie I’m never going to watch, called Force Majeure. But the opening scene is on YouTube and I’ve watched it a few times. “Force Majeure” (and you may know this, since you are smart) is a legal term, a clause they put in the contract in case something happens to one or both parties that was unforeseeable and renders them incapable of living up to the terms of the contract. It’s the “Act of God,” clause. So this movie begins with a family of four enjoying an outdoor meal at a ski resort, at the base of the ski slopes. Mountains all around, they’re eating on the patio of a nice restaurant, and they hear some BOOM sounds. Then they notice an avalanche has begun, way up the mountain, that must have been triggered by the folks who maintain the ski slopes, the way they use mortars to set off controlled avalanches. So the family isn’t worried, they try to continue enjoying their lunch, but the avalanche keeps getting bigger and bigger, and closer and closer. 

Pretty soon, the family we’re watching--mom, dad, couple of kids--become alarmed, and everyone around them begins to scream in panic. The avalanche is now enormous and appears destined to wipe out the whole ski resort. Right before the avalanche hits, and I think this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, the dad gets up from the picnic table, shoves a bystander aside, and does his best Jesse Owens right the fuck out of there. He just takes off running like the roadrunner. “Meep, meep!” Meanwhile, mom and the kids, back at the picnic table, just have enough time to think, “Hey, waitaminute, dammi--” before the avalanche hits them. 

As it happens, by the time the avalanche hits them, it has no physical punch to it; it’s mostly dissipated. So it isn’t even strong enough to knock the drinks over at their table, it just envelops them in a white cloud of loose snow for a couple of minutes, until the air clears, and no one is hurt. Then the dad comes back and tries to laugh it off. “Hooooo boy, wasn’t that exciting!” and, from what I understand, the rest of the movie is about how the incident goes on to affect the marriage and the family. In case you’re wondering, NO, I don’t draw any parallels between this movie and anything that ever happened in our family. I just enjoy watching the beginning of this movie because it’s all done in a single long take, with no cuts--in other words, it’s technically a really, really cool shot--and because, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, I find it absolutely hysterical. I love watching that guy’s survival instincts kick in so hard that, without pausing to reflect on it, he simply becomes a rapidly-shrinking dot on the horizon as he flees at the speed of sound. 

I wonder if the point of the movie is that, while we all like to think we’d have grabbed a kid under each arm before bravely running away, there’s always the chance that, in the heat of the moment, we might find out that we’re THAT GUY instead. Too bad the whole family didn’t all do the same thing he did, right? I’m just going to tell Zach, “If a giant death cloud is quickly approaching, don’t worry about me, don’t stop for coffee and a scone, just start running in the other direction. There will be no hard feelings.” See? It’s all about communication.

I hope the news in the coming week is significantly less shouty than it’s been in the recent past. I’m still working on my writing projects and looking for work. I am cautiously optimistic! Take care, and all my love to you both!

[jackdoakstx]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

Related Articles

January 18, 2019 Taos Ski Valley avalanche victim has died, hospital CEO says

January 17, 2019 Win tickets to see Lil Wayne, The Chainsmokers and others at the X Games

January 17, 2019 Breckenridge Ski Resort’s epic winter nears 200 inches for the season

January 15, 2019 Denver man identified as skier who died on Quandary Peak in Summit County

January 13, 2019 Copper Mountain’s American Flyer lift with bubble chairs now running

Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from News And Updates https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[laurendzim]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

Related Articles

January 18, 2019 Taos Ski Valley avalanche victim has died, hospital CEO says

January 17, 2019 Win tickets to see Lil Wayne, The Chainsmokers and others at the X Games

January 17, 2019 Breckenridge Ski Resort’s epic winter nears 200 inches for the season

January 15, 2019 Denver man identified as skier who died on Quandary Peak in Summit County

January 13, 2019 Copper Mountain’s American Flyer lift with bubble chairs now running

Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from News And Updates https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[aion-rsa]

The Sopranos Didn’t Terminate Robert Patrick, They Busted Him Out

https://ift.tt/3kQCxCc

The Many Saints of Newark will tell stories about things our friends, and friends of friends, did before the events on The Sopranos. We’ll see a young Paulie Gualtieri, Silvio Manfred Dante, and Artie Bucco, all who knew Tony Soprano as a kid. One childhood friend you might not see is a prequel version of Davey Scatino. Last we heard, in the appropriately named episode “The Telltale Moozadell,” he’s now “in a mental health facility in Nevada.”

Robert Patrick is probably best known for playing the cyborg T-1000 in Terminator 2. It is an iconic role in science fiction cinema, as memorable as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character. Patrick had to fill the shoes, suits, and unimaginative ties worn by David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder when he stepped into the last two seasons of The X-Files, as Agent John Doggett. He stumbled into playing against himself on The Walking Dead. Patrick is a skilled antagonist. Whether torturing misfits on the football field in The Faculty or making Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash Walk the Line, villainy comes quite naturally to the veteran actor. Patrick went in a seemingly different direction on The Sopranos, playing a pathetic, losing gambler who gets in too deep. But is he really a victim, or is this his most antagonizing role?

“When a guy hands you a light envelope, it’s just the beginning,” Richie Aprile (David Proval) warns Davey. Scatino is a nickel and dime player when he first sits in at Aprile’s card games, but when the numbers get large, Aprile does the honorable thing: He bars Davey from any game in town. Richie is not the bad guy here. “I know, it’s just a stutter step,” he offers, understandingly.

Davey doesn’t double down, though. That’s for suckers. He gets into the “Executive Game” with high rollers like Frank Sinatra Jr. and the New York family boss. It costs five boxes of ziti just to buy in. Davey lies to crash the high stakes game, lies to Christopher Moltisanti about how much money he can lay out, and has the balls to act surprised when Richie generously offers to stab him in his eye. Again, not the bad guy, or he would have done it, and with justification. Scatino is down $45,000 at the end of the night. This is on top of what he owes Aprile.

“What you think? I’m still the kid on the school bus,” Tony asks Davey before everything comes tumbling down. We don’t have to be told. This is not a new problem. Tony had Davey pegged from the time he landed at his school. The army brat who’d lived all over never learns his lesson. He makes bets he can’t cover and plays until he’s empty. Even Artie Bucco knows not to lend Stacino $20k for some “breathing room.” Artie says he has to pay for a new roof for his restaurant, but it’s because he already knows everything is going to fall on his friend’s head, and he’d never get his money back.

First Davey tells Tony’s collection guy he has a dentist’s appointment, forcing the boss himself to make a house call. Then Davey tries to leverage how their kids are so close, go to the same school, and how he pegged a guy in the head on some trip. As a show of goodwill, he offers up his son Eric’s SUV as a down-payment. Tony accepts and gives it to Meadow, who has driven in it enough to know where it came from. Carmela gives Tony agita over it because Davey’s brother-in-law is close to the provost at Georgetown, and she might have to make more ricotta pies for Meadow’s college.

