#Prospect throwback

[melia-an2fa]

I fucking hate the modern age maaaaannn I fucking HAAAAAATE how ongoing video game series can give their male characters new designs no problem but the minute a female character has a new design just like everybody the fuck else suddenly five million gamer men with six-digit Twitter followings spawn out of the aether to bitch and moan about how this is supposedly "censorship"

[insomniamamma]

Aw, El, thanks for bringing tattoo artist!Ezra back! I've missed him! I've missed this iteration of him and Cee. I think about them often, how Ez lost his arm, how him and Cee may have met, how he came to be a tattoo artist, how they ended up in Secret Springs.

This was such a fun challenge. You gave us a magical place to visit our Pedro boys! It was a delight to participate in this challenge and to read everyone elses wonderful stories.

Needles & Pins: Tattoo Artist! Ezra x F!reader w/Cee

A/n: written for @secretelephanttattoo's Secret Springs challenge! Thank you, Mayor El, for planting this seed. I am currently mulling over a tattoo much like the one described here.

Warnings: Angst. Talk about failed marriage. Reader is an empty nester. Reader has grown children. Mentions of self harm scars. Blood. I have tattoos but it's been decades and I've done a bit of research to figure out the current state of it. Any inaccuracies are on me. And yes, Pedro's red devil Met Gala look was my inspiration for tattoo artist! Ez.

A bit of flirting. It is Ezra after all. But mostly gentle fluff.

 A chain of bells on the door jingles as you push your way through, briefly glare-blind from the sudden dimness, green afterimages from the sizzling sidewalks, air-conditioned cold hits hard, and you stand, blinking and foolish as the girl behind the counter sizes you up, wild mullet of bleach-blonde hair, face set and disproving, black lacquered nails and ears spangled with golden studs and bars.  “I’m sorry— I’m a bit early, I can come back—“ And she smiles, big and open and wide--  “Oh, heck! You’re the tardigrade lady! Ez did a bunch of sketches. Lemme go grab him-“ and she rattles her way through the beaded curtain behind the register and disappears “Ezra! Your three o’clock is here—“    A co-worker had recommended Needles & Pins when you’d admired her ink, a half-sleeve magpie with a skeleton key in its beak and constellations drawn behind it like an old map. It’s in Secret Springs. That’s kind of a haul. Yeah, but Ezra’s one of the best in the business. You’ve got plenty of PTO piled up. You’re just gonna lose it if you don’t use it. You could get out of here for a bit. Yeah, maybe. And Moira gives you a pitying look. You both know the chances of you using any of that PTO are slim. This last year and change has been a rollercoaster ride, your youngest graduating summa cum laude and fucking off halfway across the country, some job at an aerospace start up that you can’t even begin to understand, but she seems happy, and the vice-gripped, duct taped, cobbled together thing that your marriage had become finally shat out. I love you, he’d said, but not the way you need me to. And on that humid night, watching heat-lightning flicker through the clouds, you say nothing, just nod, because he’s not wrong, the two of you have been holding on for a long time, for the kids, for appearances, and it’s like unclenching a fist. Kept it civil, he let you keep the house rather than selling it and splitting the difference, moved back home with his brothers and his dad, still talk about once a week, mostly about Lilly and the boys. Married so young that you never learned to be alone. So you throw yourself into your job, because if there’s one thing you know how to do it’s press your shoulder to the wheel and shove.You and Moira laugh together, but when you get home you start researching Needles and Pins and Secret Springs, tiny state park with campsites and trails, bracketed with BNB’s and small shops, strange gerrymandered artifact, small strip of beach that hasn’t been subsumed by hotel chains and timeshares. You can’t remember the last time you’ve been on vacation, the last time you’ve done anything for you and no one else, and you’ve e-mailed Needles and Pins almost without thinking. Why not? Why the fuck not?

  Appointments only. No walk ins. High end. Serious inquiries only.   And part of you balked, new to this possibility, had your ears pierced at Claire’s when you were twelve or so, and you’d felt stupid when you sent the e-mail off with some images attached. Sorry to bother you.   What a lovely idea. Water bears and fireweed together speak of resilience. The awakening of something new after a time of trial. There are species of pine that require the heat of wildfire to dry out their cones enough to spread their seeds. I would gladly meet with you to discuss this further.   And that’s how you ended up here, in this air-conditioned cave, narrow space full of framed flash art and old maps and framed photos of Ezra and the girl behind the counter, C? Sea? You didn’t quite register her name, flustered by the cool dark in contrast to the blazing heat outside.   “No need to yell, Birdie, I’m comin-“ Ezra rattles through the curtain. Broad is the first thing you notice, loud is the second. He is a confusion of color, heavily inked arms and a Hawaiian shirt bedecked with flamingos in sunglasses, spangled ears and a gold ring through his lip, bright shock of blonde hair amid his unruly curls. Smiling bright and wide,   “Hi there,” he says, purred southern drawl, and offers his hand, “I’m Ezra.”  “I figured,” you say and take his hand, warm fingers around yours and then he folds his other hand over yours, and you see that his right hand is an elaborate prosthetic, his whole arm up to his shoulder,  gold on black, a fearsome dragon framed in blooming orchids. You barely have time to register this and Ezra is ushering you through the curtain.  “I am guessing by your demeanor that this is your first tattoo,” and you smile, but can’t quite meet his eyes, his hand finds yours again and squeezes gently. “I’ve got several sketches based on our initial discussion, but i want you to know up front, if the art is not to your liking or if you change your mind about this entire venture I’ll not judge you for it.  “But the deposit—“  “A formality. Tends to keep people who aren’t sure of themselves away. I will never ink someone who isn’t fully committed, if you decide this isn’t for you i will refund you. No harm no foul. No pressure, clear?”  “Yeah. We’re clear.” Ezra smiles, dimples sinking into his scruffy cheeks, eyes crinkling into crescents.  “Excellent,” he says, “Let me show you what me and Cee came up with.”

 

 “That one.” A tardigrade drawn in the traditional style, brilliantly colored in blues and greens with bold outlines, with two crossed fireweed fronds in watercolor.  “This is an approximation-“ says Ezra, “I will replicate the colors as best I can—“  “That one.” You say, “I like the hard and soft together.”  “I do as well,” says Ezra, “I must admit that I was hoping you’d choose this design. Strength and softness are not mutually exclusive. I should warn you though.  Watercolor tattoos tend to fade a bit faster than the more traditional styles-“  “Sunscreen and plenty of it” you say, and he smiles.  “That’s right, and A&D ointment as you heal. There’s plenty of fancy tattoo healing ointments to be found but A&D has always got me through. Why fix what’s not  broken? We’ll send you home with some instructions.” He takes the sketch you’ve picked out, “Hey, Cee! Can you finagle the scanner-“ Cee pops her head and arm through the beaded curtain. She grins, devilish and sharp like a crescent moon. “Old man, still can’t figure it out, huh?” Takes the sketch from his hand.  “Oi! You are but a humble apprentice,” says Ezra, but he smiles, “An initiate! A novice even!” Cee smiles back. This seems like an exchange that happens at least three times a week, and you feel yourself smiling along with them.  “Get her prepped. I’ll do the hard part.”  “That girl,” he mutters, “You take a seat right there—“ He gestures towards a set up that looks uncomfortably like a dentist’s chair, “Cee has my station set up, I just need to glove up and we’ll talk placement.”  “Left inner arm,” You frown. You’d said so over e-mail. Can’t help but watch the flex and bend of him as he pulls a shoulder length veterinary glove over his prosthetic, and then gloves his left hand, “It’s a bitch to take apart and sanitize. I can if needs be, but best to avoid all of that. I cannot exactly autoclave this thing. And I find the calving glove less unwieldy than Saran Wrap-“  “Wait a sec, Saran Wrap? Like on a plate of leftovers?”  Ezra dimples at you.   “Exactly like that. First time Cee witnessed it, she laughed so hard i thought she might drop dead right there on the spot. Next morning there was a case-pack of calving gloves on our front stoop like some sort of-“  “It’s Amazon, Ez, not witchcraft,” says Cee, popping back through the curtain with a sheaf of papers, shoots you a knowing can you believe this guy look, “You’d be lost without me. Just admit it.” Ezra takes the papers from her.   “Go on now, don’t you have fanfic to read? What’s that Star Wars thing? Reylo?” Cee’s face scrunches in a cartoonish display of disgust.  “Man, I never should’ve told you about AO3.” And with that she’s gone.  “Your daughter’s really something.”  “She ain’t mine,” says Ezra, leafing through the stack of prints Cee handed him, draws a pair of reading glasses from his front pocket and perches them on his nose, “I don’t have that honor. Her parents kicked her from the nest and she found her way here.” He holds two of the prints in front of his face. “Show me your arm.” And you offer him your left arm, hand turned palm up. He cradles your arm, runs his gloved fingers over the thin skin there, noting the network of silvered scars, like contrails in a hazy sky, because how can he not? Old enough to be flattened and flush with the rest of your skin, no one’s noticed in years, but you know he must and you tense, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t, just selects a printed sheet at holds it up to you arm.  “This the orientation you want?”  “Yeah, I want him standing on my hand. Um, Ezra, the scars-“  “won’t be a problem, darlin, they’re old and soft-“  “I’m not gonna screw up your handiwork,” you say, and he folds your hand in both of his, gentle pressure that grounds you and when you look up at him, his eyes are soft.  “I know you won’t,” he says, “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.  We can rewrite this part of your story. I trust you.” 

 Ezra preps your skin, alcohol wipes and mild soap and he shaves your inner arm with a disposable razor, rubs some gooey stuff on you that makes you think of putting on aloe after a burn. Gotta let this dry a beat, he says, we want the stencil to come out nice and clean, rests his hand over yours while the transfer solution dries, got to let it get tacky, he says.  Not quite holding your hand but not letting go either.  “I should warn you, the bit over your inner wrist will likely be the most painful,” swipes his hand over your skin, testing the resistance against his glove, “Skin’s thin there. Not a whole lot of meat between the skin and all the veins and little fiddly bits.”  “Fiddly bits,” you echo, and feel yourself smile, “You mean the bones?”  “And tendons,” says Ezra, clips out the stencil.  “That looks like carbon paper,” you say, and Ezra grins, “It’s functionally the same, but Cee insists that the thermographic printer makes cleaner stencils than the old methods, so here we are.” He lays the sheet of paper over your arm, rubs at it with a balled up paper towel, “We want the transfer solution to soak into the paper. It’ll leave the stencil behind on your skin. There’s some tricks involving deodorant, but i find this method works the best-“ you can’t help but notice how pretty he is, face pinched in concentration, pout of his lips, those dark eyes focused on the strip of skin between your wrist and elbow like this bit of you is the only thing in the universe. “—hey! you still with me?”  “Yeah, sorry. What did you say?”  “You got a hotel room for tonight? It’s not by business, but i know you’re not local and getting tattooed blows a surprising amount of adrenaline-“  “I’ve got a  room booked,” you say, “Up over Peli’s.”  “Hope you brought earplugs,” says Ezra, “That place can get a bit rowdy on a Friday night.”   “I’m counting on it,” you say, “It’s been forever since I’ve gone to a bar.”  “Hmm,” he rubs at the transfer paper, “Do you feel your skin tightening a bit? We should be just about ready. I’m gonna click the gun on for a beat so you can hear it.”   “I’m not scared.”  “Didn’t say you were.” says Ezra, “I find this tends to go easier if people know what to expect. This buzz and my endless yap are going to be filling your ears for the next few hours-“  “It’s not bad. The tattoo machine, I mean.” And Ezra grins, slow curve that just hints at a dimple.   “My Ma always said my tongue is hung in the middle and wags at both ends. If, at any point in this venture, you need me to shut the fuck up do not be shy in saying so,” his face falls, eyes flick away a little, “There’s one more thing before we peel this stencil and get on to our business. I will need to stretch your skin, to make sure the lines are nice and clean, and for that i must rely on this foolish thing.” Ezra catches you around your wrist with his prosthetic hand and squeezes slightly.   “I do not have the sensitivity nor dexterity that i once had,” he says, “I have some haptic feedback, but it’s not the most reliable. If I grip or pinch too hard, you sing out and I will manually adjust the pressure.”  So focused on your left inner wrist and the tracery of your skin that he startles, flinches when you reach for him and grip his upper arm, brief squeeze and then gone.  “I trust you.” His eyes widen for a second, and flick away from yours.   ‘I suppose you do. Else you wouldn’t be here. Let’s get a good look at these lines before we get to fencin’.” Ezra peels the transfer paper up and you feel the pull of it, dark purple lines printed on your inner arm. And that makes it feel real.

