#Lawnmower Game: Next Generation

[mrsquill]

Whole World in His Hands

Pre-Outbreak!Joel Miller

Summary: Hi! So I haven’t written fic in… four years? I think? So please be nice to me! TLOU broke my heart and put it back together again and stamped on it simultaneously, and I couldn’t get the idea of Single Dad Joel, Uncle Tommy and baby Sarah out of my head, so here’s this!

Set within the timeframe provided by the show however no apocalypse here, baby! So, Sarah was born in 1989. Hope my maths be mathin’!

Notes: I’m not from the States, so I’m sorry if any cultural references are wrong. I’ve also never played the games - so if any backstory is missing/I’ve completely ignored, again: I’m sorry! This is based on the beautiful relationship between Pedro and Nico’s portrayals.

Warnings: Sarah’s mother is mentioned with the tiniest bit of angst, but mostly fluffiness and repairing my broken heart. So please, enjoy!

1997

The sun was starting to set slowly on another stifling Texas evening in August. The plastic grooves of the white garden chair Joel was sat in were sure to leave a mark on his bare back, but he was content enough to stay there forever. He closed his eyes and listened, half-asleep, to the sounds of lawnmowers, kids laughing, dogs barking, and Tommy shuffling around in the backyard.

The radio host announced ‘We Have Forgotten’ by Sixpence None the Richer was next up, and to enjoy, folks. Well, Joel was sure to do just that. The late summer air was soon full of breathy vocals and lilting guitar strings as he adjusted his position slightly in the late golden light, careful not to wake his little girl.

Sarah was snoring lightly, sprawled across his lap in her towel, dark curls damp from a day in the pool they had in the backyard. Supporting her head with one arm, a well-earned bottle of beer rested in his other hand, sunglasses fixed on his nose as the smell of barbecue wafted over. Joel couldn’t be sure his younger brother was actually ever quite full, not even after third helpings of birthday cake.

He’d hosted Sarah’s eighth birthday party that day - admittedly, a month late - and was grateful for it to be over, despite seeing the joy on his baby’s face when all her friends turned up for a day in their pool. The pancakes in bed and wonky birthday tiara had been enough for her to declare that this was the best birthday ever, so the surprise party was the icing on the cake.

Joel and Tommy had actually managed to pull it out of the bag: the thought of 12 screaming eight-year-olds potentially drowning in his backyard was enough to wake him at night in a cold sweat, but his brother had firmly reminded him with a slap on his back: “You’ve kept one alive for this long, brother. How hard can eleven more be for a couple hours?”

Tommy had kept the girls entertained by generally making a fool of himself in and out of the pool, and Joel had kept them fed and watered with a steady stream of hotdogs and soda, reminding them to keep reapplying sunblock and keep their hats on. His brother had rolled his eyes, but Joel reasoned one of them had to be the sensible one - and it’s been me since the day you were born, he’d added.

The moms came and duly collected at the time allotted on the shitty invitations he’d cobbled together in secret a few weeks prior, and Joel was forced to defend himself from being hit on by precisely all eleven women - single or not. He’d firmly rejected invitations for a coffee, or a whiskey, but had grudgingly agreed to come and check over a leaky faucet which he strongly doubted was leaking at all.

When the last little girl - Hayley, Sarah’s best ever friend - had left with her mom, Joel had closed the door and slid a hand over his face, resisting the urge to slide downwards and crumple on the floor. He’d groaned inwardly, Tommy chuckling from the hallway. You’re crazy, his brother had remarked, watching Joel interact with the women, his awkward flirting and half-hearted laughs enough to make anybody cringe. You don’t need to be alone forever, man. You’re thirty! You deserve a lil’ fun!

Joel reminded his brother than such fun was off his radar for the foreseeable, and Tommy held his hands up in mock defeat. S’good thing, I guess, he’d admitted. They don’t know what they’re missin’ with the younger, better lookin’ stud of this house anyway. Joel had merely rolled his eyes at that, heading for the backyard, exhausted from the day’s efforts and seeking a few moments of peace and quiet with his daughter.

He had found Sarah reading through her cards and sorting through assorted gifts on the porch swing, snuggling happily into his side as he collapsed beside her. You have a good birthday, baby? He’d asked, nervous for her answer. Everything Joel did was for Sarah. It was the reason he hauled his ass out of bed for 4am contracting shifts, had learned how to style her hair by shyly asking a teacher at her school, had let her paint his nails pink at their backyard tea party and had loved every second of it.

Sarah replied that she had, but now she wanted to play mermaids one more time, please?! It’s still my birthday! Joel could only oblige - his own dark eyes pleading at him, fringed with delicate lashes that he was certain came from her mama. Joel didn’t tend to think of Sarah’s mother often - if, at all. She had asked a few questions here and there, and he’d always managed to deflect them. As he’d slipped into the warm water with Sarah giggling on his shoulders, he knew that the time would come where they’d have the conversation he’d been avoiding, since the night Joel had brought her home from the hospital.

Looking at Sarah’s sleeping form, now, her button nose and pouted lips, Joel’s heart heaved with love for her. Joel looked over at Tommy from beneath his sunglasses, wolfing down his tenth hotdog of the day, wondering how they’d made it so far. Sarah shifted a little in his lap, and Joel felt himself swept back in time, 22-years-old, a new father without a fucking clue about what to do with this baby without a mother.

He remembered it like it was yesterday - his ex had called the house he and Tommy had just bought. Her voice shaking on the line: I can’t do this, Joel. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was pregnant. She’s yours. Please take her. I don’t have anybody else to call. He hadn’t heard from her in six months - it wasn’t a serious thing, she was a cashier at the store he got his liquor at when the weekend rolled in, and they’d been having fun. Careful fun, right?

In blind panic, Joel got to the hospital and found the right room. How he did it, he’d never know. The baby was already alone, save for a nurse who gently gestured that he should sit down and try and get his breathing together. As soon as she was placed in his arms, Joel knew his life was changed forever. She was it, this tiny snuffling bundle mewling up at him. She had his eyes, he was sure. Even if they weren’t his; it didn’t fuckin’ matter. He wasn’t leaving the hospital without his girl. His Sarah.

God, it was hard. So fuckin’ hard. Some days, Joel was close to breaking point; parenting books and VHS tapes only going to far with what they could teach him. But when Sarah wrapped her tiny finger round his, or gave Tommy a gummy smile and shrieked with laughter, Joel knew he’d take a thousand shitty days for that one slice of heaven. His perfect girl. They got through it, together.

Still got ten years of this shit, Tommy mused, his foot gently kicking an abandoned Barbie across the grass, jolting Joel from his reverie. Cheers to that, he motioned to his younger brother, taking a long pull from his beer. Tommy looked down on his niece with affection he’d had for eight years, the expression well-worn on his face, before he turned and headed inside.

The song on the radio was drawing to a close, the sky above an even richer shade of honey than before, as the string lights across the pool glowed in the approaching evening light. Bath, then bed, Joel hummed to himself as he prepared to lift Sarah to his chest gently, ready to repeat the routine he’d shaped his life around. Joel was holding his whole world in his hands, and he felt like the luckiest man alive.

[shoppncarticles]

Rotom

Skipping 18 Pokemon in Pokedex order, since they’re all past evolutions I’ve covered already, brings us to Rotom! Rotom is quite the special little Pokemon, ripe with unique gimmicks and goofy charm. This little Electric/Ghost type seems like some kind of zappy wisp, only consisting of its orange core and lightning-bolt shaped trails. The Pokedex titles Rotom as the Plasma Pokemon, and true to that title and its typing, the place you’d find Rotom in the original games was inside a creepy TV within an old haunted mansion. Rotom is a dead ringer for electronic-dwelling poltergeists of popular fiction, but its connections to object-hurling spirits don’t just end there.

Rotom’s unique gimmick is actually how it has the ability to possess old, unused appliances, changing its Ghost typing to reflect the element of whatever body its inhabiting and gaining a unique, powerful move to boot. The first is Heat Rotom, achieved by sticking a Rotom inside a microwave oven, giving it the Electric/Fire type combo. This one is easily my favorite, since not only is Rotom quite cute in its Easy-Bake Oven shape, but its electric limbs have changed shape into oven mitts. That’s the most clever and adorable thing it could be. The unique typing helps to elevate its charm too. The combination of red and orange in its palette ain’t bad either.

What’s maybe Rotom’s most well known form though is the Electric/Water type Wash Rotom, letting you control a full washing machine in battle. Despite each Rotom form having the same stat distribution, Wash Rotom is the one that sees the most competitive usage thanks to the Electric/Water typing having very few weaknesses, helped by Rotom’s ability Levitate rendering it immune to Ground type attacks. I do find it quite funny that a living washing machine is a consistent metagame staple.

Almost just as funny as controlling a washing machine monster is being able to control a refrigerator, obviously filling the role of the Electric/Ice form of Frost Rotom. I’m a little sad Rotom’s movepool doesn’t change to accommodate each form besides gaining the one special move of each form (Frost’s being Blizzard, for example), I’d love to be able to use Frost Rotom as a primary Ice type attacker in a given team. Or hell, use multiple Rotom on one team since their typings don’t overlap too much.

The Electric/Flying Fan Rotom is next up, and also makes Rotom’s design fit the appliance a bit more by having its arms becoming windy curls. That’s cute. Fan Rotom actually only gets the move Air Slash when becoming this form. Air Slash isn’t a bad move by any means, but its 75 Base Power does pale in comparison to the likes of Blizzard and Hydro Pump’s 110. Why not give it Hurricane if we’re going all out on these forms?

Lastly is Mow Rotom, the Electric/Grass type form. While the other appliances are pretty self-explanatory in their elements, being what you’d probably think of first when asked to attach one of the types to a real world appliance, I love that it was a lawnmower that was chosen to be Rotom’s Grass type form. Even more amusingly, Mow Rotom’s special move is Leaf Storm, as if upchucking all the leafy debris it’s chewed up in its wake. The big, triangle tooth smile of this form is a great addition too.

All this is to say, really, that Rotom is an especially unique Pokemon that lives up to its special reputation quite well. I’m glad that Pokemon’s interpretation of the classic Poltergeist is so diverse and iconic in its execution, with a solid selection of varied forms and options. I do wish, though, that Rotom would get additional forms to explore further typings as more Generations came out, similar to all the love that Eevee gets (or, used to get, I suppose). By far the most amusing idea I’ve heard was an Electric/Ground type potato battery. That isn’t an appliance, sure, but wouldn’t that just make Rotom even better than it already is?

Things don’t stop there, though, since while Rotom hasn’t gotten any more forms you can use in battle, it did get a few more cosmetic alternate forms in later generations, the first being Dex Rotom seen here. Gifted to players in Sun/Moon, the Pokedex’s (in-universe) Text-to-Speech capabilities seem to have been translated in such a way that this Rotom can actually talk to you, and guides you through the game while displaying a handful of helpful features. A couple people have proposed the idea of Rotom actually being the one who writes the ‘dex entries in these games, which would be a fun spin on the idea if you ask me.

And in later games, you can even have a Rotom-infested cell phone that covers all your menu and UI needs. It makes enough sense for the Pokemon universe, I suppose, to let a little electronic spirit into personal electronics in order to boost their efficiency (even if Rotom has been shown to be pretty chaotic and unruly in its appliance forms), but having so much Rotom around in personal devices kind of makes it feel less special, y’know? If Rotom’s everywhere, it won’t feel unique anymore. Hell, the only way you could get Rotom initially was from a single timed encounter with that haunted TV I mentioned earlier! Now you can just find it anywhere without fanfare. Rotom even had the Legendary Pokemon battle music playing in its first encounter, though its ability to create eggs of itself kind of proves it isn’t a Legendary like the others. I just wish Rotom was treated with the same exclusive reverence as Spiritomb, I suppose, which would help it continue to feel unique and special in the modern day.

Score: 5/5 - PERFECT!

Rotom still gets a perfect score though, because who can deny all of its amazing features and appliance applicability?

Also, Rotom’s name backwards is motor. Just in case you didn’t see it before.