“This kid’s father, he’s a fuckin degenerate gambler, but he’s also a respected businessman in the community and everything that goes along with that,” Tony tells his therapist, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). “So, it becomes my fault that he lost his kid’s car? I gotta look after him because he’s a sick bastard?”

Davey’s arc starts in Season 2, Episode 6, “The Happy Wanderer,” when we meet him and his son, Eric, while they are checking out colleges. He also appears in “Bust Out” and “Funhouse.” Patrick “met David Chase for a film a couple of years prior to him coming up with the idea, or at least selling the idea, of The Sopranos,” he told Movieweb. “Then he sent me the script for “The Happy Wanderer” and said, ‘I see you in this role. It’s against type, you’ll never be cast this way, but I think it’s a brilliant idea.’”

While the character Davey is only vaguely familiar with the concept of luck, the actor was on a roll. The unfortunate gambler role came while Patrick was preparing to work on All the Pretty Horses, and director Billy Bob Thornton “asked me to go on a starvation diet, really lose some weight and try to look deathly for this character,” he told Movieweb. “David didn’t know that I was that light and that vulnerable. But anyway, it just worked.”

This is where the acting genius of Robert Patrick is most evident. He knows playing the victim on a show about villains makes him the antagonist, and he started early. While speaking on the podcast “Talking Sopranos,” Patrick told Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa that he started needling the star of the show from the moment they met.

Read more

TV

The Sopranos’ Best End Credit Songs

By Shawn Laib

Movies

The Many Saints of Newark Review: The Sopranos Prequel Has Cement Shoes

By Tony Sokol

“I had never met Mr. Gandolfini,” Patrick said in the interview. “I am out front on a bench smoking a cigarette with Jimmy after we’d just done this read through. And we’re trying to get to know each other a little bit because we’re supposed to be high school buddies. As the conversation was winding up, I said to him, ‘You know the scene where you come to get your money, you better bring your fucking A-game.’ And he looked at me said, ‘Oh, I’ll bring my fucking A-game,’” and flicked his cigarette at the former T-1000.

The first scene the two actors shot was when Tony shows up at Ramsey Sports and Outdoors to collect the high-stakes game money. In the “Talking Sopranos” interview, Patrick said Gandolfini told him was hungover, they did it in “one take, and he scared the living shit out of me. I was so intimidated. What a fantastic experience.” He also said he attended a Gamblers Anonymous meeting to prepare for the role, and learned that a lot of people got hooked on gambling because “it made them feel powerful, like John Wayne or Sean Connery.”

That power fades as fast as any promise a scorpion makes a frog when Tony yells “get the fuck back in your fuckin hole now” to the kid he knew on the school bus, before offering a consolatory “Davey, you’re doing a good job.” In “Bust Out,” Tony and Richie become partners in Ramsey Sports and Outdoors. When David married his wife Christine, her father owned the sporting goods store, and after he died it went to her. Because Christine’s name is on the title, Davey can’t mortgage it, so Tony’s crew takes inventory.

The Soprano/Aprile venture runs up credit for bulk orders, buying barber scissors, airline tickets, and red picnic coolers. “Everybody wants one, nobody has a fucking idea how much they cost,” Richie says. “You put a Nigerian selling these on the streets for a couple/three bucks apiece, who’s not gonna say gimme one?” In a friendly late-night chat, Tony says it’s just bankruptcy fraud, and Davey will be “free and clear” when it’s over. It could have gone the other way, Tony says, explaining how he would then be crying. It’s business. His business.

Davey doesn’t even notice his kid gets into Georgetown. He’s got the muzzle of a gun in his mouth at one point, and is almost begging for his brother-in-law, Victor Musto, to beat him senseless. It is a brilliant demise on a series filled with shallow graves and burials in deep seas.

Liquidation trucks take away whatever’s left of Ramsey Sport & Outdoor except the property for sale sign. During Meadow’s high school graduation celebration in “Funhouse,” Davey tells Tony that Eric is going to Montclair State University, paid for by his brother-in-law. He also says he’s divorcing Christine and got a job as a ranch hand out west. Not too far from Vegas.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The Many Saints of Newark hits theaters Oct. 1 and will stream on HBO Max for the month of October.

The post The Sopranos Didn’t Terminate Robert Patrick, They Busted Him Out appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3imVNp5

[janetoconnerfl]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

Related Articles

January 18, 2019 Taos Ski Valley avalanche victim has died, hospital CEO says

January 17, 2019 Win tickets to see Lil Wayne, The Chainsmokers and others at the X Games

January 17, 2019 Breckenridge Ski Resort’s epic winter nears 200 inches for the season

January 15, 2019 Denver man identified as skier who died on Quandary Peak in Summit County

January 13, 2019 Copper Mountain’s American Flyer lift with bubble chairs now running

Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[jimblanceusa]

His artwork is typically thrown away. Now people raised $590K to put it on their coffee tables.

PARKER — He paints exquisite mountain panoramas rich in detail, with hundreds of tiny trees painstakingly rendered. Then the images that took him weeks to create are printed on cheap paper and distributed by the thousands for free, only to be crumpled up, stuffed in pockets and ultimately thrown away in tatters.

It might seem like a forlorn fate for art so carefully conceived, but the artist doesn’t think so at all.

Colorado Outdoor Voices

This is part of an ongoing series of profiles on Colorado’s outdoor enthusiasts. Check our previous story here:

A running joke: Comedian’s quick rise to elite runner means she’s doing Denver improv one day, leading NYC marathon the next

“That’s the best part of it,” said James Niehues of Parker, America’s foremost ski-trail map artist. “It’s used. Not many artists can say they have a piece of art that’s used like a trail map is. And what’s so nice about it is that they gather around at the end of the day and have a beer, pull out the trail maps and talk about where they’ve been.”

Having been treated as throwaway art for 30 years at ski areas across the country — including such Colorado favorites as Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Winter Park — Niehues’ work is now being accorded deep respect.

Provided by James Niehues.

James Niehues’ map of Breckenridge Ski Area.

This year his works will be showcased in a coffee table book, and already there is proof of how much it is valued. A crowdfunding effort originally intended to generate $8,000 to test the market and defray some of the publishing costs has raised more than $590,000. It also helped that people who gave larger donations were treated with not only the book but deal-sweeteners such as signed posters.

“It’s just so gratifying to see the response,” said Niehues, 73. “When we hit our goal of $8,000, everybody was elated. Then it hit $20,000, then $50,000, and it just keeps going.”

The working title of the forthcoming book is “James Niehues: The Man Behind the Map,” and it will be published this summer with almost 200 examples of his work, a behind-the-scenes look at how he creates the trial maps, and his own back story.

Defining a genre

The idea for the book came from a fan Niehues had never met.

