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defmaybe · 4 months ago

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Sprint

PURPLE KISS’ Na Goeun x Male Reader

2.6k words

A/N: Very messy lmfao, thanks for reading as always! Part of @mintwithchoco's prompt exercise!

—

“You’re arriving at the halfway point of our cycle. I’m still perplexed why they don’t let you come in after this sprint ends!” Goeun says, clearly annoyed by the fact that you were accepted into the department in the middle of this mess. Still, you have to be a professional and accept this hardship, no matter how difficult it will be.

“Don’t worry, Miss Na. I can work with that,” you answer, trying to sound firm as you walk along with her through the floor, passing countless tables and your soon-to-be co-workers. The scent of lavender wafts into your nose. It’s different from what you’ve expected the office to smell, especially a tech-related office. Sounds of clicking keyboards ring through the floor. These people are clearly working hard, and you have a lot to catch up to them.

Goeun chuckles, clearly amused by your enthusiasm. “Well, if you need anything, just tell me or the other guys, alright? We won’t bite.”

“Yes, Miss Na.”

You two advance through the floor until you arrive at an unoccupied table. The table is empty, like empty-empty. There’s nothing on it, only a plug socket on the right of the partition.

“Here’s your desk!” Goeun says, palming her hands towards the table with a small smile. “Again, if there’s any problem, just ask us!”

“Sure, Miss Na.”

“Just call me Goeun. No need for formalities, really.”

—

Two weeks go by quickly. You find yourself caught in the web of the ever-growing project your team is working on. The sprint is harsh on you, punishing in its sheer complexity and size, but you fight through it. You double your efforts on the works, so determined to earn acceptance from your co-workers. You stay for the overtime (the money’s great). You polish your work. You try to be nothing short of resolute.

And it works.

Your first sprint is a success, and your contribution finds its place in the project. The stakeholders give you a few praises during the meeting, and ecstasy couldn’t even begin to describe the emotion you feel after that.

You aced it.

—

“Well, it seems that your first sprint went well. Congratulations!” Goeun cheers, raising her bubble tea for a toast, to which you shyly reciprocate along with your other co-workers.

“You did great! Especially considering you came in during the middle of it,” Jiwoong adds, giving you a thumbs up.

“I couldn’t do half as good as you did when I joined here. Good job!” says Sumin.

“I’m here because of you guys, so–thank you!” you say, smiling. They sure have helped you a lot. You were afraid at some point that they’d be annoyed with how frequently you’ve asked them for help, but it’s apparent that these guys are genuinely kind. You’re falling in love with this company, well, at least the department.

“To the new guy!” and Goeun leads another toast.

—

The rest of the day goes by quickly as you get absorbed into the whirlwind of work. More Python, more Pandas, and without knowing, it’s starting to get dark outside.

“Hey.” Goeun greets, peeking out from the partition with a small smile. “We’re not paying more after six, remember?”

You look at the clock, suddenly reminded of how much time has passed since your last bathroom break at three. “Oh, fuck, shit,” you mumble, quickly scrambling through the tabs you’ve opened through the day on your overworked laptop. “Let me–uh–”

“I’ll wait in front of the building.”

“Sure.”

—

The chilly night air blows through your body. White puffs of air leave your lungs as you walk along the street with Goeun. Your hands occasionally rub against each other in an attempt to retain some heat. A car passes by.

“So–why did you decide to become a programmer?” Goeun asks. The sounds of dry leaves crunching under your feet can be heard. Another car passes by.

“Oh, my mom, she works in tech, and I kinda didn’t know what to do when I had to go to college, so–yeah.” You let out a huff, looking downwards as you take strides after strides along the asphalt road. Another car passes by. “How about you? Why did you become a programmer?”

“I was also like you—don’t know what to do, and I did well in Python, so I kinda just–roll with that.”

Another car passes by.

She muses, looking up at the stars, “You know, I did wanna be a singer once when I was young.”

An image of Goeun, lost in the symphony, pops up in your head. You find it cute.

You chuckle softly, out of endearment more than anything.

“But I was afraid that I’d fail, so I kinda just, well, stick to programming instead, more reliable.”

“You seem like you’d make a brilliant singer, though.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Just a hunch.”

You continue walking along the street. You take a glance at her to find her eyes, and you feel something. It’s short-lived, but it’s definitely something. You don’t consider it much more than just an eye contact, though.

“What?” Goeun asks. You aren’t going to deny that she looks good tonight. The pairing of a black leather jacket and a white t-shirt fit her like a glove. She looks much better than your average programmer.

“Nothing,” you reply, before breaking eye contact and continuing to walk into the nocturne.

After a short while, you reach her apartment, very likely one of the rooms inside this 40-floor tower (unless she’s otherworldly rich). You’ve walked past it quite a fair few times. It’s not so far from your apartment, after all.

“See you on Monday, I guess?” you say, smiling. It’s almost your bedtime now.

“Wanna have something from my room before you go? I have a few beers,” Goeun invites you, her thumb pointing towards the building.

Your eyebrows arch slightly, hands shifting inside your pockets. You’re uncertain.

“I mean, a bottle can make you go a bit drowsy and stuff,” she continues, cocking her head towards the tower. “Should help you sleep better.”

—

“Nice room,” you say as you take a look around her place.

Goeun’s room is neat, spine-chillingly neat. It’s a small studio room meant for single-living. Everything is kept in its place. No stray strands of hair on the floor, no clothes lying around. She’s good at this.

“Can’t live in a dirty room, you know?”

“I get it.”

You settle yourself on her couch nervously. It’s your first time at her place, after all, gotta be a good visitor.

“Kirin or Hoegaarden?”

“Kirin, please.”

Goeun picks up a Kirin from her fridge before walking towards you. Her legs look longer than usual from this angle.

“To our next sprint,” she says, handing you the beer can, smiling. You take it.

Cold.

“Thanks.” You open the beer can with a loud pop. A fizzling sound can be heard. You take a swig of beer. The familiar bitterness and a hint of malt runs down your throat, and you’re sure your face contorts a little as you put the can down.

Tastes good as always. Well, for a beer.

Goeun takes a seat beside you. She reaches forward to pick up the tv remote on the table, before turning it on.

“What do you wanna watch?”

—

You forget what time it is, but after Crazy, Stupid, Love ends, the last Merseyside Derby at Goodison Park starts, and you two are glued to the screen.

“I’m going to miss this stadium a lot, been there once, and it was fucking awesome,” Goeun says, taking a sip of beer. There’s a pool of aluminium cans sitting on the table in front of you now. You’re feeling a little woozy as you open your fourth beer tonight.

“Lucky.”

The word brings out a chuckle out of Goeun. You can see from the corner of your eyes that she moves in closer towards you, but that’s the least of your concern right now.

She takes a glance at you. You can see in the corner of your eyes, and this time, you give her a reply, shooting a look back at her. She laughs softly. The soft glow of the television casts onto her face. It’s mostly dark blue from Everton’s kit. You can feel the effect of the alcohol dawning on you—dizzy, disoriented—and you realize that she looks good under any light. You look into her gorgeous eyes, and there’s something in them.

Want.

Need.

Lust.

You kiss her.

You get a taste of her lipstick flavor—intense, fruity. Your body shudders as she has her hand wander around your body, feeling every curve and contour of your body—touching, sliding down your frame with haste—and she stops right on your belt.

“Can I?”

“Sure.”

Your hands aren’t doing any better in straying away from this filth, pulling her towards you by her ass. She gasps into your mouth. It’s affecting her, and you go a little further, giving her butt a light squeeze. “God,” she gasps again. Her lips softly quiver against yours. Her tongue trembles. She’s nervous.

The tug on your belt pulls you closer into her tremored body. “Shit.” Her hands begin to undo the leather belt around your pants. It makes a slight scuffle with her, but it comes off, eventually.

“Lie down,” you say. Goeun’s flushing, all red, all anxious. She grabs onto the back of your head with her hand, pulling you down with her as she falls onto the couch, and you’re on top of her.

You draw your hands forward to her jeans' button, undoing it with haste. It makes a slight scuffle with you, but it comes off, eventually. You’re so, so close to her heat right now, and you couldn’t have asked for more for tonight.