[Gen 4 Archive]

[stenka-razin]

Every Film I Watched in 2022

The Matrix (1999, dir. Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski) Bidoof’s Big Stand (2022, dir. Shaofu Zhang) Samurai Cop (1991, for. Amir Shervan) The Matrix Resurrections (2021, dir. Lana Wachowski) Citizen Kane (1941, dir. Orson Welles) Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (“鉄男II BODY HAMMER” 1992, dir. Shinya Tsukamoto) The Elephant Man (1980, dir. David Lynch) Grandma’s Boy (2006, dir. Nicholaus Goossen) Always Be My Maybe (2019, dir. Nahnatchka Khan) Game Night (2018, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein) When We First Met (2018, dir. Ari Sandel) The Kid (1921, dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1972 rerelease) Menace II Society (1993, dir. Albert Hughes & Allen Hughes) Duck Soup (1933, dir. Leo McCarey) 30 Minutes or Less (2011, dir. Ruben Fleischer) Chimes at Midnight (1965, dir. Orson Welles) Money Plane (2020, dir. Andrew Lawrence) Man with a Movie Camera (“Человек с киноаппаратом” 1929, dir. Dziga Vertov, Cinematic Orchestra soundtrack) Godzilla (1998, dir. Roland Emmerich) City Lights (1931, dir. Charlie Chaplin) Krull (1983, dir. Peter Yates) Klute (1971, dir. Alan J. Paluka) The Lawnmower Man (1992, dir. Brett Leonard) Area 51: The Alien Interview (1997, dir. Jeff Broadstreet) Ratty (2020, dir. John Angus Stewart) Heavy Metal (1981, dir. Gerald Potterton) The Northman (2022, dir. Robert Eggers) Autumn Sonata (“Höstsonaten” 1978, dir. Ingmar Bergman) Battles Without Honor and Humanity (“仁義なき戦い” 1973, dir. Kinji Fukasuka) Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima (“仁義なき戦い 広島死闘篇” 1973, dir. Kinji Fukasuka) Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Proxy War (“仁義なき戦い 代理戦争” 1973, dir. Kinji Fukusaku) Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Police Tactics (“仁義なき戦い 頂上作戦” 1974, dir. Kinji Fukusaku) Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Episode (“仁義なき戦い 完結篇” 1974, dir. Kinji Fukusaku) Logan’s Run (1976, dir. Michael Anderson) The Vietnam War (2017, dir. Ken Burns & Lynn Novick) The Devil Wears Prada (2006, dir. David Frankel) Best in Show (2000, dir. Christopher Guest) Shaolin and Wu Tang (“少林與武當” 1983, dir. Gordon Liu, dub) Shin Godzilla (“シン・ゴジラ” 2016, dir. Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi) The Legend of the Suram Fortress (“ამბავი სურამის ციხისა” 1985, dir. Sergei Parajanov) The Six Directions of Boxing (“六合八法” 1980, dir. Hsu Tien-Yung, dub) Shaolin vs Lama (“少林鬥喇嘛” 1983, dir. Lee Tso-Nam, dub) Inside the Mind of a Cat (2022, dir. Andy Mitchell) Prey (2022, dir. Dan Trachtenberg) Marathon Man (1976, dir. John Schlesinger) Final Destination (2000, dir. James Wong) Final Destination 2 (2003, dir. David R. Ellis) Final Destination 3 (2005, dir. James Wong) The Final Destination (2009, dir. David R. Ellis) Final Destination 5 (2011, dir. Steven Quayle) Mulan (1998, dir. Tony Bancroft & Barry Cook) No Time to Die (2021, dir. Cory Joji Fukunaga) The Munsters (2022, dir. Rob Zombie) House of 1000 Corpses (2003, dir. Rob Zombie) One Night in Miami… (2020, dir. Regina King) Magnificent Obsession (1954, dir. Douglas Sirk) The Knight Before Christmas (2019, dir. Monika Mitchell) Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter) Noel Next Door (2022, dir. Max McGuire) Ice Sculpture Christmas (2015, dir. David Mackay) Alexander Nevsky (1938, dir. Sergei Eisenstein) Love Hard (2021, dir. Hernán Jiménez) Falling for Christmas (2022, dir. Janeen Damien) A Christmas Prince (2017, dir. Alex Zamm) Holidate (2020, dir. John Whitesell) Cyborg (1989, dir. Albert Pyun) Full Metal Jacket (1987, dir. Stanley Kubrick) Star Trek Generations (1994, dir. David Carson) Christmas Vacation (1989, dir. Jeremiah S. Chechik) Star Trek: First Contact (1996, dir. Jonathan Frakes) Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001, dir. Sharon Maguire) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990, dir. Steve Barron) Waterworld (1995, dir. Kevin Reynolds) Elf (2003, dir. Jon Favreau) Feliz NaviDAD (2020, dir. Melissa Joan Hart) Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977, dir. Jim Henson)

[pastastick67]

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I don't remember many demo discs I had as a kid, just this and one other come to mind right now (which I'm also downloading) - but I'm just gonna chuck my thoughts on revisiting this silly psx demo disc here! It was in the official uk playstation magazine, i used to play the shit out of it over and over but only remember a couple of the games on there. Maybe I'll remember more while playing, who knows!

look at this sexy fucking disc. This invokes absolutely nothing.

The playable games on here are:

Asterix: The Gallic War

Bugs Bunny & Taz: Time Busters

Chicken Run

Cricket 2000

Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge

Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness

Re-Volt 2 (RC Revenge)

Time Crisis: Project Titan

anyway. Join me under the cut as i talk about each of these!

straight away LOOK AT THIS SCREEN

guys i think my demo disc has covid

the music is too generic to describe lmao but it goes very well with the imagery

anyway

Asterix:

I didnt grow up with Asterix! So there isn't the full nostalgic attachment there, but theres some *vague memories* here? Anyway I don't think I played much of this because it's dogshit.

It's a *VERY* rudimentary turn based strategy where you pour potions on provinces to reinforce them, then you enter an attack phase where the bigger number wins, then Caesar's Legions attack (fallout new vegas omg????)

At the end of the attack phase you enter a minigame, one of them is a 3d platformer where you play as Obelix

VERY bare-bones. There's no music *anywhere* in this demo. It's also all just very very slow. Won't be buying this when it comes out :/

Next up: Bugs and Taz!

This one is how I found the demo disc! It was one of the ones i played over and over, lets see if it holds up lol

There's thankfully a lot more to talk about here... and music!!!

This is a pretty standard 3D platformer at its core, but you can switch between Bugs and Taz, or you can play it co-op! I imagine that's how its meant to be played. If you're playing single player the other character stands entirely still, however you can hit the left bumper to summon them back to you.

You collect carrots throughout, as well as medallions that I imagine don't do anything in the demo. They seem to be your stars.

When you have enough carrots you can participate in a minigame, the one I remember is the Pelota against the Aztecs.

It's a fairly standard game, if you're playing single player though you *are* outnumbered - but it's not too hard anyway. You just steal the ball and try to throw it through the hoop.

The one I don't remember however, is

Baladi lessons? It's a fairly standard simon says type game but

it got gender in it

all in all, neat lil demo! I mostly remember finding rabbitholes and digging around in them because I thought it was insanely cool that bugs could go underground lol

Next up: Chicken Run!

this is the *other* game I played on repeat! But it *scared the shit out of me*. You'll see why.

So... this is a stealth game

You play as Ginger and you must *be careful of the dogs*

The entire demo is dreary with unsettling ambient music, why the fuck did they make the chicken run game a metal gear clone????

Anyway, you are quite literally a chicken being chased by fucking dogs. and if you get caught a menacing stinger plays as you see this

Was a bit much for me 2 year old heart i must say! Couldn't quite handle that!

Anyway, the stealth is really simple and easy, as one would expect. There's not much going on here other than childhood trauma.

Next: Cricket 2000!

yeah

Next up issss: Frogger 2!

Okay, I had no idea this existed at all. What the fuck?

Whenever I think of frogger sequels I think of those weird ps2 ones, but this is straight up frogger

Rather than the traditional level though you're presented with a themed gauntlet, such as the first stage, a garden themed one. You are tasked with saving frogger's children.

You might be wondering, what happens if you get run over by a lawnmower?

he explodes into chunks. What the fuck?

The second level is a haunted house

This is genuinely an oddity to me, I never expected them to try implement traditional frogger gameplay into something like this. Might play it on stream at some point, I'm intrigued. That being said, I definitely dont remember this. Pretty decent? The music fucking OWNS btw

NEXT: Ms. Pacman Maze Madness!

I had no idea this existed. But first I gotta say

REST IN PEACE MS PAC-MAN

she lives on in our hearts. Fuck pac-mom, ms. pac-man was where its at

Anyway this is. really *really* boring.

It's that era of pac where they clearly had no idea what they were doing, which still goes on to this day (i say this affectionately, i love pac-man) but this one was a fuckin MISS

It's trying to translate the mazes into something completely different, more a labyrinth than the single screen mazes of yore, with block pushing puzzles and launchpads, a gauntlet you must get through while collecting as many pellets as possible

and its really lame and boring im sorry. I like that the ghosts seem to wear different attire in each level, i like that my gal ms. pac-man is here

i dont like much else. its slow and tedious as hell

however

ROCKET LAUNCHER???? HUH???

Two games left!

Revolt 2!

I forgot to take screenshots but... this is an RC Racing game, it's really a cart racer with really confusing level design, a slight bump in the road will get your car flying across the entire universe and world. There's a bit where you drive under a jeep though which is pretty cute! @is-the-driving-good? No I'm afraid, ridge racer this is not.

Anyway I'm kinda rushing a lil bit because I'm tired and the last one is TIME CRISIS!!! ITS FUCKIN TIME CRISIS, DUDE!!! I love Time Crisis!!!

Time Crisis Titan

Alas... This was not the saving grace this demo disc needed. I can't get far at all for reasons I'll get into, but what *is* there is full of the silly janky charm Time Crisis is known for.

Love these silly models! Love em

Anyway, why is this on here? Why would you put *Time Crisis* on a demo disc? This *will not* shift copies, put it as a video or something, not as a playable demo! It's a fucking lightgun game, this is clearly made for a ps1 lightgun peripheral, but people are going to be playing this with a controller!

the crosshair is incredibly slow and it's VERY difficult to aim properly which is why i didnt get far, it's just... either someone is gonna not own a lightgun and see this and think its just shit, or own one and probably plan on getting it anyway, all that's needed here is a video feature showing it off, having it be playable is *a bad move*

this is likely a pretty good time crisis game! Most of the negative reviews I can see mention the beautifully crunchy graphics being bad so the gameplays probably fine, but by advertising it like this youre convincing people it isnt.

ANYWAY

this was disappointing lmfao

a fun trip down memory lane, but yeah none of these were really that fun at all. Thankfully, the PS2 demo disc I'm downloading has much more interesting titles. Will be doing the same thing with it when I can. I wrote this one over the course of a few hours, but that one will likely have more put into it.

If you read this far thank you very much lmao, and remember:

[lasclvp]

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[samtheflamingomain]

it takes a hockey team to raise a child

Before I explain myself, I want to say first: the child in this story is a 15-year-old. A child, but not one incapable of grasping the concept of losing.

I went to a hockey game today. Yes, I'm gay and I fucking love hockey sue me. I'm Canadian. It's in the blood.

There's always fun little segments during breaks like "loudest person wins a hat" etc. 99% of the time it's just rewarding the most adorable child on camera, and I'm 99% of the time totally fine with that. Yes, I would like a Kitchener Rangers hat, but I am positive that screaming 8yo will like it a lot more, very much choose that kid over me please.

Another caveat: I dislike kids, generally. Just not my thing, they seem very annoying to be around and I can't imagine having to do it full-time. But I very much subscribe to the "it takes a village" philosophy and believe that, as a member of society, I can take actions that benefit the next generation. Best example being a crosswalk where it's usually very safe to jaywalk. But if I happen to be there when a parent says "we press the button and wait till the light tells us it's safe to walk" to their young child, I also wait. It helps establish that this is a rule everyone must follow and that safety is important.

I also frequently remind myself that I was once a child, and if I were 8 at a hockey game and won a hat, I know it would've made my entire goddamn year, so I have no problem allowing kids to win shit.

But.

Today was the first hockey game of the season, stadium more packed than pre-covid. So they introduced a few new gimmicks.

If you've seen Always Sunny or have been to a live hockey game you know one of the games is bringing a random person onto the ice at the blue line to shoot a puck into the net. This year, they decided to switch it up a bit, the damn jabronies.

You start literally 2ft from the net. Shoot, score, you win a keychain.

Would you like to move back 6ft and try for a hat AND a keychain?

(The person they picked was 15 but if this were say a 10yo I would probably invoke 'children gambling' but at 15 I feel you understand "double or nothing" type deals so I'll let this point slide for now.)

Homeboy makes the shot. Obviously. But then he's asked if he'd like to go back to centre-ice and shoot for a jersey. What kid wouldn't already be riding the adrenaline of 2 goals in front of 6k ppl, being cheered on, thinking they can make the shot from centre-ice for an incredibly more valuable prize?

Of course he agrees, and misses by a few feet. Aw.

But then, the announcer asks the crowd, should he get another try? Yeah, fair enough I'll clap for it. Another shot, another miss. Ah. Well, lesson lear-

"Let's hear it if we should give him the jersey for his efforts!" Roaring cheers.

Excuse the absolute fuck out of me, but what is the point in having him shoot at all if you're just gonna reward him anyway? Just pick a seat number and say boom you win a jersey.

If it were a 10yo I would say 100% the kid did his best give it to him he's probably on the verge of tears. 15? If I think back to being that age, I think I'd almost find it embarrassing to be rewarded for failure. I can't speak for that kid, but the entire thing felt very... contrived.