“I reached out to Jim and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a copy of your coffee table book, and if you don’t have one, I’ll help you put one together,’ ” said Todd Bennett, an executive in the entertainment industry who lives in California. “That’s how it started. The fact that he picked me to help him share his story and his legacy is something I do not take lightly. This is a story that will never be told again, where you have one guy who inadvertently cornered the market in a fiercely independent industry.”

The overwhelming response to the Kickstarter campaign is an indication of what his work has meant to skiers across the U.S. for the last three decades. Once described by The New York Times as “Rembrandt of the Ski Trail,” Niehues defines the genre as did two predecessors from Colorado, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

“He carried on an art form that was done by those men,” said John Fry, a prominent ski magazine writer and editor who is a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. “His art really became an integral part of the ski experience for millions of people in the U.S.”

In fact, Niehues got his start in the genre by taking on projects Brown gave him in the late 1980s. The first one was an inset for an area of the Mary Jane trail map that Brown had been hired to do. Brown, who had started as a protege of Shelton, was ready to do something else. Niehues was working as a graphic artist at the time.

Ariel photographs have been a big part of my process.  They are invaluable tools and references to my final art.  Can you guess the mountain with the right @ handle? pic.twitter.com/QrlXqxxlEl

— JamesNiehues (@JamesNiehues) December 19, 2018

“Bill was more interested in shooting narrow-gauge railroad trains and wanted to move on,” Niehues said. “I walked in looking for a job, and I walked out with a career.”

Niehues reckons he has drawn maps for 194 resorts. Because ski areas need new maps when they add terrain, he figures he has painted 350[cq comment=”CQ”] different ski maps, including insets and multiple renderings of the same areas. He says he has painted “four or five” versions of California’s Heavenly Valley, for example, the same for The Canyons in Utah.

But if ski areas aren’t adding trails, there isn’t much need for updated trail maps.

“You can kind of paint yourself out of the market,” Niehues said.

How it started

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

James Niehues was photographed at his in-home studio on Thursday, Dec. 27, 2018. He began painting ski maps some 30 years ago and has done work for many mountains throughout North and South America as well as for mountains in New Zealand and Australia.

Niehues grew up on farm west of Grand Junction, 12 miles from the Utah border. When he was 13 years old, he was stricken by nephritis (an inflammation of the kidneys) and was bedridden for months. He already had shown an interest in drawing, so his mother bought him a painting set to help him pass the time.

“I laid on the couch painting oils,” Niehues said. “Just copied pictures out of magazines.”

That was in 1959. After high school he briefly attended Colorado Mesa University and then served in the Army from 1965 to 1969, stationed in Berlin. His career in graphic arts began in Grand Junction in 1970, and he moved to Aurora in the mid-1980s. He started painting trail maps in 1987.

Niehues owes a lot to Shelton and Brown, both of whom are deceased.

“Hal was quite a character,” Niehues said. “Just a magnificent painter. He’s better than I will ever be. He had a different style, but certainly a superior painter. As was Bill Brown.”

If Shelton was a role model for Niehues, Brown was a mentor.

“We never talked about the nuts and bolts, but more the psychology of painting,” Niehues said. “He’d tell me, ‘You’ve got to paint these as if you’re down there skiing on them, and the colors that you’re seeing there.’ That has lasted with me.”

Provided by James Niehues

James Niehues painting in the tree shadows on the 2016 Alta map image.

Niehues learned to ski while he was learning how to paint trail maps. One of his first assignments was the Alta ski area in Utah, where he discovered how rudimentary his ski skills really were.

“I’d had enough skiing that I could get down the hill,” Niehues recalled. “I was probably a beginner at that time. We went up and started skiing down. The night before they’d had about 6 inches of snow, and that was really hard for me to handle. I was falling all the time. The instructor jokingly said, ‘You’d think the guy that painted ski maps could ski.’ It took me forever to get down.”

Niehues starts the process of creating a trail map by photographing the mountain from different angles from an airplane. “I have a pilot, of course,” he said. From his aerial photos, he begins the creative process by sketching the mountain in pencil with all the trails and physical features he wants to include. In the pencil sketch, which takes about a week to draw, timber on the slopes is represented by a bunch of squiggly lines.

After the ski area approves the accuracy of his sketch, he uses it as a guide for the painting — usually in watercolors — which will include individually painted trees that are accurately rendered. He doesn’t paint evergreens where there should be aspens, or vice versa. Ski areas take his finished products and add the graphics indicating trail names and lifts.

Related Articles

January 18, 2019 Taos Ski Valley avalanche victim has died, hospital CEO says

January 17, 2019 Win tickets to see Lil Wayne, The Chainsmokers and others at the X Games

January 17, 2019 Breckenridge Ski Resort’s epic winter nears 200 inches for the season

January 15, 2019 Denver man identified as skier who died on Quandary Peak in Summit County

January 13, 2019 Copper Mountain’s American Flyer lift with bubble chairs now running

Turning three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional artistic representation requires some tricks of the trade. Shadows, for example, help indicate steeper areas.

“It’s very important that we get the shadow right,” Niehues said. “That’s part of tricking the eye into believing that it’s true. You’ve got to keep everything relative. The skier skiing down it doesn’t have the advantage I have of that view. So, as he’s skiing around the mountain looking at this, I have to remember the terrain he’s looking at and what will guide him around.”

Calling himself “just a Colorado farm boy” who became a self-taught artist, Niehues finds it immensely rewarding that people use his art across the U.S. The reception to the book project astonishes him.

“How can you be more gratified?” Niehues said. “You can’t. It’s just phenomenal. What I dreamed would be a good book is proving to be a good book before it’s even printed.”

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/19/james-niehues-ski-maps-coffe-table-book/

[hiraeth-doux]

Untouchable (4/?)

Summary: A fresh-out-of-the-NAVY widower Owen Grady knows everything about the war. His own child? Not so much. He settles in his home town with his 5-year-old daughter in hopes of piecing their shattered lives back together. And then they meet Claire Dearing…

Okay, bad news - this fic might be a bit longer than I planned. I’m trying to fix the last part now and make it less generic and boring (it’ll still be generic and boring though), and it kind of requires a few additional scenes, so we’ll see. Be warned! And thanks for your love, guys :) I hope you’re having fun so far!

Feedback is always much appreciated :)

AO3  | Fanfiction.net 

The day was cold and sunny, the sky bright-blue over their heads when Owen turned his car off the highway and headed south toward the lazy hills rolling in the distance, standing in stark contrast to the flat landscape, and a handful of low structures scattered before them – a small ranch surrounded by dark shapes of the still-bare trees.

Claire’s friend from college, as she had explained to Owen, was running a training program there and kept a couple of his own horses in the stables. He was not working on Sundays, but they were to mention his name to whoever was around today to get a tour and some horseback time for Harper. The girl was giddy with delight, her face pressed to the cool glass, peering out with anxious anticipation at the vast expanse of empty fields on either side of the road.