“Fuck,” Goeun utters, writhing under you as your hand run along the hem of her panties. Her hips buck up to you—so wanton, so full of need. “Stop with the teasing already.”

You chuckle before pulling her garments down in a single swoop. Her glistening pussy is sitting just right there—below you, waiting to be filled with your throbbing cock inside your boxers. “Already wet?”

“I’m horny, that’s normal,” Goeun says, giggling. “You’re hard too, you know?”

“Thanks.”

With no more words, Goeun pulls your boxer down your legs. Your cock springs free from its fabric cage. You lower yourself closer to her wanton cunt, making a slight touch as you run your cockhead along her wet slit.

“Fuck,” she says, breathy. “What did I say about teasing, huh?”

You chortle before you push yourself into her pussy. Her breath comes out in a stuttering rhythm. Her eyes roll up in pleasure. She’s loving this.

“Fuck, goddamn,” Goeun rasps as you push yourself into her wet cunt. Her fingers dig into the back of your head, forcefully pulling you into a sloppy, drunken kiss.

Your hands slide under her white t-shirt for her chest as you thrust into her pussy while kissing her vigorously. You give her bra-clad tits a squeeze, eliciting a soft moan out of her lips.

“Fuck, this feels good,” Goeun huffs between the kisses, hand moving with your hips to push you into her warmth. Your bodies move in sync as if it’s a habit between the two of you. She feels so good. Her pussy feels so good.

The sound of kissing rings inside your ear as you try to take in how her body feels. You drag your lips down her jaw. She smells like spring. Her skin is so smooth, so soft. The notes she makes are chaotic, but you find it angelic. Her body writhes and spasms under you as you fuck her brains out. God, she’s perfect.

You double your efforts, pushing in deeper and faster with each stroke. She cries. She whimpers. She moans. Her body responds to you so well, pussy gripping your cock like a goddamn vice.

“Ugh–fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Goeun rasps, her face flushing with red as your hand wanders under her white tee, giving her firm breasts squeezes after squeezes. “You cock, god!”

You reply to Goeun with harsher thrusts; her notes grow higher and higher as you hit the sensitive spot deep inside her cunt. She’s lighting your synapses aflame, making you see stars around her gorgeous face. Your moans and hers are filling up the bluish room.

Goeun’s breathing grows shorter and shorter. Her moans climb higher and higher as she’s at the brink of her orgasm. “Shit, shit, I’m cumming, I’m cumming!” Goeun rasps, and you thrust into her with even more intensity. Your cock vigorously pumps into her wet cunt, so determined to bring her to her peak.

And she breaks.

Her body spasms under you as the wave crashes into her. Goeun mewls, moans, cries under the sheer force of her orgasm. Her hips buck. Her eyes roll up. And suddenly, she grabs you by the collar again, pulling you into a deep kiss as you keep ravaging her spent cunt. The sound of flesh smacking echoes through the room, along with her filthy cries.

She slowly comes down from her orgasm as you keep fucking her through her peak. Goeun’s chest heaves up and down as she tries to recollect herself back up again.

Pulling back, she utters, “Fuck.”

“I know.”

And you are, again, dragged back by the collar to kiss her pouty lips.

“Cum in me,” Goeun says into the kiss, breathy, tired. “I want to feel that cock twitching inside my pussy. I want to feel your cum hitting my womb.”

The ever-so-used-to feeling is boiling inside your loins as your cock finds its rhythm in and out of Goeun’s cunt. Your hand is still playing with her bra-clad tits. Your fingers slide under the garment for her stiff nipple. She moans, struggling to keep up with the pleasure coursing through her body. It’s getting difficult for her to kiss you now.

“Gonna cum,” you whine, your tongue interlocking with hers messily. Her hand grabs onto the back of your head harsher, pulling you deeper into the kiss. The sound of it is obscene, but you’re too happy to care right now. The burning feeling is so strong right now. You need a release. You need a release.

“Do it, baby. Cum in my pussy.”

And you break.

Your cock shoots ropes and ropes of cum into Goeun’s wanting cunt. Your entire body shakes and spasms above her. You moan, whine, whimper, and cry into the kiss. Her pussy wraps your cock so fucking well, and you just fail to find any word to describe the feeling you’re feeling right now.

Fuck.

You connect your lips with her messily again. Your fingers latch onto her face as your tongues are busy exploring each other’s mouth. She finds a good grip on your ass and pulls your hips closer to hers, pushing your softening cock deeper into her cunt.

You pull back. Her bangs are a mess.

“We can’t tell anybody about this,” Goeun huffs, her chest still heaving from the sheer force of her orgasm. Her whole body flushes with red, but most importantly, she’s beaming, so full of joy.

“Sure, sure, Miss Na.”

Goeun chuckles, getting up from the couch as you get off her flushed body. “We should get cleaned up.”

“Round two in the shower?”

She shoots you a smile, before saying, “Definitely, maybe.”

—

#goeun #purple kiss #goeun smut #purple kiss smut #kpop fan #kpop smut

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python333 · 11 months ago

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residual self-image — python³

― ― ― ―

synopsis residual self-image is the mental projection of your digital self; it refers to your own physical appearance that is understood by you, that is projected unto you by yourself. you see yourself as something to be ashamed of. price sees something different.

relationships platonic!captain price & gn!reader.

characters cap. price.

word count 7.6k

warnings anxiety/panic attack [not sure exactly how to classify it; i think it's more of an anxiety attack?], reader takes SSRIs [zoloft/sertraline], suicidal thoughts and almost-suicide attempt, reader is the most unreliable narrator known to mankind, second person pov [you/your/yourself], usage of [name], usage of [c/n] for call sign/code name, bad matrix references/spoilers for the matrix and the matrix: reloaded.

note please please PLEASE let me know if this comes off as me romanticizing having anxiety or taking antidepressants so that i can fix/rewrite it /srs i don't take any form of antidepressants or anxiety medication and i also am not diagnosed with either of those!! nothing i say is final!!! i do not have firsthand experience with what reader goes through in this fic!! sorry i disappeared for a second, have some food as an apology. again, feel free to correct me on anything you think is inaccurate and i will (most likely) change it!! also sorry for like 3k words of backstory oopsies

In The Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo two options: blue pill, or red pill?

He says that if Neo takes the blue pill, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe”. But the second option, the red pill, if Neo takes that, he will “stay in wonderland and [he] show [Neo] how deep the rabbit hole goes”. Neo, of course, takes the red pill, and is shown the “real world”.

Neo is thought to be “the One”. With the “O” in “One” being capitalized, so you know that it’s a pretty important title.

In the end, Neo becomes confident in who he is and what he can do, and defeats the “Agents”. Trinity confesses her love to a “sleeping” Neo, their ship is getting attacked by whatever those weird fuckin’ creatures were called, and Neo defeats the last of the agents. The end.

You take pills too. But yours are blue. They’re matte, powdery, baby-blue pills that are branded with the name “ZOLOFT”. It’s sertraline, to be specific, and you’ve been taking it for the past few months. You’re new to pills like these, ones meant to treat anxiety and depression and a number of other medical issues, so you didn’t know how much to take at first. You asked your doctor so many questions. You think about it often, and wonder if, even though it’s their job, that doctor had gotten annoyed at some point because of your inquiry.

These pills do similar things to the ones in The Matrix, though. You take them, preferably at night, and wake up in your bed like you always do. You believe whatever you want to believe, and another chapter is closed at the end of every day, marking another page closer to the end of your story.

Some days, the story feels like it’s going to end sooner than expected.

A side effect of sertraline―or, well, Zoloft specifically―happens to be suicidal ideation. It’s not that common, not that talked about, and isn’t the most well-known. But then again, most mental disorder-treating medicines have some kind of side effect like that, and plenty of people take things like antidepressants without an issue―or so you thought―so surely you could deal with something as simple as sertraline, right?

Wrong. So, so, wrong.