Usually, they line up like 6 people to shoot for 6 different prizes, and it's usually ridiculous. A 5yo shooting from centre-ice for a lawnmower and fucking winning it and not caring. An octogenarian brining a walker onto the ice to shoot for a pool table and nearly concussing the ref way out in left field. A literal toddler that can barely move the puck and it takes a full 30s to reach the net but it does and the crowd roars as this 4yo has won... a years' pass to the WW2 Museum.

I get that it may be kinda sad that the kid pushed his luck and lost. But that's the entire fucking setup and point of this particular gimmick. To totally override it by getting an already-fired-up-crowd to cheer seemed incredulous to me.

Here's what they should've done: not made it a gamble. Oh, you made the first shot, wanna push yer luck? No, first shot you get the keychain, now move back 6ft to shoot for the hat. Nice, got the hat, now the jersey. You should be rewarding success by offering more success, because, and I cannot stress this enough:

This is a child that was plucked from his seat to go on the ice before 6k people with 0 warning. This is going to be one of this kid's Core Memories, no matter how it ends. Absolutely nobody is missing the net from 2ft away so they're getting the damn keychain. Almost no one will miss from 8ft. Almost everyone WILL miss from centre-ice. But kids don't fuckin know that. If they didn't pull the "oh let's give it to him anyway" bit he would've sauntered away jerseyless and keychainless without really understanding that 8ft v. 35ft is a much, MUCH harder shot even pros routinely miss. Like, a LOT. And not wearing skates?? If you walk onto ice in shoes and shoot a netter from centre-ice having never held a hockey stick that's almost a goddamn act of god right there. It Is. Hard.

I figure skated for 4 years. I peaked at 8, landing my only ever double toe loop. Today I can only land a single axle and a double axle maybe 10% of the time. I never played hockey, but one thing I've realized is that most people don't truly grasp how hard it is to skate from coast-to-coast. It's nowhere near as big an area as a football field, but again, you're wearing Knife Shoes and have 50lbs of equipment on. Skating sports are so much harder than you think. Most of the kids featured in these segments have never even stepped on a rink.

Which brings me to another rule: 14+. Kids in elementary school should not be made to fail in front of thousands full stop. Well, if they shoot wide and don't win a lawnmower, it's not that sad. I doubt even the kid is sad. Why is he even shooting for a lawnmower when the next fully grown adult woman is shooting for a men's shaving kit?

I could've written an entire post on the actual game I watched because it was quite eventful, but hours later, I keep thinking about that kid that lost but still won. He's old enough to understand pity and I don't think he's really going to enjoy that jersey, because he'll always know that he didn't truly win it.

Maybe I'm overthinking. But it brings me back to the "everyone gets a participation trophy" trope that Boomers invoke without realizing it's their generation dishing out said trophies.

Gen Z is my favorite generation, which feels weird to say. They're the one that's going to really make change. I truly believe they're simply more aware and smarter than any other generation. They have had the tools to do so since birth. Late millennials like myself nearly hit that mark, but even I took 18 years to become a progressive socialist. Now you see fuckin 12yos on Twitter with anarchist progressive atheist in the bio. They're fucking S M A R T.

Which is part of why this entire event felt very off. I think, if I'd gone to the game 10y ago and saw someone my age shoot and miss and still win I wouldn't have cared. I may have even envied them for their material prize winnings.

But they're smart and know what a scam is, what an MLM is, a cash-grab, a sneaky sponsor. So they also know when they're being pitied/talked down to/patronized.

OHL, get yer shit together and, if I may, also, give yer balls a tug, ya titfuckers. (Please watch Shoresy it's my favorite show ever it is a love letter to hockey).

Stay Greater, flamingos.

[derivativealigner]

Well I haven’t watched sp all the way through for about a decade now, so I thought it was time

Sometimes I wonder how accurate the fandom is when it comes to how we interpret the characters. Like, why is Stan a football star so often in fanfic and why’s Kyle always the smart one? So I thought I’d rewatch the show and make notes along the way to see where the source of all these interpretations is. I also wanted to see if I could get some fun info to analyze, but season 1 is pretty sparse in that regard so there’s not too much of that in this post, but I’ll make a post for all the other seasons too as I watch them

In summary, it’s established in season 1 already that Stan’s a star quarterback and an animal lover, Kyle’s an A+ student, and Kenny is poor and knows a lot about sex and doesn’t have many qualms about doing crazy shit. Cartman is a bit weird since he’s mostly just a naive brat in this season, but he and Kyle have a mildly antagonistic friendship already

I have all my notes under this cut. They include a bunch of small details and other observations. I also listed every Kenny death just because

Ike has freckles

Cartman says “Weak!” and “You guys” and “Seriously” a lot from the start, also “Kickass!” He doesn’t say weak or kickass much in the later seasons iirc

Stan says “Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here” three times in this season but they dropped that catchphrase pretty quickly

Bebe got named in episode 2

Stan’s been an animal lover since s01e03 Volcano since he won’t shoot a bunny or anything else. He does shoot Scuzzlebutt at the end though

Cartman’s a pathological liar but in a childish way

Randy got named in s01e03 Volcano (and it only got worse from there)

The mayor went to Princeton

South Park is next to Mt. Evanson

Kenny will literally drink gasoline

Stan’s a star quarterback in 3rd grade

Clyde’s voice is wrong as hell in S01E04 Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride and he has a dog, Rex

Garrison says Kyle is an A+ kid

Shelly seriously abuses Stan, punching him, throwing him, maiming him with a lawnmower

Cartman had a pot-bellied pig called Fluffy

Cartman’s mom smokes crack and has sex with strange men

Dr. Mephesto is probably a Buddhist since he says “Thank Buddha” instead of “Thank God”

Clyde’s voice gets kind of fixed in S01E06

A guy called Mr. McCormick is killed in a protest, launched and splattered against a network building. He doesn’t look like Kenny’s dad though

Zombie Clyde attacks Bebe, rude

Wendy gave her costume contest prize (2 tons of candy) to hungry children in Nairobi

Cartman’s mom is on the cover of Crack Whore magazine. “Back do’ ho… Five on one action!” is the headline

Cartman genuinely cries at Kenny’s grave after the whole zombie thing but gets over it because of candy

Stan knows his mom’s credit card number and has no problem using it to adopt an Ethiopian child (the boys wanted a watch that came with the adoption, they weren’t doing it to be nice)

Cartman calls Stan a vas deference, Stan doesn’t know what that is so Kenny says “Dude, it’s a pipe for your peepee” (according to a transcript). Kenny sure knows male anatomy

Kyle sniffs Kenny after Cartman asks why poor people smell like sour milk and Garrison says “idk eric they just do”

Cartman thinks poor people should die and decrease the surplus population

When the boys get Starvin’ Marvin delivered to them, Cartman says “Hey mom, we found an Ethiopian, can we keep him?” and his mom says “Sure, hun.” She rarely says no to Cartman

Kenny’s dad is an alcoholic who drinks scotch according to Cartman. I mean, Mr. McCormick is seen drinking in multiple episodes and has a hat that says SCOTCH so it’s probably true

Kenny’s family says grace

Craig’s first appearance is S01E09. Also, S01E09 is the first time Kenny doesn’t die (Coincidence? I THINK yeah but it’s still fun)

Clyde got named in S01E10

Clyde and Bebe both spit on Pip’s face, friendship goals <3

Cartman and Kyle have their first fight at Cartman’s birthday party because Kyle didn’t give the right gift. Cartman slaps his face and  screams “I hate you! I want you to die! Die!” while on top of Kyle who’s not really fighting back

Satan throws a fight with Jesus after everyone except Satan bet that Jesus would lose, which leads to Satan winning everyone’s money. Mr. Garrison says “What a mean thing to do!” and Jimbo says “He is a jerk!” and I thought it was quite a laugh so I wrote it down

In S01E11 Tom’s Rhinoplasty Bebe and Wendy are sitting in the swings together and generally appear together throughout the episode, then Bebe gives Wendy a makeover so they’re bffs obviously <3

Craig first appears in the classroom, though not sitting down, in S01E11

Wendy’s not happy about Ms. Ellen taking Stan away from her, she says “Don’t fuck with me! Stay away from my man, bitch, or I’ll whoop your sorry ho ass back to last year!”

Kenny gives Ms. Ellen a scrumptious looking sausage as a valentine’s gift and giggles deviously. Wendy’s gift to Ms. Ellen is a dead animal

Even Kenny doesn’t know what a lesbian is

Wendy’s grandma died in S01E11

Wendy gets Ms. Ellen killed by hiring the Iraqi government (?) to put her in a rocket and shoot it into the sun, then she and Bebe have a pool party (very cool, they wear sunglasses 😎) and watch the rocket hit the sun

Cartman and Pip play a game of kicking each other in the nuts until someone falls. Cartman calls it “Roshambo”

Kenny has a sack of marbles

The boys aren’t fans of Barbra Streisand, but Stan is a fan of the Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway (he’s not a quarterback anymore, he’s an American football executive and the president of football operations for the Denver Broncos of the NFL according to wikipedia.)

Officer Barbrady is a fan of Fiona Apple (who was 20 at the time and had only one album released called Tidal)

Ned knows how to pilot a helicopter

Kyle’s mom is a fan of Streisand unlike literally everyone else, she even gets an autograph from Mecha Streisand

The boys are fans of Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure. Stan says “Robert Smith is the greatest person that ever lived!” and Kyle says “Disintegration is the best album ever!” and Cartman says “Robert Smith kicks ass!” and Kenny’s dead so he doesn’t get to have an opinion

Cartman has tea parties with his toys: Polly Prissypants, Clyde frog, Peter Panda, and a dragon called Rumpertumskin

Kyle wants to make fun of Cartman for the tea party but Stan stops him because he’s concerned that Cartman needs help

Craig is in front of the school counselor’s office in S01E13

A young miss Cartman drinks like a motherfucker at the 12th annual drunken barn dance where Cartman was supposedly conceived

Stan lets Cartman borrow his bike like a good friend

Garrison wanted to have a threesome with Chef and Cartman’s mom. I don’t know why I’m making a note of this but uh… yeah.

Cartman’s mom has had sex with everyone at this bar that Garrison’s drinking at, including principle Victoria, the mayor, Father Maxi, and Jesus (and maybe Kenny’s dad since he’s at the bar but the camera doesn’t pan to him when Garrison says they’ve all slept with Liane). Later Gerald Broflovski is a possible father to Eric, so he fucked her too. Also Mr. Mephesto and his friend Kevin, that little guy, are candidates along with a lot of other people, including the 1989 Denver Broncos (and Mr. Tenorman is included in that later)

Cartman doesn’t make fun of Kyle for being Jewish much at all in this season even though the Christmas episode is all about Kyle not celebrating

Clyde and Token appear very early on and Clyde has always been in the classroom (along with Bebe, Red, Kevin Stoley, Wendy, and Pip and uhh DogPoo too I think). Craig appears later in the season and Tweek’s not in season 1 at all, so Craig’s gang isn’t really a thing yet

And here’s a list of the ways Kenny died in this season. He dies in every episode except episode 9, and he dies twice in episodes 2 and 3. Altogether he dies 14 times

S01E01 Killed after alien shoots him, cows stampede over him, then cop runs him over which finally actually kills him

S01E02 Killed in a play by a falling teepee, then a second time shot by Garrison which sends him in the air and he gets impaled on a flagpole on the way down

S01E03 Killed by a volcano rock that burns him then rolls on him but he’s alive again in the end but gets shot by Ned’s gun that he drops and it accidentally goes off

S01E04 Gets his arms and head torn off in an American football game

S01E05 Stan’s clone punches Kenny into a microwave where he gets cooked alive

S01E06 Death touches Kenny

S01E07 Kenny gets crushed by a Russian space station and turns into a zombie because he gets Worcestershire sauce in his veins, then Kyle chainsaws zombie Kenny in half, then zombie Kenny rises from his grave and is crushed by a statue and a plane

S01E08 Kenny is killed by a bunch of turkeys. His eye gets plucked out. It’s dark blue

S01E10 After Kenny gets turned into a duck-billed platypus, Jimbo and Ned shoot him

S01E11 Ms. Ellen throws a sword through Kenny’s face

S01E12 While Mecha Streisand and a giant robot Leonard Maltin fight, Kenny plays with a tetherball and gets the rope wrapped around his neck and it strangles him

S01E13 Kenny gets stuck on a go kart and it drags him around but stops and he’s still alive! Too bad the go kart stops on train tracks and a train runs him over. Stan’s grandpa sends a video of the event to America’s Stupidest Home Videos and wins $10,000

If you read all that, first of all hello. I’m not new to the fandom even though this is the first thing I’ve posted on this tumblr blog. I’ve been writing a fanfic called Caffetamine though so I’m not a complete non-entity. Anyway, I’ll watch season 2 soon and post my notes on that too probably.