She’d been up since dawn, Owen told Claire when they picked her up half an hour ago, bouncing off the walls for hours even though she knew they were not leaving before 11 and asking him one question after another despite the fact that he knew about as much as she did. It had been so long since the last time she was this enthusiastic about anything Owen was scared to joke about it up for fear of jinxing it and chasing it away, but he sort of guessed Claire knew it already, his daughter’s excitement palpable and quite infectious, too, filling the space and the pauses between them.

Filled with odd, buzzing energy, Owen kept darting quick sideways looks at Claire, sitting in the passenger seat next to him, her coat unbuttoned and her scarf loosened in the warmth of his car. But their eye contact was fleeting, her attention focused primarily on his daughter, and after a while he started to question whether the small moment in his kitchen happened at all. It was rather tempting to chalk it up to his wishful thinking, or a case of temporary insanity, and for a moment, Owen wanted desperately to jump at the opportunity to do just that. Except it was pretty damn hard to erase the memory of her face so close to his he could feel the warmth of her skin, and the light touch of her mouth to his.

However, if it bothered Claire at all, he could see no sign of it, and by the time they reached their destination, Owen decided to go along with the whole ‘ignoring the elephant in the room’ plan and act like nothing had changed, if that was what she was doing. Not that anything did, he reminded himself. Certainly not that pang of guilt that would jolt through him whenever he’d catch himself wanting more from his life than he already had.

There was no need to make anything unnecessarily awkward. Well, more awkward than it already was.

Owen whistled quietly under his breath when he turned off the paved road and onto the gravel one, splattered with patches of snow, leading toward the main entrance.  

The whole complex was neat and impressive – freshly painted barns and stables, busy on the weekend even despite the chilly weather, and a farmhouse in the back that, according to Claire, housed an office, a vet station, and living quarters for the live-in grooms and guests staying overnight.

In the distance, five bay and black horses roamed lazily around the pasture, ankle-deep in the melting snow, while to the left from them, a teenage girl trotted on a white mare around one of the equestrian arenas, her eyes narrowed against the glare of the afternoon sun. Owen and Harper walked over to it to watch her do basic jumps and practice a fancy-looking prance while Claire talked to a young man in practical knee-high boots and thick jacket covered with dust about their arrangements.

The air smelled faintly of soil, hay, and manure – not an unpleasant combination, albeit an unfamiliar one, that stirred something akin genetic memory in him. A recollection sewn into his DNA. Harper promptly climbed onto the fence, clutching the wood railing tightly with her hands, mesmerized by the dance of the white horse whose mane rippled like waves of the sea in the wind.

“Whatcha think, kiddo?” Owen asked her.

“Can I have one?” She whispered without tearing her gaze away from the girl and the mare.

“Not so fast,” he huffed good-naturedly, and then pried her off the fence when he saw Claire waving at them, motioning for them to come over. “Let’s see what else they’ve got, how ‘bout that?”

From her perch on Owen’s hip, Harper was more than eager to pet a few animals as the three of them took a walk around the farm, stroking their noses and long, soft manes, giggling when they’d snort and sniff at her, probably looking for a treat. However, for her own first experience, she chose a stocky dun pony named Chester with long grey bangs hanging over his eyes, somewhat cautious around the bigger beasts that looked gigantic up close.

“You know this means the world to her, don’t you?” Owen asked Claire as they watched a young groom lead the pony around another outdoor arena with Harper on his back, her hands clasped rightly around the saddle and reigns, her face pinched in concentration.

Leaning against the fence, Claire smiled softly without turning to him, her eyes following the girl. “It’s fun for me, too. The most exciting thing that happened in my life in the past 10 years was battling my mild addiction to painkillers, so this,” she gestured vaguely around them, “is not a bad change of scenery.”

Almost on instinct, Owen looked down at her jeans-clad legs. “Which one was it? Left or right?” He asked.

“Left.”

He nodded. “Does it still hurt?”

She glanced at him quickly and offered him a half-shrug. “Sometimes. If I overwork it.” Then added, “It’s not that bad now. For several years I couldn’t even fly because I had a titanium implant there that would send metal detectors at the airport into a cardiac arrest. That was… interesting.”

“So, you were basically a cyborg?” Owen clarified, also propping his forearms on the fence next to her, making the old wood creak.

Claire laughed, her eyes crinkling, and shook her head. “Where were you, Mr. Grady, when I needed that kind of pep talk?”

“Hm, when was it, 13-14 years ago?” His forehead creased. “Yup, I was shamelessly hitting on my French Lip prof.”

“You?” She eyed him with disbelief. “You took French Lit class?”

“Hey,” he nudged her with his elbow, all righteous indignation, “I have multitudes, too.” A pause. “Besides, it sorta wasn’t a choice. I mean, I thought it would be an easy credit.”

“Was it?” Claire inquired, still chocking on muffled snorts.

He laughed and admitted, “The toughest shit you can imagine.”

Before them, the groom explained something to Harper, showing her how to position her grip on the reigns and what to do with her feet and legs, and then he ran over to the opposite side of the arena, waving at the girl to stir the pony toward him. Slowly, Harper squeezed Chester’s sides, tugging at the reigns until he moved where she wanted him to go, her delight so radiant it threatened to lure early spring out of its hiding.

“She really does like it,” Claire noted, watching the girl navigate her way around the arena, the pony playful beneath her and eager to follow her commands. “I’ll never forgive myself if she ditches my classes for this,” she added half-jokingly.

“Doubt it.” Owen said quietly, his gaze shifting from his daughter to the woman beside him.

She was squinting just a little against the wind, her freckles pale after the long months of little to no sun exposure, her lips parted ever so slightly, curved at the corners without Claire’s knowing it. His heart did a flip, then climbed all the way up to his throat and plunged down into his stomach as an invisible hand squeezed his lungs, rendering him breathless and dizzy and so goddamn terrified he thought he’d black out. Which, admittedly, would make a nice exit.

“Um, you’ve got…” He started.

“Mm?” Claire turned to him just as he reached to brush a strand of hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear, his fingers lingering on her cheek and making her skin burn. His face was barely half an inch away from hers – when did this happen? – while their exhales were puffing out in small white clouds that they pushed between each other. His eyes darkened and he swallowed, his Adam’s Apple bobbing in his throat as his index finger slipped under her chin, his gaze shifting down to her mouth—

“Daddy!” They jerked away from one another at the sound of Harper’s voice, Claire’s cheeks hot and her breathing shallow. “Look, I’m doing it all by myself!” She waved at him, making her second circle without any assistance from the groom.

Owen smiled and nodded, telling her to keep it up. When Claire moved a step away from him, he chose to pretend he didn’t notice.