It’s probably really bad for a person who works in a military group to be dealing with such thoughts. You think about quitting sometimes, for the sake of the other people in the task force, because what could happen if the wrong straw breaks the wrong camel’s back while you’re doing an assignment? What if, caught in the crossfire between your team and your enemy, you say fuck it and decide that it’s all just too much? What are the odds of that happening? What are the odds of anything happening? What were the odds of the Earth being created, of the first animals evolving, of the first humans speaking the first languages? Statistics are so important, chance is so important, and odds determine everything. What are the odds of you deciding whether or not you have the will to live? The ability to keep going, to keep the routine you’ve always kept, to keep from taking one of those G19s from the armory and turning off the safety before pulling the trigger? To commit to such a permanent solution, one you’ve deemed as the “s-word”, because thinking about it sometimes is too much.

Or maybe it’d be a rope, your brain continues without your consent, A chain. Anything that will hold your body weight up enough for you to dangle from the fan on the ceiling―an image that makes you lean towards a chain, sickeningly enough, because of the idea of your abnormally stretched neck on display. The purple bruising that would appear, the indentations of each link, the smell of your blood and the metal of the chain unable to be told apart. Maybe your eyes would still be open, and it would look like you’re staring down at anyone who walks into your office. There’s so many possibilities. They add up, and create new odds, new chances. Every time you simply think, you are creating a new way to go about life, and that creation is sometimes stored so deeply in the back of your mind that it haunts you. It comes back around, becomes more common, the chances of it happening go up.

Sometimes the odds feel like they aren’t in your favor at all. Sometimes you wonder how you could’ve ever thought that any part of the universe was against you. It’s not bipolar; it doesn’t come and go in extremes, it just comes and goes. The odds will lower in your favor some days, and you will deem those days “bad days”, and other days they will be so high you don’t even think about “good days” or “bad days”. But those other days are almost as bad as the “bad days”, because they go by so quickly. You take them for granted so easily, too easily, and they leak through the thin lines between your fingers, leaving you with nothing by the end of the day.

Sometimes on “bad days”, your hands go from cupped to praying, and you will plead with yourself to just get better. You never do, on those days, and after taking your medicine you will go to sleep and believe that the next day will be better. Or, at least, convince yourself that the next day will be better.

You would’ve understood if Neo took the blue pill. If he stayed in blissful ignorance, even after all of the weird shit that happened to him. If he continued to wake up every day in a “normal�� world, to sell computer systems and hacking programs, to be anyone but “The One”.

Because that’s what you do. You take your medicine, and go on with life as normally as possible, even with all of the things that you’ve been through. You wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for saving the world, or beating up robot-alien-things, or whatever. Just like how you don’t want to be held responsible for really just… taking care of yourself.

Which you’re shit at, by the way, if that doesn’t make things worse.

You take your sertraline and that’s about it. It’s not like it doesn’t work, it’s just underwhelming sometimes. Before you got on it, you would take more things to heart, think about things more, and were probably a little more prone to actually killing yourself. After starting to take it, it was admittedly pretty rough. It felt like your anxiety had increased a little, like your paranoia had only heightened, and everything felt so elevated.

Then, maybe a few months after beginning to take it, everything dimmed out. Like one of those lightbulbs you can dim, everything gradually came back down, and even lowered to a more tolerable level. You were glad, at first, that you had endured those first few months the way that you did because you’re not sure you would’ve even been here to this day had you not. Reading several articles and Reddit posts about Zoloft definitely didn’t help, especially as someone who was taking it partially for anxiety, but still, you managed.

And then you realized that just taking the medicine didn’t do as much as you hoped it would.

It helps you deal with anxious and depressive thoughts, yes, but you still feel like something’s missing. That lightbulb in your mind has dimmed, but it’s only just enough light to see ahead of you. Before all of this, the light was bright enough to blind you, to make you see that dreadful stark-white that still sometimes haunts you―when it dimmed down to where it is now, it was obviously a relief, but you feel like now there’s not enough light.

You understand the whole point of the medicine is to dim that light, to help bring down your mental state to a more “normal” one, but you think that even people who don’t have diagnosed mental disorders feel strong emotions like you used to. Maybe not as strong, but definitely something adjacent to it. You miss that, funnily enough―getting strong enough emotions.

Right now, you’re sitting at your desk in your office, staring down at the plate of mashed potatoes in front of you. You get it almost every time it’s offered, and endure the teasing you get from your teammates, all for one purpose.

To hide your pills in it.

Mashed potatoes are starchy, yes, but easy to swallow without chewing. They’re thick enough to help hide the feeling of the pill going down your throat, and don’t leave that weird aftertaste in your mouth that taking your medicine with water does. You tried taking the pills with water at first, like you would with any other medicine, but with this specifically you just can’t. It’s too easy to notice, they’re too big to just hide with water, and it feels like swallowing a rock every time you take them with water.

So, mashed potatoes it is.

The pill is already mixed into it. You had folded the small blue tablet into the mushed vegetable with a plastic fork, trying to keep it as hidden as possible, making sure no hints of blue bled through the beige-yellow of the potato.

You’re now watching the mashed potatoes, unblinking, as if it’s going to grow legs and run away from you. It’s never truly easy swallowing the medicine, even with the mashed potatoes coating it, but it’s usually easier than it is today. Then again, today was deemed a “bad day” the moment you woke up, so this was to be expected.

You grab the white plastic fork after a brief moment of hesitation and pierce the food with it, hand trembling ever-so slightly as you do―not from anxiety, but from your lack of water intake―and pick up a clump of potato with little strength. The vegetable oddly weighs your hand down the tiniest bit more than usual, but you ignore this in favor of pushing yourself to just force the food into your mouth. You try your best not to chew, your jaw only really moving to chew the side of your cheek instead to satisfy your urges, and eventually manage to swallow the food.

Right off the bat, you can tell the cluster you swallowed had the pill in it. Lucky me, you think almost bitterly, not sure whether you should be happy or uncomfortable, at least it’s over with. It’s not that it’s a bad thing that you got to the pill so quickly, but usually you’re able to get a few bites of medicine-less potato in before the actual medicine itself. Nonetheless, you scoop up another fork-full―fork-full?―of mashed potatoes and try to eat as much as you can to get rid of the weird feeling of having a pill going down your throat.

Just the fleeting thought of having a pill that big going down your throat makes it feel like your esophagus is closing. You feel yourself grow closer to nausea at the feeling, setting down your fork and pushing the paper plate of your dinner aside, just to rest your elbow on the table and put your forehead in the palm of your head. It’s bad enough that you feel ashamed because of the fact you even have to take antidepressants, so it’s even worse that those same antidepressants are throwing bad side-effects at you.

Ashamed because needing medicine to function the same way anyone else does feels so pathetic to you. Maybe it isn’t pathetic. Actually, you know it isn’t; you don’t look at other people who do the same thing and think that they should feel as ashamed as you do. But you still look at your bright orange prescription bottle, labeled with your legal name, and think that you shouldn’t need it.

You think, for a moment, that it’s because of how much you’ve dehumanized yourself.

Dehumanized is such an ugly word, and it leaves a strange bitterness in your mind after thinking about it, but deep down you feel that it’s true. You know that you’re human, obviously, because physically that’s what you are. You are, undeniably, a homo sapien―a person, a living being that is a bipedal primate mammal. You, in a less literal sense, have those same cords attached to you that Neo did when he first went to the “real world”.

But you need those cords, you think, lifting your head so that your chin is resting in your palm instead of your forehead, you need to stay attached to the Matrix.

Because you took the blue pill. You found a way to keep yourself attached to the Matrix, to keep yourself grounded to what you wish you could experience without them. And those cables weigh you down, and that pod you stay encased in limits your movement―sometimes you feel more like the pod than the person inside of it―but it all seems so worth it to you, doesn’t it? To keep believing what you want to believe, to wake up everyday and dose yourself with that fifty-milligrams worth of sertraline hidden under a pile of food, to eat that food and swallow that pill even though it makes you feel like a mutt?