[mst3kproject]

Magic Christmas Tree

I thought I’d try something different this year and find a bad Hannukah movie, but everybody I asked had the same recommendation: Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights.  I know for a fact that is a prohibitively awful film, because I know people who’ve watched parts of it (I have not to date met anyone who could sit through the whole thing), but it just doesn’t feel like an MST3K feature to me.  Anyway, I have standards.  My conclusion is that people need to make more Hannukah movies… and until that happens, I’m watching Magic Christmas Tree, which comes specially recommended by RiffTrax.

This is the only Christmas movie I’ve ever seen which starts with cheerful holiday music over footage of… Hallowe’en decorations. Obnoxious bully Mark and his two pushover friends decide to go investigate a supposedly-haunted house. Naturally the old lady who lives there is a witch, and in exchange for Mark rescuing her cat, she gives him a seed for a magical tree that will grant him three wishes.  Two months later, with the tree fully grown, his first wish is to have magical powers for one hour – he uses them to torment unfortunate people who were already having to work on Christmas Eve.  His second wish is to kidnap Santa Claus and extort unlimited presents from him, but that attracts the attention of the spirit of Greed, who intends to keep Mark as a slave forever!  Good thing he’s still got that third wish.

God, I hate this movie.  I’d say it’s the worst Christmas movie I’ve ever seen, but Elves exists, so instead I have to say it’s the worst Christmas movie that didn’t have any Nazis in it.  It reminds me more than anything else of Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, in that it’s an absolute mess that seems to have been put together by people who have no idea what they’re doing.  It spends most of its time on boring, annoying irrelevant bullshit, and then when it gets to the plot, that’s boring and annoying, too!

Magic Christmas Tree is only an hour long, but that’s twice as long as it needed to be.  A plot summary makes it sound like most of the film will be dealing with Mark’s three wishes and how he uses them, but it’s half-over before we even get to that point.  The time leading up to it is spent watching Mark follow the witch’s complicated instructions on how to grow and activate the tree, and his parents dealing with this unwanted thing appearing in the middle of their back yard.  All of this is presented in excruciating detail.  We watch Mark dig the entire hole to plant the seed in.  We see his Dad struggle with the lawnmower at unbelievable length, while the Mom yacks about nothing on the phone with her friend Betty.  The Dad tries to cut the tree down with no success.  Mark has to say a set of magic words over and over and over.

It goes on so long, it passes the are you fucking kidding me? point and wanders into territory where you wonder if there’s something wrong with the disk and you’re playing the scene over and over.  It actually starts to feel like it’s on purpose – especially when the slowness is repeatedly emphasized by shots of Mark’s pet tortoise, Ichabod, who seems to be eating his patch of clover far faster than anybody else is accomplishing anything.  You’ll swear the movie is making fun of you.

The sound that accompanies all this is sometimes very peculiar.  The old lady has exactly the voice you’d expect from a witch in a cheap kid’s movie, but Mark’s Mom sounds like she’s being dubbed by a twelve-year-old boy, possibly the same one who provided the voice for Mark himself.  The tree speaks (oh, yes, it does) in the voice of a smarmy stereotypical gay man.  Santa Claus sounds like he’s half-senile and wondering what’s for lunch.

The lawnmower makes some very strange noises indeed. I guess they’re meant to be cartoonish and funny.  They’re definitely the former but they’re never the latter, possibly because they never sound remotely like a lawnmower.  When Mark’s Dad is trying to get it started it sounds like the ghost of a consumptive horse, and three hours later when it actually gets going, it makes noises like a traffic jam in Whoville.

Besides sounding weird, the actors are just plain bad.  The guy playing Santa Claus is half-asleep.  We’re told that the tree’s magic means he’s trapped in the chair he’s sitting in, and I honestly do believe that actor could not have gotten up if he tried, no wishes necessary.  The woman playing Mark’s Mom looks like she’s high as a kite and only barely keeping her grip on reality.  Maybe that’s why they had to dub her.  Mark’s Dad recites his lines like a guy on a game show reading his own life story off a teleprompter, and does his yard chores in a way that’s probably supposed to be pantomimey but is the opposite of entertaining.  The Dad gets an inordinate amount of screen time, which I can only chalk up to the fact that he’s played by director Dick Parish.

The worst of the lot are, of course, the kids, who are predictably terrible 60’s child actors.  They yell all their lines, with the volume and exaggerated emphasis you expect from a school play.  It wears thin very, very quickly.  The kid playing Mark is the worst of the lot, although I might just think that because he’s the one we spend the most time with.  He’s a huge part of why this movie makes me so mad.

I think the best way to describe Mark as a character is to say that the first time I watched this movie I assumed his name was ‘Billy’, despite the fact that everybody kept calling him ‘Mark’. He just seems like the type of nasty little brat who’d be named ‘Billy’ in a bad 60’s Christmas movie.  We meet him having lunch with his two friends by the playground, and learn that he’s a greedy little shit when he drives a hard bargain in a sandwich trade.  Greedy-little-shit-itude continues to be his primary character trait and is, of course, the core of the movie’s lesson.  His attempt to monopolize Santa Claus makes him such a greedy little shit that Greed himself takes an interest in him.

Greed is a huge hairy man who takes delight in kidnapping little boys.  I think he’s supposed to look like a fairy tale giant.  Watching him manhandle a child is an intensely uncomfortable experience.

I guess ‘don’t be greedy’ is a standard message for a children’s movie, and it seems like a particularly appropriate one for Christmas, which presents children with a great opportunity for avarice. What seems a little odd is that Mark never actually suffers any consequences for his selfishness, only the vague threat of them. There was a perfect opportunity for some of this when Mark kidnaps Santa Claus.  Santa, after all, brings toys to good girls and boys… surely by this point, after his brief reign of terror with his magical powers, Mark has been naughty enough to deserve only coal.  Apparently that’s not how it works, though.  Mark just wanders off into the woods in search of small animals to shoot with his new rifle, runs into the giant, and immediately repents even though Greed is offering him all the toys and candy he wants.

What supposedly prompts Mark to become a better person is seeing how the world has responded to Santa Claus going missing.  Curiously, there is very little emphasis on the children who are sad because they didn’t get any presents.  Maybe somebody thought that would have made them seem greedy? Instead, the vision Greed presents to Mark is of the United States military mobilizing to locate Santa and bring him home, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians-style!  So… I guess Mark becomes a better person because he’s afraid of what’s going to happen if the army finds Santa trapped in a chair in his house?  I guess that is pretty terrifying.

Another thing that blunts the lesson is the fact that Mark is given his three wishes as a reward for a good deed.  He got the witch’s cat down from the tree, so she offers him the magical seed and doesn’t let him refuse.  What then was he supposed to use his three wishes for, if not to get stuff for himself? Was this intentionally a poisoned gift, because you shouldn’t accept things from witches?  The witch insists that there are good witches as well as wicked ones, but she’s not exactly an unbiased source.  The movie never tries to blame her, though.  The situation is presented as Mark’s fault, and Mark’s alone.

Finally, at the end Mark wakes up and finds that of course the whole thing was a dream – there was no witch, no magic tree, and no Santa Claus.  This is less annoying than it could have been because at least it’s not a surprise. Mark did hit his head when he fell out of the tree the cat was in, and the movie changed from black and white to colour.  We’ve seen this before in The Wizard of Oz and we can guess where it’s going. The audience might assume that Mark will wake up and immediately take the opportunity to be generous instead of greedy, perhaps by giving his friend something to make up for the lunch trade. Instead, the woman who owns the cat (who is not actually a witch, but looks even more like one in this part of the film than she does wearing the Hallowe’en witch costume in Mark’s dream) offers him milk and cookies, and he delightedly accepts.  This just gives the impression that he’s learned nothing.

Is there anything in this movie I didn’t hate?  Well… among Mark’s school friends is a token black kid, who is not differentiated in any way from his peers.  He talks like them, he dresses like them, and the writers did not use either his lunch or his Hallowe’en plans as a way to demarcate a class difference between him and the others.  So yeah, the movie sucks, but the writers tried really hard not to be racist.

Happy fucking holidays.  I want to say hooray for surviving 2020, but we’ve still got a week to go.  That’s plenty of time for oh, I don’t know, an alien invasion, or a giant meteor, or the Yellowstone supervolcano, or zombies, or whatever.  At this point, if most of us aren’t dead by this time next year, I’ll count that as a win.

[wazafam]

Pokémon can draw inspiration from many different things. Some designs come from mythology and legend, with fantastical creatures appearing throughout every generation. Some, like Audino and Conkeldurr, are the Pokémon versions of specific real-life professions. And some like Vanilluxe and Appletun, are literally pieces of food.

RELATED: Pokémon: 10 Water-Types Who Totally Belong In A Different Type

Then there are those Pokémon that are kind of just everyday objects brought to life. Whether they're keychains, chandeliers, batteries, or teapots, these mons are the subject of criticism and acclaim. Many fans consider them inspired, while others think they're just lazy. These designs are part of Pokémon, though, ever since the first 150. They're not going anywhere anytime soon.

10 Charjabug

Charjabug is the pre-evolution of Vikavolt, introduced in Generation VII. It is a dual-type Electric/Bug that ranks as one of Alola's strongest Pokémon and a staple of many Gen VII teams.

At first sight, Charjabug resembles a battery. And it indeed is a battery, which might suggest a lack of interest from the designers. However, Charjabug's design also includes elements from the denkimushi, a Japanese caterpillar whose sting feels like a small electric shock.

9 Sunflora

Introduced in Generation II, Sunflora is the evolution of Sunkern and a favorite of moms all over the Pokémon world. Sunflora may be one of the cutest Grass-types ever, but that doesn't take away the fact that it is literally a sentient sunflower.

Unlike other Pokémon, whose designs include at least some alteration to their real-life inspiration, Sunflora's is as simple as it gets. It's a sunflower with two legs and a perpetual smile on its face. Many fans consider it one of the worst Pokémon due to its simplicity. Its cuteness is undeniable, though.

8 Magnemite

Magnemite is one of the original 150 Pokémon introduced in Generation I. As such, it is a fan favorite of many Genwunners and usually escapes criticism of its design, even though it's as straightforward as it gets.

Magnemite is a floating magnet with a large eye in the middle. Like most Pokémon, however, there's more to its inspiration than meets the eye. Magnemite represents electromagnetism and is one of the most ancient Pokémon to exist as there are 3,000-year-old carvings of it in the Ruins of Alph.

7 Gourgeist

The Pokémon anime showed a celebration called the Gourgesit Festival, a thinly-veiled version of Halloween. People wear Pokémon costumes and trade candy with each other all through the night. The name comes from Gourgeist, a dual-type Ghost/Grass Pokémon native to the Kalos region.

RELATED: 10 Most Powerful 6th Gen Dual-Type Pokémon, Ranked

Gourgeist itself takes inspiration from a traditional jack-o-lantern. Its different sizes also reference the tradition of trying to grow the bulkiest pumpkin for Halloween. Its upper body references the candles that light the insides of jack-o-lanterns.

6 Elekid

Quite possibly the angriest-looking baby Pokémon, Elekid is another Electric-type whose design is apparent to anyone who sees it.

Elekid is very clearly an AC power plug. What's more, its design doesn't have any other inspiration behind it. It is simply a power plug brought to life. There's a certain charm to its simplicity, but it's puzzling that it doesn't get the same level of hate as other equally uninspired Pokémon.

5 Chandelure

Despite its seemingly frail appearance, Chandelure is an excellent - and disturbing - Pokémon, while also being one of the strongest in Generation V, in fact. Within the context of the franchise, Chadelure's fire is capable of burning a person's spirit.

Chandelure clearly draws inspiration from a chandelier, something that becomes even more apparent by the fact it apparently resides in dilapidated mansions. It also borrows inspiration from will-o'-the-wisps and the idea of haunted mansions.

4 Trubbish & Garbodor

The Garbodor family gets a lot of hate. Widely considered as two of the worst Pokémon ever created, they're one of the reasons why Generation V had such a bad reputation when it first came out.

Trubbish and Garbodor are trash, literally. The former is a small trash bag with bunny-like ears, whose name is a combination of "trash" and "rubbish." The latter is an even bigger trash bag that broke and now has garbage coming out of it. Its name is a combination of the words "garbage" and "odor," reinforcing the Pokémon's relation with waste. Garbodor remains controversial to this day, but that didn't prevent it from receiving a Gigantamax form, which was atually widely unpopular.

3 Sinistea & Polteageist

Generation VIII took one of its real-life inspiration's trademarks, the United Kingdom's fondness for tea, to the next level. A Sinistea appears every time a spirit possesses a cup of tea. It then evolves into Polteageist when exposed to one of two items, either a Cracked Pot or a Chipped Pot.

RELATED: 10 Most Powerful 8th Gen Dual-Type Pokémon, Ranked

Both these Pokémon have rather dull designs and even their names are lazy tea puns. While fans always expected some kind of tea Pokémon in Galar, hardly anyone thought the result would be this literal.

2 Klefki

Perhaps no Pokémon is a memeable as Klefki. A sentient keychain with a rather mischievous nature, it steals keys it likes and never returns them. Klefki is also quite powerful, despite being the tiniest Fairy Pokémon in existence.