On the way back to town, they stopped for a late lunch – or early dinner – at the 50’s-styled diner just outside of the city limits, bustling with other patrons on their way back home after the weekend away. The three of them took a booth by the window closer to the back, and between the slurps of her milkshake and shoving French fries into her mouth, Harper recounted everything she’d seen and done this afternoon, alternating this flow with occasional reminder to Owen that having her own pony would be ‘so awesome’.

“How about you keep your room clean for one week, and then we’ll talk?” Owen suggested, eyebrows raised. Harper’s face fell in defiance instantly, and Claire dove behind her mug of hot chocolate to hide her stifled laughter.

He listened with half an ear, nodding at all the right moments, his own burger hardly touched, as he tried to decide what bothered him more – the fact that Claire would barely look at him or that he had no idea what to say if she did do it. Screwing up twice in two days was somewhat excessive even for him, and something told him that looking the other way twice in row was not an option. Alas, she was focused entirely on his daughter instead, absently tearing pieces off her own turkey sandwich and reminding Harper to breathe as she spoke.

When they dropped Claire off at her house, she slipped out of the car after waving a halfhearted goodbye to Owen and pulled the back door open. “So, you had fun?” She asked Harper, her head tilted quizzically.

“Thank you!” The girl pulled her into a tight hug. “The bestest present ever,” she whispered into Claire’s hair, and Claire squeezed her back, brushing a quick kiss to the top of Harper’s head.

“You’re welcome.”

“Don’t move,” Owen instructed his daughter when Claire started toward her door and hopped out into the cold evening, following her up the narrow path. “Claire.”

She paused, her hand already on the doorknob, her expression puzzled. For a brief moment, her gaze flickered toward the car. “Did I forget something?”

“No…” He hopped up her porch steps two at a time. “I don’t think so.” Winded more from accelerated heartbeat than a 5-second jog, he stopped in front of her, feeling as confused as she looked, his mind empty. “Look, about earlier--” he started and faltered.

“Nothing happened,” she said quietly, never breaking the eye contact.

“I know,” Owen added quickly. “And it’s not that I don’t want it to.” He paused, watching her. From this close, he could feel her, the warmth radiating off of her practically tangible, the green of her eyes pulling him in like gravity. “Because I do, Claire. God help me, I do.” His voice dropped, sounding hoarse somehow, his whole body humming with deep, needy longing. “But it’s too fast, too soon. And Harper… She’s really attached to you and if something doesn’t—I’m sorry.”

This was meant to be an entirely different conversation if he hadn’t talked himself out of it two minutes ago when his guilt kicked in, rendering him paralyzed on the inside. What a moron.

Claire’s lips quirked faintly but the smile never came. “I know. It’s okay, you don’t have to apologize.”

“Okay,” he echoed, not sure what else to say. Not sure if there even was anything he could say.

She pushed the door open. “Thank you for today. I’ll see you later, Owen.”

---

Owen had yet to figure out why some days felt like the whole world belong to him while the others made him wonder if it was falling apart before his eyes. And while the moments of crisis were growing few and far between, he couldn’t help but feel sometime that the entire universe was conspiring against him. Granted, there was no other way to look at it after burning his mouth on his coffee and then promptly spilling said coffee down his shirt, remembering that he definitely needed to take care of their laundry before they ran out of clean clothes altogether.

It did not qualify as a good morning.  

“Harper!” Owen bellowed down the hall for the third time. They were going to be late. Hell, they were late 10 minutes ago.

“I can’t find my bracelet,” she said without looking up when he appeared in the doorway of her room to find her kneeling near her dresser, rummaging through one of the drawers.

Owen ran a hand over his face. “Okay, you’ll have to do without it today then.”

The girl pushed away from the dresser and dove under her desk. “I can’t go without it,” she said with a frown. “Grandma gave it to me!”

He stifled an exasperated sigh. Checked his watch and pursed his lips into a thin line, the crease between his eyebrows deepening. “Harper, come on, we have to go.”

“I have to find it,” she repeated stubbornly, her voice breaking. “I can’t go without it.”

“You can and we need to be out the door in two minutes,” he countered, which came out snappier than Owen intended.

The girl looked up at him, “Why does everything always have to be your way?”

“Because I say so, that’s why,” Owen pointed out, feeling like he was starting to lose his patience.

In looks, Harper took largely after her mother – the same curve of her eyebrows, the same slightly upturned nose, the same dark curls, falling nearly to her waist. There was an old photo album with Jenny’s childhood photos that Owen kept in the study and if he put Harper’s picture next to her mother’s when she was her age, they could easily be mistaken for the same person, or twins.

The girl’s stubbornness was all Owen’s, though. She would never leave the house wearing blue sneakers if her heart was set on the red ones, or wear pigtails on a ponytail day, or eat her vegetables if she didn’t feel like it. He had yet to discover a force of nature that could make his daughter do what she didn’t want to do. It was cute when she was little, and one day, he hoped, she would put this trait to good use, but right now it was getting more and more frustrating the older she got, their communication calling for negotiating and compromising, and Owen was starting to suspect that her teenage years would be a nightmare for both of them.

A part of him loved that willfulness in Harper, the determination that pushed her to learn how to walk and read before her peers did, but it also made her withdraw into herself in any situation that was out of her control. This was why she took the loss of her mother so hard – like she was trying to will herself into growing up faster so she could have a better grasp on something that was yet outside of her full comprehension.  He admired her for that, however wistful that admiration was – at times, Owen couldn’t help but think that she was stronger than he’d ever be.

Which was wonderful, all things considered, except they really didn’t have any time for this right now.

Harper’s eyes welled up when she looked up at him. “Why are you so mean?” Her lips began to quiver, and her breaking voice stabbed him right in the heart.

“Harper…” Owen took in a deep breath. “Okay, let’s look for it.”

“Go away!” Angry tears sprung out of her eyes, and she sank onto her bed and gave that knife a twist. “I don’t want you, I want my mommy!”

He exhaled sharply, feeling sick to his stomach.

She wasn’t that far off – if he was in Harper’s place, he’d also want just about anyone else who was more qualified to do the job. He was a joke, and he kept messing everything up. They were constantly late, he was forgetting stuff, mixing up the dates. Half the time, he had no idea what he was doing, and the other half he still wasn’t sure he was getting it right. Owen was trying, but he couldn’t help but wonder if it was enough to justify all the mistakes he kept making along the way.

It had been over ten months now, and while they made some progress with their routine, he still felt like a fraud, their lives feeling more like a game, something he could step out of to take a breath and regroup. Particularly, on the moments like this one. A part of him was still clinging to the hope of finding the middle ground, figuring out the balance between having to be two parents at the same time, but even that hope was starting to fade, filling him with dread of being stuck in this uncharted territory for the rest of his life. It was like he couldn’t figure out the right steps, or sometimes the steps were right, but the music had changed.