You take a shuddering breath in, your thoughts building up in volume and mass, more questions entering your mind too fast for you to process them all. You feel that familiar rush of adrenaline, the kind that triggers your ‘fight-or-flight’. It lights your nerves on fire and causes them to jump, to electrify, and you feel your fingers twitch with the feeling. It almost feels like there’s something crawling along your nerves, under your skin, and the thought almost triggers your gag reflex. Your eyelids flutter, barely shutting for just a moment before you force them open. Your gaze flits over to the still-mostly-full plate of mashed potatoes.

You’re usually able to finish them, even on “bad days”. But today, with nausea swirling uncomfortably in your stomach, and a too-big pill going through the thin tubes inside your body, you find that it’s much harder to even think about picking that fork back up. You can almost feel your heart beating through your palm, that continuous th-thump, th-thump growing exponentially faster, and your palm getting sweatier by the second. You shift your feet and find that invisible needles are poking at the bottom of them, small pins that push and prod at your skin that leave a strange hot-cold feeling. It forces you to take the pressure off of your feet by holding them up ever-so slightly, the soles of your shoes just barely touching the ground.

You swear your heart rate increases at all the different sensations lingering on your body. You can feel your breathing starting to pick up, and for God knows what reason, you suddenly find it difficult to keep your eyes locked onto one object. Your gaze dances around the room as a surge of chills runs up your spine. A trail of goosebumps rises after each wave of biting cold, passing over the bony projections of your dorsum. After having so many of them, you know instinctively the signs of an oncoming anxiety attack, and know how quick those symptoms escalate from simple shallow breaths to the inability to keep your breathing consistent at all. Yes, they develop slower than a panic attack does, but the gradient from fine to not-fine is hard to view as slow when there’s so many symptoms to keep track of.

At the thought of such a thing happening, your gaze instantly locks onto the prescription bottle sitting on your desk. It’s still uncapped―fortunate for you, because you’re seriously doubting your ability to uncap something with a child-proof cap on it right now―and in your eyes is practically glowing. It’s so tempting, because it’s just right there, so easily accessible, so easy to just grab and pour however many pills you need down your throat. The thought makes you realize how dry your mouth feels, how constricted your throat feels, but your mind is too filled with a flurry of incoherent thoughts to dwell on such feelings.

With your free hand, you grab the uncapped bottle. It shakes with your hand, now more from your building anxiety than your dehydration, and makes the tablets inside rattle. You bring it to your lips, ignoring the chiding voice in the back of your mind telling you how disgusting it is to just put it on your mouth like that, and shake it just enough to get a single pill out of it. The dryness of the pill sticks to the wetness of your mouth, just below the border of your bottom lip. You set the bottle down and poke at the pill with the tip of your tongue, the weird vanilla-like taste of the medicine spreading across the muscle easily.

Your mouth is dry, so you have to use the residual saliva sitting on your tongue to slick the pill up enough to go down somewhat-smoothly down your throat. It’s still rough, and some areas of the pill remain powdery, the feeling of it sliding down your throat enough to make you gag. For a brief moment, the action causes the pill to lodge in your throat―it’s not big enough to make you choke or anything, but it’s enough to make your heart beat faster and your hands grip onto the edge of your desk tightly. Your thumbs are tucked under the edge, the first knuckle at the tip of your finger bent and the flesh of the tips of your fingers turning lighter from the pressure.

You cough once you feel the pill go down your esophagus entirely, and breathe raggedly afterwards. Deep down, you know that the medicine takes some time to work, and that if you gave it a little longer than a minute that you’d start feeling better. But the reeling anxiety that wraps around your throat like a chain seems to pull you impossibly farther away from that betterness, and forces your throat to tighten to a point where your breathing feels limited. You go from breathing through your nose to your mouth, where you can still taste the lingering artificial-vanilla with every inhale.

It’s getting worse, an annoying voice tells you, one that manages to be louder than the others, the medicine’s supposed to help. You’ve only taken a hundred milligrams so far. Another and it’s a hundred and fifty. An overdose is only if it goes over two hundred.

It’s stupid logic but more tempting the more you think about it. It is, after all, only a third pill. You’d be pushing it—

Do you really care all that much that you’re pushing it? What if you want to break that limit? The limits you made, to keep yourself alive, that you still sometimes question the existence of?

―but that doesn’t really compute well in your mind, and you soon find yourself reaching for the bottle again. Each pill shakes with your hand, and with each tremor another wave of tablets hits the sides of the bottle, like a visual representation of the thoughts that bounce off of the walls of your brain. You lift the bottle, and bring it to your lips, the area that makes contact with your mouth cooler than the rest of the bottle from earlier when you had done the same thing. You’re about to tilt it up before you hear a sudden knock at your door.

The noise is startling and makes you drop the bottle, the pills spilling over the edge of it and onto the table.

“Shit,” you curse quietly under your breath, quickly flattening your hand and sweeping all of the pills into a pile, and picking them up in clusters. You manage to get them all back in the bottle before another knock sounds out, and cap the bottle before opening up one of the small drawers on the side of your desk and shoving it in there.

“Come in!” you call out in a strained voice, praying that you’ll be able to keep it steady for as long as the person at the door needs to talk to you. You close the drawer just as the door creaks open.

Much to your horror, you look up to see your Captain.

Your palms are still sweaty as he walks in, so you try to discreetly wipe them off on your pants, and hope to whoever can help you that he doesn’t pay too much attention to the sweat gathered on your forehead. You take a deep breath as silently as you can, attempting to gather yourself before Price can notice anything being wrong.

“It’s a quarter past two,” Price comments once he walks in, closing the door behind him, “why are you still awake?”

You look over to the digital clock on your desk almost immediately and, oh shit, it is exactly 2:15. You look back over at Price, who is busying himself with pulling the chair that was once in front of your desk around it, presumably to sit next to you. You still feel the dreadfully fast pace of your heart, that th-thump, th-thump, th-thump that you can hear blaring in your ears. It makes itself known in your chest, in your wrist, even in the base of your throat―almost every pulse point in your body has forced you to become aware of its existence.

You swallow dryly, trying to ignore said feeling, and reply, “Why are you still awake?”

Price raises an eyebrow at you, pulling the chair up beside you and sitting down in it, “I asked first.”

You look at him with an unimpressed look on your face. “Can’t sleep. Why are you up?”

Price hums and leans back in his seat, arms crossing over each other, “Same reason.”

It doesn’t sound like a lie, but it doesn’t sound entirely true either, in your opinion. It’s not that you don’t trust him, but he just seems like he’s up to something. What that something is, though, you aren’t sure.

“Why the food?” Price nods over to the plate of mashed potatoes, very noticeably unfinished.

Your gaze follows his to the mashed potatoes. You can still feel the moisture on the palms of your hands, the small tremors that wrack your fingers, and Price’s presence does nothing to soothe your flaming nerves.

“Wanted dinner,” you shrug as casually as you can, forcing a neutral expression onto your face―you briefly overthink what a neutral expression looks like, and decidedly just let your face relax the best you can, “I didn’t get any when everyone else went, I was busy with something, and didn’t really want to head over to the mess with so many people over there, plus I was busy.”

You look over at Price after your lengthy explanation, not realizing just how lengthy it was, and watch the corners of his lips quirk up into an amused-yet-worried smile.

“You said you were busy twice,” he points out, before pausing, and pointing out again, “and it looks like you’ve taken a few bites out o’that at most.”

You don’t bother to look at the mashed potatoes again; you know very well how they look, and know how undeniably full the plate looks.

“Didn’t feel that hungry,” you make up a poorly thought-out excuse, that even you can understand is unbelievable.

Price blinks at you, slowly, before sighing.

“Are you alright?” Price asks, looking more concerned than amused now. You should’ve known from the moment that he walked in that you wouldn’t be able to hide anything from him. If not for the fact that he always seems to know what’s going on, then because of the overwhelming presence of your disquietude.

You look at him and try to figure out what to say. What is there to say? You were panicking just two minutes ago, with your prescription bottle in one hand, the other too shaky to hold up the damn thing. You can still taste that vanilla. You can still taste the plastic. The bottle itself never once touched your tongue, but every time your tongue rests in your mouth, the tip of it pokes at the same exact place the bottle made contact with. You expect it to taste of vanilla, like its contents, but it doesn’t; it tastes like the pharmacy you got it at. It tastes like the sterile white of the counter, the fingers of the person who handed it to you, the money you spent on it, and the time it took you to get it.