Klefki's mischievous lore also ties with the pagan belief of fairies as treacherous and impish. Like the fairies in folklore, Klefki can also be dangerous to Pokémon and humans alike, especially when its precious keys are in danger of thievery.

1 Rotom's Many Forms

When it comes to straightforward designs, Rotom remains undefeated. Depending on its form, it is either a simple lightbulb, a lawnmower, a refrigerator, a stove, a fan, or a washing machine. The idea is original and daring, but the execution ultimately falls short.

Rotom's original form comes from another Game Freak creation, Pulseman. It also draws inspiration from several natural phenomena and folklore, like poltergeists, magic smoke, and the still unexplained ball lightning.

NEXT: Pokémon: 10 Fire-Types Who Totally Belong In A Different Type

10 Pokémon That Are Basically Household Items | ScreenRant from https://ift.tt/32fML4F

[alarawriting]

52 Project #1: The Chicken Story

Every part of this story is true. Even the lies. In fact, especially the lies.

***

Yes, I live in the city and I have chickens, no thanks to city legislature. You’d think that cities would be more supportive of having chickens; they kill rats and they produce eggs, what’s not to like? Well, okay, chicken poop isn’t all that pleasant and they destroy all the plants in their run, but unlike, say, cat or dog poop, chicken poop is useful as fertilizer. The city’s somewhat tolerant of hens, but they’re appallingly sexist toward roosters; I mean, yes, the poor guys are loud, but so are dogs and I don’t see anyone banning dog ownership within city limits. Roosters protect their flock from predators and they can serve as watch animals. They don’t actually crow to tell you it’s dawn, though, that’s a myth. Mostly they crow to tell you “Goddamn, yo, check me out, I’m a rooster.” Or something like that. If roosters could talk they would absolutely perform hip-hop.

Anyway, I have a funny story about those chickens, and roosters, and my son, who’s a ninja. No, I’m not making this up, it’s his superpower. He could be standing right there and I could be looking for him and I wouldn’t see him. He’s not invisible, he’s just… very good at going unnoticed. That was really helpful when we were trying to get our second house.

Oh, yeah, so this place is actually two halves of a duplex, and originally, we owned just one. Then the neighbor overextended himself bricking up all the yards back there. You see the street back there? All the yards behind my house are made of concrete now. Rudest thing you ever saw, because they didn’t put in drainage, so all those yards that used to be soil and dirt ended up flooding, directly into my garage. I had my car floating in it, out to the street. I mean, it was raining pretty heavy and all the cars down at the bottom of the hill were also floating, but I’m halfway up the hill so you wouldn’t expect my car to float, but no, I open my garage, and there it is, bobbing up and down. I loved that car. It floated down the street and ended up in the river – yeah, there’s a river down there, you can’t tell most of the time because it’s so shallow it’s barely a creek, but that day it was overflowing and my car floated right into it and sailed off. Never got it back. Pretty sure it’s in the bay someplace. Now all we have is my wife’s minivan, because she was at her parents’ house with the younger kids that weekend, and I’m really not a fan. Who builds a car large enough to transport drywall but too small to stretch your legs if you’re an adult man? Honda, that’s who. She doesn’t care because she’s short, but I miss my car. It was a Chevy Impala, we called it Vlad because you have to call an Impala Vlad, right? Vlad the Impala? Come on, it’s a Dracula joke.

Right, so anyway, the reason they’re all bricked up is that my neighbor was trying to buy up all the properties there, so he had a business offering people that he’d brick up their yard – no more tickets from the city about high grass and weeds, no more kids sneaking into the back to grow illicit tomatoes, no rats – and a lot of people took him up on it, because they didn’t realize about the flooding. Sure, most of it ended up in my garage, but a lot of it ended up in people’s basements, and no one around here has flood insurance, we’re halfway up a hill. And that dislodged the ghosts. See, most of this city’s built on an ancient burial ground of some kind or other… I don’t think Native American, I think it was one of those colonial cemeteries or something, so when you flood basements, you’re gonna get ghosts. And that meant people trying to sell their properties because they’re haunted. So he figured he’d buy up all the houses on the block cheap, right? Except some investigators came in from a government agency and they figured out that he’d known about the ghosts and that’s why he talked people into letting him pour concrete all over their yards, so there were lawsuits – I considered joining in myself, but at the time, he lived on the other half of my house so I didn’t want to stir things up. And at the end of the lawsuits, he was the one who had to sell his house for cheap in a big hurry or face foreclosure, because he’d had to mortgage his house like three times to pay the lawsuits.

Well, we tried to get it legitimately. My wife’s name isn’t on the title to my house, so she was eligible for an FHA loan. But they absolutely refused to believe that she wanted to buy the house next door to the one she was living in just to live in it. They were convinced she wanted to rent it out. She pointed out that the mortgage payments were like twice what anyone would pay to rent a place around here – yay for gentrification, I guess – but they weren’t convinced. So we rented her an apartment and she was going to live in it for six months so that she could go back and get the FHA loan – I mean, she wasn’t really living in it, she was just storing her books in it, but no one was going to be able to tell she wasn’t living in it because if an auditor came to the house, she had it rigged with cameras and speakers and whatnot so she could talk to people remotely and tell them not to come in because of the books, and if you looked through the windows you could see that you couldn’t see a damn thing because of the piles of books everywhere, like seven-foot-tall stacks of books all over the place. But before she could go back to get the loan, the bank finished foreclosing on the guy and then the house wasn’t available for sale.

Now, see, we knew that sooner or later, the bank was going to sell that house, so we went into action. Here’s where my son being a ninja came in; we had him go over there and steal all the doors inside the house and hide them in the attic. The embarrassing thing is that he forgot where he put them so the entire house still doesn’t have doors. We have to have a curtain up in front of the bathroom, since it’s an old house and the width of the doorjamb doesn’t match the sizes they make doors anymore. The cops came and searched for the doors – I think they were suspicious that we took them, since how many houses have a ninja? But after they went up into the attic and two of them fell through the ceiling and broke their ribs, they decided it wasn’t worth their time. Also, I kept pointing out to them about the lawsuit, and the ghosts, like my family was the only one who’d have motivation to steal the doors? Really?

Then we filled the bathroom with dead rats. I guess this requires a little bit of explanation. We didn’t have the chickens yet, or the assassin cat – did I tell you about my assassin cat? No? Well, let me finish telling you about the house first. So we had a lot of rats, and we were poisoning them, as you do when you’ve got that many rats, and we also had traps, and a giant dollhouse with murder dolls in it. You’ve never used a murder doll on a rat? It’s a doll that’s got a knife in its hand, and when the sensors in its eyes detect that there’s a rat walking by, it starts slashing at it like Jason at camp. My wife dressed them up nice so the rats would be fooled, and changed their clothes every day so they wouldn’t smell like rat blood. They had these frilly Victorian white outfits that she just drowned in bleach to get the dead rat smells out.

So anyway, when you’ve got four dozen dead rats, what do you do with them? If you put them all out in trash bags, the city might condemn your house for having that many rats. Never mind that most of them were swarming over from the other house anyway because it was abandoned. So we piled up the dead rat bodies in the bathroom. Then my son stole their refrigerator and rolled it out in the late evening, strolling along with it, mostly because at the time he wasn’t 18 yet but also because ninja, and we loaded it into my wife’s minivan and drove it to a friend’s house because his wife had gotten drunk on cheap wine and stabbed their refrigerator to death with a knife. Apparently it was a really big knife. Then we took the oven, which was good, because there were rats living in it, and we hid it in our garage, which we didn’t keep cars in anymore because of the risk of the garage flooding and the cars floating away. Since we were cognizant of the cops potentially looking for the oven, I let my wife take all the books back out of the apartment she’d been renting because we couldn’t really use it for what we’d intended anyway, and she stacked them all around the oven, and after she was done not only could you not tell there was an oven in there, but you didn’t want to go anywhere near it because you were afraid of a seven-foot-tall stack of books toppling over on you, and I’ve never met a cop who’s seven feet tall. They never did come by, though. Which was good, because the first time it rained, my wife went out there to retrieve all her books to save them from flooding, and of course then you could see the oven again.

We tried to steal the hot tub, but someone else got to it first, along with my lawnmower and backup generator. I felt really bad about the backup generator because we had some really beefy squirrels in there running the dynamo wheel and I don’t know where I’m going to get squirrels that big and strong again.

Then the bank started showing the house, so we stepped up our game. We played death metal at ridiculous volume when people would come to see the house, until we found out from my youngest son’s friend’s mom that she’d actually come to look at the house and thought the death metal was encouraging, as it suggested neighbors she could get along with. So after that it was endless repetitions of music from Sesame Street and The Song That Doesn’t End and Dora the Explorer. During that time period we all wore headphones; it was kind of unbearable, except for the youngest kids, of course. They didn’t mind.

We put cat food and sardines in the air conditioning vents, and potatoes in the closet so they could rot and turn to mush in the dark, and my oldest daughter, whose room was absolutely full of ghosts, did a séance and an exorcism to get the ghosts to move to the other house, and of course it was full of flies because of all the dead rats, and then we randomly placed mannequin parts in strategic locations. It must have worked, because in the end, no one bought the place and the bank put it up for auction, and my wife’s parents bought it for her. And then, of course, we had to clean up the potatoes, and the flies, and the ghosts, and the cat food – someone had gotten to the dead rats already – and deal with the power company being too scared of the ghosts to come hook us up, and the insurance agency rejecting my wife’s parents’ insurance application because someone came by while my daughter was doing her séance/exorcism and apparently black magic is one of those things they don’t tell you you can’t do in an insured house, but they won’t insure your house if they know you’re doing it.

So after all this, after my son the ninja has busted his butt trying to make this place unliveable so we could get it at auction for cheap enough that my wife’s parents could afford it – they’ve got that kind of professional man and housewife money that only boomers get to have anymore, not rich but sure as heck not as poor as I’d be if my wife didn’t work – he says, he wants chickens. He’s found his spirit animal, or something, and it’s a bird. It doesn’t hurt that I have a new boyfriend – yes, I said it, I have a wife and a boyfriend and they know about each other and we all live in the same house, and if you don’t like it, you know what you can sit and spin on. Anyway, my boyfriend is a wild animal dude from Canada, who, like, communes with animals and has conversations with them and is very possibly actually delusional, but he has all these ideas about how we can convert the two yards into an urban farm. It’s his original idea about the chickens, but my son is thrilled with the idea and I’m not gonna say no to the guy after he helped us get our second house, and I like the idea myself, so we go and get chickens.

First snag. My wife’s parents hate chickens. They hate birds in general. Apparently when my wife was a kid, they had a dog who didn’t believe in birds, and the birds pecked his eyes out, so they’ve got a grudge. I… gotta say, much as I love dogs, any dog who told a bird to its face that he didn’t believe in birds had it coming. You just don’t tell people that they don’t exist while you’re looking straight at them. That’s rude.

Second snag. The city won’t let us have more than 4 chickens per yard, but my boyfriend has acquired eight because he thought we’d be able to use the second yard, and because my wife’s parents hate birds, that isn’t happening. And no one wants to give any of the birds up. We’ve got some amazing chickens. We’ve got a white Silkie who I like to keep on my lap and pet when I’m being a supervillain, because any villain can have a long-furred white cat but it takes a really original guy to have a long-furred white chicken. (Obviously, Silkies don’t really have fur, but their feathers have a consistency like silky fur, hence the name.) We’ve got a Silkie crossbreed who sings dubstep. She’s a tiny little bantam chicken, but because she was raised by my son, who has been taking care of all the chickens since we got them, and they think he’s the alpha hen, she gets to boss all the rest of the chickens around because she’s the daughter of the alpha hen, which I guess makes her Princess Hen or something. We’ve got a big black Cochin with feathers on her feet, and a Naked Neck chicken who wants all the rest of her feathers off too, and a bunch of others. Really exotic chickens. So we’re not giving up any of these chickens for anything. We hide the two bantams – the Silkie and the princess – in the house, which necessitates chicken diapers, about which the less said the better – and we just kind of pretend that we have four outdoor chickens instead of six.

And our chickens are heroes. The cops come by one day looking for an armed robber who’s hiding somewhere. The chickens are all riled up. We think they’re worried about the cops, until eventually, they start pecking at something under their coop, and here comes the robber, crawling out from under the coop shrieking because he’s being pecked by half a dozen birds. The cops give the chickens a medal – one for all of them, they don’t have that many medals lying around, and we have to take it away from them and hang it in the house because they’re fighting over it all the time. And the news decides to do a human interest piece on our hero chickens, and we think the world should know how awesome our chickens are, so we let them.

This turns out to be a mistake. Because we’re not legally allowed to have six chickens. So one cold winter afternoon, while we’re getting ready to spend a weekend in another dimension, Animal Control comes and steals all our chickens, and trumps up charges against us such as “no water” (which is what happens after you tip a waterer over on its side), and “inadequate shelter” because they tore the door off the chicken coop to get at our birds, since naturally we had the coop door locked, and “immoral consecration of chicken souls to Satan” which is just a flat out lie. We’re atheists, not Satanists, and even Satanists don’t actually consecrate chicken souls to Satan. That’s mostly edgy teenagers who were raised Catholic.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through a dimensional portal, but the thing is, they are only open for a short period of time, and it can be years before they open again. We couldn’t change our plans; the tickets for the boat were very expensive, since only so many boats were going to be allowed to sail through the portal so it was a really limited thing, and this close to sail time there was no way we could sell our tickets or exchange them. So we had to go on our trip for the weekend, which was great. Really fun. Not as much fun as the time when I was a kid and my family went to the moon and had a barbeque, but do you ever really have as much fun on a vacation when you’re an adult as you did when you were a kid? I keep meaning to take my kids there one of these days – among other things, my family’s barbeque grill is still stuck up there and I want it back – but I’m a little bit afraid that I won’t be able to get the magic back and it’ll be really depressing. While we were sailing out there, we actually got to see the Kraken, at a safe distance away, breaching out in the bay some ways away. My oldest daughter wants to be a marine biologist, so she was telling us all kinds of Kraken facts, and disputing my statement that the fire that burned down the city a century ago was actually caused by the Kraken.

It was carrying a car in its tentacles. I couldn’t be sure – my vision’s not the best even with a telescope – but I could swear the car looked just like Vlad the Impala.

Anyway, when we came back, we found out that the chickens had already been shipped out to a zoo in a different city.

My wife piled us all into the minivan and we drove five hours to go see the chickens at the zoo, and they were doing fine – they were apparently now a traveling exhibit at a petting zoo – but it turns out chickens can see ninjas, particularly ninjas who raised and cared for them. They got so excited when my son snuck into their enclosure to steal them back that they raised a huge ruckus, and even the most talented ninja can’t stay invisible when he’s surrounded by clucking chickens. Then my wife started trying to tell a sob story about stolen chickens, but I’m afraid I got a little angry at the injustice of it all, and it is possible that a zoo employee ended up in a pond, and as a result we were thrown out of the zoo. And then they went to the other side of the country, and we just couldn’t figure out how to smuggle six chickens onto an airplane, and we couldn’t take off enough time from work to go out there with the car… so we basically gave up. The chickens were having a good life at the zoo, and getting them back was going to take way too much effort.

We hardened our premises, securing the run with a locked gate so an animal control officer would have to climb over a six foot fence to get at our chickens, and then protected the fence by getting clematis to grow all over it so it turned into essentially a six foot tall flowering bush, and got a set of eight chicks that we were assured would grow up into hens. Spoiler alert: you can’t tell what sex a chick is. Half of them grew up into roosters. So we ended up with four hens, plus the two bantam hens in the house, to live outside again, but we also ended up with four roosters, and we had to keep the poor guys in the basement. My boyfriend lived in terror of Animal Control, fearing that every time he heard a cop car, it was the cops coming to break into our basement and take our chickens. I’d say he was a little paranoid if not for what happened later; turns out it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Well, some of our new chickens had a case of wanderlust. We had Raspberry, who really liked to sleep in the bush, and Henry the Eggth, who was something of an escape artist; we kept finding her running down the street, sometimes with my son’s ninja headgear on her body, like she thought that if she just dressed like her ninja Queen Chicken Dad, she could borrow his powers and sneak out unseen.  It didn’t work like that; no matter how hard a chicken trains to be a ninja, she just can’t do it. Not if her goal is to go unseen by humans, anyway. I have no idea whether Henry was able to hide from other chickens or not. The other two, Marie Curie (she got that name because she was a Polish, and Marie Curie was from Poland) and Hen Solo, would sometimes fly up to join Raspberry in the clematis bush. Chickens can’t technically fly, most of the time, because they’re too big for their own wingspan, but Solo was a bantam and Polish are a pretty tiny chicken breed too, so they were both light enough to fly as far as the bush.

Down in the basement, we had Eggy Pop, the sweetest little bantam chick size of an egg you ever saw, who grew up to be an asshole bantam roo, the kind who have a real chip on their shoulders about being bantams, and will try to kick everyone’s ass, including humans; MeToo, a beautiful Silkie who got his name when we thought he was a hen and figured that if anyone was gonna harass a chicken it would be that one; Dr. Tran, whose name I really can’t explain if there are young kids around; and Lyndon LaRoo, who kept trying, and failing, to improve his own position in the pecking order. (Dr. Tran and Lyndon got name changes when we figured out they were roos, as previously they had been named Nightmare Moon and Twilight Chicklet.) We had to keep them boxed in with baby gates, otherwise they’d have escaped through the secret tunnels we’d dug in the basement. (And what a pain those were. Ever try to dig secret tunnels in an area full of ghosts without disturbing anyone’s bones and getting a poltergeist infestation in your house? We had to use the stud finder to find the bones and then avoid them. Must have made the whole project take four times as long.) Upstairs in my son’s room, we have the two bantams, Scootaloo the Silkie crossbreed princess, and Ms. Bigglesworth, the white Silkie.

One day, all the outdoor chickens disappear. Gone, without a trace. This is deeply upsetting to me, my boyfriend and both my sons, so when a neighbor comes by and tells us that there are a lot of chickens running around an empty lot up one of the streets behind my house, we’re very hopeful, and we go into action. We take as many cardboard boxes as we can, the kind my wife uses to store books, and the four of us head up there on foot, since my wife is the only person with a car and she’s taken it and my younger daughter to go visit my oldest daughter in college.

Well, we find there are a lot of chickens up there in that empty lot. We find ours, all right – Raspberry and Henry and Marie and Solo – and a whole lot of others. A Barred Rock rooster, two Orpingtons, a Wyandotte, four random Cornish (these are meat birds, rarely found as pets because of their short life spans, so who knows what they were doing up there), a gamecock and two game hens (couldn’t tell whether they were American Game, Old English Game or some other kind, but they were little and the roo was fierce), an Ameraucana, an Easter Egger, a Brahma, a Rhode Island Red and a Jersey Giant, and then there were the really weird ones – a Sumatra, a Yokohama, a Houdan, a large Oshamo, an Onagadori, two ducks, a baby peacock, and a flamingo. I have no idea what those last guys were doing hanging around chickens.

We’re very worried for these chickens. They’re running around free in an abandoned lot and they’re expensive chickens, a lot of them, that someone is probably looking for… and my experience with Animal Control tells me that if they come along and take the chickens, the families who bought these chickens will never see them again. I have a lot more faith in my boyfriend’s ability to find local chicken owners on Craiglist or various neighborhood sites than I do in Animal Control’s willingness to actually look for owners of the chickens. So I tell my boys, and my boyfriend, that we should grab as many chickens as we can – not just our own, but all of them, so we can repatriate them to their correct homes.

We start boxing chickens. For most breeds you can get two in a box. Little chickens, sometimes three. My ninja son is an experienced chicken wrangler and my younger son is good at making a lot of noise and scaring chickens toward my older son, my boyfriend, or me. We get our own chickens boxed up quickly and start boxing the other chickens.

Then this woman I don’t recognize shows up and starts screaming at me that she’s called Animal Control and I don’t have any right to have any of these chickens. I point out that some of these chickens are mine, but she isn’t having any. She accuses me of being a chicken thief and insists that the chickens have to go to Animal Control. I tell my ninja son to get himself, his brother and my boyfriend out of here with all of the chickens they already have in boxes, and I distract the woman by arguing with her that I have every right to my own chickens and all of these chickens are mine or belong to neighbors of mine that I intend to return them to, and there’s no need to call Animal Control, who will probably ship the chickens off to a petting zoo and the owners will never see them again. She’s not having any. I’m the worst person in the universe for taking chickens that belong to me out of a yard they don’t belong in.

I stand there arguing with her until Animal Control actually shows up, at which point I head back home, hoping my boys have been smart enough to stash the extra chickens somewhere safe. Here’s where there’s a problem. I have a permit for four hens. Not the six hens I actually own, where the bantams live in the house half the year; the city doesn’t let you keep chickens in your house, never mind that bantams have a hard time living through the winter if they live outdoors. And not the four roosters I own, because you’re not allowed to own a roo in the city, and also you’re not allowed to keep chickens in your basement, which would be a reasonable prohibition if not for the prohibition on roosters and the fact that you can’t sex chicks worth a damn.

While Animal Control is gathering up the chickens we didn’t get to, plus the ducks and the baby peacock (the flamingo has flown off by this time), this crazy woman follows me back to my house, continuing to harangue me about stealing chickens and she’s going to have Animal Control inspect my house. I turn back toward her. “Do they have a warrant?”

“I – what? They’re Animal Control, they don’t need a warrant!”

“The only entity that doesn’t need a warrant is Child Protective Services. Everyone else – the cops, the FBI, the Time Police, the SCP Foundation – they’re all required to get a warrant. Why do you think Animal Control would be an exception?”

“Okay, well! We’ll go to a judge and see about getting that warrant!”

“And who’s ‘we’? Unless you work for Animal Control, you’ve got nothing to do with them getting a warrant. All you are is a complainant.”

“You’re a terrible person who mistreats chickens!” she shouts. “Your yard is horrible, your lawn is nothing but weeds all year long, you put construction trash out on your parking pad, and you keep six chickens when you’re only allowed to have four! Four! Four chickens and only four chickens!”

I’ve just figured out who called animal control on us the first time, when our chickens were confiscated, and I feel sudden rage. “You seem to pay a lot of attention to my house for someone I’ve never seen before,” I say. “You know that stalking is against the law, right? Maybe I need to get a warrant served on you.”

She flounces back toward Animal Control, but now I know that she knows where I live, that she has some kind of long-standing grudge against me, and Animal Control actually listens to her. This could be bad.

So when I get back to the house I find a zoo waiting for me. My sons released all the chickens… into the house. Argh. “You’ve got to get them into the basement,” I tell my oldest. “Use the secret tunnels and get them out of here before Animal Control arrives!”

Animal Control shows up five minutes later when my sons have just finished boxing chickens, and after I’ve just finished texting my wife about what’s going on so she can get back here. They demand to come inside my property because they say I have illegal chickens. I tell them the only chickens I have are the ones I’m permitted to have. They don’t believe me. They tell me they’re going to go and get a warrant. I tell them to have fun with that. They insist they can hear a rooster inside, and my heart sinks, because they absolutely can. The basement roos have set up a cacophony of crowing in response to the sound of all the chickens who my son has just finished boxing up and who were previously running around my house.

Now they’re telling me that if I don’t let them in to get the roosters they can plainly hear, they are authorized to use force. Since when has Animal Control been so hardcore? I can’t afford to let them in; quite aside from the roosters and all the extra chickens, I have an illegal rabbit and none of the cats have licenses. Plus, there’s a tarantula. I can’t remember whether it’s legal to have a tarantula for a pet around here. “Fine,” I snap at them, and with great regret, I go downstairs, I get Dr. Tran and Lyndon, and I hand them over to them to protect the rest.

Meanwhile my sons are in the basement on the other half of the house, the half owned by my in-laws, and they’re using the secret tunnels we dug under the entire street to deliver chickens to every house on our side of the street. My boys managed to recover 16 out of the 24 chickens or so we found running around in that lot, and my older son the ninja dropped 2 or 3 chickens at each house (he kept the game hens and their roo together and left them in our old enemies’ basement. I haven’t talked about our war with the people down the block whose son has always been a terrible person and who always decorate outrageously for the holidays, but you have to hate people who have a 20 foot Frosty the Snowman on their roof all winter long.)

Animal Control leaves. The woman, who is hanging back in the yard watching Animal Control, leaves. My wife arrives. Now the thing you need to know about my wife is that, at heart, she longs to be Big Sister – like Big Brother, but just surveilling everybody without actually doing anything about it. Also, she can’t recognize faces. She recognizes me because my hair is distinctive, but she always mistakes my oldest daughter for one of her friends with a similar hair color, mixes up my son and my boyfriend a lot because they have vaguely similar hair, and one time stalked a guy through a shopping center because she thought he might be her brother. There was absolutely no reason to think he might be her brother, to be honest, her brother lives in a different state. So she’s got all this software on her PC that does facial recognition and matches it against databases.

She takes the pictures my youngest son took with his cell phone of the crazy woman, runs them through her databases, and gets a hit. The woman lives on the street behind ours where all the back yards got bricked up. Don’t recognize her name at all, and my boyfriend confirms she is not one of the people he corresponds with online who’s a fellow local chicken owner. So we have no idea what this woman has against us, but my wife doesn’t care.