You’re going to walk out of here with something like a story in your skin forever.   “The fireweed—“  “I know. The stencil lines are just there to keep me from going too loosey-goosey,” says Ezra, “That being said, how would you feel about some slight splatters? So the stems do not rise so harshly from the water bear’s back, perhaps a bit darker than the color of the fireweed. Something to really make this little fella pop.”  “Dark. Like a dark purple fading up into the pinks.”  “Yeah? What do you think?”  “I like it,” you say, and you feel yourself grin wide, and Ezra’s smile mirrors your own, “This is gonna be so fucking cool.”  “It will,” he says, those dark eyes bracketed in delighted crinkles, “I’ve got you, darlin. We’re gonna make some magic.”

 It doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it would, and you tell Ezra so, and he smiles, bent over your arm.  “Everyone’s pain threshold is a bit different,” he says, “You are squirming very little for your first ink.”’   “I was in labor with my oldest for twenty three hours. This doesn’t even register.”  “The linework is usually worse in terms of sharp pain,” he says, “The color and shading tend to be more persistently annoying. Like a shirt collar rubbing on a sunburn.” He has a light on a swing arm like a dentist uses, framing him in a bright halo as he hunches over your arm, catches his curls in bright filaments, the scruff of his cheeks, slope of his neck, breadth of his shoulders. Sharper pain as he touches the crease between wrist and hand, bracelets of fortune, you think they’re called, draw your breath in a sharp hiss, little hooked curves of the tardigrade’s claws.  “Breathe, sugar, you’re doing just fine. Worst part’s nearly done.” His eyes flick up to catch yours, warm soft and magnified by his glasses. “And I really must know. what’s your favorite dinosaur?”  “Deinonychus,” you answer unthinking, “Dromeosaurs are pretty cool in general, but Deinonychus is my favorite.” And you smile. Knowing exactly what he’s doing and thankful for it. “The raptors in Jurassic Park were actually Deinonychuses. Modeled on them at least. Actual velociraptors are turkey-sized.” Ezra smiles up at you, perfect plump lower lip bisected by a gold ring, damn he’s pretty, and nothing hurts at all.  “Huh,” he says, “And here I was thinkin you were a T-rex girl. S’pose that’s what i get for making assumptions.”  “Well you know what they say about assuming—“  “Indeed I do. My mother was very fond of whipping out that particular turn of phrase.” He stretches your skin so he can get the tardigrade’s odd little mouthparts just so.  “What’s your favorite?”  “Favorite what?” The curved, segmented back takes shape.  “Dinosaur. You can’t just ask someone that question and not answer it yourself.” Ezra stills for a beat, and then the needle starts up again, line sloping down to meet up with a hook-plated foot.  “Ankylosaurus.” he says.  “Really?”  “Sure. Mother Nature took a cow, a snapping turtle and a panzer tank and stuck em in a blender and then tied a cinderblock to the end of it’s tail. What’s not to love? Hmmm,” he swabs at the beaded blood and oozing ink, “Hard part’s done. How about a little breather?” Ezra stands and stretches like a lazy cat, rolls his neck side to side, heads for the refrigerator, tucked in the corner and plastered in stickers, punk bands or microbreweries, you can’t really tell.   “Stretch your legs,” he says, “This next phase will take some time.” You swing your legs over the side of the chair, stand up and then plop back down.  “You okay, darlin?”   “Stood up too fast.”   “Apple or orange?”  “Huh? Orange,” You feel your face going hot, “I followed your instructions—“ Ezra hands you a cold, sweating bottle of orange juice.  “I know you did,” he says, “When you get tattooed, you are signing up for an injury. One that happens over the course of several hours, but an injury all the same.  Everyone reacts a little different. Your sugar just dropped is all. You drink that juice and you’ll be right as rain in no time at all.”  “I thought I’d be okay-“  “And you are,” says Ezra, “I’ve had three hundred pound bikers slither out of the chair at the first sight of blood. It happens sometimes. I’ve gotten woozy a time or two myself.”

He shoves up his shirtsleeve and shows you a dog in a space helmet,   “That’s Laika,” you say.  “Patron Saint of one way trips,” says Ezra, “You can see a bit of wobble in the curve of her helmet. It was far from my first ink and it still hurt like a sonofabitch. You didn’t do a thing wrong, okay?” He rests his hand on your shoulder briefly, warm weight of it grounds you, and he hunkers down so his eyes meet yours, no judgement there, just concern, and without thinking, you mirror him, rest a hand on his vibrantly inked bicep, Laika brave and doomed amid a swirl of watercolored nebulae, his skin warm beneath your palm and you feel the breath rush out of you, didn’t know how hard you were clenching your jaw, didn’t know you tight your chest was.  “Thank you.” And for a beat those lovely, dark eyes hold yours, before they slide away, cheek curved up in a half-smile.  “You are most welcome. Shall we proceed?”

 The color inking goes much as he described, more annoying than painful, like a constant pressing of fingernails against your skin, different gun with more needles packed together, ink laid in, blood wiped away, back and forth over the same bits of skin, needles dipped and rinsed, tiny plastic cups of color that make you think of a child’s paint set, and the two of you settle into easy conversation, a flow back and forth like a gentle tide, mostly Ezra explaining all the hidden delights of Secret Springs, you simply must get breakfast at Cisco’s, it don’t look like much but they’ve got the best biscuits and gravy i’ve ever tasted, and Cee swears by their Hangover Helper, it’s like a layer dip of grease. Hash browns and corned beef hash and scrambled eggs with sausage gravy and cheese sprinkled over it. I keep tellin Frankie he should rename it the Heart Attack Platter, but he won’t hear it— Ezra’s voice and the buzz of the tattoo gun and the rhythm of him pressing into your skin and wiping away the blood and excess ink set you drifting, content to listen to him ramble, like the patter of falling rain.  “So what got you here?” asks Ezra.  “Moira. I saw her ink and asked—“  “No, darlin, what got you here?” And you find it hard to speak, to put into words, did everything right, married and had kids and a house and a good job and a husband who loved you until he didn’t, did everything right and still ended up with an empty house and no one to come home to except the cat. Lilly and Liam and Joey off on their own and settled and they all call you on Sunday like clockwork, as if you are an obligation and not someone who held them when they were small, talked them through the fears of monsters in the closet, talked them through the humiliation of first love, you know they love you, they tell you every time, at the end of every visit, hug you so tight and tell you they love you. Love you too, but you still come home to a dark house and an empty bed, you honestly can’t remember the last time you’ve been touched or kissed or held. Been so long since you did things for you without thinking of him and the kids that it feels wrong, shameful.  “I wanted to do something just for me, I guess.” You frown.  “I’m guessing you are not in the habit,” he says, “Of doing things just for the joy of it.” You laugh, a bright and brittle sound that pulls itself from your throat, even as your eyes burn, his eyes flick up from the brilliant pinks and oranges and purples, and you turn your head away.  “I’ve prodded a raw nerve, I’m sorry. Cee rightly says I have no filter-“  “It’s okay. It’s just…you do everything right and you still end up all alone, you know? Lil and the boys are all doing fine. They call me every Sunday, and I know I should be happy, and I am happy. Happy for them-“  “But not for yourself,” says Ezra. And you think of how the intimacy slowly bled out of your marriage, held on so tight for so long, thought you could muscle through it like you do everything else in your life, but love wasn’t enough, determination wasn’t enough, gritted teeth and stubbornness weren’t enough.   “No. Not for myself.” You frown. You haven’t put it in words before, too busy keeping it together, trying to gut through it like you do everything, keep your head down and push through, “You think your life is one thing and then it just isn’t anymore— this probably seems silly to you.”  “Not at all. I often think of cicadas,” he says, and returns his attention to the fireweed blossoms.  “Cicadas?”  “Yes. They live the majority of their lives under the ground, feasting on roots content with living in the dark and then something calls them up above. They split themselves open, crawl out of their old skins and take flight.”  “You’re saying I’m in the process of crawling out of my own skin,” you say.  “I’m saying that your future doesn’t have to look like your past,” says Ezra.

 “The past is another country,” you say, and you can’t remember where you’ve heard the phrase.  “Just so,” says Ezra, “Just so. We’re redrawing the map right here. And it is a joy to redraw it with you.”  “Are you—are you flirting with me?” Ezra scrunches his face in mock disdain, “I would never ever flirt with a client. That would be deeply unethical and Cee would undoubtedly yell at me. However, once I finish inking this last frond and we slather you in ointment and wrap you up you will no longer be my client-“  “And then?” He smiles at you, all dark eyes and dimples.  “Well then we are just two folks enjoying the moonlight and wetting our toes in the surf. If you’d walk with me a spell. If you can further tolerate my rambling,”  “I think I’d like to get my feet wet.”

[firechilde]

In honor of the NHL Combine starting today in Buffalo for the top draft prospects here’s a few throwback photos from some of my fav players.

So young, so goofy!

Also, I’m a little frightened of (normally) sweet John Marino. His pic looks more like a mugshot!

[intheupside]

@mnwild:

Like father like son 😊

Kody Dupuis paused for a photo with his dad Pascal, former Wild player, and his mom Carole-Lyne while at the TK Prospect Showcase

sid vs duper junior one day?

throwback from taylor

[a-grim-thin-hope]

welcome to a short one shot called.... idk, "harry potter's attempt at connecting with hated teacher via baked goods over incendiary topics, probably because he's still reeling from the battle in which he lost his senses" ??

----

Sometime around three-thirty in the afternoon, Harry stood on the front step of the dilapidated house located on the corner of Spinner's End and absently wondered if he should have made a treacle tart after all.

Not everyone liked apple pies, Harry reasoned. And though he could be wrong, he certainly couldn't imagine Severus Snape enjoying one. Or experiencing enjoyment, period. It just seemed a bit too cheery for the dour man; apple pies were usually featured in holiday ads about happy families, not shown being held by potentially insane students who decided to bring pie to one of the most hated members of society (or so he'd heard) on a whim. Hence, the original choice of treacle.

It would have certainly matched Snape's prospected mood, in any case.

Harry sighed miserably. Maybe he should have just brought along a few Blood Pops instead, just as a - possibly? - friendly throwback to the good old times when he, and most of Hogwarts, was convinced Snape was a vampire. After a brief moment of consideration, he ditched that idea and grimaced. He doubted that the 'good old times' was anything that should be brought up when conversing with Snape, ever.