It’s nothing pleasant. The strange vanilla of the pills aren’t either, but they’re preferable to the bottle itself.

Price notices you zoning out for a moment, and waves a hand in front of your face. Your eyes unconsciously track his hand for a moment before you blink back into reality and look at him. You knew you were fucked earlier, but when you look at his expression, at the look in his eyes as he watches you snap back to reality, you know that he knows. Maybe he doesn’t know exactly what happened, or how it happened, but he knows something. Fuck, he knows.

Or, maybe he does know. Maybe he heard your cursing through the door, even with your low voice, maybe he heard the pills spill onto the desk, maybe he heard the opening and closing of the drawer, maybe he―

He’s staring at you.

―has security cameras set up in here, because he does in every room, every hall, everywhere but the bathrooms and the sleeping quarters―

He’s talking. It’s muffled by the sound of your own heavy breathing.

―or maybe it’s just intuition, a gut feeling he has, where he just knows that something’s wrong, that same gut feeling that everyone seems to get when something isn’t the way it’s supposed to be―

Your palms are sweaty. Your heart is pounding out of your chest. You’re starting to feel a little lightheaded.

―the same “gut feeling” that you experience every day but have to ignore because it’s not a gut feeling it’s anxiety and your real gut feelings feel the almost the exact same way anxiety does so you may never know if you ever get an actual one―

Price grabs onto your arm, though the feeling of his skin on yours can’t push past the skin-crawling sensation that coats your skin.

―but how do you really know that your gut feelings aren’t gut feelings? How do you know that anything is anything? That it’s really Price that’s sitting next to you, that it’s your own office you’re sitting in, that―

“[name]!” Price’s voice snaps you out of the trance you seem to be in, and you sharply inhale at the sound of his voice, his volume much louder than you expected it to be.

You didn’t realize how fast and heavy your breathing had really gotten until this point. You look at Price, a little more on the panicked side now, with restless eyes that can’t stop flitting all over his face. He takes his hand off of your arm before you can even notice it was there in the first place, and leans back away from you.

You try to take deep breaths, but each breath feels like trying to breathe underwater, and each inhale-exhale leaves you shuddering. You look down at your lap, breath hitching and stuttering, and the moment you open your mouth in the hopes of breathing easier, you are all too aware of just how dry it’s become. You’re sure you let out some kind of sound that alerts Price of your growing distress, because he hesitantly leans forward and takes a deep breath.

“[name],” Price keeps his voice soft and quiet, quieter than he’d been just a few seconds ago, his soothing voice a gentle wave crashing against the rock of your mind, “you’re okay. Look at me, soldier.”

Like a remote to TV static, the noisiness of your mind is partially calmed and the waves that wash over your brain provide sweet escape from the overwhelming adrenaline and cortisol thrumming in your veins.

Mindlessly, you do as he asks, his words grounding you and tugging you back down to Earth more effectively than any anchor could. When you look at him, his eyes are clouded with concern and there’s a small frown on his face that almost perfectly juxtaposes his usual quokka-smile.

You know you’re still trembling. You can feel the hairs that stick up on your legs and arms, the weird hot-cold feeling that creates pinpricks of discomfort across your body, the way your heart is trying to escape the prison cell of your ribcage—but none of it compares to the unbelievable dizziness you feel. Your head is a balloon filled with helium and it is slowly deflating, but not fast enough. You feel like you’re no longer in control of your own body—or were you ever in control?

Your stomach is churning. There’s a sense of dread that dwells there. You might throw up.

Cutting through your thoughts is Price once again.

“You listenin’?” your Captain asks, to which you nod after a delay of a few seconds. Price holds a hand out and gives you a questioning look, the question of ‘can I touch you?’ clear enough on his face that you nod lightly and he takes your hand gingerly.

“Do y’know where you are?” Price asks. You nod, and he softly requests, “can you tell me where?”

“My office,” you answer simply, the gravel in your voice making you wince. The warbling that escapes your mouth is nowhere near your usual voice, and for a moment you think you might be right about needing to vomit, but you manage to push it down and pray. Price ignores this and pushes on.

“And who am I?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know.

“... The Captain.” Price purses his lips—he doesn’t really want to accept this as an answer, because he wants you to say his actual name, but he knows what you mean, and you know what he’s doing. He knows that you mean that you’re here, that you’re present, and you know that he’s trying to ground you the best he can.

“Do you know my name?” he questions, to which you nod again, though a little more moderately, seeing as the repetition of nodding your head only makes you more lightheaded, “what’s my name?”

You take a few shaky breaths, ones that are shallow and uneven, ones that hitch enough for it to be so noticeable that Price manages to pick up on it. You open your mouth to talk, but find that your tongue is too heavy to lift to create coherent sounds. The thought somehow heightens your anxiety, something that seems to be noticeable to Price, judging by how his expression shifts to something impossibly softer.

“Here, let me—” Without another word, Price cautiously brings your hand up to the middle of his chest, where his sternum is.

He exaggerates his breathing, taking long, deep breaths in, and similarly long exhales. His chest rises and falls satisfyingly, and it’s clear that he wants you to copy him. You try your best at first, taking that same too-deep breath that he does and fail almost immediately as you choke on the air you attempt to inhale. Price brushes his thumb over the back of your hand and takes another exaggerated breath, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. You keep your gaze more focused on the lower half of his face as you copy him, oxygen going in through your nose, and carbon dioxide going out through your mouth.

That one successful breath is followed by an unsuccessful one, then another successful one, then another, and it’s a little rocky but you find that soon enough you’re breathing. There’s air flowing in and out of your body smoothly, with each exaggerated breath you take, almost in sync with Price, until finally he puts your hand back into your lap but continues to hold it. He squeezes it once before letting go, and clasps his hands together.

“What’s my name, soldier?” he asks, and this time you think you can answer him.

“John Price,” his name feels weird coming out of your mouth, especially with no honorifics, but he accepts the answer anyway.

“Good,” Price praises, giving you a small smile, “you’re doing good.”

The approval he gives you helps to calm your nerves the tiniest bit, and you feel yourself slowly coming down from the God awful high that you’d just been on. Again, you’re not sure how he knows, but he senses that you’re calming down―is it because your breathing is steadier? You aren’t nearly as restless? You’re no longer zoning out?―so he leans back in his chair and watches as you do the same.

“Now,” he breathes out, “can you tell me what’s going on with you?”

You look away from him for the briefest moment, sparing a glance at the cabinet you know the bottle of your pills lays in, before looking back at him. If he noticed you pulling your gaze away from him for a split second, he doesn’t mention it nor does he make it known that he did.

“There’s not really anything going on,” you shrug, to which Price scoffs.

“[c/n],” he looks at you, disbelieving, “two seconds ago I had to help you breathe normally. I know that there’s something that’s going on, somethin’ that had to trigger what just happened.”

You stay quiet and he gives you an expectant look. The pressure from his fixed glare makes you feel like you’re about to explode.

Finally, you answer him defeatedly, though vaguely, “I was in the middle of taking my medicine when you knocked.”

Price stays silent, expecting you to elaborate.

“And…” you try to find a way to make it sound less awkward than it does in your mind, though you suppose there’s never really a correct way to go about something like this, “I almost took more medicine than I needed to.”

The silence continues, but now Price looks less expectant, and instead more of a mix between concern and something else you can’t identify. That something, though, is still soft, and still has a hint of pity―maybe sympathy?―to it.

“Almost?” he repeats, “was that on purpose?”

When you think about it, it’s complicated. You didn’t necessarily intend to overdose, you just dismissed the idea of it. Or, at least, you don’t remember trying to overtly kill yourself. Then again, you knew the risks of taking more pills than prescribed to you; had you taken that third pill, you would’ve only been one more away from an overdose, and even then you’d still probably get some kind of health issue.

Price’s face hardens when you don’t answer immediately. He must be taking your silence as a “yes”.