She goes online to those places that want you to subscribe to three dozen print magazines, and subscribes to them all, in the name of the crazy lady up the street. She orders cheap sex toys and has them shipped there. She signs the crazy lady up for a subscription to monthly snacks in the mail, and Book of the Month Club, and yes I want more information about energy choice, please send an agent to my home. She gets the woman’s phone number out of online databases and requests car insurance quotes, home insurance quotes, quotes on solar panels, quotes on home renovation, quotes on exorcising ghosts, and please send me information on cruises and destination vacations.  She prints the woman’s name on about fifty shipping labels and starts putting moldy VHS tapes of children’s cartoons from the 1990s into envelopes, creates a fake online business so she can buy a Stamps.com account in the name of the fake online business, uses a prepaid Visa card from the drug store to pay for the postage, and mails all the tapes to the woman… one at a time, every day, for two months. She prints fake labels for empty prescription bottles for AIDS anti-virals and really hardcore anti-psychotic drugs and puts them on the prescription bottles, and she’s gonna have my son drop them off in the yards of the neighbors of the woman, but I point out to her that that’s kind of ableist because her entire idea revolves around getting revenge by making the neighbors think the woman is sick, so she shelves that idea.

You don’t mess with my wife.

Animal Control comes back with a warrant the next day. We show them around the house. See? No chickens here. No chickens in our yard, they disappeared. No chickens anywhere in the house! We don’t open any of the doors to the other side of the duplex, so they don’t know that the other side of the house is also ours and therefore they don’t know about the chickens that belong to us that we hid in the basement over there, nor do they know about the secret tunnels we have running under our entire street so they don’t know about the random chickens in the neighbors’ basements. My boyfriend reports that on his neighborhood forums, lots of people are complaining they can hear rooster noises, but they can’t find any roosters, because none of them expect to find roosters in their basements, so they don’t look.

After Animal Control leaves, we go down to the shelter where they drop the confiscated animals, and try to claim four of the eight chickens that got picked up yesterday because if this works, then we’ll find who in the neighborhood lost their chickens and try to get them back to them. We’re told that the confiscated chickens have already been identified as to who they belong to and their owner has picked them up.

Owner, not owners. Remember, you’re only allowed to have 4 chickens per house in this city, but someone managed to get eight.

My son retrieves the various chickens he’d been hiding in people’s basements, we pile them all into the car, and we drive to my boyfriends’ parents’ farm in Canada. Extradite these chickens, assholes. When the heat dies down we can try to find their real owners, we figure. Meanwhile we retrieve our own chickens from the basement on the other side of the house, put four out in the yard and put the two roosters in with the bantam hens, then think better of it and remove MeToo and make him a house rooster. He wears a chicken diaper well enough and he never crows anyway, and Eggy bullies the crap out of him so it’s best he doesn’t stay in an enclosed environment with him.

Then my youngest daughter comes home from school with a story. Apparently there are wild chickens in the woods near our house. What?

I should explain this. We live in a city, but we live close enough to the outskirts and to various parks that there are small patches of nature all over the place. The “woods” is about a block long and four trees deep, hardly what I’d consider woods, but it’s a good place to dump possums when you find them hiding in your laundry room. (Yes. Possums in our laundry room. Lots of them.) So my son and I go back there, and sure as day, yes, there are chickens back there. All of the chickens that got confiscated from that yard, plus additional chickens who have been disappearing from people’s flocks all year. Either somebody has been stealing chickens and then keeping them in a mega-flock in the woods… or the chickens have been escaping, and gathering together.

We leave the chickens where they are; I’m no narc, to rat out chickens who maybe just want to be free. But my son and I do put up wire fencing to keep our chickens from joining them, because one off-leash dog and those chickens could be in a world of hurt. We do notify the other chicken owners in the neighborhood about the woods chickens, and over the next few days, several of the chickens disappear from the woods as they’re retrieved by their owners.

Meanwhile, my wife has continued her vendetta against the crazy lady. She has my son go over in the middle of the night and throw trash into the yard, which she stole from trash cans in the park so there’s nothing that can be tied back to us, and then calls 311 in the morning to report that the woman’s yard is full of trash. She inspects our car every day to make sure no one has slashed the tires, but she uses a ballpeen hammer to break the crazy lady’s headlight because that will get her a ticket. I tell her to let it go. She buys a bale of hay and throws it in the woman’s yard. And she’s still sending moldy videotapes.

A For Sale sign pops up on the woman’s house. We’re currently extending the tunnel network over there so we can sneak in and leave tripe in the air conditioning system and dead rats. It’s not next door to our house, so there’s a very good chance that my wife actually could buy it, this time.

Never found out why she had a grudge against us, but she’s moving out, so who cares.

[addierose444]

Remote Learning

It has now been 4 weeks since I packed up my room in Hubbard and returned home to Vermont. The first few weeks were challenging because it was such a big transition and I couldn’t help but focus on what I would miss. Now that I have adjusted more and have been in remote classes for two weeks, I thought I would provide a quick update about remote learning. This specific post is focusing on academics, but I will probably write another update post next week about other aspects of remote college.

I have taken six online courses in the past, so I wasn’t as worried about remote learning as some of my friends. That said, the online courses I have taken in the past were designed to be online. I have been pleasantly surprised with how my remote college classes have been so far. This is thanks to the hard work of professors and other Smith faculty as well as the extra week dedicated for preparations. Classes really vary in how they deal with the new remote format. Most of my classes are real-time on Zoom, so I am glad to be on the east coast and not to have to worry about time zones. While most classes are recorded, being able to attend classes in real-time provides the necessary structure and social interaction to my day. 

Many classes also have asynchronous components. For instance, my math class has pre-recorded lectures and then real-time worksheet sessions in Zoom breakout rooms. My physics class is similar in that the first half of class is asynchronous and the second half is synchronous. The general format of the class is pretty much the same as on-campus with discovery experiments on Mondays, follow up activities on Wednesday, quiz on Thursday, and problem-solving on Friday. (We also discuss our textbook readings in an online forum, which is what we have been doing all semester).

My game theory class has lectures via Zoom. While we no longer get to play the games with a neighbor, since it was already a lecture-based course it has seen the fewest changes in how it works remotely. The class has always had the additional resource of my professor’s YouTube videos, but my professor has added an extra 30 or so videos over the past few weeks. If you are interested in learning game theory, check out the link above to learn the basics. Alternatively, you can use the videos to decide if you want to take the course in the future, which is exactly what I did. 

In my engineering class, we are spending most of our time on final projects in groups of four. Each group is finding a system of interest and analyzing mass and/or energy flowing through that system. We also still have a few traditional homework assignments and an exam. We no longer meet as an entire class which has been sort of weird.

My least favorite part about remote learning is the inability to do hands-on labs. We now have to either watch our professors do the labs or they have been cut from the curriculum. This has been disappointing for me since my physics class had just gotten to studying circuits which I had been looking forward to building. Last semester, in EGR 100, we had the hammer-screwdriver project outside of class. For EGR 110, we have the engine lab. For the engine lab, we take apart a lawnmower engine and put it back together. Unfortunately, my group was scheduled to do the lab last week and thus were unable to actually do it. That said, the engineering department is going to try and let us do it in the fall instead. 

While I recognize that having my own room is a luxury in itself, one of the most challenging things about remote learning is that it is exhausting being on the computer all day and doing classwork and homework all in one room (my bedroom, so sleeping as well). The primary upside to this crazy time in regards to coursework is that I have fewer exams!

[caramelabbacchiato]

Tag Game!

Thank you so much for thinking of me @passionelawyer and @cocojumbohno

(o´〰`o)♡*✲ﾟ*｡

Rules: tag 10 people you want to get to know better!

Name? 

Strange

Birth year? 

1995

Sign? 

Aries/Taurus cusp

Height?

4′11″

Put your playlist on shuffle and list the first four songs:

I have way too many playlists so I just shuffled my general library!

Acrylic - Leikeli47

Devil’s Pact - Catholic Spit

All I Need Is You - Jeong Jinwoon

Hit Me Up - Omar Apollo, Dominic Fike, Kenny Beats

Grab the nearest book, turn to page 23, what’s the 17th line?

They were of the most curious character: odd transgressions that I never imagined previously. (Wuthering Heights)

Ever had a song or a poem written about you?

Nope

When was the last time you played air guitar?

Oh God....I can’t even remember.

Celebrity Crush(es)?

ANGELA BASSETT. And Steve Carell. And I may lose subscriber for this, but I will always love Suga of BTS.

What’s a sound you hate/love?

I love the sound of a good storm. The harder the rain beats down on my roof and windows, the better! If it’s not too cold out, I like to sit on my front porch and just listen.

I hate the sound of my heat coming on, because it sounds like someone is running through the basement and up the stairs. I’ve been living in my house for a little over two years now and it still scares me every time! 

Do you believe in ghosts?

Yes! I had a very near-death experience when I was a child and ever since then I’ve been more prone to experiencing things.

Do you believe in aliens?

I am an alien, so of course!

Do you drive?

Right now, no. But I plan on getting my license next year! I had a lot of problems with my citizenship a few years back, so I couldn’t, and then life got too hectic for me to get it ;u;

Last book you read?

I have been reading nothing but information about selling insurance for the last three months! Save me!

Do you like the smell of gasoline?

Typically, no. But if there’s also a lawnmower and it’s paired with the smell of fresh mown grass, then hell yeah!

The last movie you saw?

Ooohhh, I haven’t watched a movie in a while...I can’t really remember. I just finished Astronomy Club on Netflix, though, and it gave me life!

Do you have any obsessions rn?

I can tell when I’m obsessed with something when my housemates start threatening my life over never shutting up about it. JoJo is definitely number one on that list, then Haikyuu!!, anything and everything space, conspiracy theories, insurance (weirdly and unfortunately), and tarot! Just to name a few lasfj;asaeriuae

Do you tend to hold grudges?

If you apologize to me and then continue to do it, then yes. It kind of depends on the person and what they did, too, though. 

Are you in a relationship?

Single pringle from womb to tomb, babey!

I tag

@wowzers-howzers @usagi-akihiko3d @kiwiitin @bistanduser @okubean @bunnywritings and anyone else who’d like to do this! 

[avoutput]

Final Fantasy VII Legacy || Memories of a Great Storm

Legacies take shape before you, around you, through you, and beyond you. As incredible as it might be to be the subject of a legacy, the true strength of a legacy is how it builds you up. When you are young and finding yourself, the building process is a ride, a rumbling beneath your feet, wet clouds in the sky above your head. When a legacy is forming, there are signs that you are still too young to see, but you can feel it. It beckons to you, wanting you to be a part of it. You want to stand at the shore of its coming alongside all the others who want to feel the waves at their feet. Like all storms, everything has to be just right. And like a tree falling in the woods, someone has to be there to witness it, to tell its tale, and in doing so, this tale becomes woven into you. Because it isn’t just the storm, the waves, the quaking that makes the legacy, it’s the people who survive that keep it alive. Final Fantasy VII was for me, this great storm.

The first time I played Final Fantasy VII was on the floor of my cousin’s room on Christmas day. Every tsunami starts as a ripple. I didn’t have a Playstation. In fact, despite reading multiple gaming magazines, I must have glazed past it, because I had never even heard of it. I was too blinded by the Nintendo 64 and its legacy. I went from a Nintendo baby to a Sega kid between console generations, and I missed out on a lot of the SNES until the end of its life cycle. I didn’t want to miss out again, so I put on blinders and put in a parental request for the N64. You can imagine my surprise when FF7’s opening cinematic played out on a tiny tube tv. The ripples became waves and the ocean began to move. When I started playing, I wasn’t even sure what was happening, who anyone was, and how there could have been 6 other games I had never played. My cousin was trying to explain the concept to me, but I couldn’t hear him. I just wanted more. But, it was Christmas day, and in my family, that meant family time. Work. Maybe a slightly unique aspect of my family, but Christmas presents were opened at night around the entire extended family. The middle-kids were responsible for passing out all of the gifts to every other member of the family, and this was a long and painful process, especially for an 11 year old. Once everyone was finished, the middle kids opened their gifts in front of everyone. And even though I hadn’t asked for it, all I could think of was how much I wanted one of those boxes to be a Playstation. Not only did I not have any luck with that, I also didn’t get longer than 30 minutes with the game. Instead, every moment was punctuated by familial obligation. I went home unhappy, unsatisfied, my mind never left Midgar. I took a step further from the shore, deeper into the water.

The internet was still young and so was I. The best I could do, the best I could find, was fan pages and old magazines with little information. I absorbed as much as I could, but color pages and chibi gif animations of the FF7 crew just couldn’t cut it. But in all of the noise, there was some news. They were making a PC port of FF7. Alarm bells. Surely my 2 year-old desktop would be too far behind to play the game. My dreams felt again dashed. Through all of this, my obsession made my mother vaguely happy in a roundabout way. The desktop background of the living room PC was Tifa, and her big breasts helped my mother believe I wasn’t as gay as her earlier impressions, a conspiracy theory of her own making. To this day, she still makes jokes about Tifa. The only thing that would have only made her happier is if she was black. Anyway, the world had caught on to Final Fantasy, and I wanted to be a part of it. But when you’re 11, time is much more of a key to gaining something, it has to pass for anything to happen. As an adult, you can make things happen, but kids, they need an angle. A hard angle. That usually means you need the parents to come through, but they need to be unwitting participants in your obsession, pawns in your game.