(Or even thought about in his presence, actually; lack of eye contact when conversing with the man was deemed unacceptable, and he was a Legilimens.)

This was mainly because alluding to those years in Snape's presence would probably finally drive the man to commit the murder Voldemort couldn't. And, contrary to some people's beliefs, Harry did actually have a sense of self preservation. Sometimes. And even common sense, occasionally!

Harry shifted his weight slightly, still indecisive. Compared to his current insanity, maybe bringing Blood Pops would have been a good back-up plan. Still. It couldn't be helped anymore; he had made an apple pie, and it was rather too late to turn on his heel just because his former professor might not like his confectionery choices.

Carefully shifting the warm tin to one of his hands instead of both, Harry lifted a fist and hesitated for one long moment - a tense pause in which even the cheerful warbling of the birds seemed to still in an unnatural quiet - before rapping neatly on the splintered door three times. He regretted it almost immediately, and as the crippling doubt kicked in, he figured the only thing to do about it was to ignore the doubt and add a fourth, unnecessary knock that was far more pitiful than its predecessors.

"You're being bloody ridiculous," Harry finally told himself firmly, as the minutes stretched on and the surly potions master still hadn't appeared. "He's not going to care about what you've baked." This sentiment sounded hollow, even to his own ears, but he soldiered on and lifted his hand for another go at the door with its chipped paint that had no right looking as foreboding as it did.

It turned out to be rather pointless, in the end; he'd hardly tapped his knuckles against the wood before it flew open so harshly that Harry winced in preparation for the inevitable bang as the door met the wall and that never came.

"Indeed I shall not, Mr. Potter," Snape drawled, voice unusually hoarse - likely a product of the thick, ropey scars winding up his thin neck. "In fact, you'd be sorely mistaken if you assumed that I cared very deeply about anything pertaining to you. What, exactly, are you doing outside my door?"

For someone who, quite frankly, looked awful, it was almost impressive how quickly Snape managed to formulate an insult at the unexpected appearance of an unwelcome Potter. Awful was actually somewhat of an understatement; his skin was sallow and far too pale, even for him, and the dark circles under his eyes were so deep-set, Harry could hardly tell where his black eyes began and exhaustion ended. He couldn't even muster up the proper embarrassment at Snape overhearing his vocal ramblings.

"I, um. Pie," Harry finally managed, rather stupidly. "I - I mean. I've got it. Pie, that is - could I maybe set this down? Sir?"

After a wary pause, Snape finally moved aside, somewhat mockingly, one hand gesturing to the dark hall behind him and the other remaining firmly braced on the doorframe. "But of course," he said dryly, and waited until Harry tentatively took a step inside before shutting the door with the loud sound that Harry had anticipated.

-----

Harry had been to a lot of awkward tea parties since the downfall of Voldemort.

He wasn't quite sure why: just that the defeat of a tyrannical, evil overlord apparently warranted celebration, and that celebration often came in the form of baked goods of varying quality, lukewarm tea, and awkward dinner table conversation about subjects no one really wanted to talk about. Maybe it was just something functional members of society were supposed to do.

Harry wouldn't know; most of the time he was supposed to be developing skills that would allow him to be a functional member of society - something, even at the ripe old age of seventeen, he most certainly was not - was spent locked in the cupboard under the stairs with a few spiders for company.

But no, yes, awkward tea parties. He'd experienced a lot of awkward, tense silences, but this one took the cake. If by cake, of course, Harry meant pie, and if by pie he meant the apple pie he had slaved over that morning in the hopes that it would be, at the very least, somewhat edible. The grimace on Snape's thin face indicated it was not, but Harry thought it tasted pretty good for a first attempt.

Still, maybe he should have made a treacle tart. He'd never regretted anything as much as he did in that moment as making an apple pie for someone who hadn't even asked for a pie, and it increased tenfold when Snape sighed irritably and placed his plate with his mostly untouched piece on the table.

"Mr. Potter," he began, folding his hands on his lap with an all-too-familiar look of derision settling across his features. "As much as I...appreciate this unexpected visit, you've yet to explain why, exactly, you've brought me a mediocre confection and the obligation of social interaction."

Harry tensed a bit, fiddling with his fork as he looked down at his empty plate instead of the looming presence of his former potions master. "I - mediocre? I thought it wasn't too bad. Sir. Then again, that was my third attem - "

"Potter," Snape snapped. "I've developed no miraculous tolerance for your imbecilical ramblings in the blessed months I've not been burdened with your presence. Get to the point before I lose the small amount of patience I've managed to dredge up."

Harry barely ignored the ridiculous urge to applaud. He'd almost missed the acidic comments the teacher had been so known for. Not a lot, but enough that the familiarity of the exchange lessened the bite of the words somewhat. Harry took a deep breath, placing his plate gently down with a clatter as he immediately picked up his teacup in another poor attempt to avoid looking at Snape.

"You see," he began cautiously, swirling the tea in a smooth motion. "Hermione - you know, Granger - well, she sort of went around giving baked goods to everyone she wanted to make amends with, and I figured...it wasn't a bad idea. I mean, I'm not very good at baking, I'll admit that much, sir, but it seemed doable, so - "

"Your point."

Harry took a fortifying gulp of watery tea. "Right, right. Sorry, Professor. Anyway, I decided to follow in her footsteps and I...made you a pie. First person on my list, actually! For amends, anyway. Because - because there are definitely...amends to be made. I think. So, ah. Yeah."

Harry didn't look up, trying not to cringe with every choppy word that left his lips, the previously confident tone fading into something more cautious with the storm cloud that had descended over Snape's features. Wonderful! He'd missed being chewed out for mistakes he didn't know he'd made.

"Publicity stunts so soon, Potter?" Snape spat, abruptly angry, spidery hands clutching at the armrests of the armchair he sat stiffly in. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The Chosen One, off to offer up a few platitudes for his Death Eater professor and thusly, is lauded for such a selfless act. Brava, Potter. Brava."

Harry bristled, placing down the china cup harsher than he'd wanted. "That's not it at all, sir," he said, trying not to match the professor's sharp tone and failing just a bit. "I just wanted to say sorry, for the way we all mistrusted you. I think?"

That hadn't been at all what he wanted to say, but nerves had a habit of stealing his words. Admitting he'd wanted to see--what, if his old Potions professor had changed since sharing those memories? If there was not a hint of affection in the man who had sneered at him his whole life yet set his jaw so firmly against raising him like a pig for the slaughter? Or just the need for normalcy: subdued and barraged with a black, bleak hatred that felt like being back at the Dursleys' again?

There was a moment of silence where Snape scrutinised him, black eyes narrowed and glittering with more suspicion than Harry thought warranted, given that he had just apologised. Awkwardly, he took a bite of his apple pie, and found he was even more offended by Snape's criticism of mediocrity. For a third try, it was very good.

Strangely, the action caused something to ease in Snape's severe expression. Mirroring Harry, he took a bite of the slice in front of him, and Harry resisted the urge to fist-pump childishly when he took another shortly after. So the great bat of the dungeons didn't survive only on the souls of children! But even that revelation was muted by the stiff acknowledgement Snape offered the next moment.

"Typical Potter, absorbing the guilt of others. I haven't the faintest idea of what you would be apologising for. I would be a very poor double agent if I was not mistrusted," Snape sneered, lacing his fingers together and then pulling them apart in an unusual show of human fidgeting. "Besides. Between the two of us, I suspect I've the most to make amends for."

It was roundabout, vague, and exactly the type of statement to come from the man who had introduced himself to nervous First-Years by swooping through the dungeons like a - well, Harry thought wryly, like a bat out of hell. More awkward tea-sipping commenced, mostly on Harry's part, who wasn't sure how to respond. Snape raised an arch eyebrow.

"And was that all, Mr. Potter?" He drawled. "Or should I resign myself to an evening of inedible baked goods and titillating conversation with the Chosen One?"

It was with dawning horror - the sort one might feel when seeing your parents kiss, though Harry wouldn't know - that Harry realised his dour professor was, in his own way, joking. Something in his expression must have given his maelstrom of wary surprise away, because Snape looked faintly irritated at his shock.

"I'm not very titillating," Harry said through the brain-fog descending on his mind. "I'm arguably edible, though." It was only after he saw Snape's faint smirk that he realised what he said. "No! I - sir, my pie is edible. That sounds worse. My baked goods are great. They're - I'm sorry, Professor."

"So we've established." Another sip of cooling tea, this one somehow managing to convey schadenfreude.

In his desperation, Harry, casting about for a subject that didn't make him sound like a stupid First-year, chose the worst one. "I came to ask about Lily! Mum, I mean. Only if - if you'd be willing, of course, sir," he blabbered as a storm slowly descended over Snape's face.

Dismayed, Harry realised how much his former professor had relaxed in his presence, because his sneer worsened and the lines etched into the corners of his eyes deepened. His acidic voice was a good indicator too, though. Of course, it was mostly the hunched shoulders: Harry had always been good at body language. For example, when Voldemort had had his wand pointed at him, he was probably going to try to kill Harry.

This felt a little like the same. "Invading the privacy of my home could not be enough for Potter, no," Snape hissed. "Must you also invade my mind? You have seen more of my dismal childhood than even Dumbledore in your unwelcome Legilimency forays, and now you wish to poke your grubby fingers at the worst moments of my life?" His eyes were flashing now; despite this, Snape seemed unusually honest. "That which was given to you in the Shrieking Shack was all you were or will be granted ever again."

Unbidden, the sickening thud of Snape's body hitting the ground, the sticky blood against Harry's hands, it all came rushing back.

Harry flinched, and reflexively stabbed his fork into his half-eaten pie slice. Snape, unmoving except for the flickering of his black eyes, stared at the wobbling fork, then at Harry, then back at the fork. In the fireplace, flames crackled merrily; somewhere deep in the dilapidated house, the spicy-sweet smell of Pepper-Up brewing wafted.

"No, sir," Harry finally managed thickly, hating that he felt like an eleven-year-old once more. "Nothing like that. I just wanted to know what she was like. My therapist said I should ask someone who knew her best, and Hermione - well, she was glowing with reconciliation and key lime pie, and she suggested you."

Snape angrily stabbed his fork into the last bit of crumbling crust, his free hand coming up to rub at his scarred neck. He sounded hoarser. "Oh, indeed, if Granger suggested it!"

Unthinkingly, Harry retorted, "At least I'm trying to become a functional member of society." Immediately, in the silence of his head, he wrote his will and debated on the merits of forget-me-nots (too on the nose?) versus spider-lilies for a coffin decoration.

Even the air seemed still in anticipation. Finally, Snape made a rough, wet sound in his chest, which Harry realised after a few tense moments, was his new version of laughing. "Touché, Mr. Potter," he rasped, and then pointed his rusty fork towards the pie tin. "Serve me another slice and ask your blasted questions."

Triumphant, Harry did both.

-----

Guys im Not gonna lie to you. this is nothing special. but it would have made my 17 y/o self happy to share and know people liked her writing and I am nothing if not a people pleaser. shout out to you who expressed interest ily. tbh this is more a character study than a good plot ok but if you like that...