“Not… really,” you answer slowly, “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He nods, waiting a few seconds before asking, “Have you thought about it before?”

By it, for some reason, you sense that he isn’t asking exclusively about taking one too many tablets.

It’s tempting to be dishonest about it; it’s a shameful thing to you, to use the things that are supposed to help you to harm yourself, to be so careless with your own life. You know that it isn’t necessarily all your fault, but there’s still that small part of you that can’t help but feel guilty for using something so many other people try so hard to get to almost kill yourself with.

After a few beats of silence, you decide to answer, “Yeah.”

Price nods again, and he looks like he expected that answer. “D’you want to tell me more about that?”

You could, hypothetically, go in-depth about all of your weird thoughts about committing. The ones you’d been having just, what, fifteen minutes ago? Thirty minutes ago? The ones about chains wrapped around your throat, stolen guns from the armory, deep purple bruising and a stretched neck. Those thoughts, the ones that try to make ending your life sound pretty, that try to make it sound appealing. It’s not to convince yourself, you don’t think, but rather to help you come to terms with the fact that you were already convinced that you were going to commit at some point. The thought still scares you, because you’re a pussy―terrible, terrible choice of words, a voice at the back of your mind insists, you’re not a pussy, you’re just like anyone else―but you felt like you just knew that you were gonna die by your own hands. That you’d already made the choice, and now you have to understand it, to realize it.

You are in that room full of TVs, with The Architect in front of you, telling you that you have no choice. That, in fact, the problem is choice. You are surrounded by a million other yous, all protesting, all denying that you have no choice but to kill yourself, all yelling “Bullshit!” because deniability is the most predictable of all human responses.

But, you remind yourself, The Architect was wrong. He told Neo that he couldn’t do anything to save Trinity from her “fate”, but Neo did save her. He plunged his hand into her chest and forced her heart to beat.

That’s true.

And, you add on, The Architect is a computer program, tasked with mimicking human emotions, despite never having felt them. He could never understand the power of human will, of the desperation so many humans have to live.

Because The Architect was never alive. He is a sentient computer program, whose job is to create a world in which humans can “live” while they are fed on in the real world, but his problem was his inability to create anything less than perfect. We aren’t expected to be perfect, and are taught that flawlessness doesn’t exist, which is why he came to the conclusion that he needed a “lesser mind” to help him create a better Matrix.

You aren’t supposed to succumb to the idea of having no choice. Because that, in itself, is a choice. Everything you do is a choice. Even if everything you do will only add up to the same ending, to the same fate, why should you waste time not making the choices you want to make? When you assume that you have no choice, you assume that everything you do will go to waste, but that’s not true. You aren’t the only person that exists. You aren’t the only person who makes choices. The choices you make affect other people’s choices, and those choices affect another person, and another, and another. You still have to live through the choices you make, as does everyone else, so even if everything will end the same, why should you make inherently bad decisions when you could be making good ones? Why should you go through things you don’t have to go through, just because you believe that nothing matters in the end?

“Not really,” you answer Price, snapping yourself out of your thoughts, “I don’t… want to think about it too much right now.”

Price looks a little more worried now but he doesn’t protest your decision.

“Is there anything in here that you could use to hurt yourself?” he asks after a moment, “Or that you’ve already used?”

You bite your tongue. Technically, the pills count, you suppose, but those are your meds. You can’t really have those confiscated.

“Other than the medicine, no,” you answer truthfully, much to Price’s relief, as is evident on his face as his hardened expression softens.

“Good, good,” he shifts in his seat.

He’s gearing up for something. You can tell with the way he subtly presses his clasped hands together, the way his face goes through a mix of emotions, and the way the deafening silence of the room really seems to be getting to him.

Suddenly, he asks you, “D’you think you’re going to… ?”

He doesn’t ask you explicitly, but you have a good idea of what he’s asking.

“I was thinking about it,” you respond softly, “before you came in.”

Price nods, having expected that answer. You’re not sure if it was obvious, or if he just assumed you were thinking about it because of you confessing to having thoughts of it before this.

“Y’know I have to tell someone about this, right?” Price reminds you gently, as if you didn’t already know, “Someone up the chain. Might be Laswell.”

You hum affirmatively, because you didn’t expect anything less from him, and know that it’s for the better. It doesn’t make you feel any better, obviously, but you know how to be realistic when the time calls for it, and you know that if the roles were reversed you’d do the same thing. Not because it’s mandatory, but because when you imagine Price in your situation, the thought wraps itself around your heart and twists.

The room is silent for a beat, and you get the feeling that Price is somehow more uncomfortable with the quiet than you are. He shifts in his seat while you stay still, and he clears his throat to break the silence for a brief moment before speaking up again.

“It’s late,” he points out the obvious, before pausing and irresolutely asking, “do you want to head back to my quarters with me for the night?”

His words confuse you for a moment. You open your mouth to ask why, before it suddenly hits you―oh, right, you just basically confessed to being suicidal. He doesn’t want to leave you alone right now.

“Yeah, sure,” you agree, less questioning than Price expected you to be judging by his momentary look of surprise, before he nods and begins to get up.

He pushes his chair behind him, standing up straight, and holds a hand out for you to grab. You grab it gingerly and use it to haul yourself up, your knees cracking as you do after having been sat for so long. You wince at the sound and Price gives a light-hearted chuckle.

“I thought I was s’posed to be the old one?” he teases, making you give him an unimpressed look and let go of his hand. The room falls back into soundlessness.

You both remain silent as Price leads you out the door of your office, turning off the lights and closing the door after you, and continues to lead you down to his sleeping quarters. His are farther down the hall from yours, because of his higher rank, and therefore takes longer to walk to from your office. The long walk is quiet enough to hear a pin drop, but you both don’t mind this, as the atmosphere here is more comfortable than the one in your office.

Eventually, you make it to his room, where he opens the door for you and signals for you to walk in first with his hand. You enter the room and hear him enter shortly after you, and go to sit on his bed before pausing.

“I’m still in my…” you gesture to your clothes, gear-less but still not your “normal” sleeping clothes. Price raises an eyebrow at you as you wave at the state of yourself.

“I’ve seen you sleep in worse,” he points out, “and I think you sleep in this than in your actual sleeping clothes.”

You’re about to ask how he even knows about that, before he answers you before you can voice your question, “I’ve seen you walking back t’your quarters in these clothes and hear you snoring a second later at least ten times.”

You close your mouth and sigh through your nose, before muttering, “Didn’t know I was talkin’ to fuckin’ Sherlock Holmes.”

Price snorts at your retort, “If I’m Sherlock, are you Watson?”

You think about it for a moment, before shaking your head negatively.

“No?” Price toes off his boots and walks over to you, sitting on the bed, “Then who are you?”

You sit down next to him, “I dunno. I’m like…”

“Like Neo,” you continue, ignoring the way Price’s eyebrows immediately raise, “and you’re Morpheus. But less smart.”

“You’re not Neo,” he scoffs, “and I’m not a less-smart Morpheus.”

“I wasn’t askin’ you,” you grumble, shaking your already-loose boots off of your feet and crawling up Price’s bed. You manage to snake under the covers and feel Price’s eyes on you as you do, staring holes into your face.

He hums in acknowledgment, not bothering to answer you verbally, and instead gets up to lift up the covers and get into bed. The bed is small enough as-is, but with two people inside of it, it obviously gets much smaller. Price doesn’t seem to mind, though, and turns so that his back is facing the door and his front is facing you. Directly in front of you is the base of his neck, but if you tilt your head up, you can see him looking down at you with tired eyes.

You let out a soft breath through your nose and realize just how tired you are. Price seems to notice this, because his arm comes up and rests across your side, his hand splaying across the middle of your back. He gives you a comforting sweep of his hand, before settling it on your upper back, absentmindedly rubbing his thumb in soothing circles against your clothed back.

You close your eyes, and he closes his, and it feels like you’ve woken up in the real world and removed the cables from your body.

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phantomrose96 · 1 year ago

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Hey not to go all "tumblr is a professional networking site" on you, but how did you get to work for Microsoft??? I'm a recent grad and I'm being eviscerated out here trying to apply for industry jobs & your liveblogging about your job sounds so much less evil than Data Entry IT Job #43461

This place is basically LinkedIn to me.