Owen crouched in front of Harper and reached for his daughter whose shoulders were shaking with quiet sobs, bracing himself for being pushed away, and if she did it, he knew he wouldn’t blame her. However, she leaned into him and pressed her face into his shoulder, her tears soaking Owen’s shirt and her small body trembling.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Owen rubbed Harper’s back gently. “I miss you mom, too. Very, very much. But we have to make it work without her, baby. As a team, remember?” Maybe if he repeated it enough times, he’d learn to believe it.

The girl nodded and wrapped her arms around him, her ragged breathing evening out slowly. “Okay.” She sniffled. “Daddy? Are you going to get sick and die to?” She asked quietly.

“What?” Owen pulled back and wiped away the tears from her cheeks, his forehead creased as he searched her features, his chest tightening at the sight of tired acceptance on her face. “No, honey. Where did you get that?”

She rolled her shoulders in a half-shrug. Her hands dropped in her lap, fingers bunching the fabric of her purple tutu.

“Hey,” Owen tapped her on the chin until Harper was looking at him again. “Never, I swear.” He pulled at her hands until she let go of the starchy fabric – a nervous habit she picked up from Jenny – and clasped them in his palms, their eyes locked together. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Promise?” Harper’s eyes narrowed assertively in a cautious hope that she didn’t trust herself with just yet.

He willed himself to offer her a smile, hoping it looked more reassuring than it felt. “Cross my heart.”

At last, the worry lines on her face smoothed out, and she nodded slowly. And then asked, “Can we stay at home and watch cartoons today?”

Owen gave her a look - one eyebrow arched in a silent, Do you need to ask? Harper wrinkled her nose – there was no point in arguing, and they both knew it.

He uncurled from the floor and stood up, and Harper slid off the bed and followed him into the hallway, this time without protest.

Two minutes later, they found her bracelet in the pocket of her coat where she put it the previous evening.

Another thing that Owen discovered after finally dropping his daughter off at school (only 20 minutes late for her first period) was a black cashmere glove wedged between the passenger seat and the center console. He pulled it out and twisted it in his fingers. The fabric was pleasantly soft to the touch, smelling faintly of Claire’s perfume.

---

“I’m just saying – he’s a good guy,” Karen pressed for what felt like a hundredth time.

“I don’t need you setting me up with anyone,” Claire countered with patient tat threated to turn into exasperation any moment now and blew a wisp of hair that kept falling over her forehead off with a huff. “And why would you want to do it, anyway?”

A hand of her hip, Karen regarded her glumly across the room. “My love life is dead in a ditch, Claire. Let me live vicariously through you.”

“Well, thank you, but no, thank you,” Claire snorted. “I can take care of my love life without your help.”

“Right,” Karen snorted, earning an expressive eye-roll from her sister.

After the divorce, she decided to redecorate the house in an attempt to try and erase the presence of her ex-husband from her life to the best of her ability. After living for nearly twenty years surrounded by everything beige and pastel, Karen settled on baby-blue for the living room and mint-green for the kitchen. The hallway was still under consideration.

Currently, she and Claire were halfway into repainting her living room while her sons, Zach and Gray, were sent to clean the garage, the sound of their bickering wafting through the vents as they pushed around the boxes of useless junk no one had the heart to throw out. Claire knew for a fact that they were not likely to make any progress there whatsoever, but at least it kept them out of the way.

However, ending up elbows deep in paint and redecoration supplies was hardly what Claire expected when her sister asked her to ‘come over and help out with something’ on her day off. Apparently, there were two types of people in the world – those who hired professionals for this kind of thing, and those who shamelessly exploited their family.

“You are a professional,” Karen pointed out when Claire brought it up. “And you’re free.”

“Wow, I’ve never felt more appreciate in my life.” She deadpanned.

Claire’s phone dinged, announcing a new text message.

The corner of her mouth curled up at the sight of Owen’s name that popped up on the screen.

Lost anything? it read.

Are we playing 20 questions? She typed back. Should I ask if it’s an animal, a vegetable, or a mineral?

Owen responded promptly, Found your glove.

Claire bit her lip, doing her best to ignore Karen who was making big eyes at her. Thank god, I thought it ran away from me.

The screen came to life almost immediately. Well then, it’s grounded until you’re reunited.

Are you up for the challenge? You saw what it’s capable of. She shook her head, trying not to notice a fluttering in her chest and a soft warm glow in the pit of her stomach.

I have a 6-yr old who’s learning how to make waffles from scratch. I can handle a runaway glove.

You’re a brave man.

Instead of sending another text, Owen called, a picture of him and Harper that Claire took at the girl’s birthday party blinking on the screen – Owen grinning for what he was worth, slightly blurry next to his daughter who was blowing out birthday candles, her party hat slightly askew.

“Hey, um… You need me to bring it over?” Owen asked when she picked up, his voice laced with amusement, and maybe it was the paint fumes, but she almost managed to convince herself that she could no longer hear the notes of tension that seemed to permeate every conversation they had since last Sunday. All one and half of them, and every word they’d exchanged felt like trying too hard.

“No, it’s okay. Believe it or not, I have more than one pair of gloves, Mr. Grady,” she responded.  

He chuckled, and Claire imagined him standing in his kitchen bathed in the morning sunlight tangled in his hair, making it look golden at the ends. Imaged him leaning against the counter with the easy grace he was seemingly unaware of, his cheeks shaded with stubble, probably still sporting a bedhead.

“Yeah, well… I was just worried about your mutual separation anxiety. Wouldn’t want that to happen.”

Claire snorted. “We’ll live.” A pause. “So, waffles, huh?” She could hear the clatter of pots and pans on his end of the line, and Harper’s voice reading from a cookbook or maybe a magazine.

“Stranger things happen.”

They do indeed, she thought.

Like a snowfall in the Sahara Desert.

Or Venus spinning backwards for no particular reason.

Or the fact that practical and level-headed Claire Dearing was grinning uncontrollably like an idiot right now while her logical thinking and pragmatism were having a laughing fit. With a suddenness that left her lightheaded, Claire’s life was spiraling out of control, making her feel like she was balancing on a tightrope – one wrong step, and she’d be flying into the abyss. The only difference between this and a circus trick was that she was blindfolded as well, or at least so it seemed.

God, she was in so much trouble.

“Who was that?” Karen asked as soon as Claire hung up.

“No one.” Claire grabbed her abandoned roller and dipped it into a tray of baby-blue paint, grateful for an excuse to focus on something that wasn’t dealing with the flopping of her heart in her chest. It grew five size too big and couldn’t fit in her ribcage anymore, making her slightly dizzy.  

“Could you be any more obvious?” Karen rolled her eyes. “What’s going on with you two?”

Claire turned away, choosing to concentrate on the task at hand. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sis.”

Karen snorted. “Wanna try that again, but with more feeling?”  

---

There was something soothing about repetitive activities that Owen found particularly comforting. Some people meditated, other knitted, and he loved to run. The simple action of pounding the pavement, one step after another, pushing himself forward helped him clear his mind, set his thoughts straight, or, in most cases, rid him of any altogether. Funny how physical exertion could be so consuming it barely ever left the space for anything else.