[tieronecrush]

seven minutes in heaven (the bathroom)

frankie morales x f!reader

rating: E (18+ only, MDNI)

summary: it's your roommate ben miller's birthday and he's invited the special forces guys over and asked you to invite some of your friends. the night comes down to a throwback game of seven minutes in heaven. you've been into frankie for months, so when your name and frankie's are pulled together, you can't help but wonder what can happen in seven minutes?

word count: 2.9k

warnings: mentions of a break up, alcohol use/drunkeness (benny), grumpy frankie, use of pet names (mariposa, hermosa, cariño), dirty talk in spanish (i hate conjugations so pls let me know if anything is wrong lol), mirror sex, unprotected sex, breathplay? (mouth gets covered), pls let me know if i am missing anything

“You gotta be kiddin’ me, man. Why are we playing this shit? We’re all grown adults,” Frankie huffs to your right in the small circle in yours and Ben Miller’s living room. His arms are crossed over his chest, gray t-shirt pulling taut at his shoulders. Warm brown eyes are rolling up to the ceiling under the brim of his Standard Oil hat that you swear is glued to his head — you’ve never seen him without for as long as you’ve lived with Benny — and it works to hide the luscious dark curls that fight to peek out around it.

“Oh, loosen up, Fish! We’re all here to have fun, so just play the game. Everyone here’s agreed to it, and it’s my fucking birthday so you have to do what I say!” Benny leans forward next to you on the couch, projecting his voice toward Frankie and gesturing vaguely around with his hands while his words start to slur together.

You laugh softly, patting Ben’s shoulder and nodding your head to get him to lean back on the couch again instead of trying to get in his friend’s face. Truth was, the prospect of this game did stir up some nerves in your stomach, even as an adult, but you wouldn’t dare go against Benny’s birthday wishes. So, you’re stuck playing Seven Minutes in Heaven with his Special Forces buddies, his brother, and a good mix of your friends that Benny has…taken a liking to.

It was one of the perks he got excited about when you’d come to him, a bit desperate, needing a place to live when your long term boyfriend of four years broke it off with you and asked you to move out. He agreed to have you in his guest room for the foreseeable future until you could scrounge up enough for rent somewhere on your own, and that first weekend he begged to throw you a “welcome party”, which was his ploy to get a bunch of your friends over for him to chat up.

That was a few months ago now, and it happened to also be the first time you met Frankie — Catfish to the Special Forces guys.

And since then, it’s been months filled with tension between you two, awkward interactions and quick touches to pass him drinks or him scooting behind you in your tiny kitchen when he was over. It was always heated with you two, electricity flowing with a current and waiting for a spark. But Frankie was a gentleman, never assuming or overly forthcoming, and you were, well, rusty. Not dating in four years really throws you for a loop when trying to hook up with someone.

Frankie’s eyes meet yours when your laugh reaches him, a flash of excitement evident in the widening of his pupils. A smile stretches across your face at him, shaking your head.

“Probably don’t want to go against this birthday boy, Frankie. He’s not afraid to guilt you into things, or worse, just bother the shit out of you until you do what he wants. Plus, nobody has to know what does or doesn’t happen behind the door.”

Ben whips his head towards you with an exaggerated shock in his face, Frankie’s chuckle low as everyone else laughs.

“Don’t give him any ideas about not fully immersing in the game. He’s just bein’ a grumpy old bastard.”

Benny turns away from you as Frankie rolls his eyes again, the birthday boy pulling out two names from the bowl in the center. It ends up being one of your friends and Santiago, which earns a cheer knowing his suave reputation. Once the two are back in the bathroom, the younger Miller brother sets a timer on his phone and everyone gets to chatting and drinking again. You and Benny argued back and forth before the party about using the other’s room for the game, finally deciding to use the hall bath for sake of neutrality. And clean sheets.

A handful of rounds have come and gone, people returning with smirks or poker faces, everyone trying to pull out any information from the participants. You have yet to go, and it’s the same case for Frankie. Benny’s been choosing the names for everyone, hiding them close to his chest and throwing them back in the bowl to be selected again.

You watch Ben pick out two new slips, reading your name off of the first one. Echoes of your quickening pulse thud in your ears, heat rooting across the nape of your neck. Ben’s eyes dart to Pope as he looks at the second slip of paper, and your stomach drops with disappointment from the high hopes you didn’t realize you had. Your own eyes fall to your lap as you wait to hear Santiago’s name out loud, molars biting the inside of your cheek to attempt to swallow your small pill of upset.

“And Fish.”

Your vision fills with Ben’s side profile, your stomach now doing somersaults as nerves begin to take over. Your mouth dries, tongue pushing against the roof of your mouth and sucking in your cheeks to try to conjure up any saliva. Frankie seems nearly as surprised, or is it nervous? Contempt? He’s hard to read at the moment; the only clues into his reaction are the split second of widened eyes and rubbing his palms up and down his denim-clad thighs before he stands and looks at you.

The hooting and hollering start when you get up from your spot on the couch, small steps leading Frankie and yourself down the hallway away from the party and into your bathroom. Nothing is said as he closes the door and locks it, his large frame turning back to face you across the small tiled floor while he leans back on the door’s surface.

His eyes lock on you, pinprick shocks following their wake as he takes you in from head to toe. There’s still a neutral expression on his face, hands slipped into his front pockets. Your own gaze fixed on your tray of makeup at the side of vanity, anxious fingers reaching out to fidget with a lip gloss. The silence in the room is deafening, the muffled sounds of the group only filling the dead air so much. After what feels like an eternity, you can’t take it, clearing your throat and speaking up.

“We don’t, um, obviously don’t have to do anything.”

You’re still not looking at Frankie when you hear his gruff voice respond.

“Is that what you want, mariposa? To do nothing?”

He grabs your attention with the nickname, a swirl of butterflies batting their wings wildly in your gut when you take in a new expression on his face. Tender eyes with a flirty smirk. Pushing off of the door, his strides take him only two steps before he’s in front of you, hand pulling his hat up and the other raking through his hair in a nervous twitch. Your lower back presses into the edge of the countertop, mouth blubbering like a fish as you try to formulate a sentence.

“Cause, if I’m honest, I don’t want to do nothing,” Frankie’s hand finds the counter at your side, one arm brushing against your shirt. His other reaches for your cheek, hovering over close enough for you to feel the warmth radiating off of his palm, “I’ve really wanted to kiss you since I met you. Can I please do that, hermosa?”

“Yeah, you can, Frankie,” comes out breathy and pathetic from your mouth, half a whimper as you wait for the moment you’ve thought of since you saw him in your kitchen.

In an instant, Frankie’s lips are on yours in a gentle but confident kiss. His hand has found your cheek finally, laying passively before it grips tighter and tilts your head back to give him more leverage over you. The embrace turns heady, his mouth slanted into yours as the two of you move together quickly to make up for all the lost moments from months prior.

When his tongue melds against yours, a soft moan slips out and is swallowed into his mouth. The noise pushes Frankie toward you, close to the point that his front is pressed entirely against you. You can feel how hard he is, the way his bulge digs in against you sending another moan out of your mouth. His large hands leave their places on your cheek and the counter, grabbing fistfuls of your hips and your ass. Frankie pulls away enough to speak against your swollen lips, short and demanding.

“Up.”

With one effortless lift as you jump, you're seated on the countertop, and Frankie’s kissing you hard again. Your own hands rest one on his shoulder, the other reaching to take his cap off and discard it on the ground, fingers combing through his hair. An arm wraps around your lower back, tugging you across the cool stone surface to the edge. His other hand grips the back of your thigh, pulling your legs further apart to slot himself between them, grinding himself against your clothed center. The feeling of pressure on your clit makes your head fall back from his kiss, a whimper pulling out of your chest as your hips work to catch more of the feeling.

“Y’know, I’m pretty sure we don’t have much time left before someone’s gonna be banging down the door, but I want you so bad right now, hermosa.”

Your head drops forward again, staring into Frankie’s eyes that are very clearly blackened with desire even in the low lighting of the bathroom. Licking your bottom lip, you nod quickly and mutter out.

“Fuck me, Frankie. I don’t care how fast or rough you need to be, just please fuck me.”

A groan comes from him at your words as he grabs you again, dragging you off the counter to stand on your feet again. His hands on your hips turn you around to face the mirror, making eye contact in the reflection.

“Take your shorts and panties off for me, cariño. Gotta be quick.” He winks at you, a light smack to your ass before he pops the button on his jeans and drags the zipper down. You do the same with your denim shorts, dropping the material along with your underwear to your ankles, stepping one out.

Behind you, Frankie has pulled his pants and boxers halfway down his thighs. One of his hands finds your lower back, gently coaxing you to bend forward on the counter. His other set of fingers prod through your folds, a breathy moan coming from him as he feels your wetness.

“This all from me kissing you, hermosa?”

“Nah uh. It’s from just being in the same room as you all night.”

“Mmm, you’ve wanted me that bad, angel? Should’ve said something. We could’ve been having lots of fun these past few months.”

“I was—I was shy.”

Frankie shakes his head as he looks at you in the mirror, a devilish smirk on his face.

“Don’t think you’re shy now, cariño. Eres una chica traviesa (You’re a naughty girl),” his fingers slip into your entrance for a few ticks, a gasp fogging the glass in front of you as he pulls them out, “You ready for me, mariposa? Might be a lot to take.”

He winks with a smug look on his face, messy curls hanging over his forehead and framing his face.

“Francisco, just fuck me already. We’re losing time that you could be inside of me.” Your frustration bubbles over out of impatience. He waits for another beat to tease you, and when you open your mouth to complain again, he drives his cock into you.

His smugness was granted — the way he’s filling you up completely is unlike anyone you’ve had before.

As if he knew your reaction before it happened, his hand covers your mouth to muffle the loud moan that jerks out of you. Frankie wastes no time, his thrusts starting fast and hard from behind.

“This what you wanted, mariposa? Wanted me to fuck your hard and fast? A mi chica le gusta sucio, no? (My girl likes it dirty, right?)”

Your response is stifled by his hand, the only sounds in the room Frankie’s low voice and the slap of his thighs against your ass. Your eyes screw shut at the feeling of his cock dragging in and out of your walls quickly, the head of his length brushing that extra sensitive spot inside of you.

“Nah uh, cariño. Eyes open. Want you to watch me fuck you like the dirty girl you are.” Frankie’s hand squeezes your ass tightly, a yelp coming out of your mouth from behind his hand. You open your eyes and look at him in the mirror, sweat building on your forehead and your exposed collarbone. He makes eye contact with you in the reflection, his hips fucking into you rougher.

“Fuck, don’t you look pretty taking my cock? Es todo lo que soñaste, hermosa? (Is it everything you dreamed of, beautiful?)”

Your tongue pokes out of your mouth, licking the salty skin of his fingers. Frankie groans quietly and shifts the position of his hand, two of his thick fingers pressing in between your lips to fill your mouth.

“Chupa, cariño. Suck.”

Following his demand, your cheeks concave and your tongue swirls around them in your mouth. Frankie’s eyes darken further as he watches in the reflection, thrusts becoming sloppier.

“‘M so close, cariño, don’t think I can last much longer. You gotta be quiet while I take care of you, yeah?”

Without an answer, his fingers slip from your mouth. His other hand finds your lower stomach, pulling you up to stand with your shoulders against his chest, cock filling you up with each drag of his hips. The fingers wet with your saliva are quick to circle your clit, the extra stimulation barreling you towards the edge.

“Oh fuck, Frankie! Yes, yes, yes!” Your whines are as quiet as you can make them, the back of your head pressing hard into his shoulder as his next thrust sends your vision black and muscles taut. Every thought in your brain seeps away, pleasure filling every crevice of you.

Your walls squeeze around his cock, nails digging into his arm around you as he fucks you through your orgasm while chasing his own.

“Fucking hell, mariposa. Pussy’s fucking milking my cock, god. So tight. Eres tan perfecta para mi (You are so perfect for me).”

He thrusts his cock one, two, three more times before he pulls out quickly, replacing the feeling of you with his fist and repeating your name over and over under his breath. The sound of your come around his cock nearly drops you to your knees to take him in your mouth, but the looming pressure of time keeps you standing, compromising by bending over the counter again. Ropes of his warm come paint your ass and your wet cunt, a whine falling from your lips as his own soft, melodic whimpers fill your ears.

It’s quiet in the room except for the gasps of breaths you both take to calm down, eye contact made through the mirror as you both smile widely at each other. Nothing else is spoken as Frankie grabs tissues from the shelf above the toilet, wiping his come from your skin. Before he clean it up entirely, you swipe a fingertip through one streak, bring it to your lips to suck it clean. His mouth hangs open at the sight and you smirk satisfied, winking before you pull up your underwear and fasten your shorts up again.

Both of you are buttoning as a fist pounds on the door, the sound of a phone alarm following it. Benny’s voice booms from the other side, a cackle evident in his tone.

“Time’s up, boring fucks!”

Frankie looks at you with a sweet smile, nodding toward the door, “Ready?”

You exhale a chuckle and nod, taking a look in the mirror and making eye contact with Frankie as he looks at your reflection tenderly. Your hands brush at your hair, tapping the sweaty makeup back into your skin. Frankie shakes his head behind you, tugging you around by your belt loops. He leans down, pressing a chaste kiss to your lips.

“Ladies first, mariposa.”

You step ahead of him, swinging the door open after twisting the lock undone and being met with a stumbling Benny on the other side.

He looks between the two of you, suspicion on his face as he tries to read your minds. Both of you have a poker face on, and he groans, shaking his head.

“Took you both long enough. What, were you fixing your clothes?”

“No, Frankie was just watching as I fixed up my makeup and had a catch-up. Nothing exciting for you to gossip about, Benny.”

He groans, marching back to the living room, “They didn’t do anything! Just fucking talked like losers.”

Frankie chuckles behind you, his warm palm rubbing against your lower back as you walk down the hall in front of him. His touch drops from you when you enter the party, both of you returning to your original seats and falling back into the conversation as the game switches to Truth or Dare.

Santiago glances at Frankie sitting next to him, chuckling to himself, “Zipper’s down, Fish.”

IF YOU WANT TO BE ON THE TAGLIST, PLEASE FILL THIS FORM OUT! thank you!

taglist (everything/frankie): @vee-bees-blog @joelsflannel @casa-boiardi @wannab-urs @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin @fishingforpike @msjarvis @swiftispunk @northernbluess @walkintotheriveranddisappear @sugadolly @yazsos @addictedtotlou @cannolighost @atinylittlepain

[kaesficrecarchive]

do you maybe know some taekook fics which include fluff ????

I wasn't sure if you meant exclusively fluffy fics or if a little angst was allowed so:

Exclusively fluff:

Stuffed Drumsticks and Cotton Candy Kisses by orphan_account (1/1 | 6,528 | M)

Taehyung is really good at precision-based games and Jeongguk is really good at strength-based games. Together, they amass a terrifying number of prizes before being kicked out of the carnival.

(meet cute)

Something Blue by starsign (1/1 | 11,077 | E)

When Jeongguk met Taehyung, he wasn't expecting to fall in love. But when his feelings blossomed into something new, he knew he had to do something special to confess. or wedding planner Jeongguk and florist Taehyung say "I love you" with flowers

(strangers to friends/fwb to lovers)

unexpectedly you by serenitaes (1/1 | 15,162 | NR)

“Oh my god,” Jeongguk mutters, spinning on his heel because he can’t look Taehyung in the eye right now otherwise he will combust. “What are you doing?” Taehyung giggles, tugging on his arm. “Turn back around, I wanna see your face.” “No,” Jeongguk gets out. “I’m good here.” “Jeongguk.” “What?” he mutters, still with his back to Taehyung. “Jeongguk.” Jeongguk huffs, slowly turning back around. He’s met with Taehyung’s wide-set grin, sparkly eyes and handsome as hell face that gets his neck warming further because Taehyung really is insanely handsome. “Did I make you blush?”

(single dads au)

the happiest place on earth by taecheeks (1/1 | 15,250 | E)

“Oh god, Kook. Don’t tell me you’re going to propose in front of the Cinderella Castle. That’s like, extra cheesy. The most cheese, even for you.” “No?” Jungkook laughs. Does it sound as nervous to Taehyung as it does to himself? “No, that’s corny. Definitely not.”

(established relationship, marriage proposal)

Hey Baby, Is Your Latin Name ‘Pterophyllum?’ Because You Look Like an Angel(fish) to Me. by laykive (littleheichou) (1/1 | 27,150 | T)

Part of the 100 Writing Prompts Challenge - No.7 "Fish". Taehyung's professor tells him that he can't do a fourth art project on fish, for some strange reason. AKA: Taehyung draws a boy that he happens to sit in front of in the library and falls in love with each individual line.

(college/uni au)

taekook take care of each other <3 by autumnstae (6/6 | 28,244 | G/T)

A series collecting fics of taehyung and jungkook taking care of each other, set in a multitude of universes.

to always follow the sun by thruspring (1/1 | 36,019 | E)

In which Jeongguk upgrades from being his boss' frazzled and overworked assistant to prospective future step-parent practically overnight.

(boss/employee relationship, single dad au)

Fluff + angst:

Cinnamon Crisp by teatimetaemint (1/1 | 21,482 | M)

Jungkook needs his daily dose of cuddles and Taehyung likes to wear Jungkook's clothes. They don't care that alphas and omegas aren't supposed to be best friends.

(omegaverse)

how to take a fall by orphan_account (2/2 | 27,939 | G)

"I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly." or, Taehyung and Jeongguk form a bond by chatting and exchanging semi-anonymous messages on Twitter, blissfully unaware that they are actually business competitors.

(identity porn, online romance)

Outlines by meganni (5/5 | 119,975 | M)

Simply put, Taehyung needs a boyfriend for his brother’s wedding – Jeongguk volunteers. (Featuring lots of phone calls, a healthy amount of practice, and unnecessary throwbacks and references).

(fake dating au)

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

i couldn't find anything about time tots so I'll ask now, sorry if it's repetitive. How long does a pregnancy span? And are there specific stipulations for a child to inherit their parents genes? (P.S. this is in regards to non looming offspring)

How do natural Gallifreyan pregnancies work?

Weirdly enough, while we have some fairly OK info on hybrid Gallifreyan-Human pregnancies (we're calling these babies Chronosapiens until told otherwise), pure Gallifreyan pregnancies—those occurring naturally without using a Loom between two Gallifreyans—are much harder to come by. Below is a bit of a speculative look at it based on what we know about their reproductive biology.

👶 Gallifreyan Pregnancies

🕒 Duration: Due to their complex physiology and the nature of their DNA, the gestation period for a Gallifreyan carrying a Gallifreyan baby is probably a bit longer than in humans. It could extend up to a year or so, reflecting the time needed to fully form a being with all the bells and whistles of Gallifreyan biology.

🧬 Genetic Transmission: In non-looming reproduction, it's critical that specific genetic traits—such as the triple helix DNA structure fundamental to Gallifreyans—are successfully passed on. This genetic makeup is crucial for the child to inherit typical Gallifreyan traits (this is obviously far less of a risk for pure Gallifreyan tots than it is in hybrid pregnancies).

⌛Temporal Sensitivity: Given their intrinsic connection to time, Gallifreyan fetuses might develop temporal awareness early in the gestation process. This could necessitate a protective environment to shield both the fetus and the mother from potential temporal anomalies.

🧠Accelerated Cognitive Development: The fetus might begin interacting with its environment or even exhibiting telepathic abilities while in the womb.

📜 Stipulations for Genetic Inheritance

There aren't any notable stipulations beyond the absolute necessity of the tot having the triple-helix DNA. However, it could get more social and political when you start talking about Gallifreyan-Gallifreyan time tots.

🔬 Genetic Compatibility Testing: Since Looming is usually such a controlled practice and natural birth less so, parents might undergo genetic compatibility testing to ensure their offspring will inherit desired Gallifreyan traits.

🧪 Gene Therapy: In cases where there is a risk of not passing on "desirable" Gallifreyan traits, prospective parents might consider pre-emptive gene therapy to correct or enhance genetic material before conception.

🌌 Ancestral Lineage Considerations: The child's rights to certain family legacies or positions within Gallifreyan society might be contingent on demonstrating a pure or enhanced Gallifreyan genetic lineage.

🏫 So ...

As stated, Gallifreyan-Gallifreyan pregnancies are a bit of an enigma compared to hybrid pregnancies, but we can assume they're probably longer than in humans because of the more complex pie they have to bake and the potency of the natural Gallfireyan abilities in a non-hybrid embryo is probably going to have an effect too. Then, there are all the political and social factors to consider.

Related:

💬|🍼👶What would a Human/Gallifreyan pregnancy look like?: Details on the possible gestational aspects of a hybrid pregnancy.

💬|🍼🏠Could two Gallifreyans from different Houses have a healthy loomed child?: Biological and cultural implications of inter-house breeding.

💬|🍼✨What happens to a foetus when a Gallifreyan regenerates?: How regeneration during pregnancy could work.

Hope that helped! 😃

Any orange text is educated guesswork or theoretical. More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →📢Announcements |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts → Features:⭐Guest Posts | 🍜Chomp Chomp with Myishu →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired 😴

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2008 - Number 1 - Sandrine - "I Feel the Same Way"

Belgium Count 2008: 11

Well. Here we are. One of the two songs that gave me the reason to start writing about national finals and Eurovision. When I first heard I Feel the Same Way, I couldn't believe it hadn't won. Then I realised what it lost too and then just how strong this entire national final was, and I wondered what the hell happened in Belgium in 2008. It's only after writing about every national final and Eurovision from 1992 onwards that I began to realise just how normal this was.

Especially for Belgium.

Sandrine Van Handenhouven was one of the crop of singers from Idool 2004. She may only have come third there, but Sony, the record company who were offering the contract to the winner, liked her so much they gave her a record contract too. Some singles and an album followed in 2005, and those singles charted but didn't get the acclaim or sales that neither Sandrine nor her backers expected.

In 2007 she moved to a new label and management, The Entertainment Group and as part of this new push, she entered Eurosong. There was a sense of excitement around Sandrine's prospects within the business to the extent that for this entry they recruited some big names to write the song.

It's by Felix Howard, Peter John Vettese and Michelle Lawson. The latter had won award for her vocals in the UK, while Peter had been a member of Jethro Tull in the 1980s and had written songs for an astonish variety of people from the BeeGees to Idina Menzel to M People to Mel C. Felix Howard's back catalogue was even more starry. He worked extensively with Amy Winehouse on several tracks with writing, production and backing vocal(!) credits. He also wrote several songs for Sugababes including Stronger as well as working with Sia.

This was a power line-up and the song they came up with was a triumph. Awash with Wall of Sound production techniques, it brought all the pomp and brass and drive of a sixties pop symphony. Back in the day, this style of production was called the Wagnerian approach to rock and roll. You can feel that all-encompassing swell carry you off as Sandrine and her team of worshipful dancers strut their way through their three minutes of classic pop.

It truly is a full-on, glorious sixties throwback. This sort of song and production is not something that features much at Eurovision. It's not a girl-bop, it's not rock, it's not a ballad, it's not going to fit into any of the conventional boxes. It's its own thing and Sandrine has the power and glam to pull this off without breaking sweat. Her voice is strong and stable enough to match the massed horns of the instrumental and by the end she's using them as a launchpad to take off into her own orbit.

It really is a song that Eurovision desperately needs and has never had.

Sandrine won her heat, beating three other songs that have already made my top sixty-four for 2008. A Butterfly Mind, Elisa, and Paranoiacs. It was in the semi-final that the likely outcome became apparent. Although she advanced safely, she did so in second place behind the eventual winner.

The final of Eurosong 2008 got a fifty percent audience share on Belgian TV. It was big. Sandrine came second and the eventual winner crashed out of the Eurovision semi-final in seventeenth place, behind Dustin the Turkey. It's a fate I can't imagine would have happened if Sandrine had won. Her consolation prize was being Belgium's spokesperson for the scoring in the final - after the country had been eliminated.

Nevertheless, the song was a huge hit. It stayed in the Ultrapop chart for sixteen weeks hitting a peak of number two. An album followed later in the year as well as more singles. Sandrine decided to make a move to TV and became a presenter on Eén aka VRT 1. As well as making more music and presenting more TV on and off, she's also acted, and eventually she did make it to the Eurovision.

In Liverpool in 2023, Gustaph invited Sandrine to be one of his three backing singers for Because of You. In a time of recorded backing vocals, he made sure his backing vocalists were not only live but right there on stage as part of the performance with him.

Sandrine is a singer who I think the entirety of the Belgian music industry respects and they probably think that she hasn't had her due rewards over the years. She's still got it, and maybe one day she'll get to put right what happened in 2008 properly. VRT - maybe for 2027?

For now, here she is singing Let Me Fall as part of the VRT charity show Der Warmste Week in late 2024.

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Throwback Thursday: Elmer Riggs

Imagine being a fossil mammal guy. I know, it's hard when there are dinosaurs out there but just give it a try. You've been in South Dakota and Nebraska working on Oligocene deposits pulling out some gnarly mammals. Then you go to Utah and start working on some Eocene mammals and the trail leads you to Grand Junction, Colorado. While there, you are approached by someone who says they are an amateur fossil collector and the president of the Western Colorado Academy of Science and they have some dinosaur bones they want you to see.

That is what happened to Elmer Riggs. He was born in India and moved to Kansas when he was just a small boy. He got both his bachelor's and master's degree at the University of Kansas and then was hired by the Field Columbian Museum (now know as the Field Museum of Chicago) as the museum's first paleontologist.

Now, back to Grand Junction. Okay, so, it was actually the smaller suburb of Fruita that he was sent to go look for dinosaurs. Him and a small team were out prospecting when they stumbled upon a very large humerus (upper arm bone).

Riggs initially though it belonged to a Brontosaurus and that it was a crumbly piece of junk so he actually gave priority to a much nicer looking Camarasaurus (Morosaurus) in a nearby quarry. However, once this humerus was completely uncovered, he knew it wasn't Brontosaurus but something bigger.

He further misidentified the element as a femur rather than a humerus due to it's immense length. It's wasn't until the lab preparation was complete that they recognized it as a humerus. All the white bones in the diagram below belong to the holotype (the first described specimen) found at Riggs' Hill.

As you can see, the holotype is the most complete Brachiosaurus material and it's really not that much. Fingers crossed we have a little more at Evil Tree Bonebed. How cool would that be!?

Riggs named the "largest dinosaur ever!" Brachiosaurus altithorax meaning "high chested arm lizard" and at the same time, noted that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were probably the same animal.

You can still visit the quarry where Brachiosaurus was found today. I have been there myself. It's a short trail about five minutes from the Dinosaur Journey Museum. If you ever head out that way, check them both out!

[metalsongoftheday]

Wednesday, June 4: Downpour, "Without the Fear"

Shadows Fall didn’t so much disband as deflate as their commercial prospects dimmed, and as Matt Bachand, Jonathan Donais and especially Jason Bittner kept busy with other projects Brian Fair was the odd man out.  So it was nice to hear his roaring on Downpour’s “Without the Fear” even if this was clearly a weekend warrior gig with some old Massachusetts metalcore pals.  There was definitely more than a little Shadows Fall here, and not just because Fair’s vocals were so distinct: the riffing and leadfooted percussion recalled Of One Blood, which also made sense since Derek Kerswill briefly drummed for the Shads.  The track was a bit of a throwback, and its pleasures were minor, but Fair’s presence was always welcome on the scene even if “Without the Fear” felt a little too inside his comfort zone.

[euchreiade]

Throwback to when a prospective one-night stand at a party was twice older than me (2 years ago) was really attracted to me (and attractive to me at the time) and we talked for 2 hours but revealed they were proud former military (for an imperialist nation) AND anti-vax. I nopped out of there reaaaal fast. I saw them afterwards at the party and they mopped allllll night.

I just hope they fumbled me so hard they reconsidered how they perceive their behaviour and past and were able to change. Otherwise... well my sympathy for them is quite limited.

[mariacallous]

Jay Graber, the C.E.O. of the upstart social-media platform Bluesky, arrived in San Francisco the Sunday after Donald Trump’s reëlection and holed up in a hotel room. She’d spent the previous days road-tripping down the West Coast from her home, in Seattle, stopping at beaches and redwood groves along the way, and in San Francisco she’d hoped to remain half in vacation mode. But now Bluesky was seeing a surge in new users, and it was looking as if she’d need all hands on deck. “There was momentum,” Graber recalled recently, adding, “It was just picking up day by day.”

Since launching, in early 2023, Bluesky had positioned itself as a refuge from X, the site formerly known as Twitter. For nearly two decades, Twitter had been considered the internet’s town square, chaotic and often rancorous but informative and diversely discursive. Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals began fleeing, and Bluesky in turn accumulated more than ten million users by the fall of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks. But the post-election influx proved to be of a different order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger compared to a Macy’s at the start of Black Friday sales.

Graber put in sixteen-hour days overseeing Bluesky’s twenty-person staff, taking calls with prospective investors, and recruiting new hires, leaving her hotel room only to pick up DoorDash deliveries in the lobby. In Seattle, Bluesky’s chief technology officer set up an automatic “failover” so that if one of the company’s servers crashed another would take its place. A team of engineers took shifts to insure that someone was on duty at all hours, battling to keep the overwhelmed servers online—“like firefighting,” as one put it. On November 14th—two days after Trump announced the creation of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency—Bluesky staffers stayed late, in a virtual “situation room,” to watch the day’s sign-up ticker hit a million. In a matter of two weeks, Bluesky’s population doubled. Today, it has a user base of more than thirty million.

Disaffected X users gravitate to Bluesky as a throwback to a gentler, saner social-media experience. Being on the site feels like a mixture of Twitter in 2012, when it was a haven for internet nerdery, and in 2017, when it was a seedbed of anti-Trump #Resistance. The Bluesky interface reassuringly resembles Twitter’s, down to the winged blue logo (a butterfly instead of a bird) and the character limit on posts (three hundred rather than early Twitter’s hundred and forty). The platform is theoretically open to all, but some MAGA trolls have reported that their accounts have been blocked. Discourse is solidly left-leaning, and disagreements tend to be internecine. The most followed account belongs to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As if to consummate Bluesky as a successor to the liberal Twitter of yore, Barack Obama recently joined and, in his first post, celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.

The platform is not yet populated enough to qualify as the internet’s new town square. Even after the Musk-induced exodus, X reports that it has more than five hundred million active users per month; Threads, Meta’s self-fashioned Twitter alternative, has around three hundred million. Yet Bluesky wields outsized influence in the social-media landscape because of the innovative infrastructure on which it’s built. All the giant social networks are what’s known as centralized platforms: most aspects of user experience, from content moderation to algorithmic recommendations, are dictated by the corporation that runs the platform. Bluesky, by contrast, originated as a radical side project within Twitter under its co-founder and former C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, to create a decentralized social-media model. Where X or Facebook runs primarily on proprietary technology, Bluesky is powered by an open-source protocol, a sort of instruction manual and set of data standards that allows anyone to build compatible software on top of it. As a result, users can customize the algorithms and content-moderation rules that govern what appears in their feeds—and, if they don’t like Bluesky, they can take their followers and their archive of posts and build or join another site running on the same protocol. The power that typically lies with corporations is thus redistributed to the users themselves.

With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as “around thirty-three”) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men. With Trump and Musk in power, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward turn. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has cut back on fact checking, abandoned D.E.I. efforts, and said that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish only pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that subjects users to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wanted to, could just delete the whole X time line—just do these totally arbitrary things,” she said, adding, “I think this self-styled tech-monarch thing is worth questioning. Do we want to live in that world?”

The Seattle area, home to Microsoft’s and Amazon’s headquarters, is perhaps the most significant American tech hub outside the Bay Area. You can’t throw a Starbucks venti there without hitting a software engineer. But Graber told me that she chose the city in part for its separation from Silicon Valley, and for its “moody and majestic” landscape: “Some people said I moved here because I’m a moss maximalist, and they’re not wrong.”

Graber and several Seattle-based employees have desks in a co-working space with views of Puget Sound. One day in January, I met Graber there. Tall and willowy, with a halo of tight dark curls, she wore a hooded black coat from the Chinese brand JNBY which gave her high-cheekboned face a slightly witchy aspect. The workspace was bright and sparse, with motorized standing desks and scattered beanbag chairs. Graber’s station was in a pod of four cluttered with external monitors, Annie’s crackers, and spent coffee cups. Compared with most tech leaders, she has a low-key digital footprint. On her Bluesky account, one representative post features a photo of her arms cradling a hen, captioned “My favorite chicken.”

“Jay” is an adopted moniker. Bluesky was named before Graber became involved, but by coincidence her given name is Lantian—Mandarin for “blue sky.” Graber likes to say that her mother, an émigré from China, chose it to lend her daughter “boundless freedom.” Her mom, who worked as an acupuncturist, and her dad, a math teacher and a former lieutenant colonel, met at a Christian university in Oklahoma. They raised Graber, an only child, in a Baptist community in Tulsa. Growing up, Graber looked forward to Friday nights after church, when she was granted unfettered access to the family’s desktop computer. A formative internet experience was a game called Neopets, in which users raise digital creatures and connect with other players in a shared virtual village. As an adolescent, Graber kept a blog on Xanga, an early social platform, and taught herself rudimentary code so that she could customize her page with music and a zebra theme.

At the time, Graber identified less as a computer kid than as a bookworm, reading stories of scientific and mathematical discovery. “One thing that interested me was how a lot of inventions came through ordinary people trying things,” she said. “It wasn’t just the lone genius.” She read the children’s fantasy series “Redwall” and every “Robin Hood” book in the library; she grew to love such feminist sci-fi authors as Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, who, as Graber put it, excelled at reimagining “how society could look.” To this day, she remains an avowed fantasy devotee.

In one corner of the Bluesky office sat a pile of padded training swords. Graber belongs to a club that re-creates medieval sword-fighting tactics, and the office had recently staged a tournament. She picked up a mock shortsword and extended it expertly in one hand. I grabbed another, plus a small plastic shield, and she led me in an impromptu battle. “A lot of men just rely on brute force to get through things,” she said. “When you learn that, you can still win, with better leverage and technique.” She raised her sword and mimed slashing it down toward my exposed neck.

After high school, Graber enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, figuring that its combination of liberal-arts, engineering, and business programs would allow her to “maximize optionality.” She chose an interdisciplinary major called Science, Technology, and Society, and as part of her senior thesis designed an online time bank through which students could swap labor—taking photos for another person, say, in exchange for cooking lessons. Graber told me, “In some ways, it was like a social network.” When she graduated, she moved to an all-female coöperative in West Philadelphia and volunteered for local tech-policy projects, which led to a job as an organizer at Free Press, a media-advocacy nonprofit. But the policy world operated “at a high level of abstraction,” she said, and she found it unsatisfying: “Being able to make change directly has always been really appealing to me.” On work trips to San Francisco, meeting with tech activists and hanging out in “hackerspaces,” she was drawn to the tech industry’s nimble immediacy.

In 2015, she enrolled in a coding boot camp in San Francisco, then landed a job at a startup that employed blockchain cryptography to track inventory for corporate clients. But she was restless there, too. According to Graber, her mother had hoped that she would become a doctor, and would tell her, contra the name Lantian, “You have too much freedom. You have to learn how to be more grounded.” In San Francisco, Graber started going by Jay. A blue jay, she reasoned, could navigate both sky and land.

A new crypto opportunity soon arose: a friend’s brother was running a bitcoin-mining operation in a defunct ammunition factory in rural Washington and needed help from someone with technical prowess and an appetite for grunt work. Graber moved to a house near the factory and, between shifts, spent hours studying code on her own. She described this to me as her “cocoon period”: “There were no distractions—no place to go, no parties, no friends.” Even in isolation, Graber displayed a future tech founder’s knack for self-invention. She wore earrings made out of salvaged memory sticks and dyed locks of her hair electric blue and purple. She began lifting weights and, for a brief time, tried an all-meat diet. “I’m pretty experimental,” she said. “I’ll try anything once.”

In mid-2016, Graber went to San Francisco to attend the first annual Decentralized Web Summit, hosted by the open-web organization Internet Archive. There she met Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, who was developing a cryptocurrency called Zcash. Wilcox-O’Hearn told me that Graber stood out for the contrast between her “youth and her seriousness,” and for her emotional intelligence. He hired her as a junior engineer, and she eventually rose to oversee developer operations. One early Zcash transaction became something of a legend within the blockchain community: in the memo field, the sender had encrypted a romantic message. Though people didn’t know it at the time, the note was for Graber, from a programmer paramour.

San Francisco was good for networking and dating, but Graber was spending all her money on rent. She founded her own startup, Happening, a kind of social network for event organizing, but it didn’t take off. “I was trying to figure out how to get people to use a social app,” she said. “But starting from zero was really hard.” Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. “If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it,” she said. “You can follow things that seem synchronous.”

On the internet, protocols are a bit like a city’s electrical grid—crucial to its functioning but invisible to most civilians. When you send an e-mail, you are making use of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). When you visit any website, you are using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (hence the letters at the beginning of every address, HTTP). Because of SMTP, your e-mail account can send messages to any other e-mail account; you don’t have to be a Gmail user to e-mail a Gmail user. Daniel Holmgren, one of Bluesky’s head engineers, likened the company’s protocol—called the Authenticated Transfer, or AT, Protocol—to an “open data lake”: whatever is in the water is public property, and any boat on the lake can dredge it up. Conventional social media, by contrast, is siloed: a Facebook account cannot follow or message a TikTok account. In recent years, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple have all been targets of antitrust lawsuits. Protocols are anti-monopolistic by design, allowing stakeholders to build coöperative systems that run side by side. As the founder of Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, put it in an influential talk in 2015, decentralized technology has the power to “lock the Web open.”

What piqued Dorsey’s interest, though, was a long 2019 essay by Mike Masnick, the founder of the blog Techdirt, titled “Protocols, Not Platforms.” The piece summed up a “crisis” that social-media companies faced with content moderation: caught between complaints that they allowed the spread of hatred and disinformation and complaints that they stifled free speech, they managed to please “almost no one.” The solution, Masnick argued, was to develop social-media protocols, which would allow individuals to design filtering tools based on “their own tolerances for different types of speech.” At the time, Dorsey was facing accusations that Twitter “shadow banned” content from conservatives; he’d been questioned by Congress about the company’s content-moderation practices. If Twitter were on a protocol and the work of content moderation were decentralized, then the company’s leadership would no longer be the target of blame. (Dorsey did not respond to requests for comment.) Several decentralized social networks already existed, among them Mastodon, another Twitter-like platform, but none had broken into the mainstream. Masnick, who today is a Bluesky board member, told me that Dorsey contacted him out of the blue and said, “I’m convinced by your paper. I think we’re going to do it.”

Graber likes to compare Bluesky’s decentralized structure to a hotel. Users are “going off and exploring custom rooms that people built, and maybe there’s another hotel out back.”

Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund the development of a “decentralized standard for social media” which Twitter would eventually adopt. To kick-start the project, his team created a group chat on Matrix, another open protocol for digital communication, and invited select people who expressed interest in joining. Then Twitter’s C.T.O., Parag Agrawal, kept tabs on the group to see who would emerge as its leader. Graber joined and was struck by the rudderlessness of the conversation. New people would pop in, make a few unsupported suggestions, and then drop out. No broader vision seemed to be coalescing. She began collating papers that other group members mentioned and wrote an overview of existing open-source social-media protocols. She told me, “The way that you become a leader is you just add value—you just do things.”

In early 2021, Dorsey and Agrawal started conducting interviews with prospective Bluesky heads. Jeremie Miller, who created the pioneering open-source instant-messaging system Jabber (and later became a Bluesky board member), sat in on the interviews as a consultant. He recalled that Graber easily became his pick. The Twitter heads had preconceptions of what Bluesky should be, he told me: “She didn’t give in to those and just propose the things that they wanted to hear.” Still, the search dragged on for months. In the meantime, Graber accepted a position at Twitter itself, working on blockchain technology. Then, in the summer of 2021, during onboarding, she got a call from Agrawal, offering her the role of Bluesky C.E.O. Put off by the protracted hiring process, Graber said that she’d accept only if Bluesky could exist separately from Twitter. Negotiating independence took another few months, but the decision proved pivotal. That November, after years of pressure from an activist investment firm, Dorsey resigned as C.E.O. and was replaced by Agrawal. Then, in January, Musk began buying up Twitter stock. By that April, he’d become the largest shareholder. Encouraged by a disaffected Dorsey, he offered to buy Twitter outright, for forty-four billion dollars.

Twitter had agreed to compensate Bluesky for constructing a protocol, with twenty-five million dollars over five years. Following a brief period during which Graber paid her first contractor out of her own pocket, Twitter executives made sure that an initial twelve million dollars went through. But Graber knew that, with Twitter’s leadership in limbo, she now had to think beyond Bluesky’s original goal of hosting Twitter. She put out feelers to other companies, including Reddit, about the idea of using Bluesky’s protocol. Then, in August, 2022, noting the dread on Twitter at the possibility of Musk’s takeover, she made another crucial decision: Bluesky would build not only a protocol but a social network to run on it. Doing so would offer a proof of concept, Graber said: “But it was also important in case we’re on our own and need to lean in on Plan B.”

That October, Bluesky débuted a landing page with a sign-up box. Within days, driven by word of mouth on extant social media, it had a wait list of more than a million e-mails. The next week, Musk officially became Twitter’s owner. When Masnick heard the news, he texted Graber some friendly advice: “Work faster.” The Bluesky team reached out to Twitter to ask whether Musk would continue to fund the protocol. Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board, had urged Musk to make Twitter open source, so Graber held out hope that Musk would support the project. But they soon received an e-mail from a “random dude with no Twitter e-mail address,” stating that their contract would be cancelled.

In late 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe how social-media companies make changes that benefit them but gradually, inevitably degrade user experience. In recent years, Facebook and X have buried news by deprioritizing links to articles. Instagram and Pinterest have flooded feeds with surreally inane A.I.-generated content, making it harder to find posts of interest. Social-media users who voice dismay at such changes are accustomed to feeling as if they are petitioning uncaring gods. Bluesky staff members, by contrast, like to describe users of decentralized technology as “agentic,” a jargony way of saying that they get to choose what they see.

One January day, I met in San Francisco with Rose Wang, Bluesky’s C.O.O., and Emily Liu, its head of special projects, who spoke about the average social-media user in a way that evoked a factory-farmed chicken resisting going free range. With the advent of platforms such as Bluesky, users “don’t have to petition the mods or complain about the algorithm,” Liu said, using a shorthand for moderators. She added, “Hating the mods is an artifact of when mods had all the power.”

Wang, a longtime friend of Graber’s (and the co-founder of a line of snacks made with cricket flour), said, “Success is when users ask us to build tools so that they can go and create whatever experience they want.”

Decentralized social networks can take several forms. The most complex are peer-to-peer systems, in which each individual connects her computer directly to others using her own private server. Perhaps the most prominent example is Urbit, a blockchain-linked platform founded by the neo-reactionary programmer Curtis Yarvin, which has only around sixteen thousand accounts. A more accessible approach, employed by platforms such as Mastodon, which has some ten million registered users, is the federated model, in which some people build servers to host groups of accounts, forming a “federation” of user-hosts. (Last year, looking to break into the so-called fediverse, Meta took its first step into decentralized social media and began integrating some of Threads’ functions with the protocol that Mastodon runs.) On Bluesky, any user can host her own account on a private server or join the server of another user-host. But the vast majority of users choose a default option that lets Bluesky’s servers function as host. As a result, creating an account on Bluesky can be as easy as signing up for Facebook or X.

In the spring of 2023, Bluesky rolled out an invite-only beta version of its app. The first batches of invitations went out to just a thousand people from the wait list each week, but each new user was given invite codes to recruit others, and the population quickly diversified. Wrestlers formed an enthusiastic niche and soon attracted other sports subcultures. Brazilian Taylor Swift fans established a community. Early adopters came disproportionately from the groups most negatively affected by Musk’s right-wing makeover of X—sex workers, trans people, people of color. X users in the media and progressive politics traded invite codes like passengers on a ship hijacked by lunatics, offering spots on the only lifeboat.

When I joined Bluesky, in April of 2023, the scene was underpopulated and raw. Content moderation was minimal. An optional What’s Hot algorithmic feed collected content that was popular across the platform. The posts that qualified had as few as a dozen likes and were, as one user observed, roughly “1/3 nudes, 1/3 technical discussion of federated networks, and 1/3 pet photos.” Posts were dubbed “skeets,” for “sky tweets,” a term that has a double meaning as vulgar slang. Without the possibility of going viral (or attracting much attention, period), users’ only incentive was to entertain their fellow internet addicts. The poet and author Patricia Lockwood, a maestro of tweeting, had departed Twitter after Trump used the platform to incite the January 6th riot. She joined Bluesky in May of 2023 and began skeeting in her signature absurdist style. In one brief prose poem, she narrated tumbling down a hill: “haha—Yes! it will be the job of sisyphus, my sexual partner, to roll me up again.” Lockwood told me that Bluesky felt a bit like “returning to a second childhood,” striving to reclaim a social internet that was fun and freeing.

The early enthusiasm allowed Graber to raise eight million dollars in seed investment that July, providing the team with the runway to keep growing. Then Bluesky’s sign-ups slowed, in part because of competition from Threads, which débuted that month. In February, 2024, Bluesky’s social platform became open to the public, yet it continued to feel like a digital backwater. I checked in sporadically that spring and summer and found little action; periodically, I posted messages into the void such as “btw I’m still on this site.” In August, when X was briefly banned in Brazil for refusing to follow local moderation laws, a wave of Brazilians (among the world’s most internet-savvy people) migrated to Bluesky. But the platform may well have remained as niche as Mastodon, which stalled out after experiencing a bump in popularity when Musk acquired Twitter. One feature that helped make Bluesky a viable X replacement was its “starter packs,” offering user-curated lists of accounts to follow in certain areas of interest, so that new members didn’t have to rebuild their online communities from scratch. Threads soon added the same feature.

When a user logs on to X, two tabs appear at the top of her feed: For You, which shows algorithmically recommended posts, and Following, which shows posts from accounts that you follow. The analogous features on Bluesky differ in significant ways. Where X’s Following feed is crowded with ads and recommendations, Bluesky’s contains only the things that people you follow have posted, in reverse chronological order, as on early Twitter, giving Bluesky users a clearer sense of the conversation happening in real time. A Discover feed, meanwhile, custom-selects posts for each user according to an algorithm designed by the company; one of its advantages over X’s For You is that you don’t have to see Musk himself spouting an endless stream of MAGA propaganda and proudly puerile memes. But the site’s biggest departure from X is its My Feeds tab, which allows users to select additional algorithmic feeds designed by fellow-users. At the Bluesky office, Graber opened her laptop, which bore a large sticker of a vine-wreathed sword, and pulled up a test account, then navigated to the menu of feeds. She clicked on one called Science, moderated by a self-vetted crowd of science professionals, then on one called Fungi Friends, which filled the feed with photos of mushrooms. A Popular with Friends feed shows posts getting engagement from people you follow; Quiet Posters, conversely, brings up messages from accounts you follow that don’t post very often.

Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, previously worked at Twitter, until Musk dismantled its content-moderation team and eventually forced him out. Rodericks told me that Bluesky performs “a foundational layer” of moderation, with more than a hundred contractors working to remove such things as child-sexual-abuse material and threats of violence. But more fine-grained filtering decisions are made at the individual level. In Settings, users can choose from among hundreds of homespun labelling tools that flag or block certain posts in their feeds. The labels range from the straightforwardly functional (a red check mark for authenticated power users, akin to Twitter’s old blue checks) to the idiosyncratically satirical (a label that identifies landlords, private-school graduates, and associates of Jeffrey Epstein). One of the platform’s most prominent feeds, Blacksky, which draws more than three hundred thousand users a month, offers a tool to identify and block racism and misogynoir. Bluesky as a company can afford to enable free speech because the platform’s smaller, optional communities have the power to police speech however they choose. Blacksky’s founder, Rudy Fraser, told me, “If anyone uses a slur anywhere—in a username, bio, in a post—we can get automatically alerted and take action.” He added, of moderation decisions, “If you’re making everyone happy, you’re maybe not serving a community.”

If there’s a trade-off to nurturing insular online communities, it’s that Bluesky as a whole still lacks the kind of cacophonous urgency that defined Twitter in its heyday. The dominant discourse tends to take place in a tone of cosseted aggrievement. On a typical day, a litany of posts might ask why “nobody is talking about” a given issue—the death toll in Gaza, the threatened defunding of NPR—although people are in fact talking about those very things on the same website. Even when it’s politically diverse, social media too easily creates echo chambers. In time, if Bluesky wants to remain relevant, it will have to evolve beyond its relatively monocultural milieu.

Graber likes to compare Bluesky to a hotel: “We’re trying to create a good time for people who step into the lobby,” she said—though the lobby also contains construction materials, left there as a community resource. Users are “going off and exploring custom rooms that people built, and maybe there’s another hotel out back.” If the system proves successful, there will eventually be many hotels operating on the protocol. In the eyes of some of Bluesky’s original supporters, though, the success of its social network has undermined its decentralized vision; its hotel grew so lively so fast that people didn’t venture off to build their own.

Aaron D. Goldman, a former Twitter engineer who worked for Bluesky in its first year, told me that hosting millions of accounts on Bluesky’s servers is costly and creates pressure for the platform to monetize its user base. “If we’re going to have huge hosting costs, then we need a toll booth somewhere,” he said. Graber has resisted replicating Twitter’s advertising-driven model, and Bluesky’s open-source structure obviates the possibility of licensing the platform’s content to train A.I. programs, as companies such as X and Reddit have done. Bluesky currently has only one revenue stream, from hosting accounts on custom domains, but Graber envisions sustaining the business by eventually charging subscription fees, and by monetizing its marketplace of custom tools—users would pay, say, five dollars a month for Blacksky, and Bluesky would take a cut. Still, Goldman said that Bluesky, even with “the bones of a good decentralized system,” has ended up with “the same incentives that led Jack to make Twitter very commercial.” Goldman helped design Bluesky’s protocol, but he and Graber later came to an impasse; he was let go in late 2022. (Graber ascribed their parting less to ideological differences than to Goldman’s lack of productivity; he was “not shipping like an engineer,” she said, and was “treating this more like a research project.”)

Last May, Dorsey revealed that he’d left his seat on Bluesky’s board. In an interview, he complained that Bluesky was “repeating all the mistakes” that Twitter had made, becoming “a company with V.C.s and a board.” He recommended Nostr, an obscure “censorship-resistant” social protocol to which he had donated five million dollars. Graber told me that Dorsey’s departure actually “freed up” the company somewhat. Some prospective users had grumbled that Bluesky was still the pet project of a billionaire; without Dorsey’s involvement the allegation was moot.

Even on the decentralized internet, founders are not above competing for the primacy of their tools. Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, told me that last year he and Graber discussed a collaboration that would have allowed their two protocols to interoperate, but each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol. Rochko did not see the point in Mastodon using AT Protocol, given that Bluesky already dominates it. “There isn’t really a lot of benefit to running your own app on it,” he said. “There would just be no place.” If the decentralized-social-media vision is realized, a single protocol might, like SMTP for e-mail, one day host an entire mainstream social internet: the next generation of Facebooks, Instagrams, and TikToks.

In January, Mallory Knodel, the executive director of the nonprofit Social Web Foundation, co-founded an initiative, Free Our Feeds, to foster the construction of more social networks on Bluesky’s protocol. The goal, as Knodel put it to me, was to “take them up on their offer to make it a truly decentralized platform.” Perhaps there will soon be a proliferation of other popular social apps operating alongside Bluesky. In the meantime, there are signs of growth. Flashes, an Instagram-like site that launched in February, has so far been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times. My favorite project besides Bluesky is a tiny site called PinkSea, a version of Japanese oekaki, bulletin boards for sharing digital drawings. I can log on to PinkSea using my Bluesky account information and post what I draw on both platforms simultaneously. In the Bluesky office, I pulled up PinkSea on Graber’s laptop, and she said that she had never seen it before. It is not a digital town square; with perhaps a few hundred active users, it’s barely even a digital dive bar. But its existence suggests the possibility of other creative projects on the protocol to come. Graber scrolled through the feed, which showcased both sophisticated anime figures and crude doodles, and her eyes lit up. “What excites me is new worlds emerging that I can’t imagine,” she said.

As the sun began to set, we walked from the Bluesky office to a pub. Graber, who doesn’t drink, settled into a dark nook and ordered a non-alcoholic Guinness. As Bluesky has become more mainstream, Graber has asserted herself more pointedly as a nemesis of social media’s Old Guard. For an appearance at South by Southwest in March, she wore a custom T-shirt that parodied one of Zuckerberg’s own design. Where his is emblazoned with the phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a riff on the Latin “either a Caesar or nothing,” hers read “mundus sine caesaribus”—“a world without Caesars.” (The company started selling the shirts for forty dollars apiece and made more money in a day than it had in two years of selling domains.) In Bluesky’s founding documents, taking a lesson from Twitter’s history, Graber introduced a slogan: “The company is a future adversary.” In other words, they must design their platform today in such a way that, even if new leadership eventually jettisons their guiding principles, the thing they’ve created will remain impossible to abuse.

Graber seemed almost to welcome the idea that Bluesky’s legion of thirty million-plus users could someday disband; if people migrated elsewhere on the protocol tomorrow, it would only prove the viability of her vision. “Every centralized system faces the problem of succession, because leadership changes, and you eventually get someone not smart or not good,” she said. “Then users can vote with their feet, because they have their relationships and their data and their identity. Somebody else can come along and say, ‘Hey, I’m doing it better. Come over here.’ ”

[thatfilmfreak]

Thoughts on A24’s ‘Materialists’ Trailer

Hi all! Today I wanted to discuss the upcoming movie, Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson as a smart-talking NYC matchmaker who keeps her own love life out of the fray, the film casts her into a whirlwind affair when she meets a smooth billionaire (Pedro Pascal) and a shaggy ex (Chris Evans) on the same evening. The internet is already buzzing with the casting announcements, and the film appears to be set to give the rom-com genre a shot in the arm by juggling the traditional tropes with an edgy A24 sheen. The links provided are what I used to help me write this. Happy reading! www.empireonline.com/movies/news/materialists-trailer-dakota-johnson-matchmaker-torn-between-chris-evans-pedro-pascal/ variety.com/2025/film/news/materialists-trailer-dakota-johnson-pedro-pascal-chris-evans-1236339295/ deadline.com/video/materialists-trailer-dakota-johnson-pedro-pascal-chris-evans/

A24 is shifting gears with its first-ever rom-com, Materialists, and honestly, it's about time. The indie studio has built its reputation on its terrifying horror films, gritty dramas, and brain-twisting thrillers, but now they're diving into love triangles and witty banter headfirst.

Leading the charge is Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a sharp-tongued New York City matchmaker who's excellent at finding love for others but doesn't seem to have any use for her own. At least, that is, until she encounters a smooth-talking and ridiculously handsome new socialite (Pedro Pascal), only to run into her down-on-his-luck ex (Chris Evans) on the same night. Cue the romantic chaos.

The casting alone has people buzzing. The internet has literally exploded at the prospect of Evans and Pascal vying for Johnson's affections, and honestly, who wouldn't? Pascal is the ultimate go-to for a billionaire with charm—maybe Rege-Jean Page could have pulled it off too, but Pascal is perfect. And Johnson? She's built a career on choosing interesting projects, and seeing her in a rom-com is both unexpected and fitting.

Rom-coms have been struggling in recent years. Either they're so desperate to defy expectations that they neglect to be fun, or they stick so closely to the formula that they're just. boring. But Materialists seems to have cracked the code. It's embracing the tropes we love—hello, love triangle—without feeling like a cookie-cutter throwback. Bridget Jones' Diary levels of romantic tension, but with an A24 twist, is what I'm hoping for.

Rom-coms are meant to be predictable, albeit in a positive way. You anticipate heartbreak, drama, and a happily ever after, and if Materialists delivers that and can make it feel fresh, then it might be the movie to resurrect the genre.

[eldriitchmurmurs]

lol throwback to my most downvoted statement that i ever made on reddit when i used it, which was that if somebody is looking to fuck and they don't wanna fuck a transsexual, it's on them to ask all prospective sex partners if they're a transsexual, not on any hypothetical transsexual to ever say anything. and the reason it got downvoted is because i think everybody who hit that downvote button had a horrible moment of clarity thinking of what their life would be like if they had to ask every woman that they were trying to bang if she was a transsexual or not.

[wgtdaytime]

I just got super excited at the prospect of seeing an episode of The Young and the Restless from 1985 for Christmas.

All shows should preempt their holiday shows with a throwback.