I'm gonna start by saying I am so so very sorry you're a recent grad in the year 2024... Tech job market is complete ass right now and it is not just you. I started fulltime in 2018, and for 2018-2022 it was completely normal to see a yearly outflow of people hopping to new jobs and a yearly inflow of new hires. Then sometime around late-spring/early-summer of 2022 Wallstreet sneezed the word "recession" and every tech company simultaneously shit themselves.

Tons of layoffs happened, meaning you're competing not just with new grads but with thousands of experienced workers who got shafted by their company. My org squeaked by with a small amount of layoffs (3 people among ~100), but it also means we have not hired anyone new since mid-2022. And where I used to see maybe 4-8 people yearly leave in order to hop to a new job, I think I've seen 1 person do that in the whole last year and a half.

All this to say it's rough and I can't just say "send applications and believe in yourself :)".

I have done interviews though. (I'm not involved in resume screening though, just the interviews of candidates who made it past the screening phase.) So I have at least some relevant advice, as well as second-hand knowledge from other people I know who've had to hop jobs or get hired recently.

If you have friends already in industry who you feel comfortable asking, reach out to them. Most companies have a recommendation process where a current employee fills out a little form that says "yeah I'd recommend such-and-such for this job." These do seem to carry weight, since it's coming from a trusted internal person and isn't just one of the hundreds of cold-call applications they've received.

A lot of tech companies--whether for truly well-intentioned reasons or to just check a checkbox--are on the lookout for increasing employee diversity. If you happen to have anything like, for example, "member of my college Latino society", it's worth including on your resume among your technical skills and technical projects.

I would add "you're probably gonna have to send a lot of applications" as a bullet point but I'm sure you're already doing that. But here it is as a bullet point anyway.

(This is kind of a guess, since it's part of the resume screening) but if you can dedicate some time to getting at least passingly familiar with popular tech/stacks for the positions you're looking into, try doing that in your free time so you can list it on your resume. Even better if you make a project you can point to. Like if you're aiming for webdev, get familiar with React and probably NodeJS. On top of being comfortable in one of the all-purpose languages like C(++) or Java or Python.

If you get to the interview phase - a company that is good to work for WILL care that you're someone who's good to work with. A tech-genius who's a coworker-hating egotistical snob is a nuisance at best and a liability at worst for companies with even a half-decent culture. When I do interviews, "Is this someone who's a good culture fit?" is as important as the technical skills. You'll want to show you'll be a perfectly pleasant, helpful, collaborative coworker. If the company DOESN'T care about that... bullet dodged.

For the technical questions, I care more about the thought process than I do the right answer, especially for entry-level. If you show a capacity for asking good, insightful clarifying questions, an ability to break down the problem, explain your thought process, and backtrack&alter your approach upon realizing something won't work, that's all more important than just being able to spit out a memorized leetcode answer. (I kinda hate leetcode for this reason, and therefore I only ask homebrewed questions, because I don't want the technical portion to hinge at all on whether someone managed to memorize the first 47 pages of leetcode problems). For a new hire, the most important impression you can give me is that you have a technical grasp and that you're capable of learning. Because a new hire isn't going to be an expert in anything, but they're someone who's capable of learning the ropes.

That's everything I have off the top of my head. Good luck anon. I'm very sorry you were born during a specific range of years that made you a new grad in 2024 and I hope it gets better.

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ashok13 · 8 months ago

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#Software Training Institute #Full Stack Development #Java Course #Python Training #AWS Certification #DevOps Course #IT Training #Job Placement #Real-Time Projects

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kitkatt0430 · 2 months ago

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Welp, I've been using external methods of auto-backing up my tumblr but it seems like it doesn't do static pages, only posts.

So I guess I'll have some manual backing up to do later

Still, it's better than nothing and I'm using the official tumblr backup process for my smaller blogs so hopefully that'll net the static pages and direct messages too. But. My main - starstruckpurpledragon - 'backed up' officially but was undownloadable; either it failed or it'd download a broken, unusable, 'empty' zip. So *shrugs* I'm sure I'm not the only one who is trying to back up everything at once. Wouldn't be shocked if the rest of the backups are borked too when I try to download their zips.

There are two diff ways I've been externally backing up my tumblr.

TumblThree - This one is relatively straight forward in that you can download it and start backing up immediately. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done. Does not get static pages or your direct message conversations, but your posts, gifs, jpegs, etc are all there. You can back up more than just your own blog(s) if you want to as well.

That said, it dumps all your posts into one of three text files which makes them hard to find. That's why I say it's 'not pretty'. It does have a lot of options in there that are useful for tweaking your download experience and it's not bad for if you're unfamiliar with command line solutions and don't have an interest in learning them. (Which is fair, command line can be annoying if you're not used to it.) There are options for converting the output into nicer html files for each post but I haven't tried them and I suspect they require command line anyway.

I got my blogs backed up using this method as of yesterday but wasn't thrilled with the output. Decided that hey, I'm a software engineer, command line doesn't scare me, I'll try this back up thing another way. Leading to today's successful adventures with:

TumblrUtils - This one does take more work to set up but once it's working it'll back up all your posts in pretty html files by default. It does take some additional doing for video/audio but so does TumblThree so I'll probably look into it more later.

First, you have to download and install python. I promise, the code snake isn't dangerous, it's an incredibly useful scripting language. If you have an interest in learning computer languages, it's not a bad one to know. Installing python should go pretty fast and when it's completed, you'll now be able to run python scripts from the command line/terminal.

Next, you'll want to actually download the TumblrUtils zip file and unzip that somewhere. I stuck mine on an external drive, but basically put it where you've got space and can access it easily.

You'll want to open up the tumblr_backup.py file with a text editor and find line 105, which should look like: ''' API_KEY = '' '''

So here's the hard part. Getting a key to stick in there. Go to the tumblr apps page to 'register' an application - which is the fancy way of saying request an API. Hit the register an application button and, oh joy. A form. With required fields. *sigh* All the url fields can be the same url. It just needs to be a valid one. Ostensibly something that interfaces with tumblr fairly nicely. I have an old wordpress blog, so I used it. The rest of the fields should be pretty self explanatory. Only fill in the required ones. It should be approved instantly if everything is filled in right.

And maybe I'll start figuring out wordpress integration if tumblr doesn't die this year, that'd be interesting. *shrug* I've got too many projects to start a new one now, but I like learning things for the sake of learning them sometimes. So it's on my maybe to do list now.

Anywho, all goes well, you should now have an 'OAuth Consumer Key' which is the API key you want. Copy that, put in between the empty single quotes in the python script, and hit save.

Command line time!

It's fairly simple to do. Open your command line (or terminal), navigate to where the script lives, and then run: ''' tumblr_backup.py <blog_name_here> '''

You can also include options before the blog name but after the script filename if you want to get fancy about things. But just let it sit there running until it backs the whole blog up. It can also handle multiple blogs at once if you want. Big blogs will take hours, small blogs will take a few minutes. Which is about on par with TumblThree too, tbh.

The final result is pretty. Individual html files for every post (backdated to the original post date) and anything you reblogged, theme information, a shiny index file organizing everything. It's really quite nice to dig through. Much like TumbleThree, it does not seem to grab direct message conversations or static pages (non-posts) but again it's better than nothing.

And you can back up other blogs too, so if there are fandom blogs you follow and don't want to lose or friends whose blogs you'd like to hang on to for your own re-reading purposes, that's doable with either of these backup options.

I've backed up basically everything all over again today using this method (my main is still backing up, slow going) and it does appear to take less memory than official backups do. So that's a plus.

Anyway, this was me tossing my hat into the 'how to back up your tumblr' ring. Hope it's useful. :D

#tumblr backups #kitkatt0430 tutorials

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marta-diablo · 7 months ago

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Remembering The Mighty Boosh Through The Lens Of Actor And Photographer Dave Brown

“Come with us now on a journey through time and space,” I heard for the fifth time during a recent binge of the beloved BBC comedy series The Mighty Boosh. The televisual project, which stars creators Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt in various workplaces, is how most fans will remember the Boosh, but the legendary comedy troupe scaled the pages of books, the retro realm of radio and the live stage too.