A few days after Jenny’s funeral, he woke up completely numb, his mind a black hole, which felt surprisingly refreshing after a long period of agonizing pain over the sickness and the loss of his wife. It was almost like his brain blocked out the whole incident, making Owen believe half the time that Jenny would be in the kitchen or watching cartoons with Harper when he got back home from work. Something like coping mechanism – he was well familiar with the concept in theory after those mandatory therapy sessions that followed one of his NAVY tours.

It was easier that way, too. He could function the way he used to. He could get up in the morning and make breakfast for his daughter and go to work and pick up groceries on his way back. He’d probably lie to himself if he said he wanted it to be any other way. Frozen somehow. Stunned.

It didn’t matter.

At the time, nothing mattered. The woman he loved more than life itself was gone, his whole existence was in ruins – why would he want to feel anything about any of this? A few months ago, he was certain this was how it was going to be until the day he died – going through motions as if on autopilot, sticking to the basics of existence rather than actually living, holding on to the sweet oblivion of dreams that made sense more than his reality.

Not only did it feel better than the alternative, it felt fair. What right did he have to be happy when Jenny was dead? How could he allow himself a sliver of hope for the future when hers was taken from her? He had a clear plan and goal ahead of him – make sure his daughter’s life was better than this. End of story.

And then…

And then he started to thaw, the feelings he never knew he could have again peeking cautiously from their hiding, waking up from a long slumber, shaky and uncertain but eager and willing to overflow him. Of course, he fought them as best he could, shoving them back and burying them deep and shutting them out with persistence and determination. The anticipation of something new and wonderful mixed with guilt and shame, Jenny’s face before his mind’s eye, sobering and grave.

Until the edges of that image began to blur and it cracked and faded like an old photograph, and the heavy black mane Jenny used to wear in sloppy buns on the top of her head and the chocolate softness of her gaze stepped back, giving way to bright-red waves and a dusting of freckles and the sea-green of Claire’s eyes, the sound of her laughter echoing in his head. Until he was going to bed and waking up with her face before his mind’s eye.

In the past decade, Owen Grady had seen enough death, blood and violence to last him a few lifetimes. He’d long lost count of the times when he was half a step away from becoming a memory and never seeing the light of another day again. And yet, it was nothing compared to the animal fear that was clutching him in its sharp claws right now. The fear of taking a leap again and betting on a maybe instead of sticking to a safe no.

Of course, there also was a matter of Harper. Did he have any right to bring another woman into their lives when the memories of her mother were still raw and fresh in his daughter’s mind? No, he did not. It already frightened Owen that she was young, her recollection of Jenny more fleeting than his. In a few years, she would barely remember her at all, the face on the photographs would be a face of a stranger. Was he in a position to speed up this process by bringing another person into their small world after trying so hard and for so long to conserve it the way it had been when the three of them were still together?

But how on earth was he supposed to choose between logic and common sense, and the fact that he was head over heels for Claire?

Owen circled around the park, before slowing down and stopping eventually, breathless. He bent over, hands propped on his knees, gulping hungry for air, his lungs screaming. For once, a 12-mile run left him more agitated than he was when he left the house.

That evening Owen found Harper sitting at the coffee table in the living room after dinner, her school workbook open before her and her crayons strewn all over the place.

“Hey, kiddo? Whatcha you up to?”

“Spelling,” she said when he plopped down next to her.

“Sound like fun,” Owen offered enthusiastically, stretching out on the carpet, but she only shrugged. Then her expression brightened and she peered down at him. “Can we go see the horses again?”

Owen chuckled. “We might have to ask Claire about that.” He made another attempt to gather his thoughts together. Took a steadying. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” The girl reached for a blue crayon and filled the large boxes with shaky P-H-O-N-E.

“What’d you say if Claire started hanging out with us sometimes?” He watched her look for another crayon before diving under the coffee table to retrieve it.

“She’s already hanging out with us,” Harper responded, seemingly more interested in her homework.

Owen cleared his throat. “Maybe more than that,” he said. “Like, maybe we’ll have her over for dinner now and then, or take her to the movies with us, or to the park. Stuff like that. Hypothetically speaking.”

She turned to him with a frown. “What’s a ‘hypoticly’?”

“Hypothetically. It means ‘in theory’,” he explained. “Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. But if she will, would it be okay with you?”

Harper sat back on her heels. “Why won’t she? She likes us.”

He laughed at that. “You think so? Well, I still have to ask her.”  

“It’s okay.” The girl grinned. “Hypo—what was it?”

“Hypothetically.” With a victorious whoop, Owen pulled her down for a vicious tickle attack.

---

“Stop it, man!” Barry demanded from his spot near the workbench where he was scrubbing his hands clean with a solvent the following Friday, its sharp scent hanging in the air.

Elbows deep in the guts of an old Harley Davidson, Owen glanced up at him. “What?”

“You’re humming,” Barry raised his eyebrows. “Why are you humming?”

“I’m not humming,” Owen scoffed.

“You are, too. What is it? Did your daughter get an A or something?” He paused theatrically. “Or is it that hot --”

“Shut up,” Owen told him, his mouth curving into a smile against his will.

“’Cause if you’re not gonna go for it, I might,” Barry warned him, earning a dirty cloth in his face, tossed with surprising precision.

“You need to get a life,” Owen said, pulling away from the motorcycle and standing up, his hands shaking with the nervous energy coursing through him.

“Hey, where are you going?” Barry called after him when he grabbed his jacket and headed for the exit.

“I got a date,” Owen tossed over the shoulder with a short laugh, his insides churning at the sound of his own voice and the idea of… whatever it was he was going to do.

---

It was a little known fact, but her entire life could have easily turned out entirely different.

The first time Claire stepped on the ice, she was 4, and up until this moment, she was living and breathing her dreams about bright, colourful leotards and tight buns and doing gymnastics, like Karen. Yet, when their parents went to sign her up for the lessons, the class was already full, leaving Claire devastated and heart-broken. Her only option was to wait for the next year, or maybe hope that someone would drop out, vacating a spot she could take.

Her mother suggested trying ice-skating to fill the time until Claire could join the next group, and the offer wasn’t met with enthusiasm. Why would she want to do it if it wasn’t gymnastics? But Claire didn’t have much of a choice except to maybe sulk in her room and fell miserable, and at the time, she really, really wanted to have a thing, like her sister. And after her first hour on the skating rink, she never thought about gymnastics ever again.

Push, turn, jump…

Triple flip, her lifelong nemesis.

Claire winced at the mild tug of ache in her leg, caused by an awkward landing. It was all about the setting - knowing what she had to do and seeing it in her mind wasn’t enough. Her body needed to be aligned perfectly and positioned properly for every move. She knew from experience how doing it wrong might end.

All her life, she heard people tell her that her techniques looked effortless and smooth and flawless, not one of them seemingly realizing that there was always fear. The ice was merciless if she allowed it to be, yet it also gave her the freedom like nothing else, and the short moments in the air, mere seconds of floating above the smooth, pale surface were worth it. They were worth every bruise and scratch and all of her tears. There was, after all, nothing quite like flying, like an illusion of breaking the laws of physics and tearing off the ground, escaping the grip of gravity at last, longing for more than she could have.

And at the same time, it kept her grounded and focused, her attention zeroed in on here and now. More whole than ever.

Spin, lunge…

“You really are living here, aren’t you?”

A familiar voice broke through the melodic notes of Across The Universe, nearly throwing her off balance – both literally and figuratively.  

Claire whipped her head around, so engrossed in the moment she thought she might have imagined it. It had been so long since Owen casually dropped by when she wasn’t teaching, she’d forgot to look for him in the bleachers, hidden in the shadows outside the brightly lit arena – a habit she developed briefly after the first few time he’d done it. The one she wasn’t particularly proud of.

She straightened up and pushed the hair that escaped the scrunchie holding it together at the nape of her neck out of her face. “Actually, I am. I sleep on the pallet over there,” she motioned vaguely toward the corner of the auditorium. “And my house is just a decoy to keep my sister off my back.”

He chuckled. “Why am I not surprised?”

“What brings you by, Mr. Grady?” She asked, only half-joking.

In the two weeks since Harper’s birthday, Owen made a point of having as little interaction with her as humanly possible. No, he wasn’t rubbing it in her face, but his attempts were undeniable nonetheless. He’d drop Harper off and collect her afterward, not a minute late, always ushering the girl out the second the pulled on her street shoes and avoiding looking at Claire for more than a second at a time like she was contagious with something incurable.

As a result, Claire went out of her way to stick around talking to the other kids or their parents until Owen and Harper were gone, desperate to prove that two could play that game. Which only added to her puzzlement that she was seeing him now, not only here out of the blue, but stepping onto the ice, grey ice-skates on his feet. He clutched the barrier for a second to steady himself, stiff and cautious, and her eyebrows hit the roof at the sight of him.

And then he started toward her, not at all uncertain in his movements – something that undoubtedly came from practice.

“Colour me surprised,” Claire whistled under her breath, and Owen laughed, the sound bouncing off the walls to hang for a moment in the hollow space above their heads.

“I actually played hockey,” he admitted. “A long time ago.”

She arched an eyebrow, allowing him to slide closer to her, trying to guess what was it that caught her attention. In a snug leather jacket and black dress shirt underneath it, he looked different somehow, but she couldn’t quite place her finger on what made her think so. Not his wardrobe choices, she decided in the end. She saw him dressed in grease-stained work clothes as well as in casual and what Owen perceived as ‘business casual’ attire before.

No, there was something about him this time…

“And then what happened?” She asked, genuinely curious.

“Middle school. Puberty.” He flinched at the memories. “I stopped being interested in hangin’ out with people that looked like me and got into spending time with people who looked like you.” His gaze traveled up and down Claire’s body, and she raised her chin, her eyes glinting with amusement.

“But girls like jocks,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, and they also like having boyfriends who don’t spend 4 hours a day chasing a plastic puck,” Owen countered.

“Fair enough.” She raised her hands, conceding his point. “So…” In one fluid motion, she slipped away and around him, disappearing in the shadow for a second only to emerge in another spotlight, “do you have any other hidden talents I know nothing about?”

Owen pushed back, making a slow semi-circle on the spot, following her with his gaze.

“Sometime I don’t burn the food to a crisp when I cook,” he responded, watching her face.

A laughter bubbled up in Claire’s chest. “Wow, you’re quite a catch,” she started, and then cut herself off with a wince. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like—It’s all Karen’s fault.”

“Karen thinks I’m a catch?” Owen specified, making an awkward spin as if to prove a point.

“No! I mean, yes, obviously--” Claire rolled her eyes, “--but it’s not what it was about.” She shook her head, trying not to think of the traitorous colour rising up her cheeks. “My sister got divorced recently and she hates when people treat her like a divorced woman instead of like, you know, a person. And I guess I thought you’d also be sick of being defined by something that happened to you instead of who you are.” After that, she clamped her mouth shut, hoping that one of the overhead lights would maybe fall on her head this very moment. “I’m going to stop talking now.”

Owen stayed quiet for a long moment, before his lips stretched into a rueful half-smile and he rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “You know, I’ve heard ‘I’m sorry, my condolences’ so many times in this past year that at some point I almost started to believe it was my name. I actually almost introduced myself as ‘I’m sorry, my condolences’ when I first met you.”

“Shame.” She bit her lip when Owen nearly tripped over himself, trying to keep up with her. “That’d make one hell of a first impression.”

Claire didn’t really notice she was skating away from him while Owen was advancing on her until her sacrum bumped into the barrier, catching her off-guard, and the next moment, he was right in front of her, bracketing her with his arms, his hands gripping the railing on other side of Claire for support. And they were both breathless, and she could feel the pounding of his heart against her chest and his warm breath on her face, and the world was spinning so fast.

“Why are you here, Owen?” Claire repeated softly.

His eyes were deep blue and stormy, making her think of being lost in the sea, and drowning, drowning, drowning.

“Trying to not be defined by something that happened to me,” he murmured, his face so close to Claire’s he could see every golden spec in her eyes, every freckle, every smallest detail already seared into his mind. His nose bumped against hers, his lips hovering over Claire’s for a second before she tilted her face up, pressing her mouth to his, her fingers curled tightly around his jacket.

She smelled of something sweet and tasted of cherries – a mix that left him lightheaded, her lips soft and warm against his. And when she started to pull away, Owen dipped his head, deepening the kiss, his teeth tugging lightly at her bottom lip, his heart suddenly too big for his body, and too hot, and too full…

“So I was hoping,” he began when Claire drew back a little at last, “to maybe take you out for dinner. If you happen to have a couple hours on your hands.”

“I think I could shift some things around,” she whispered, her head swimming. “But what about--”

“It’s okay,” he promised her as his shuddered inhale reverberating through her, no longer able to hold back the words he’d been swallowing for quite a while. “I can’t get you out of my mind for one goddamn moment, Claire. Couldn’t for months now, and it’s driving me insane.”

“And Harper…” Her hand traced the collar of his shirt, his skin rippling and shivering under the touch of her cool fingers.

“Harper’s staying with my mother till tomorrow.”

Feeling her face break into a grin, Claire wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling herself up urgently on tiptoes and closer to him, dizzy and elated. “Tomorrow, huh?” Her lips crashed to his again as Owen’s hand slipped up her back, a guttural moan forming in the back of his throat, and she prayed to god they wouldn’t float away.

To be continued....

PS HCs are welcome!