Luckily, my dad was KING PAWN. My father, always the type to want to be on the cutting edge, bought us (himself) a laptop. This was out of nowhere, no prodding or manipulation, and while his claims for having bought the machine for work and school were dubious at best, I went with it. And with that came the specs I would need to play the PC version. But there was a catch. Christmas had passed and my birthday was in the fall, months from our current Spring. There wasn’t a free pass in sight. No amount of chores would fill my coffers and quell the storm in my heart. I need another rube. But with Spring came green. Money right out of the ground. My best friend had a lawn mower and I had a plan. Get this, what if we mowed lawns… for money? Bam! Winning ticket. There were one million old ladies and lads dying to give money to cute kids dragging a lawnmower from house to house. After mowing what felt like one thousand lawns, I was able to buy a copy. The storm was becoming a hurricane.

It was time to monopolize my dad’s new toy. Like most of his new toys, if it wasn’t a paperback book, he spent barely any time with it after a few weeks, so it worked in my favor. As fast as childhood actually passes, to children, the relative perception of time’s passing is slower than an adult’s. The more they want something, the longer it takes to manifest. Mix that with a negatively polarized Murphy’s Law, and you get your worst scenario; a computer that can run the first few hours, but crashes during certain enemy moves. This is where we meet the eye of the storm. My resolve is broken, my will shattered. How will I ever play this game? A million years passed (about a week), and that is when I realized my closest friend had gotten a new computer that last Christmas. A proper desktop model, in his own bedroom. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring the game to his house because PC games required an install and I couldn’t just bring the game home and continue my save file whenever I felt like it. Still, that next weekend, like every weekend, we had a sleepover, and for the third time, I started the game over. I took the game as slowly and methodically this time as I had before. The eye of the storm was slipping past. I was able to pass the Sector 5 Slum to Sector 6 tunnel I had gotten stuck in at home. By that time, I was the only one left awake. As I neared the top of the Shinra building, I could feel the storm in my heart reaching a fever pitch. I was so close. I saved Aeris, met Red XIII, beat Rufus, and sat in awe as Cloud rolled down the stairs on a thundering motorcycle. My heart was racing as I took out enemies to save my allies until there was no more road left. I was so excited, I was at the edge of Midgar. As I punished the highway monstrosity between me and my escape, the storm was beginning to calm, and then, turning red, he melted down and exploded in Final Fantasy fashion. And I had done it. My characters were free. The game was over. To be continued in Final Fantasy 8. RIght?

The hurricane died down, the characters begin to discuss their next steps. At this point, I have been playing around 9 hours straight. It was about 2 or 3 AM. I was just beginning to resign myself to take to a pillow and pad on the floor. But then the earth beneath the sea began to move and the waves began to take shape once again. And then, suddenly and with no provocation, the city of Midgar became a mere fraction of its size and Cloud became a giant. The world had shrunk and in the distance the curvature of the world could be seen. I began to move around and enemies appeared on my path. The waves miles of shore had become the size of skyscrapers. All at once I realized that it wasn’t the end. There was more. So much more. It wouldn’t be Final Fantasy 8 until I beat Sephiroth. There were 2 other discs. What was I thinking? Of course there was more. But why did it take so long to get here, to find more. I was bamboozled by the sights and sounds of Midgar, sung a sirens song by Avalanche and Shinra, and believed my mission would take shape and be completed inside the walls of some slums in some city that surely didn’t make up the entire world. Sephiroth and Shinra were a threat to the world, not just the people of this city. That was when the tidal wave met the shore. A tsunami of realization. A whole new identity was consuming me.

In the calm of the wave that had consumed me, weightless in my memories, my brain started making connections. My cousin introduced me to manga like Dragon Ball and Akira. I had grown up on a steady diet of Mario Bros, Sailor Moon, Sonic the Hedgehog, not to mention the growing phenom Pokemon. He told me all these animated dreamscapes came from Japan. A friend of mine showed me Final Fantasy III on his SNES, but it didn’t excite me like Link to the Past or Mario Kart. Cloud was not in Final Fantasy III as far as I could remember, but I had missed the other installments in between. And the world didn’t look at all similar. Who made this game? Squaresoft? I’ve never played a genuine Nintendo game on a computer before. But this came out on Playstation. What is happening? Oh, Sephiroth put a tree through a snake. Maybe all of these things are Japanese? My cousin told me Sega and Nintendo were from Japan. Wow, that is a big cannon and now I have to march and get on a boat? How much longer could this game be? I could feel myself getting tired. This is a nice beach town. What time is it? I have to get to the Golden Saucer next. A tap on my shoulder, sun in my eyes, my friend says, “Dude, you are still awake? Did you play all night?”

My eyes were open. The tidal wave had passed and I was baptised a whole new person. I was awake floating on a sea of my own consciousness. The next 10 years of my life would be shaped by RPG’s, Anime, Manga, Computers, D&D, and Cinema. Nerd Culture. I found a whole new person after playing Final Fantasy VII. It put together pieces that had been lying scattered, shaping a fan, a creative, and a more curious soul. I would challenge peers to try these new experiences, hoping it would awaken them the way it had me. I hadn’t realized that what awoke me was the perfect storm yet and that for most people, they wouldn’t be able to experience it the same way I had. I was able to find comradery in my closest friends and all of these cultural touchstones bound us even to this day. Final Fantasy VII’s legacy, maybe all legacies, aren’t just the collective experiences of having been a part of its success, but in the lives that were shaped around it; we are the base at which the monument stands. It’s legacy is strengthened by those who survived the storm and it continues to thrive because it was the perfect storm. A storm that still draws people in. A great storm that never died. A story we all still tell.

[tamiacharity-blog]

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[featherliketouch]

Well, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing these characters and just writing for this fandom in general. It’s my first time (and it is nearing three AM), so I apologize if this seems OOC. From a lot of the fics I’ve read about them, I always had this thought that Gladio was a big brother, so he’d have them big brother instincts and skills to look after someone who’s sick.

With that, I hope you’ll enjoy!

(also just in case, mentions of parental neglect and some self depreciating thoughts)

Prompto could tell that the moment he opened his eyes, it was going to be a rough day. 

A headache pounded sluggishly behind his temples. There was a tickle in his throat whenever he swallowed. He had some trouble breathing through his nose. Even with the blanket and long sleeved shirt that he wore to bed last night, there was a persistent chill setting up shop in his body. 

While he had tried his hardest to keep himself healthy with the transitioning of seasons, it seemed that his body was revolting on him for the long work hours, meager meals and fitful sleep. With how cold it was getting, he had to decide on having a decently warm apartment to return to or put food on the table. Three guesses on what his choice was.

The checks that his parents sent him was only enough to pay the rent each month with maybe a bit leftover to cover half of the utility bill. Prompto knew that it was not enough but he couldn’t find it in him to call and ask for an increase. He was already lucky enough to have a roof over his head. There were refugees living in the slums, so who was he to complain that there wasn’t enough money for him to eat?

(Deep down, he knew that this was an unhealthy mentality to have but it was mostly buried underneath his anxieties. He had a place to call a living space home. He was lucky, given his dirty refugee status. He shouldn’t be if he valued living selfish. Nothing good ever came from being selfish.)

His part-time job at the camera shop helped put some extra pocket change in his bank account, as well as his nightly gig at the local fast food joint. Prompto needed the second job to keep him afloat this coming winter, which meant cutting back on his hang out time with Noctis.

It always sucked, having to bail on his best friend. Prompto would love nothing more than to crash at his apartment and play video games all day, but he had to set his priorities straight. He very well can’t mooch off of the crown prince. 

(It was always a surreal thought to have, that he the insignificant loser that he was best friends with the Noctic Lucius Caellum. Prompto very well can’t ruin it over something as trivial as surviving this.)

He only needed to keep this up until spring rolled along. When keeping himself from freezing to death was no longer a priority, he could stick to only one part-time job. That should free up more time to spend time with Noctis but until then, he’d just have to ignore the awful feeling in his heart when he sees the hidden frown each time he had to cancel their plans survive through the winter.

Prompto could do this. 

Prompto thinks he can’t do this. 

Even when he took the last of the cold medicine left in the barren cabinet, it seemed that whatever bug that he caught, it was determined to hit him fast and hard. Just the trip from his apartment to school sapped what little energy he managed to scrounge up from the granola bar he swallowed down before leaving. 

His thin jacket offered him little protection from the cold, so he had been shivering until he entered the warm corridors. It should have tipped him off that he wasn’t faring well when his body still quaked ten minutes in, but he was too focused on heading to class without tripping into everything and everyone in his path. His legs felt shaky, vision swimming. It felt like he was trudging his way through thick honey, for that was how heavy his limbs felt.

Finally, he managed to enter his class and collapse on his desk with ten minutes to spare. Prompto was absolutely spent. His shallow, shaky breaths gave way to a brief coughing fit, which he muffled into his arm. Prompto kept his head there when it ended, exhausted. 

It was only the first class of the day. Would it be appropriate to take a quick power nap before it started? Noctic wasn’t here yet, so that must mean he still had some time. 

Oh well, it didn’t seem like it was his choice to make. Having closed his eyes with his head resting like this, falling unconscious asleep just felt like the natural order of things. 

The next time that he woke up, Prompto had the distinct feeling of being run over by a truck. Or a train. Some sort of massive force that slammed into his body, for that could be the only reason for how awful that he felt. 

With his eyes closed, the next thing that he noticed was the soft surface he was laying on. His desk was made out of wood and had edges. It could not be this soft. Not to mention, Prompto had this vague feeling that he fell asleep sitting up, not lying down.

Then, he felt the cool pressure atop his forehead. It was a deliciously blissful distraction as opposed to how uncomfortably hot the rest of his body was. A blanket seemed to be covering him, soft to the touch. Wasn’t his blanket usually thin and a little starchy? Since when was it this fluffy?

This little inconsistencies was what made him realize that something wasn’t right. Well, the only way to find out was to open his eyes. That simple act alone took an unreasonably amount of energy, not to mention it made him be aware of how itchy and gummy they felt.

Prompto blinked a few times, his vision slowly clearing up the muddiness. He blinked. This was not the classroom. He stared up ahead. That... wasn’t a familiar ceiling. Or was it? At least, it was not the ceiling in his bedroom.

His gaze then flickered to the side... where he found a figure sitting on a chair, reading a book by his bedside. Prompto took a moment to recall that big, muscled frame. 

“Gl’io?” He mumbled, throat burning. Was that his voice? It sounded like a chainsmoker that made out with a lawnmower.

Gladio looked up from his book at the soft sound. A small smile curled his lips. 

“Heya kiddo,” he replied, keeping his voice soft. Prompto’s headache very much appreciated it. “Glad to see you’re awake.”

Prompto mewled in response, his throat hurting too much to form actual words. As if realizing of his plight, Gladio stood up and grabbed something from the bedside table. Before long, something cold and wet was pressed against his dry lips. The blond eagerly sucked on it, almost crying from how good it felt against his parched throat.

“That helped?” 

He gave a weak nod, lips parting for another. Gladio obliged before he settled back on his seat.

Once he was done, Prompto could finally address the nagging thought at the back of his mind.

“...where ‘m I?”

“We’re at Noct’s place. One of the guest bedrooms.”

Something must’ve shown on Prompto’s face, for Gladio elaborated. “Apparently, you passed out in class from a scorching fever. Noct helped you to the nurses’ office but they can’t get a hold of your parents, so Noct called Iggy.” Gladio sounded amused. “Never thought I’d see Specs gun it like he did but still following traffic laws.”

Prompto was pretty sure his brain shut down halfway through the explanation. He passed out? Noct carried him? He was bothering Noct? He potentially infected the crown prince with his germs? He was wasting Ignis and Gladio’s time? He was taking up space in Noct’s apartment? He was--

It took him a moment to realize that he was sitting up, a muscled arm curved behind his back as a gentle voice instructed him to match his breathing. Prompto wasn’t sure how it happened, but eventually it didn’t feel like his heart was about to burst from his rib cage. He was caught in another coughing fit, with a hand soothingly rubbing his back throughout it all.

Once done, he slumped back against Gladio, utterly spent. 

“You’re going to be fine, Prompto,” he uttered. From their close proximity, he could feel Gladio’s chest rumble with his voice. Prompto felt fingers brushing away his damp bangs, before something cool pressed itself against his forehead. He unconsciously leaned into it, wanting more of that relief.

He almost whimpered when it was taken away, only to return, this time being evenly cool and stayed on his forehead. Prompto wasn’t exactly laying down, still being half cradled by Gladio, his body resting against his. His usual response would have to pull away, feeling deeply embarrassed but as it was, Prompto just couldn’t find the energy to spare.

There were still plenty of questions he wanted to ask, and a lot more feelings he needed to cycle through but when Gladio softly told him to get some sleep, I’ll wake you up later, Prompto’s eyes slid shut on its own accord. The last thing he recalled before sleep claimed him was deep, soft humming.