Like Monty Python, the Boosh thrived on surrealism, but while the former made lengthy strides in religious satire and social commentary, the latter specialised in pop culture references, scaly man fish, talking naan bread and virtually anything Fielding and Barratt could conjure from the colourful cauldron of their unfiltered psyches. Ever awoken from a strange dream and decided not to tell the story? “No, it’s too weird,” you might think. Thankfully, the Boosh never held back.

On the topic of naan bread, I’d like to introduce you to today’s featured photographer, Dave Brown. As well as sporting gorilla garb for his role as Bollo, Brown played several other minor characters, including the deadly Black Frost and, of course, an anthropomorphic naan. While coordinating crimps and marshalling the mayhem as the troupe’s self-confessed “organised control freak”, Brown was never far from his camera. Much to our benefit, he took thousands of photos, documenting the Mighty Boosh’s meteoric journey to the big screen and beyond.

Last week, I had the great pleasure of chatting with Brown to sort through his extensive photography collection and discuss his time as a member of the Mighty Boosh. “I was at university with Noel,” he began, revealing how the Boosh came about in the 1990s. “We lived together at uni and, before I specialised in graphic design, in the course that we did, I was Noel’s partner. He was the copywriter, and I was an art director. We used to write various things and do crazy shit that always got horrendous marks, but actually turned out to be way ahead of its time because it was so ridiculous.”

“We used to be into comedy; Noel always wanted to be a comedian,” he continued. “We were basically comedy trainspotters. And there was a comedy club near where we were in Buckinghamshire called Hellfire Comedy Club. We’d been to see everyone, Kevin Eldon and Harry Hill – all of the greats of that era. Julian was on that bill as a comedian, and me, Noel and Nige [Coan; he and his partner Ivana Zorn conducted the animation for The Mighty Boosh] went to see him do the stand-up and then chatted to him after.”

The students became well-acquainted with Barratt, who told Fielding he had won the Daily Telegraph open mic award. Inspired, Fielding also entered the open mic competition, and there began his first foray into Britain’s comedy underworld. “When [Noel] did that, me and Nige kind of shadowed him through the whole journey, which was extremely stressful. I think Frankie Boyle won it, and I don’t think they have a second place, but I think Noel pretty much came in second.”

Energised by the open mic success, Fielding became involved with the Edinburgh festival alongside Chris Addison, Julian Barratt and Frankie Boyle, among others and eventually began working on the first incarnation of the Mighty Boosh stage show with Julian. “They started realising they were kindred spirits and started writing together,” Brown remembered. “They did Mighty Boosh, which was the first live show. They had met Rich Fulcher while doing a sketch called Unnatural Acts. They liked him and asked Rich to be the zookeeper in their first live show, which won the Perrier Newcomer Award.”

The troupe began to take shape in the late 1990s, a time when Brown was working a steady job as a graphic designer. “I was just living with Noel in Hackney, mucking about and helping them out and getting involved in that Monday night stuff [at the Hen & Chickens theatre in Highbury & Islington], playing music dressed up as different shit. Then I went to Australia to work,” he told me. “When I came back from Australia, [Fielding and Barratt] were writing their third live Edinburgh show [Auto Boosh] and wanted a third person in it because they wanted to do various characters and wanted two people on stage while the other changed into different characters. So they asked me, and I agreed to do that.”

Following the success of Auto Boosh in 2000, Fielding and Barratt were commissioned to partake in a six-part radio series, The Boosh. The show aired in October 2001 on BBC Radio 4 and served as a golden gateway to their popular television adaption, The Mighty Boosh, which aired on BBC Three for three series between 2004 and 2007. “My job varied from helping out with props and playing stupid characters when they needed,” Brown said of his role on the set of the TV show. “I was quite influential in the live direction of it and them two [Noel and Barratt], I was a therapist between those two most of the time [laughs].”

With a fine cast including Brown, Fulcher, Michael Fielding (Noel’s brother), Richard Ayoade and Matt Berry, Barratt and Fielding created a world unlike any other that gave fans a chance to escape. It could be hard to fathom how this silly world of surrealism could offer anything beyond laughter and release; however, in 2020, Netflix removed The Mighty Boosh from its catalogue, citing the use of blackface in episodes like ‘The Spirit of Jazz’ and ‘Jungle’.

‘Auto Boosh’ at Edinburgh Fringe 2001

BBC Radio Show 2001

As we touched upon this delicate topic, Brown recalled the show’s censorship as a particularly distressing period for the Mighty Boosh group. While Netflix cancelled the show, the BBC decided to keep it on iPlayer, instead issuing a warning that needs to be accepted before proceeding to the stream. “I love the fact that the BBC stood by us; Netflix just pulled us,” Brown said. “You know, you gotta tread so carefully. I’d hate to think that we ever offended anyone. I think most of our characters were so fantastical and based on surrealism and fantasy, based on our heroes. And everything was a celebration of those heroes and of a surrealist, fantastical, dreamlike child angle on all of that. So when you get accused of something so dark, it really hurts; we were all really hurt by it.”

“We always made sure that everything we did was based on fun, humour and silliness and never wanted to offend, upset or alienate anyone,” he continued. “We had so many people [fans] who felt like they were on the fringes of society all getting together because of their love of the Boosh. And we’d have people sending us letters saying, ‘I was suicidal’ or ‘I was being bullied, then I got together with this Boosh community. You’ve saved my life – you’ve improved my life’. We were always getting beautiful letters and feedback from fans. To then hear that we were getting cancelled for being inappropriate, it was like a double-edged sword where you go, ‘OK, times have changed, and we would never write that stuff now.’ But at the same time, there was never any malice.”

Brown added: “We weren’t dressing up or doing voices to alienate a particular race or particular section of society. But if we did offend anyone or if anyone watches it now and is offended, then that’s really sad, and we’re sorry.”

Towards the end of our conversation, I was keen to ask the question on all fans’ lips: “Have we seen the end of the Mighty Boosh?”

“All of us are still very close,” Brown affirmed. “We talk to each other all the time. I talk to Noel more than anyone else, but still, Julian was down here a couple of weekends ago. You know, life becomes life. Most of us have got children now. Rich has now moved from America to Richmond. We all meet up occasionally. We met up before Christmas at a Kim Noble gig, which was incredible.”

“We have a massive following in Australia; hence, this gallery have contacted me and asked me to put these exhibitions on. I was like, ‘Does anyone give a shit anymore?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s massive!’ So there was always talk of doing a reunion show or something. But it’s a hard one, you know – I try and think of Noel squeezing back into it. It would have to be relevant to the time. I don’t know how it would be or what it would be, or whether it be as a band.”

Brown then revealed that, beyond the group’s near-constant musical references and sonic tangents in the various live and TV episodes, they had actually put a lot of work into an album. “We went to Electric Lady Studios in New York and recorded a whole album,” he revealed. “Like 25 tracks properly produced in one of the best Studios in New York, and it never got released because of disputes between the American representatives and English representatives. And Noel and Julian had a meltdown over that.”

As well as their huge following in Australia, The Mighty Boosh aired in the US on Adult Swim and dredged a cult following. “A cult following over there is like ten times bigger than a popular following over here,” Brown said.

They weren’t totally aware of the scale of their influence across the Atlantic until they visited on a DJ tour. “We went to New York and LA and did the big Comic Con in San Diego, and it was just fucking insane,” Brown remembered. “The following was mental. We went to the Bowery Ballroom in New York, and we were just meant to be doing a DJ set. But we ended up doing a bit of a live ad-lib thing, finding costumes and stuff because it was sold out. There were queues like four blocks down the road trying to get in, and the Roxy was the same.”

Below, we present a collection of photographs from Brown’s colossal archive, some of which you may recognise; others have been shared exclusively for his feature. The photographs are arranged chronologically, mapping out The Mighty Boosh’s epic journey from 1997 to 2013.

Dave Brown’s Photographic Journey With The Mighty Boosh: