#Weird is also code for Expensive To Fix

[lamajaoscura]

NaClYoHo Day 18

Sometimes, when you go to fix a thing in the house, you wind up breaking it. So the shelf that was slanted is now slanted even more, and if you try to fix the anchor, you could rip a giant chunk out of the wall. Or if you try to move the stove, you risk breaking the already testy oven. Vintage homes are so scenic and /aesthetic/, right?

Not every day can be a winner, y'all.

[asterias-record-shop]

BINGOO! Can you please write a Miguel O’Hara sugar daddy story with prompt 15? I’m not creative enough to write a description for this but could you add a mention of the age gap? Miguel is Like 30 or something. Reader is young and wants money ofc. They met online and are meeting up irl. Thank youu

—𓆩[mi menté, cuerpo, corazón, y alma]𓆪—

I am so sorry anón honey, I got completely carried away!! I hope you enjoy it though!

𓆩[main masterlist]𓆪 𓆩[request/ask me something!]𓆪 𓆩[updated bingo card!]𓆪 𓆩[bingo masterlist]𓆪 𓆩[join the bingo taglist!]𓆪

𓆩♡𓆪 CHARACTER - Modern AU! CEO! Sugar Daddy! Soft! Miguel O'Hara x Sugar Baby! Fem! Reader

𓆩♡𓆪 TYPE - fluff, smut, angst

𓆩♡𓆪 WORD COUNT - 3.1K

𓆩♡𓆪 SUMMARY - You loved being a sugar baby. Truly, you did. The only con was the fact that you had to get with someone who was literally a hair away from dying, so when Miguel found you, it was truly a saving grace. After a while, he made you cut off all of your other sugar daddies, easily matching what they give you and more. Things have gotten weird lately, though… and you’re not sure how to take it, even when he says everything is ‘strictly pleasure’.

𓆩♡𓆪 STORY WARNINGS - cursing and foul language || obsessive behavior || sugar daddy & sugar baby relationship || possessive! Miguel || his wife and daughter do not exist anymore 🤍 like at all || Latina coded reader || featuring Jessica Drew as another CEO because we love her (spider-verse variant) || sugar daddy & sugar baby relationship turned real relationship || i speak rancho spanish so i write rancho spanish, it ain’t google translate so it might not make sense- || miguel is lowkey an asshole so he is an asshole now || fighting || you make him fix himself || i’m ngl, i don’t know what the hell i did but i had fun and there’s smut so enjoy || this is so much more kinky than it initially was going to be- || kinda OOC Miguel || sub turned dom! reader || sub! Miguel || sounding || cbt || slight oral || praise & degradation || riding || non-protected sex || cumming inside || ending is supposed to be humorous I’m not weird ||

Finding a sugar daddy that wasn’t quadruple your age was hard. Very, very hard. What was wrong with men? Couldn’t they just become billionaires at twenty-five?

Bastards.

Oh, but then Miguel O’Hara came along. A man in his early thirties that absolutely towered over you at 6’9”, built like a fucking god with looks to match and wealth to pair.

In the beginning, though, you had your doubts, so many doubts. You didn’t know what made him drawn to you in the first place, mainly because you had over five sugar daddies and he easily matched the prices immediately and made you get rid of them. He easily matched all your prices, doing even more before purchasing a test to make sure you were ‘healthy’.

After that, everything else happened extremely quickly - him buying you a car, jewelry and clothes, but the most recent was having you move in with him in his extremely large mansion. The first thing you noticed was that he had nothing in his home that gave it personality. No pictures, just crazy expensive art and photographs of things that were also crazy expensive.

He didn’t even have plants. Or a dog. Or a cat, something to give him some sort of personality besides that stupidly hot face. And stupidly hot money, but that’s why he was at work while you were at a shelter, promising yourself that you’d take some sort of pet home. You had settled on a kitten, a tuxedo kitten with a little bow tie and a mustache, along with small little mittens on his paws.

He immediately curled in your lap, a giggle falling from your lips as you stroked the back of his head. “I’ll take this one… I’m gonna name him Hart.”

And with that, you took him home. You bought him his own bed and all of the toys he could ever want or need, and you sat in the closet you had made his room as you wagged the cat toy in front of him, Jessica on the phone.

“Y/N, I really think you’re going to kill him bringing that cat into his house!” She laughed, snacking on her latest craving.

“Oh, he won’t! You’re being overdramatic, he’s gonna love Hart,” you wiggle the stick some more, the kitten swatting at it as you heard Miguel’s loud voice yell out for you. “Oh! He’s here, I’ll call you later Jess! Love you!”

“Don’t get killed!”

You giggled as you hung up and quickly stood, running out and fixing your skirt. “Miguel!”

He was tired today, you could tell. His body was more tense than you had ever seen, the buttons at the top of his shirt undone and his tie loose with his blazer open. You paused, his clenched fists making you swallow slightly. You had your share of violent lovers, and you sure as hell weren’t going to have another.

“Hola, mi reina,” he whispered, voice hoarse as he set down his briefcase and his fists unclenched. He softly set his hand on your hip, kissing softly against your temple as he sighed. “I’m sorry, it’s been a tough day.”

You inhaled as he softly pressed kisses down your temple around your eye, along the apple of your cheek. “Wh-What happened?”

He shook his head, his hands going from your hips to the pretty skin of your thighs that was exposed by the skirt. “Stupid idiots who don’t know how to fucking do their job.”

You hummed softly as you stroked the back of his head, twirling the locks of his hair with your fingers as you kissed his sharp jaw. You were already on your tiptoes, his hands supporting you as he ducked down. “I’m so sorry, Miguel,” you whispered as he let out a soft hum. “I uhm… I got something.”

“Ah si?” he responded, his hands slipping under your skirt to tease your pretty cunt. “Es esto, mi reina?”

“No,” you giggled, shaking your head. “Lemme show you.”

He smiled as you dragged him along, pulling him toward the closet you turned into the kitten’s room before turning around. “You can’t get mad.”

He started to cross his arms, raising a brow. “Why would I get mad?”

“You won’t be mad because you can’t. That’s my whole point,” you say, nodding firmly. “Okay?”

“You can’t say I can’t get mad and expect me not to get mad.”

“Oh, shut up!” You laughed, shaking your head as he hummed softly and leaned down. “Just… trust me.”

He hummed again as you opened the door, the loud mews of the kitten making his eyes widen. You felt your smile disappear as you inhaled, shaking your head as you turned around. “This is Hart! He’s a little spy,” you giggled, kissing the kitten’s small head. “H-He was named after-”

“I know who he’s named after, Y/N,” Miguel growled, glaring at the kitten in your hand. “Why is it in my house?”

“Our house,” you correct him, a scoff falling from his lips. “What?”

“My house,” he basically growled, stepping forward as you started to step back. “Just because I fuck you like a ragdoll and cum inside of you like a cumdump doesn’t mean that this is your house.”

You inhaled as you held the kitten closer to your chest, scoffing. “You’re a fucking bastard, Miguel O’Hara. This is strictly business as always, isn’t it? You fucking asshole.”

He scoffed as you went around him, shaking his head. “This is mine, Y/N! All of it!”

“It might be yours, Miguel, but you don’t want it! You keep this giant house full of nothing that you love, nothing that you care for! You don’t even have a damn plant here!” You yelled at him, inhaling as you sent him a glare. “You’re a self absorbed bastard, Miguel.”

“I have you here,” Miguel spoke, something that completely betrayed his previous words. “You’re… all I could ever need.”

“You don’t need me though. The only thing that you fucking need is a damn whore,” you shake your head, keeping Hart close to your chest. “I will get myself a lawyer to get myself out of this contract, and we’ll never have to see each other again.”

“Y/N, wait-”

“No! Fuck you!” You were already rushing to your room - which was sadly one you shared with Miguel - locking it before he could come in after you.

“Y/N, amor… mi amor, I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not!” You yelled, sighing. How could you ever think this would go any other way? “Just… go away!”

To be honest, you weren’t sure what made you think you could love him. Actually love him and have it reciprocated, but you didn’t want to leave. You had worked so hard in this relationship with Miguel, gaining his trust and what you thought was his love, for fucks sake you couldn’t lose it now. What he said just… got to you.

It wasn’t until you heard a soft knock that you unlocked the door, Miguel slowly stepping into the room. “What do you want?”

“I just… look at this,” he gave you the binder, swallowing. “If you uhm… look at it, it annuls our last contract… if you sign it, mi amor-”

“What, are you gonna try and bribe me?” I ask, softly scratching Hart’s ear before he gives you the binder.

“Perdóname, amor,” he whispers, slowly falling to his knees in front of you. You certainly weren’t expecting this. “Read it.”

“Summarize it for me.”

“It says that you own me,” he says, tilting his head. “Everything I own, you own. Everything I am is yours,” he takes your hand, softly kissing against your wrist. “I’m sorry… that it took me so long to see how important you are to me. Soy tuyo, mi mente, cuerpo, y alma.”

You swallow as you stare at the dotted line, looking down at him as he kisses your skin. “Tu cuerpo? Es mío?”

He groaned as your hand shapes his jaw, softly tugging on his hair as Hart jumped down, sauntering out of the room as though he knew what was about to happen. “Todo es tuyo, mi amor,” he whispers, groaning as you pull his hair so he’d stare up at you. “Todo lo que quieras, es tuyo. Nomás me digas y es tuyo. Todo, todo es tuyo.”

You hummed, sighing as you moved your hips to come off the bed slightly. “Show me. Show me that you belong to me and I’ll sign it.”

He hummed, sending you a smile as he started to kiss against your wrist. “Of course, mi reina.”

You smile slightly as he starts to tug off his shirt, carefully unbuttoning and kissing along your calf before slipping off your heels. “If this keeps going, Miguel, you need to know that I’m not putting up with your bullshit.”

“Ya se, mi reina,” he whispers, his tongue flattening up your thigh as he pulls down your skirt. “I’m aware.”

“I’m going to sign that shit in your cum.”

He laughed, nodding. “If that’s what you want to do, mi amor.”

You tilted your head down at him, raising a brow. “That raises no red flags?”

“No, they’re actually green.”

You hold back a laugh as he slowly stands up, already taking off his clothes before you put up a finger. “I’m in charge, right?”

“Yes,” he said, tilting his head slightly. “What would you like me to do, hm?”

“Get on the bed,” you say, standing and slipping off your clothes. “Why are you just standing there? Go.”

Miguel smirked slightly, but followed your orders, his bare body looking perfect against the bed. “Well, what do you want me to do next, mi amor?”

You hummed, staring for another few minutes. “Get hard. I’ll be back.”

You go into your closet, but after hearing Miguel’s moans, you knew he listened to what you said. It wasn’t until you went into your drawer filled with sex toys did you know what you wanted to do - oh, you were going to make him sob. You grabbed the small silver toy you had never had the chance to use on him, biting your lip as you finished taking off the rest of your clothes and fixing your bra and underwear.

It was normal to makeup with Miguel with sex, then talk about what happened and why it should never happen again before you fell asleep, resulting in Miguel waking you up with breakfast in bed and another lavish apology gift.

When you walked out, you smiled when you saw Miguel bucking his hips into his hand, his thick cock dribbling precum out of his bright red tip. “Look how pretty your cock is, baby… so, so pretty.”

He lets out a dry laugh, groaning. “Oh yeah? Que vas hacer?”

You giggled, slowly sliding between his legs and taking out the metal sounding rod. “Voy a jugar con lo que es mío.”

He lets out a choked moan as the cold tip of the rod dragged in a circle along the tip of his cock, already lubed up so you wouldn’t hurt him, a giggle escaping your lips as you slowly pushed it into his cock. He lets out a choked moan as you laugh, watching as it slowly disappears inside of his cock.

“Hijo de su pinche madre,” he cursed, groaning as he bucked his hips, stomach clenching as you watched his body slowly fall to your mercy. “Amor, please, please- I'll be good, I just need to fuck you.”

“Cállate,” you ordered, giggling as you pushed it inside until the ring was showing, your mouth latching onto his balls and sucking softly. “Come on, be a good boy and fuck it.”

He cursed as he starts to roll his hips, following the sounding rod as he groaned loudly. One of your hands rubs along his thighs, giggling as you stared up at his face all scrunched and desperate. He really did make a good sub.

“Come on, don’t stop now, Miguel, you’re doing so good,” you move away from his balls but continue to cup them, moving so that his fat cock was settled on his abdomen and you rubbed your now bare pussy against his shaft. “Come on baby, I know you want to cum. As soon as you cum, I’ll put your cock in me and I’ll let you fuck me.”

He groaned loudly, almost growl-like sounds falling from his lips as he forced his hips to go faster, fucking into the sounding rod as he rubbed against your wet cunt. You couldn’t hold back your own moans, the friction of his cock perfect against your cunt and he wasn’t even inside of you yet.

“Amor, please, please!” He was begging to cum, even if he didn’t quite know it yet, a groan falling from your lips as you continued to squeeze and rub his balls. He had never been this quick to cum, and you knew you’d have to try this again soon. “I’m close, chingao, I’m close.”

You let out a laugh as you watch the sounding rod start to be pushed out, pushing it back in as he whined. “Not yet, amor mío.”

“Por favor, mi vida, necesito- fuck!” He screamed out as you continued to hump against his length, pushing and pulling the rod in and out of his cock.

“Say it again. That you’re mine.”

“Fuck, I’m yours! Soy tuyo, mi mente, cuerpo, corazón, y alma, ¡chingada madre!” He yelled out as you finally let go of the sounding rod, watching it pop out of his cock and a perfect, pornographic cumshot follow. You moved your hand from his balls, lifting your hips as you continued to pump his shaft. You watched as the pearlescent liquid spurts onto his toned abdomen, smiling before cupping your hand in front of his tip and gathering his cum.

He panted, watching as you slowly smeared it along your cunt and placed the sounding rod onto the nightstand. “Next time we need to go bigger.”

“Whatever you say, amor,” he whispers, groaning as you pull his cock to push into your cunt, another loud groan falling from his lips. “Fuck, you feel so good.”

“I know,” you spoke, laughing slightly as you gasped. No matter how many times his cock was inside of you, you never got used to it. “Fuck, Miguel, It’s like you get bigger every time.”

“Maybe I do,” he smirked, offering that playful wording as you finally sat on his pelvis, groaning loudly. “Look at how perfect you look with my cock inside of you, mi reina. Fucking perfect.”

You whimpered, groaning as you started to roll your hips, his cock feeling as though it was deeper than it ever was. “N-No, no.”

He smirked, tilting his head. “No what, amor? Tell me.”

“Stop that,” you order, knowing damn well if he kept talking like that you’d soon be on your back begging for him to fuck you. That’s now how it was going to happen, not today. “I’m in charge. Not you.”

“I never said you weren’t, amor-”

You leaned forward, pressing your lips firmly to his as he held your hips, helping you rock onto his cock. “Stop talking.”

He laughs as his other hand pulled you in for another firm kiss, your hands searching for the contract before his hips slam up into you. You pulled away, gasping as he lets out a loud groan, cursing. “Thought you needed some help, mi amor.”

Your hands claw against his shoulders as he keeps your chest pressed to his, using his strength to easily thrust up into you. For fucks sake, he couldn’t even let you have this, but you weren’t complaining as he grunted underneath you and you felt his cock rub against every place you ever wanted him to be. He repeatedly thrusted into you at that perfect rate to hit that spot inside of you that just made your body go limp, stomach twisting and turning.

One of the pros of having a man who knew your body like the back of his hand was that you could always count on him making you cum.

You gasped as his cock finally thrusted against that perfect spot that easily made you come undone, mind blurring as you basically see stars right as your nails dig into his skin. Your cunt clenched and squeezed his cock as a result of your orgasm, a hissed groan falling from his lips as he thrusted a few more times and finally came inside of you.

Your eyes rolled back, the added feeling of his cum spurting inside of you, filling you up as your inner thighs started to register slight heat from the power of his thrusts. You panted as you started to sit up, Miguel letting out a slight laugh before you grabbed the sounding rod and the contract.

“Q-Qué estás haciendo?”

You looked up at him, giggling as you dipped the rod into his cum. “I said I was going to sign it with your cum.”

“Mierda, Y/N, don’t do that!”

“What?! You think I was joking?! I said it was a red flag!”

Thank all of you so much for supporting me!! Even though Bingo requests and Bingo itself is done, I have my next event already planned - please stay tuned!! Requests are closed but they will be open when I clear my inbox, and again, thank all of you so much!!

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© asterias-record-shop

[whaliiwatching]

Caught up to the fic!! Absolutely fascinated by all the queer/punk/poc history here, since I don't know much myself. Very sweet chapter as well.

Unrelated question - mostly - but why is it common fanon to depict Noir as the more scarred up of various spiderpeople? Naturally everyone has their fair share of fights, though the only we see sustaining any marks is Peter B and his misaligned nose. Personally, I've taken it as Noir Peter not healing as cleanly due to it being Spider God stuff over Weird Radioactive Healing Factor stuff. Thoughts?

thank you so much!! i’m glad you liked it, & hope the ending was satisfying for ya <3

short answer: hot

long answer, plus a map of my idea of noir’s scars: under readmore :)

i’m not a devout spidey comic/movie fan or a doctor. this is based on conjecture and minimal research!

when i came up with my unmasked noir ideas, i wasn’t influenced by fanon—i hadn’t seen any other fan art, not even when itsv came out. but i can think of a good few reasons that scarred noir is a popular headcanon: evidence of what he’s been through makes him feel more tangible/relatable, the visual difference enhances his thematic individuality as distinct from other spider-people (especially other Peter Parkers), self-consciousness can explain why he doesn’t take off his mask in itsv even around other spiders.

all perfectly valid and interesting reasons! but the first two reasons are doylist and the last one is missing a crucial question: why does he have scars? unless a wound is severe, gets infected, or gets lucky, it won’t usually scar. facial injuries especially need to be really bad to leave a mark. and of course most if not all other spider-people have the healing factor. so what gives??

i like the spider god’s curse influences healing factor idea; it opens up some nice angsty possibilities regarding an inability to Be “Fixed;” no matter how much he tries, he can’t erase/forget what’s happened to him. but i also enjoy the bandaging someone up after a fight genre of fic, and am annoyingly pedantic, so my personal working theory is that the healing factor is not a doctor with ten plus years of experience and an accurate understanding of human anatomy. when a bone really badly breaks, it has to be reset or it’ll heal wrong. to me, the healing factor doesn’t know what ‘right’ is, only ‘fast’ and ‘effective.’ it’s an accelerant, not a substitute for medicine.

so let’s establish the baseline. modern spideys either receive modern medical attention or the injury is superficial enough that they don’t require it. even poverty-stricken peter parkers get rushed to the hospital, because fictional doctors Don’t Care About The Money and/or peter is dolled up in spider gear and who’s going to ignore a visibly beat-up celebrity hero?? plus i honestly believed peter b’s nose was just genetics or smthn. my nose is misaligned and it’s never been broken to my knowledge

to compare, noir lives in 1933 and, far as i can tell, doesn’t rlly garner the same fame and respect from the public as modern spideys do. in the 30s, medicine was meh (they had x-rays but didn’t rlly consider radiation much of a threat, penicillin was still in its infancy, polio was a huge threat, etc) but was also, more importantly, far too expensive for most people suffering during the Great Depression. whatever treatment noir receives after a fight, if any, would look way different from ours. that means his healing factor, which can’t differentiate scars from normal skin or a misaligned bone from a whole one, would be inefficiently assisted or left alone. it would leave its history behind.

on the infectious disease side of things, it’s probably much easier for even noir to recover from less physical ailments like the flu and pneumonia—spider healing factor likely remembers and codes for immunity better than regular immune systems—but without modern drug therapies he’d still be worse for wear, ie internal scarring. mans would have a shorter-than-average parker lifespan if not for the pseudo-immortality of the Spider God

anyway. all this to say, here’s my personal map of parker’s scars. crop tank and daisy dukes to keep tumblr off my ass <3

(tbh this is more for my reference than anyone else’s, i’m sick of looking through my art of Just His Forearms to keep my details consistent, but maybe someone will find it interesting lol)

[girakacheezer]

Marlowe Devblog #10

I came across an issue in the game where if a box is flush against the wall, I can stand on the floor beneath the box as long as I’m walking into it.

This issue also occurs sometimes in stacks of boxes, but normally because there’s a very small ledge/difference in position that’s less than 1 pixel and thus not visible to the human eye.

Since this is similar to the issue I faced in Marlowe Devblog #3, I thought maybe a similar solution would work, where I could just simulate collision in different orders to find the correct outcome.  But with throwing entities into the mix, this would double the number of simulated collision runs in a single entity check, if not increase them further, so this strategy is becoming less appealing.

I looked online to see if anyone else has faced similar issues with tiles or whatnot, and one solution I saw people mention was to “change the player’s collider to a circle”.  In this engine I’m making, collision isn’t really built to the point where it can work with arbitrary geometrical shapes, just rectangles (it makes calculations a lot simpler), but I can still use the idea of a “rounded hitbox” to fix this.

The issue right now is that as a perfectly rectangular object, when we try to fall down and into the right into this “wall”, the corner of our hitbox hits the hidden corner of the wall below the box and end up getting pushed up as well as to the left outside the wall and box.

Using a circular hitbox though, the corner of the player’s hitbox wouldn’t get snagged on the hidden corner in the wall anymore, allowing us to “slide” past it.  However I don’t have circular collision programmed into the engine, so instead I’ve opted for a slightly different solution.

The idea is instead to use a hitbox that behaves more like this, with “rounded” corners to help us slide past things when we’re against a mostly flat surface.

In practice how I achieved this was by snipping the ends of the collision lines for map collision, so that there was a bit of room to avoid hitting the corner/edge of the line inside the “wall”.  I chose to snip the map lines instead of the player box since in general map lines are bigger than entity hitboxes, and rounding the corners of a very small hitbox could lead to weird interactions.

However this had an issue where if I jumped into a corner just barely, I could clip the player’s corner into the line and get OOB, since map line collision is permissive in that if you were behind a line the frame before, you’re allowed to be behind the line until you’re in front of it again.

So I updated the collision such that for the map lines, there was a tiny space behind the line that if the corner/edge of the hit box was in, it would snap the player to the line edge, even if it was on the inside of the line before.  This prevented the issue where the player could clip OOB via corners in geometry.

This update to line collision also meant it fixed the issue I previously had in devblog 3 without the need for multiple collision simulations, so I was able to remove that code from the map collision which will increase the perf of collision code in general.

This also lets you slide around corners if you bonk into them just barely, which is a nice feature to have to make jumps/collision feel more fair.

I also applied a slightly modified version of this corner forgiveness to entities, and it works well here too.  It also solves a previous issue I had where you could get snagged on a corner if sliding against a solid flat wall of boxes, which previously I had a solution in place that sorted entities by distance from the target before running collision checks, which was a rather expensive solution performance wise.  I’m able to remove that sort() call now, thanks to this.

[ridiasfangirlings]

I've been having a series of weird dreams where I'm Saruhiko. Today was no different. In my dream, Saruhiko was computer pet, you know, those that are supposed to help you with computer tasks and that are also Spywares? Yeah, and the one owning the computer was Yata.

Imagine like future AU where there are like all these virtual ‘assistants’ that you can purchase to help you with various tasks, kinda like in Chobits. Yata isn’t very good at computers but he needs one for his part time job so he decides to get an assistant that specializes in computer tasks, since you can just plug the terminal into the computer and you’ll have your own little virtual pet right on your desktop who can do things for you. Most assistants are really expensive though so Yata ends up at this like kinda shady place that was suggested to him by one of his friends, Kusanagi, who runs a bar near Yata’s place and lets Yata do odd jobs for him. Yata gets a little confused by the instructions since he accidentally spilled soda on them though but he thinks he must be in the right place, he did end up at a junk shop after all. The only guy in the shop at the counter isn’t paying attention at all and Yata ends up picking up this little robot penguin. The shop guy doesn’t remember where that one came from but yeah it’s probably good with computers, just give me whatever you think it’s worth. 

So Yata takes home his little penguin robot, he thinks it’s actually kinda cute in a weird way with its nerdy blocky glasses. It came with a cord to charge and another one to connect it to the computer so that’s what Yata does, the penguin opens its eyes and a little virtual person with glasses that match the penguin’s appears on his screen. Yata’s proud that he got it to work and to his surprise the virtual assistant makes a small sound like ‘tch’ and says it wasn’t hard, you just had to plug in a cord. Yata can’t believe his own virtual assistant is talking back to him. When he clicks on the screen a little box saying ‘Fushim1’ opens above the character’s head so Yata figures that must be his name, and he tells Fushimi to help him first with cleaning out this old PC Yata got secondhand. Fushimi makes the ‘tch’ noise again and says Yata must be really useless at computers, if he bought one as bad as this. Fushimi can tell that the whole thing is virus ridden and what kind of idiot buys a computer without checking for malware first. Yata’s all well that’s what I bought you for and Fushimi rolls his eyes as a little broom pops into his hand and he says Yata’s lucky Fushimi finds the code of the virus just interesting enough to play with.

 Fushimi fixes up the computer and Yata’s all impressed, so he did get the coolest virtual assistant after all. Fushimi actually looks almost happy about that, or at least Yata thinks, but it’s hard to tell and anyway were these virtual assistants even supposed to have expressions. Yata assumes this must just be how they are and doesn’t think about it until his friend Kamamoto stops by and hears Yata arguing with his computer, Yata’s like yeah my virtual assistant is kinda hard to deal with. Kamamoto looks confused and says the virtual assistants are supposed to do whatever you ask without question and he’s never heard of one being difficult (or gloomy, or ‘an annoying bastard in glasses,’ as Yata keeps complaining). Yata’s like huh mine isn’t like that at all, he tries asking Fushimi about it but when he does Fushimi’s face suddenly goes blank and he says ‘classified’ in this unnaturally flat voice. Yata wonders if he could go back to the shop and ask but remembers the guy there didn’t recognize the penguin either, he decides to look at the penguin terminal but all he finds is a barcode with ‘Saruhiko’ above it. Maybe after this Fushimi starts glitching a little and Yata’s suddenly worried about losing him, even knowing that this should just be a virtual pet and nothing more, and he decides he needs to find out the truth behind Fushimi’s origin.

[coffee-in-veins]

Hi hi! I've only played the Crimson Court dlc once so I've never wondered about this before, but I was reading a fic that mentioned how the Fanatic has a cure for the curse. Do you have a headcanon on how he got that? I can't recall whether is it a definitive cure or if just temporary, because if it's a definitive cure that's very impressive!

hello hello! hope you're fine and thank you for the ask :}

now i feel like Crimson Curse expert all of the sudden but i'm honoured you're asking me about it ^^

regarding your question - it is true! one of the ways to cure your Crimson Cursed heroes is, in fact, hunting the Fanatic, as defeating him drops a consumable item labelled simply as "The Cure":

Tooltip reads:

Its origin and ingredients unknown, but this tincture will quell the Curse. (sic)

and it's a consumable that, if used on a cursed hero, permanently cures them from Crimson Curse, regardless of its stage. the cured hero can be re-infected but this is the only way to cure the Curse before endgame (where you have the Sanatorium being able to do it after defeating the final boss of the Court) and without defeating any of the CC bosses (the event "A Veil Lifted" which cures all of the infected).

this item also can somewhat explain how Fanatic is keeping himself Curse-free while fighting the infected, but from the looks of it, it comes at the expense of everyone around him. which is doubly funny (and a lot more insidious in-universe) if you consider that the only place you cannot get an encounter with him is... well, the Courtyard itself. the very "den of the plague" he is trying to purge. ironic, isn't it?

i understand the game limitations of why it is coded like that. the in-universe lore implications (or rather theories) of those limitations, however... well. let's look closer, shall we?

some people speculate that Fanatic cannot enter the Courtyard because he doesn't have "the invitation" that you get if you kill the Gatekeeper mob. this would indicate that he respects the authority of Bloodsuckers over the Court, which is... weird, for a zealous fanatic. why would having no invitation stop him? he could just get in and do his job. I can understand why the Heir(ess) would try to play "nice" with a den of Bloodsuckers just near their town: if you won't play by Bloodsuckers' rules, Bloodsuckers won't play by their rules either, and Hamlet, in canon, is in no shape to withstand an onslaught of pissed mosquitoes. the town is a sitting duck, and in no position to anger the neighbour substantially. especially considering already present threats from other areas (canon swine attacks on villages, brigand raids, as well as Shrieker raids from the Weald and attacks on ships from the Cove). Hamlet cannot afford to piss the Court off all at once.

unlike a single, highly skilled man who (supposedly) has no base and just hunts those things everywhere they happen to be. wouldn't he be able to get away with this? he should be, right. he has the equipment. if you win, you get bloodsucker-fighting trinkets.

however, I have a much more prosaic and dark headcanon: he's scared to go there. Fanatic knows how risky it is, he knows that he’ll get killed if he steps into the Courtyard. so he simply... doesn’t. he doesn’t go and actually try and fix the problem, he’s “treating” the symptoms.

and by “treating” I mean stalking infected humans.

who are weaker than “true” Bloodsuckers. who are confused, maybe ill from extreme body transformations, probably scared of themselves, of their changes and sudden urges and can barely control themselves. villagers and travellers who would probably trust “a holy man” who promised them salvation from this odd ailment.

and all those people... end up on pyres.

think about it. when you meet him in combat, there are always - and I do mean always - people burning in the background. hell, even your own heroes end up on the pyre during the fight. we also know that surrounding areas, too, have suffered from Bloodsuckers. the initial quest is about a man who died from mosquito bites after he found a way into the Courtyard - which, again, dismantles (at least, for me) the idea of Fanatic being unable to get into the Courtyard if he really wanted to.

the town event after the Court is revealed reads:

Intolerable! Clouds of mosquitoes and other, less identifiable pests continue to descend upon the Hamlet with maddening persistence! Illness and irritation abound (sic)

so mosquitos canonically pester people around. mosquitos which, canonically, can transfer this Curse. it's not just your heroes who succumb to the Curse. it's just that as an Heir(ess) you, personally, are only bothered with your heroes, as their well-being and symptoms cause you to haemorrhage money and you can't simply dismiss them. therefore, Fanatic always have an abundant amount of bodies to shove into the flames.

seriously, with the number of pyres he needs, the dude has to constantly chop wood every waking moment of every day that he's not out there hunting your parties.

and that got me thinking.

he always has wood. he always knows when your party which consists of infected leaves towns. he always has bodies burning.

I believe he's leading a cult.

there has to be someone who helps him. if you tried to play the game you know how much everything costs. food, equipment, items, tools - it all costs money. you can meet Fanatic everywhere, anytime, unless you're following a very specific boss route. so someone informs him of your movement. someone provides him with all he needs to sustain himself and his fires. and frankly, if surrounding villages do start succumbing to the Curse and the guy offers a solution, albeit a horrible one... well... it's Darkest Dungeon. we all know those guys would accept without thinking twice.

that's why you never see him deep in the Courtyard - he doesn't have to throw himself into real danger to feel accomplished, to stroke his self-righteousness and to be convinced that he's "helping". he has a lot of victims - that's true. but that is not helping with the root of the problem.

now, regarding why and how he has the Cure.

well, he is clearly shown to be the priest of the Light (considering his relics), or at least, he believes himself to be one. based on Vestals, Crusaders, and the altars you can find and purify in Ruins, the Light canonically can create miracles if you do it favours and believe hard enough. considering that the guy is called Fanatic, we can safely assume his belief levels are off the charts. and he has a lot of "martyrs". so... that may upset a lot of people, but I think the Cure (and the reason why you cannot get it made) is made out of those burned people. it's martyred ashes and holy water and a lot of self-assuredness. after all, holy water canonically harms cursed heroes (stress and blight if I recall correctly) if they are in a Bloodlust state. so it does something to their cursed bodies. just not enough.

if it's distilled and mixed some more, and purified by a person who sees himself as infallible... well. who knows. but the purity seals, the prayer beads and the overall Light symbolic on the Cure's bottle, mixed with previous awful things happening in DD universe (from Outsiders bonfire having Swine instead of a pig to all of the messed up occult rituals, all of the messed up practices of the Church of the Light, and Ancestor of all things...), it wouldn't surprise me to have this be the basis of the Cure. suffering. pure, distilled, holy (in the most horrible way of that word) human suffering.

wouldn't it be poetic too, in a way? horrible, sure, but... interesting? pooling the suffering of dozens so that the suffering of one could be lifted. the moral choice it presents.

I wish we knew better about the cure. I wish it provided this moral question. I wish heroes had some barks about using it. but alas. we can only speculate, as far as I'm aware. so, I'm speculating to my heart's content.

hope this theory was fun for you to read :}

[aroace-poly-show]

Ha llegado el tiempo más esperada del país! La hora de la miseria en la cueva del homosexual :D

I feel overly annoying and confident so I decided to make you an analysis on why Eight by Sleeping at Last would make a beautiful hw song. I always imagined it a good Nene com, but since it doesn't quite match the music box event, maybe it'll serve you as inspiration for another one? Also Google isn't showing me the lyrics so I'm going to write them myself with extra emotionality✨, sorry about that.

Putting the lines colour coded for the characters and blue if I have no idea.

I remember the minute

it was like a switch was flipped

I was just a kid

Nene upon realising she forgot her words, completely alone in a hall full of people staring at her.

Who grew up strong enough to pick this armor on

And suddenly it fit

A LOT OF THINGS. Could be Tsukasa giving into his role of a people pleaser to make Saki and everyone around him happier at his expense, could be Emu giving up her "childish" behaviour after the Wonder Stage was closed off, could be Rui accepting that he is a monster and coming to live as a loner.

And god that was so long ago, long ago, long ago...

Nene and Rui. Do I even need to clarify?

I was weak and perfectly naive

And I grew up too quick

All of them honestly. What happened with Hollow Wonderland and having to give up their childhood to soon?

Now you won't see all that I have to lose

And all I've lost in the fight to protect it

Emukasa, constantly giving up, constantly fighting, yet so completely lost in the dark.

I won't let you in, I swore never again

I can't afford, no, I refuse to be rejected

Ruinene but actually all of them more or less, especially the fear of rejection part.

I want to break these bones 'til they're better

I want to break them right and feel alive

Ruikasa coded, to me. Rui who needs to be fixed just like the robots he fixes. Tsukasa who'd run his blood dry if it meant Saki could go out of the hospital.

You were wrong, you were wrong, you were wrong

My healing needed more than time

EMU. EMU WHO NEVER GOT TIME TO GRIEVE HER GRANDPA, EMU WHO NEVER HAD ENOUGH TIME TO HEAL OVER THE WONDER STAGE AND NOW SHE DOES BUT IT'S STILL SO SO LONELY AND WEIRD FOR HER TO EXPRESS EMOTIONS.

When I see fragile things, helpless things, broken things

I see the familiar

Something about Nene writing songs that capture the feelings of all those who were never let themselves cry. Something about Emu recognising Mafuyu's smile as something horrid because she's seen it before. Something about Tsukasa's lyrics always sounding like bedtime lullabies that he never got to hear. Something about Rui seeing the loneliness both of them hoard, a dim light in their eyes too familiar to forget.

I was little, I was weak, I was perfect, too

Now I'm a broken mirror

Could be anyone honestly this fits too well.

But I can't let you see all that I have to lose

All I've lost in the fight to protect it

I can't let you in, I swore never again

I can't afford to let myself be blindsided

All of them once again but can I just say HOW MUCH THE ATMOSPHERE CHANGES FROM THE FIRST ONE?? THEY'RE BEGINNING TO BE VULNERABLE YET THEY STILL RECOIL AT THE TOUCH, THEY DON'T WANT TO BE ALONE YET THEY FEAR PRESENCE MORE THAN ANYTHING. IS THIS ANYTHING. DOES ANYONE HEAR ME?

I'm standing guard, I'm falling apart

And all I want is to trust you

COULD BE RUI BUT COULD ALSO BE EMUNENE. JUST IMAGINE A VERY SAD EMU IN SMILE OF A DREAMER, CLOSE TO CRYING AS SHE HIDES AWAY, AND NENE COMING IN TO CARE FOR HER. IMAGINE THE TRUST. IMAGINE IT'S FAULTS.

Show me how to lay my sword down

For long enough to let you through

TSUKASA WITH THE SWORD OF THE KNIGHT PROTECTING THOSE HE LOVES AT HIS OWN EXPENSE. RUI WITH THE SWORD HE WAS GIVING A BIRTH — HE WAS BORN A WEAPON AND A MONSTER. ONCE AGAIN: TRUST. THE KIND OF "PLEASE SHOOT ME AND HOLD ME IN YOUR ARMS AS I DIE BECAUSE I CAN'T SAVE MYSELF AND I WON'T FORGIVE MYSELF IF I HURT YOU" TRUST. THE RUIKASA TRUST.

Here I am, pry me open

What do you want to know?

I'm just a kid

RUIEMU RUIEMU I CAN'T EXPLAIN BUT JUST— TWO KIDS WHO'S CHILDHOOD WAS RIPPED AWAY FOR BEING OSTRACIZED FOR SOMETHING THAT WASN'T THEIR FAULT.

Who grew up scared enough

To hold the door shut

And bury my innocence

NENEKASA. I know Tsukasa doesn't have anxiety nor anything close to it, but holding the door shut could be a way to show him staying at home while his parents spend their time with his dying sister. Alone in his room. Scared of monsters under his bed no one else will ever get to see because no one has walked into the house in more time he can measure.

But here's a map, here's a shovel

Here's my Achilles' heel

SOBBING HEAD IN HANDS STOMPING ON THE FLOOR BLOOD AND GUTS ALL OVER THE PLACE AS I SMASH MY SKULL INTO LITTLE PIECES THEY MAKE ME SO ILL

I'm all in, palms out

I'm at your mercy now and I'm ready to begin

The found family. The found FAMILY DUDE I CAN'T

I am strong, I am strong, I am strong enough

To let you IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN

They have healed thanks to each other and now they're ready to take on the world.

I'LL SHAKE THE GROUND WITH AAAALL MY MIGHT

AND I WILL PULL MY WHOLE HEART UP TO THE SURFACE

NENE. NENE.

For the innocent, for the vulnerable

And I'll show up on the front lines with a purpose.

For the innocent goes to Emu for having to bury her own self in the backyard with tears in her eyes and mud under her nails. The vulnerable goes to Rui because he never got to be vulnerable with anyone but the one's he Rui-ned (never making that pun again). Because he was a born monster and monster don't have any feelings, so what's the point? And the "front lines with a purpose" part goes to Tsukasa because... Wow he finally found why he likes theatre so much, didn't he?

And I'll give all I have:

I'll give my BLOOD, I'll give my SWEAT

AND AN OCEAN OF TEARS WILL SPILL FOR WHAT IS BROKEN

ALL OF THEM SINGING IT TOGETHER PLEASE. THEY HAVE SACRIFICED SO MUCH AND GOT SO LITTLE, NOW THEY'RE WILLING TO TRY AGAIN AND SACRIFICE THEMSELVES FOR EACH OTHER.

I'm shattered porcelain

Glued back together again

INVINCIBLE like we've never been

What's that thing about filling your cracks with gold? What's that thing about fireflies shining in the dark of night? Yeah that thing.

ksdhjffd HI HELLO WELCOME. THIS IS SO FUCKING GOOD rotating this in my brain oh my god. i have some little notes on some lines that also mean a lot to me for other characters btw

“But I can't let you see all that I have to lose/ All I've lost in the fight to protect it “

^ this one feels also ruicore. as in protecting nene. nene is all he really has left to lose. yk.

“I'm standing guard, I'm falling apart/And all I want is to trust you/Show me how to lay my sword down/For long enough to let you through”

^ tsukasa fucking tenma who needs to be taught vulnerability is A Thing he’s allowed to do

“And I'll show up on the front lines with a purpose.” <- i have nothing to add for this one it’s so tsukasa but i just need to let you know how much i LOVE THIS LINE. also your rui-ned pun was awful i hope you do it again /silly

anyway. ourdfghfsggfdhjjksagjhfgfdfhdf oh this is good. this is very very good. this is so rumdfjhgsjms,admfghafngfsd. i need to be put down thank you for sending this de tu cueva homosexual /silly

[spearheadrampancy]

So... if you don't mind me asking how've you been?

hoo boy. yeah. tldr: alive!

quite a fair chunk of shit happened i think. when i redownloaded the app i weighed up if i was gonna make a post abt what's happened, but ultimately decided against it bc i wasnt sure how active i was gonna be. looks like the answer is very, so i might as well for anyone who's curious (:

on with the details in no particular order!

just before we stopped posting, we mentioned how the company we worked for announced big profits, an expenses-paid trip for the top employees, and also the tiny small news that the team we were on was getting downsized from 20 ppl total to about 3 (6 to 1 for my role specifically). well, we did end up losing our job completely because the company was unwilling to make reasonable adjustments so we could move to the same role in a different team (we don't have any legal grounds to take action unfortunately). but this was fine for us bc we grew jaded with how management was doing shit anyway. they also laid off about 700 people from across the company a few months later.

we spent months trying to find a job, and eventually applied to university on a whim. we got in! we're studying game design and are currently in foundation year (level 0) of the course. we were pretty worried about "fitting in" and suff but honestly we made friends instantly and it turns out a lot of lgbt autistic folks are studying game design foundation year. strange! (/s). its a little weird being part of the popular clique now.

we built a site. a real one! with colours and scripts and all that! a couple sites, actually, but only one is what we're comfortable sharing publicly (other site is sys member info for friends to reference). the site is on neocities, available here. we got really into coding for realsies around the time that we stopped posting. we also got into something called choicescript, but the site took priority as we use it as a digital portfolio. we also started practicing API work by making little tools for the discord bot pluralkit, but they are. uh. far from finished

we got an rgb bulb that actually works with shortcuts, so it inspired us to actually code shortcuts again. they're pretty advanced now; we have a series of them dedicated to forcing us to sleep (it obviously isnt working given i'm still awake at 4am !!), but they're really smooth and helpful

we started drawing properly again (i know we've posted a lot of art on here but most of it is low effort memes. and also none of it was trad art, which we got back into), in order to prep for being asked for a portfolio for uni. which we eventually didnt even get asked for. we opened an instagram account to post it to while we work on getting our art on our actual site, and recently a deviantart account for crossposting.

i stopped writing. i also largely stopped building on my ideas for games and comics and such. this was more because i had More Pressing Things to be writing about, like our CV, and our applications, but i havent really picked it back up. in a bit of a plateau of inspiration rn. wanna fix that though.

we started playing hotline miami, which we'd been meaning to do for years. completed the first, got halfway into the second before a TERRIBLE AWFUL THUMB INJURY (dramatic. didnt even need glue) rendered us entirely unable to use a controller. it healed but we havent finished the second yet. today's actually the first time since august that we've even touched a controller, let alone played any games.

we got back into making music. we decided the system was going to start releasing music as a collective, so we set up a whole youtube channel and stuff for it. videos'll start january 1st, we hope.

i convinced two people to watch red vs blue. my token cishet guy friend who was my colleague at Shitty Workplace (i sent him slutty locus from earlier and his only response was "amazing") and one of my new uni friends (very autistic i think they will go feral for it). token cishet just finished season 8 and uni friend is in season 3 i believe.

health wise has been. a ride... our normal gp stopped practicing entirely, and we dont trust the other gp's at our clinic, so we've been entirely unmedicated and unchecked since november of last year, barring OTC stuff. except for the part where at the end of october we finally saw a rheumatologist (after being referred in 2019!) who said we probably had fibromyalgia. earlier this month we also caught some Mystery Illness that lasted two weeks and nobody knew what it was. our voice still hasnt recovered fully and the whole experience was weird, but the hospital nurse wasnt concerned and it didnt come back as positive for That One Illness That Got Really Popular In The Last Three Years so its honestly likely that it was just the regular old flu, which we werent used to after only really suffering from Disabled Person Sicknesses for the best part of the last 15 years.

we met steve downes and jen taylor, the voice actors of halo's master chief and cortana! got photos & signatures (: steve complimented my jacket and jen Really Wanted A Nap.

WE GOT THE GRIFBALL PLUSH (: i would make this bigger if i could. it's just one of those Material Gains that has a lot of sentimental value to us. and i found my glow in the dark ring which i cried about. again: material gains of high personal significance.

so yeah! a lot. im probably missing something because i have the brain of a sieve. but we're alive and thats the important part.

[skinsort]

I don't think I have a ton of followers, but for those who are here, below the cut is basically a very long think piece on jcink skinning that will probably offend a lot of people, but it's my honest take and I'm willing to hear other people's constructively expressed criticisms, and am very open to revising my opinion. I just was surprised by the SOPs I found in the jcink rpc when I started writing this skin and was doing research into whether I wanted to try selling it or not. For anyone wondering about the future the TLDR is as follows: I will probably make another skin and sell it as a multisale and see how that goes. This will probably happen a long time from now. I will probably never take custom commissions. I will probably charge more than people would like for my skins, but I think I have good reasons for that. More below the cut on the actual thoughts.

There were a few obstacles that became immediately obvious when beginning to work on a jcink skin for the first time.

First off, jcink is imo fundamentally bugged.

It has a slow initial load time even on the default skin, always over a second, usually over 2 in my testing. Industry standard is .5, and php (the backend language of jcink's templating system, and i assume the databases), though old, is perfectly capable of meeting that threshold. I personally find this an infuriating fact about jcink, especially since I can do nothing about it.

There are two distinct skins on any site by default, neither of which are responsive. Responsiveness basically refers to whether or not a website looks good regardless of screen size. It's a universal concern in any modern tech company. I understand that when jcink was first written, a lot of what's possible today wasn't available, however we are long since past the time (in my opinion) that it would have been simple for John to reskin the default view of jcink to be responsive and provide that as an alternative to the og defaults. If nothing else, this would provide a better standard for what a 'functional' skin might look like, and maybe even a baseline for people to build off of. Instead we have tables which are generally unusable in modern web design.

Jcink is also not terribly accessible by default. I found text labels missing in several places (for screen reader users), no keyboard accessibility on a few default functions (for people who can't use a mouse), and of course, nothing in the docs to remind people to keep what features there are in the default skin.

Then we have the added complications of the jcink rpc community, the skinners and coder in general within the space. I think I can break down my thoughts on this into three main categories: Price, Product, and People. I have a lot of thoughts about these topics, so bear with me.

Price

Look me in the eyes. Not one single skinner I could find was charging a market rate for front end web development. The most expensive person I could find wasn't even asking for 25% of the money a front end website developer would make for a skin professionally, and I found them because people were putting them on blast for charging as much as they did. The jcink rpc has been getting bargain basement prices on code for EVER, and seems to have NO concept of the time and complexity of writing actually good code.

I have mixed feelings on this.

I have not seen a professional grade skin in the wild, not once, not even my own. The css on my skin is sloppy. There are areas I got a serious case of the fuckits on and wrote some ugly code. There's at least one info page on my site that looks weird af on mobile and I have no intention of fixing it. I say this with love, compassion, and appreciation for everyone who codes for this community. Not one single jcink skin I have ever interacted with would constitute a professional level of work in my field. No one whose work I have interacted with (again, including my own!!) should be charging a fully professional rate.

This is a hobby. We do this for fun. We shouldn't be in an arms race for the prettiest skins, but we are. People like nice interfaces, it will affect their decision to consider or nope out of a site. So, we're in a situation that for a 'not boring' skin, custom skinning has become much more of a norm. In order to have a successful site, admins generally need to invest in a decent skin. With a custom skin, you can easily get to $250 in cost, and I've seen it go quite high from there. That's a lot of money for a site which may not survive. That's a big fuckin' deal. Some people are serial site starters so if one fails, that's fine, the skin can be reused, but I personally have not adminned a site since 2016 until a month ago. If I had sunk $250 into a skin, plus $80 for jcink premium for a site that never took off, suddenly my 'free' hobby becomes quite dear. I think it's only right that there be a certain degree of friendliness in the community when it comes to pricing because of this, even for truly professional coders (again, of which I've seen zero). Skinners are part of the ecosystem and deserve to be properly valued. Admins shouldn't have to pay out the ass just to have a better chance of their site taking off.

There's a great deal of risk involved in most skinning transactions I know of. First off, unlike the real world, we often don't know each other's irl identities. This makes a situation rife for scammers on both ends of the transaction- from skinners not getting paid for delivered work, and customers not getting the product they asked for, if they get it at all. This rightfully affects both parties' feelings on how to adjust pricing to account for risk. If you're a coder, prices should be higher, if you're an admin, prices should be lower. This has been more or less solved for multisales with payhip etc, but custom skins are still fraught, and in a world where plenty of players won't consider a site if they've seen the skin too much, that is still a significant chunk of the activity at play.

So do I think skinners should be paid fully professional rates? No. From what I have seen and learned, absolutely not. It didn't occur to me to track the time spent on my skin until quite late in the process, but if I had to guess I'd put it at about 40 hours worth of work. I'll talk more about this in the product section if that seems like a lot of time to you. I'll throw out a very loose figure and say that $50/hr is about right as a figure for what a professional developer would make doing this kind of work, after tax etc. If you're being responsible about the IRS, it would bump significantly higher. If you multiply that by the 40 hours I spent on my skin, we're getting into multiple thousands of dollars for a custom skin if people were charging professional rates. Now it's very possible that if I made skinning My Thing, that I'd build up a library of components I could pull on to make skins much more quickly. I know for a fact that many skinners do. But even if we say I halve my time on my second skin (optimistic but v possible), we're at $1000 if I was charging the prices I charge my employer to keep me on board. That is CLEARLY unsustainable for a hobby centric community where money never gets involved. So what should pricing look like? I really think that depends on the product.

Product

So. I think there's some room for honest reflection in jcink skinning communities about what is being sold. To contextualize this, I have to lay out the basics of what my general mindset is around what makes a website good for its users.

The obvious one, and the one that I think gets the most attention in jcink skinning is aesthetics. How a site looks, whether it's pretty, etc. I think this is important, I care about things looking good, but out of these five concerns, this one is frankly last on my list of what's important.

UX Design/Functionality. No, this is not the same as aesthetics. Is a site easy to understand, use and navigate. Does it make it seamless for a user to get where they want. Does it provide the contextual information they expect from the page they're visiting. These questions are fundamental for me, and I'd rather have a well designed user experience, than a well designed asethetic experience on a site.

Accessibility. Is a site readable. IS A SITE READABLE. IS A SITE READABLE. Is there enough contrast on a page that a colorblind user could read it? Can you navigate it with a keyboard? How about a screenreader? Is the text large enough for standard screen sizes. Does it stay large enough across devices?

Responsiveness. If someone on a phone visits my site, will they have a good experience in every view? Will they have the functionality they need? What about a tablet? What about someone with a small desktop screen, or a huge one? If I have hovers somewhere on my site, is it still navigable on mobile, or is it now an unintuitive situation? Phones take way longer to load than most computers, do all the assets (gifs, images, multiple fonts, etc) on my site make it frustrating for a mobile user to visit my pages?

Performance. When I said jcink is bugged earlier, performance was one my complaints. The base page load time of jcink is shitty. However, what's worse is when a skin takes a baseline of 2 seconds for pages to load, and bumps it up to 5, 8 or (the worst I've seen) 13 seconds to load after someone tries to visit a page. I have not seen a single jcink skin (aside from my own), which adds less than a second of loadtime to jcink's default performance. Again, in an industry where the basic standard is under half a second, jcink skins do not perform to a professional level.

If a website fails along these metrics, it cannot be considered professional for general public consumption. The problem is, everything except aesthetics requires a considerable baseline of knowledge and practice to do well. These are problems that many fortune 500 companies have not figured out (that's because their execs are dumb dinosaurs, but still). So when it comes to the question of 'how much should a skin cost', I think a skinner is obligated to consider their product. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it functional? Is it accessible? Is it responsive? Is it performant? For most skins, the answer to at least three of these questions is NO, and I think that pricing should reflect that. In my opinion, I think most skinners do well with asethetics, some skinners do well with functionality, and I have yet to see any truly accessible, responsive, or performant skins in the wild. When it came to writing mine, I think I needed about 5 hours to get familiar with how jcink worked, and then if I only wanted my site to look good on a desktop monitor, I probably could have spent 10-15 hours to write my skin as a noob having to look up every php variable John uses in jcink's terrible docs. That is not what I did. My skin is fully responsive, it is fully accessible, it is to my personal taste aesthetically, and is very performant (on average .25-.35 added seconds to my load time) despite having piles of functional scripts (all of which i wrote myself) on several pages. I also wrote several things that make my life and my member's lives easier. I have a member directory and face claim that require no work on my end past sorting an accepted character into the right member group. I have an autotracker built into member profiles so people can keep track of their threads. I have a button which allows members with lower end computers to turn off most graphics on the site so their computers don't sound like airplanes taking off. I have a light mode/dark mode switch that guests and members can both use. Personally, I would not feel like a freak for charging $1000 for a custom skin of this caliber. It's half what I would earn normally (using the $50/hr figure from earlier), and it lives up to all my standards for what professional code ought to do for its users vs. one or two. The css is not my best work, but I can say without undue arrogance that it's far and away easier to touch without breaking things than any other skin I've looked at, and the actual interface that people see and interact with is great. Again, the aesthetics are simple and to my taste, but it makes sense and has lots of quality of life bits and bobs in it. I'm proud of it. I understand if that entire paragraph read wildly, but I don't say any of it lightly or with the intention to belittle anyone. I'm trying to contextualize how I think about how price relates to what is actually being delivered. But even though I genuinely feel $1000 would be an excellent deal for the work I have done on my skin, I could not possibly stomach charging that much money to a single person for this skin, which (in addition to me using it on my own site) is why it is not going on sale.

To be honest, I have NO idea how much time a typical skinner spends on a custom skin. My approach is different from most people who do this for the community, and I also do adjacent work professionally and have for many years. I suspect that if asked to achieve all 5 of the above criteria, I would be able to do that significantly faster than most skinners. That said, I have no library of components I can turn to, and I hate a lot of the standard choices in building skins and would rather write my own. Isotope, cfs, etc can burn, they're bad code. There's tradeoffs to how I'd do things and how others would, which have significant impacts on time spent, but also on the outcome. Generally however, when it comes to jcink pricing, and how much people should charge or spend on a skin, I think the above 5 things should be the primary metrics. I made my own because I couldn't find a single skin that was truly accessible or responsive, and because I know how the sausage is made I simply couldn't stomach it. I can't really tell you how much you SHOULD pay for a skin that only does Aesthetics and Function, or only Function and Accessibility or any other combination. It's really not my place. I have thoughts on what I would charge, trying to be fair to myself and others if I were to make a multisale. But that's for a different post.

People

And then there's people. I touched on this earlier with some talk about scamming. I have heard horror stories on both ends of this interaction, and I think, simply speaking, it has created a lot of distrust around something which is a core decision for a lot of boards- which skinner to work with, what standards to set, how much things should cost, how to arrange payment. Payment structure has to take care of both you and the commissioner, but it also has to take into account that lots of people are gonna drive you up a wall, go ten rounds on their requirements, and then expect finished work two weeks after they finally got back to you about a core feature. With all due respect, clients who know NOTHING about tech and still have a lot of opinions on exactly how things should be done are my personal nightmare. I have not figured out any good way to account for this. I think custom commissions can be great for both the coder and the customer, but it's a total crapshoot as far as I can tell with no solve that I know of. I think there is also greater than average honesty and flexibility required from both parties in a non-professional setting(like jcink coding is) where money is still being exchanged. I think skinners have to be honest about their capabilities, their timeline, and how they want to work with customers. I think customers have to be honest about their expectations, their priorities and their consistency (are they going to change their mind frequently). I think both people need to be willing to find compromise. Since NO ONE is producing professional products and NO ONE is paying professional prices, there needs to be an understanding that sometimes things need to adjust. But, with custom skinning, it's often a lot of money for people. 250+ is a significant chunk of change. It feels wild to pay that much and not get exactly what you want. However, exactly what you want may be outside the skillset of a hobbyist, or it may simply be difficult or tedious or finicky, even for a professional. You want me to do custom svg clipping all over a skin? I'd rather die than do that during my free time. Furthermore, no skinner is being paid to do EVERYTHING that a professional site might demand. Being unhappy that you didn't get every concern addressed is not reasonable with the rates getting paid right now. There's ground to give on both sides. Flexibility is key, and it gets hard when there's money on the line.

Okay but so what?

Bish i don't know!!! Skinning is difficult niche stuff, especially if you're actually meeting any kind of professional standard. It's really easy to do badly. Paying for products where there is literally no professional available is always complicated. Idk what to tell you man. I'm just saying that I don't think anyone is getting paid a rate they deserve relative to the time they put in (probably), and simultaneously people don't get a product that lives up to the rest of the web right now because there's no real industry level professionalism available. And what's worst is that it's nobody's fault!! It's a tough spot to be in as a community! As for me, I'll probably do multisales in the future, and I'll probably charge significantly more than others because I'll be delivering significantly more. I am simply incapable of coding something that isn't responsive and accessible and performant if I'm going to charge money for it. It simply shan't happen, which means my time and skill will be reflected in the work and ergo the price. As for commissions, other people's taste irritates me too much to willingly get into typical freelancing in any capacity (affectionately, i will never be doing certain aesthetics unless people are willing to pay me my full rate, which no one should lol). I will almost certainly never do fully custom commission work. It is simultaneously not worth my time to do it for the rates offered by the jcink rpc, and it's not worth a commissioners money to pay for my skills when people are well used to skins that don't rise to professional standards anyway. Since I've finished my skin I've started posting some of the scripts I whipped up on caution. You can scroll back in this blog and find some of them. I'll probably continue to do that with anything I think another skinner could use. I will probably also start posting tutorials for discrete components so people have some examples of what responsive coding looks like. It's a tough nut to crack if you've never seen it up close before! If I'm really going to be a good member of the community I should probably start posting those here too more regularly. I basically just really want to help people out with their coding and contribute to the overall health of jcink skinning without undervaluing myself or gatekeeping good code. I will probably post my thoughts on how I'll be structuring the pricing for upcoming work in the next week or so. Expect updates after the holidays on upcoming skin ideas. Most of them have to do with implementing fun design stuff I never get to do at work- parallax effects, color manipulations, funky shapes, abusing css filter rules. I'd love to hear what kinds of things people would be excited to see first!

[absurdbartholomew]

lets say you just got put in charge of a brand new popular cartoon properties video game, you have a team consisting of an college intern coder, a brilliant musician, a couple coders who are quiet and keep to themselves, and you, the art designer and playtester.

you have a tech demo that got the ball rolling and landed your team this job. now comes the hard part, how much money is being put into each department of your team, are you going for a multi console release? is the game full 2d, 2.5d, or 3d? you have 2 years to get this game out and finished.

how are you going to make this licensed game hell string itself into a proper product

unfortunately, I cannot answer the first two questions as a developer (that would be up to the publisher who has the license, which said license would be nearly impossible to negotiate for with such a small development team. I'm assuming this team is a dev-for-hire style team.) I can say that our team would be assigned to the NDS version of it assuming it's a multiplatform game. if not, we would probably be assigned to the gamecube and playstation 2.

the game's amount of dimensions would most likely be determined by what time we started this project. if it was from 1999-2009, it would most likely be 2.5D (not fully 3D as our team is small and only has one programmer. licenses for a full game engine would probably be expensive) if it was from 2015-now, full 3D would be completely viable with just a single programmer due to premade game engines making it much easier.

I'm going to assume this project is from 1999-2009 (cause all the cool cartoons were from that time!!)

more specifically I want to start in 2006 as we would probably be given more interesting projects + the benefit of nostalgia whether it be from people who actually played it or people born in 2009 who like to pretend they were around in 1996 for super mario 64.

anyways, most of the difficulty on this project would probably be related to the programmer. he was probably trained just enough to work with most systems and is probably fluent with C++ (though, he'd write it exactly like C) but he barely knows how to write functional code. if it makes it easier to describe, he basically has the same skill as someone working on a bad spongebob horror fangame where the Spooky Patrick chases you in a dim hallway using bfbb textures if they could write in C++.

bug reports from anyone on our team who decided to playtest at the time would totally pile up and some of them would just waste our time (for example, someone would miss every dev meeting and report that unlocking something intentionally was a bug)

anyways, knowing me, I would most likely go for a style similar to the cartoon. is the main character's head weird as a result of translating it to a 3D model? tilt it away from the camera a bit. can we not add an outline to that specific object? shut up.

i'd also push for creative solutions (you can achieve A LOT with just clever usage of texture scrolling, blending, and vertex color) since we're working on a DS game and obviously shaders aren't possible.

being a lowly art designer (and playtester!) I cannot contribute much to the project and any art-related work I'd submit would most likely be messed with by the programmer (probably just downscaled textures. nothing wrong with that!)

i probably wouldn't HAVE to playtest since everyone else on the team does that anyways

fast forward 1 year (we were already 1 year in development prior to fast-forwarding), our team finds a bug related to crashing when loading a week before the game is due for review by nintendo. somehow the sole programmer fixes that in just 3 hours and THE DAY IS SAVED!

game's submitted. nothing we can do now if anything else comes up. seems like we fixed everything!

anyways 9 years later speedrunners find 8 more game breaking glitches, 6 of which involve loading

assuming the game is based off of a popular license, we get emails constantly asking for the source code, source art assets, and concept art. we get about 17 emails asking for these each week, some with threats! (the "popular license" is spongebob. this would only happen with a spongebob game.)

thats all

[artechae]

Dryer Repair in Dubai: Keeping Your Clothing Fresh and Dry

There's no need to stress because Artechae is here to provide remarkable clothes dryer repair work services in Dubai. Whether you're facing issues with your dryer or browsing for "clothes dryer repair work near me," our skilled specialists are prepared to help you.

Why Choose Artechae for Clothes Dryer Repair Work? At Artechae, we understand that an effectively working dryer is essential for keeping your clothes fresh and dry. Here are some reasons we are the favored option for clothes dryer repair Dubai:

Experienced Technicians: Our service technicians have comprehensive experience in identifying and repairing all major brand names and models of dryers. They stay updated with the most recent industry patterns to make sure efficient and trusted repairs.

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Extensive Medical diagnosis: Our professionals carry out a comprehensive diagnosis to recognize the source of the problem. This enables us to offer precise solutions and guarantee long-lasting repair work.

Real Parts: We use only authentic replacement parts for clothes dryer repairs. By utilizing high-quality elements, we ensure the resilience and optimal efficiency of your dryer.

Transparent Rates: Our company believe in transparency when it concerns rates. Our group provides in advance pricing, so you understand the expense of the repair work prior to any work is done. There are no covert charges or surprises.

Customer Complete satisfaction: Your satisfaction is our leading concern. We make every effort to provide exceptional client service and guarantee that your clothes dryer is brought back to its complete performance.

Dryer Repair Work Services Offered At Artechae, we provide a thorough series of dryer repair work services. Our service technicians have the knowledge to deal with different clothes dryer issues. Here are some typical issues we attend to:

Clothes dryer Not Heating If your clothes dryer is running but not producing heat, it could be due to a malfunctioning heating aspect, thermostat, or thermal fuse. Our professionals will diagnose the concern and change the defective components to restore appropriate heating.

Poor Drying Performance Is your clothes dryer taking longer than normal to dry your clothing? This could be an indication of restricted airflow or a malfunctioning wetness sensor. Our professionals will clean the dryer vent and inspect the internal elements to improve drying performance.

Noisy Operation Weird noises coming from your dryer can suggest damaged drum rollers, belts, or bearings. Our professionals will examine and change any faulty elements to eliminate the sound and make sure smooth operation.

Electrical Issues Electrical problems can position safety threats and impact the functionality of your dryer. Our competent specialists can manage electrical repairs, such as fixing defective circuitry, replacing broken power cords, or attending to control panel concerns.

Mistake Codes Modern dryers typically show error codes when something fails. Our technicians are fluent in translating these error codes and can quickly diagnose and solve the underlying concerns.

Other Typical Problems In addition to the pointed out concerns, we also resolve other typical dryer problems, such as malfunctioning timers, damaged door switches, and faulty motors. No matter the issue, we have the knowledge to fix it.

There's no need to stress since Artechae is here to supply extraordinary dryer repair services in Dubai. Whether you're dealing with issues with your clothes dryer or browsing for "dryer repair near me," our experienced service technicians are prepared to assist you. In this short article, we will talk about the significance of dryer repair work, the services we offer, and offer responses to typical questions you might have.

At Artechae, we use a detailed range of dryer repair services. Our technicians have the knowledge to deal with numerous dryer problems.

[thehvacproviders]

HVAC Providers

HVAC Services North York are required for many different reasons. These services can boost the air top quality inside an office or home, and can likewise conserve power. A/c specialists are specialists at dealing with a range of various issues. They have the ability to collaborate with a range of various systems to help clients attain the goals that they set for themselves. Along with giving a/c services, these service providers can also aid people enhance the air quality in their houses. These services can include setting up whole-house humidifiers, digital air cleansers, germicidal lights, and thermostats. They can likewise perform duct cleansing to guarantee that air in your home is clean. Whether your a/c system needs a tune-up, or you require a whole brand-new setup, heating and cooling specialists are well equipped to deal with any type of situation. These experts likewise supply a/c consulting and style solutions. These professionals can help with estimating the capability of a building's cooling and heating system and choosing the appropriate parts. 

They will likewise develop the system making use of the most appropriate refrigerant and various elements to make sure that the building will fulfill its requirements. Lastly, they can make as well as install the system. The procedure of mounting a heating and cooling system calls for a structure license as well as code-compliance examinations. Whether you wish to lower your energy costs or maintain your residence comfy, routine a/c maintenance is the best way to guarantee that your heating and cooling system is in good shape. With regular maintenance, cooling and heating systems will certainly run more effectively, causing reduced energy bills. As well as, it's always better to stop expensive fixings by caring for these problems before they occur. Heating and cooling professionals have the ability to discover any issues with a HVAC system and also will repair any type of components that are damaged. Get to know more from HVAC Contractors Etobiocoke.

They will additionally repair the system until it works once more. Furthermore, several heating and cooling professionals will certainly also execute emergency repair work. This is since cooling and heating issues usually happen without caution, and therefore, need prompt attention. These issues are especially common throughout winter season as well as summer season, when they require to be taken care of asap. Apprenticeship programs are an additional terrific way to learn the cooling and heating industry. These programs are supplied by various neighborhood associations. Instructions usually last in between three as well as five years, and can aid you find a profession in HVAC. Instructions can be unpaid, however can bring about paid work if you can demonstrate your abilities and also strive. Usually, cooling and heating systems call for fixing or substitute, or they could need to be entirely changed. Indicators that your HVAC system requires fixing consist of inconsistent temperature levels throughout a structure, high energy bills, or weird sounds. 

On top of that, an a/c system may not switch on and also fail to supply warmth or air conditioning. If you are experiencing any of these indicators, call an expert a/c solution company today to obtain a professional viewpoint on your heating and cooling system's needs. Normal upkeep of your HVAC system can save you cash in the future. By having your system serviced consistently, you can avoid more costly repair services and substitutes. Additionally, routine upkeep will help your heating and cooling system run much more efficiently. If your system is not working correctly, it will certainly have to work tougher than it should, causing greater energy prices and greater utility costs.

For more valuable information, click here - https://www.wikihow.com/Choose-an-Air-Duct-Cleaning-Company

[solarwonux]

84.  “I can tell you’re stressed, let me fix that.”

roomate!junkook x f!reader

genre: smut

w.c: 3.2k

warnings: smut, fwb, Jungkook and his tattoos, tattooartist!jungkook, dom!jungkook if you squint, spiting, cum eating, oral sex (m receiving), a brief mention of voyeurism, briefly edited, also Jungkook is kind off fluffy, this couple is weird af y’all. 

note: hello, Idk what I did but I’ve done it lol. This is also a drabble that will eventually be part of a bigger story that I have half outlines lol, so I hope you enjoy this preview. I hope you like it please let me know your thoughts. Enjoy.xx

MASTERLIST || PROMPTS

Fourth time’s the charm.

Jungkook thought as he made his way to the front door of the tattoo shop. He pulled on the handle rather harshly making sure it was closed. Last week he had forgotten to lock the door, resulting in a drunk stranger walking in demanding a tattoo. Thankfully, the stranger’s intrusion triggered the security alarm, waking Jungkook in a fright. He ran down the steps of his apartment - the one located above the shop, half naked, carrying the bat you and him kept by the front door, his heart pounding against his chest. 

To say the least he was terrified. Scared that something would happen to the expensive tattooing equipment. Scared that Yoongi would fire him and therefore kick him out of the apartment, scared of something happening to you. His nerves subsided when he found the drunk stranger, passed out on the couch in the waiting room. 

The equipment, his job and you were all safe. 

Ever since then he had made it his mission, even writing it down on a highlighter yellow sticky note as a reminder; to check not once but four times if the front door was locked.

Jungkook sighed, giving the door one last pull, making it rattle against the locks, before deeming it locked. A fifth time wouldn’t hurt. 

He turns around, walking past the waiting room and the reception desk. He does one last look over, mumbling underneath his breath, checking to see if he had done everything he needed to do on his to-do list before turning off the lights. Quickly, he pushed aside the colorful paint splattered curtain that hid the front door to his apartment to the general public. He pressed in the code, waiting for the lock to click, going over the appointments or lack there off he had the following day. 

As of late, Jungkook, Yoongi, Jimin and Hoseok hadn’t had many clients come into the shop or request an appointment via instagram. He blames the rival shop that opened a few blocks away, and their stupid flash event, where they tattooed people for free. Of course they weren’t intricate pieces, small basic ones that you would pick out from the generic tattoo binder. But it still caused a dent in their clientele. 

That night you came home after work to find the four tattooists, on the couch, shooting glares at the shop door, with a large bottle of whisky in between them, and their man-size ego down in the slumps. The solution was simple, at least it was in your head. 

“Hold an event like theirs, maybe shirtless. I’ve only seen Jungkook’s abs because he loves walking around the apartment half naked but I’m sure you guys have a promising pair.” You suggested with a shrug, earning groans and complaints from the four artists on the couch. 

Yoongi stood up first, holding a hand out as an attempt to regain his balance from the sudden movement. “I’m not degrading myself or my art for clients. I’m also not giving away my talent for free.” He slurred, pointing an accusatory finger in your direction, “and my abs are better than Kooks.” 

“Alright, it was just a suggestion.” You held your hands up in defeat, taking a step back. “I’m going to bed, enjoy your pity party.” You smiled at them before making your way to the front door and disappearing. 

In hindsight, maybe you were right. Except for the half naked part, that’s dangerous and goes against all tattoo etiquette. But maybe holding a flash event and offering tattoo’s half off was not a bad idea. It would surely bring back their clients and make way for new ones. He would have to bring it up to his coworkers tonight when they came over.

Jungkook sighed, stopping at the top of the stairs facing the final door that led to his living room. He could hear the loud poppy music you were playing behind the door. Living with you wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be when Yoongi first offered you the vacant room. You were clean, organized and relatively respectful of personal space, but he hated your music. It was generic and just way too bouncy and happy, it was a good thing you gave a great head, if not he would’ve begged Yoongi to kick you out long ago. Before he got attached.

He wasn’t a dick he just thought with his dick ninety nine percent of the time and right now it was very much needing a stress release. Jungkook punched in the final code and opened his front door, revealing you in nothing but a tight pair of leggings and a sports bra, sweat droplets running down your body as you followed along with the exercise video on youtube. You looked very much like you would look after the two of you finished fucking and it made his cock stir in his jeans.

“Did you lock the door?” You said in between breaths, squatting down, finishing your last rep of squats. Jungkook bit his bottom lip, nodding in response. His hands were down by his sides, itching to squeeze your ass, to pull you against him and take you on the couch. It wouldn’t be out of pocket either. He knew you would give in the second he gave you that lust filled look of his. The one that was desperate and needy and practically begging for your touch.

You stopped pausing the video and turned to look at him, hands on your hips, chest heaving in a poor attempt to catch your breath. Jungkook knew he was fucked. “Are you sure you locked the door?” 

“Yes I checked five times tonight, have you had dinner?” He blinked rapidly, stuffing his hands in the pocket of his jeans hiding his hardening cock as best as he could.

“An hour ago.” You reassured, unpausing the workout video and positioning yourself in downward dog. 

Jungkook looked up at the ceiling, taking deep breaths following your haggard ones and counted to ten. He couldn’t take it anymore; he needed you. Needed your mouth around him until he was painting the back of your throat white. Counting to ten once wasn’t enough to calm him down. It wasn’t until he was halfway through his third recount that he felt your arms circle around his waist, a faint kiss left underneath his earlobe, that he knew he was done for. 

“I can tell you’re stressed, let me fix that.” You whisper leaving opening mouthed kisses down his neck tonguing the spot between his clavicle and neck. Jungkook’s eyes opened wide, his lips parting in an inaudible sigh. 

“Fuck baby please.” He caved, taking your head in his hands and pushing you away before leaning down and capturing your lips with his, in a wet, messy and needy kiss. He didn’t care that your lips were salty due to the sweat, they felt like heaven against his. 

You moaned into the kiss feeling the wet muscle of his tongue swiping against your bottom lip asking for access, in which you so rightfully gave him. His hand left your cheek and traveled down your neck until it was groping your boob through your thin sports bra. You pulled away to catch your breath for a few seconds, whimpering as his palm worked against your hardened nipple diligently before kissing him again, teeth clattering against one another. 

He pulled away pushing your sports bra up releasing your boobs, his index fingers and thumbs pinching your nipples and pulling on them gently. “Jungkook, w-what do you want?” You moan, closing your eyes as he rolled your nipples between his sweaty palms. Not only did Jungkook love touching your ass, he also loved playing with your boobs, claiming they were the best pair of boobs he had ever seen in his entire twenty six years of life. 

“Get on your knees baby girl, want to see your lips wrapped around me.” He mumbles against the crown of your head while he continues to knead at your boobs. 

You nod kissing the outline of the tattoo that was peeking against the neck of his white t-shirt. You send him a wink. A deep hum leaves his lips as you slowly kissed your way down his clothed chest, until you were face to face with his jean cladded bulge. You looked beautiful, your eyes glossy with need and your mouth watering as you couldn’t wait for the weight of his cock against your tongue.

He puts his hand on the back of your head and pushes your face against his jeans, he was so hard he could feel himself pulsing with need. It didn’t help that your fingers were walking up his thighs at an agonizing pace, while your mouth was now kissing him through the fabric, satisfied hums leaving your lips. “You’re so fucking hard Kook.” You pull away finally unbuttoning his jeans, your fingers brushing against him while you unzip his pants slowly.

“You’re such a tease baby girl, almost makes me think that you want to get punished tonight.” He tilts his head, pushing his hips into your hands as you palmed him over his boxers, while your other hand pushes his jeans down, leaving him in only his t-shirt and black boxers. 

You look up at him smirking, leaning in to kiss the tattoo decorating his thigh. You had gotten off on it many times before, it was your favorite pastime when you were needy and bored. “Maybe I do, take your shirt off.” You demanded, biting down on his skin making him jump. 

He grabs your face, squishing your cheeks making you face him, “Be careful I’m not feeling very nice today.” The sinister look behind his eyes makes you shudder, “open your mouth,” You smile, parting your lips sticking your tongue out before Jungkook leans over, a glob of spit hitting your tongue making you moan in delight. “What do you say?” His grip on your cheeks is hard. 

“Thank you sir.” You mewl, hooking your thumbs underneath the waistband of his boxers, wasting no time in freeing him. His cock was pretty, you had once told him that and it made him double over in laughter. No one had ever called his cock beautiful. Maybe big but never beautiful but you were a character and he should’ve expected a comment like that from you. 

“Good girl, now go on, this is all you’re getting tonight so you better enjoy it.” He wraps his hand around himself, spitting down onto his length using it to lube himself up before guiding it to your slightly parted lips. He knew you loved to watch him touch himself, sometimes if you weren’t home and he was needy he would sit on the couch fucking his hand knowing you would walk at any minute and help him finish the job. Or sit in front of him on the coffee table, legs spread wide touching yourself, moaning his name like his fingers were inside of you instead of yours. If Yoongi knew the dirty escapades that happened behind the walls of the apartment above his tattoo shop he would never step foot inside again. Thankfully he didn’t know, yet. 

You stick your tongue out and lick his head, rolling your nipples against the palm of your hands. The sight was award winning and Jungkook wanted to so badly get his camera out and capture the moment. To add to your shared collection. “So fucking sexy baby girl, always so good for me.” He tapped the head of his cock against your tongue before you close your lips around him, running your tongue underneath the head of his cock. 

Jungkook’s hand came behind your head, guiding you further down his cock sending a thrum of arousal up his spine. You hollow out your cheeks looking up at him with watering eyes. He moans, gripping your ponytail, giving you an experimental thrust making you gag around him. It sounded like the beginning of a beautiful melody, not the ones that belonged to your shitty pop music but the one that would keep you up at night lost in thought. 

“Fuck, your mouth feels like heaven.” He thrusts again, while you tug on the hem of his shirt. “Want to see me, look at my tattoos while I fuck your mouth?” He grunts, quickly discarding his shirt once he hears the needy moan that escapes your cock filled mouth. He knew his tattoos were your ultimate turn on. The reason you had gotten on your knees before him the first time after living together for a full year. He couldn’t say no, not when the only thought running through his mind was the stain your red lipstick would leave behind on his cock. 

Calm him a douchebag or compare him to a hormonal filled teenager, he didn’t care. He was a man after all. One that hadn’t had sex in two years after his last girlfriend cheated on him with his brother. 

Frankly, he needed an ego boost and you were there to give it to him, so he caved.

You pull off of him breathing heavily, a thread of saliva connects your lips to the head of your cock as you try to catch your breath. The sight was anything but underwhelming and enough to make him cum, but Jungkook hated his cum going to waste. He was healthy and young and it should go to good use.

 “I-I want you to use my mouth, please.” You croak before dragging your tongue up and down his shaft. “Want you to cum in my mouth sir.” Mumbling, you tease his head with the tip of your tongue making him groan. 

“Such a dirty mouth, it's a good thing I’m making good use out of it.” He says, a cocky smirk evident on his face. You nod happily, humming with please as you take him into your mouth again, sinking further, hollowing your cheeks moaning around him as you watch his face scrunch up in pleasure. His abs contract as he tries to control himself, at least until you give him the go ahead. And you do with a slight tap of your fingers against his thighs. 

He growls, thrusting his hips into your mouth, guiding your head up and down, gagging around him. His cock feels hot and heavy against your tongue, making both of you moan simultaneously. “Always letting me use you, what would our friends say if they walked in. You know I invited them over for drinks, right?” 

You whimper around him, closing your eyes at the thought of getting caught with him, balls deep down your throat. You hated that he had caught onto your slight voyeurism kink as it was only a matter of time where he threw all tattoo etiquette he knew and lived by out on the window and fucked you in his workshop, with only a thin curtain separating you and the rest of the shop. 

His thrusts get more desperate. His orgasm was approaching quickly as he twitched inside of your mouth. You dig your nails into his thighs, creating crescent moons as you feel your lungs start to give out. He mutters a low fuck followed by a quick apology before he pulls away. You gasp resting your hand against your chest, your eyes are filled with tears, bubbles of saliva painting your chin. Jungkook swears he’s never seen a sight as beautiful as this one and once again he’s cursing himself for not giving himself enough time to grab his camera. 

“Can you go more or do you need a break?” He whispers, eyes filled with concern while he caresses your cheek with his thumb. 

You shake your head, “Just give me time to regain my breath.” With a soft smile you leave a chaste kiss against the tattoo decorating his hip. It was part of a bigger piece, one that adorned the entire right side of his body, but nevertheless for some odd reason it was your favorite one. 

Jungkook nods, wrapping his hand around himself, muffled curses escaping his beautiful lips. “I’m so close, baby girl, just let me cum on your face.” He all but begs, gripping his cock tightly and thrusting his hips into his hand. 

You pout, a sound of protest leaves your swollen lips making Jungkook roll his eyes. “You can blow me again later, open your mouth baby.” He tucks his lips in between his lips, hips casting into his hand desperately. The pool between your legs grows, overflowing as you watch the mesmerizing sight in front of you. God, he was so fucking sexy. 

You open your mouth sticking your tongue. Jungkook throws his head back moaning your name in a sweet incantation, ropes of cum hitting your tongue and cheeks, while you moan along with him. 

Jungkook opens his eyes, riding out his orgasm, painting your chin watching as you drag your tongue into your mouth swallowing his salty substance, humming in satisfaction. “J-Jungkook.” The needy way you say his name makes his cock twitch and he has to keep himself from getting hard again. 

“You look so pretty baby girl, so fucked out and pretty, only for me.” He whispers, collecting the cum that was dripping down your chin with his thumb before bringing it up your lips, coating them. “So filthy too, thank you baby.” He leans down, running his tongue against your cheek collecting his cum before kissing you slowly and sensually, pushing his tongue inside of your mouth, coating the inside with his cum. 

Jungkook hates his cum going to waste. You whimper, snaking your arms around his neck pulling him closer, sucking on his tongue. He grins against your lips and moves away, chuckling as you continue to chase his lips with yours. “I need you Kookie.” You sigh, a pout forming on your swollen lips. “Please just fuck me, use me. I don’t care anymore.” You let out a sob, your pussy throbbing begging to be touched. 

He helps you up, circling his arms around your waist, nosing your hair as he sighs. He wants to give him, lead you to the couch, but the guys were going to be here at any minute and he couldn’t have time to please you the way he wanted to. 

“Let’s go shower, I promise the second the guys leave I’ll eat you out like a starved man.” He suggests, leaving a light kiss against your forehead. He didn’t feel as stressed as he was earlier, but that’s all thanks to you and how easy it was for him to get lost in your world.

“Is that a promise?” You tilt your head curiously, toying with the hair resting against the back of his neck.  

“I always keep promises, baby girl.”

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[hongjoongtrasher]

Goodbye Baby Goodbye ch.2

GENRE: Angst , smut, fluff

PAIRING: office worker!seonghwa x female reader, ceo!hongjoong x female reader, established relationship, lovers to ennemies.

OTHER: little brother!jongho, best friend!yunho, colleague!yeosang, roommate!san, office worker!mingi, manager!wooyoung.

WARNING: cheating, betrayal, manipulations, protected sex (BE SAFE KIDDOS)

Masterlist - Previous chapter

Synopsis:

It all began when your now 4 year-old boyfriend Seonghwa had an invitation to his entreprise’s party. Surprised to hear you could tag along, you met Kim Hongjoong, the CEO and close friend of Seonghwa. Rumored to be a playboy, the rich boss of your boyfriend is determined to add you to his conquests.

Indeed, Seonghwa wasn’t lying when he was saying KQ Enterprise was like an empire. You’ve never been there, and yet you were here, standing in front of the gigantic building, right after your boyfriend came to pick you up.

The preps for this evening have been like a war. Fortunately, San helped you a lot. He was a good adviser for your makeup and hairstyle. Since you had received such an expensive dress from your boyfriend’s boss, you couldn’t let the rest being down. Of course, when you called Seonghwa in a intense panic, talking about the dress you got from Mr. Kim, he didn’t seem surprised.

« Oh, actually I talked to him about the dress code, and he figured out you may be hadn’t an outfit for this occasion. But I swear I didn’t ask anything from him. »

You were still bewildered after his explanation, because it didn’t explain how he got your name and address. But Seonghwa only said:

« Mr. Kim is a man full of resources Y/N. He’s the CEO at the head of an empire, so it’s not really surprising he’d found your personal informations. But don’t worry, he won’t do anything armful to you. »

Still, you weren’t really happy with the fact your boyfriend’s CEO could find your personal infos so easily.

« Y/N…Just accept this gift. I’m sure he didn’t want to upset you, just pleasing you, in a certain way. »

« Fine, I won’t talk about it from now on » you grumbled into your phone. « But I don’t want any of those things in the future. »

And the D-day came. San had left you right after you were done, his own boyfriend came to pick him up as well. It was the first time you were meeting Wooyoung. He seemed to be a nice guy and you had this sort of feeling of knowing him for a long time even though it was the first time you were meeting. While San was still in the bathroom, Wooyoung explained to you his position in KQ Enterprise. He was the team manager of the economic team whereas Seonghwa was a manager into the CEO personal team. You were impressed by how high they were into this enterprise but Wooyoung smirked and mischievously answered:

« Because KQ Ent is mainly composed of young people. The Boss is privileging youth over oldies who will soon retire. »

San soon came to see you both, signalling his boyfriend he was ready. Wooyoung smiled at the other male who was really handsome tonight. You didn’t know San could be this hot in this all black tuxedo and hair pulled back. You were so used to see him in sweat pants and shirts with messy hair. Such a loss for the women population you had thought at this moment.

« Weeeell, I’m ready, so we’ll go ahead Y/N, see you there ! ~ » said San with a large smile which made a weird difference from his look.

You nodded and waved to the boys. Only five minutes after, Seonghwa knocked at your door. You came to open the door, trying not to step on the expensive shiny dress you were wearing. When you opened the door, you had found a subjugated Seonghwa, his mouth opened as soon as his eyes landed on your elegant figure. But he was so handsome as well. Wearing a dark blue tuxedo with a white shirt, a silky pocket tissue on his perfect blazer. His dark hair were neatly styled by some wax, and you could smell his cologne from here. You felt so lucky at this moment to have him as your boyfriend.

« You’re gorgeous » he only whispered after a moment, which made you blush.

« T-Thanks. San helped me to..mh be prepared » you mumbled back shyly, not used to wear expensive stuffs.

« You ready ? » he asked softly.

« I just have to grab some things and put my shoes and we’re good to go. »

You wearing heels was a thing to watch. Fortunately, the most suitable pair you had was almost brand new. You had bought them with your first pay check from your part time job, but soon gave up when you tried to keep them more than a whole day. You also had a classic white blazer and a small pouch that Seonghwa had gifted to you for your second couple anniversary.

« Hwa…What should I do ? I’m so nervous » you shakily said when he came to you after parking his car.

You felt his hand falling on your back as he made sure you were facing him. His eyes searched for yours as he said firmly and yet so sweetly:

« Everything’s gonna be alright Y/N. I’ll be by your side. »

His other hand gently stroke your cheek as you nodded, trying to repress your anxiety. Seonghwa took your hand to pass it around his arm. And then, you both entered the giant building where security guards were controlling the entry. They didn’t ask your name but bowed their head at your boyfriend, letting you pass easily while shouting : « Good evening sir ! »

For a second you thought being in a drama, it felt so unreal that you almost lost your nervousness. Seonghwa leaded you calmly to the reception hall, where you could already hear people chatting and the classy jazz music in the background.

« Oh my God » you repeated to yourself, squeezing Seonghwa’s arm tightly to which he responded by squeezing your hand with his free one.

The huge hall was crowded with a lot of people, most of them were employees here. You just kinda followed Seonghwa, politely greeting people he was saying « Good evening » etc. You glanced around you furtively, small standing tables were on display for everyone to get some appetizer even waiters were going through the crowd with silver trays with champagne glasses. You got one from Seonghwa. You weren’t usually drinking, or more you weren’t a good drinker, but you were feeling like drinking right now to forget your tension. As Seonghwa was talking to another manager, suddenly everything stopped and most of the others’ eyes were all directed in one direction.

A rather small man had entered the huge hall, platinum hair pulled back but with a sharp glance arrived. Even if you were at the other side of the room, you could feel his obvious charisma as he made his way through the mike stand near the small pair of musicians. You noticed his dark winey red tuxedo, perfectly fitting his body. You almost shivered when Seonghwa leaned to your ear to whisper: « It’s CEO Kim. »

Kim Hongjoong, the brilliant CEO of KQ Enterprise. He was known to be really young to be the owner of such a company, but his youth wasn’t a hurdle to rule over his company with an iron handle. The hall had gone completely silent, waiting for the host of this party to talk. He cleared his throat before offering a smug smile to the assembly, his eyes scanning the large hall.

« Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the annual party of KQ Enterprise. Tonight, is the night where we are celebrating our achievement for the past goals we were keeping in sight. I am well aware that I maybe asked for a considerable amount of efforts during those past months, but this is thanks to your hard work, perseverance and audacity that we can proudly announce that KQ Enterprise will add the brand new branch in the US market… »

A salvation of applauses erupted in the huge hall, Seonghwa clapping enthusiastically. You were a bit confused but followed the move, fairly impressed by his speech. But he wasn’t done yet.

« As you also know, I may be the CEO, but everything wouldn’t be possible without my dear sister, Hyewon - once again people applauded towards a young woman who was standing at the corner of the stage, humbly bowing her head at her brother’s words- who always find the good words to guide me. I received a lot of praises from you all tonight, but I am not the only one to be thanked tonight. You all deserve to be thanked for your hard work, and be proud to belong to our enterprise. Thank you »

A standing ovation exploded as the blonde exited the stage, bowing slightly to some people who were still applauding him.

Seonghwa looked so proud at the moment that you turned to him to congratulate him as well. « You’re amazing, I’m proud of you » you said as he chuckled in shyness. « I’m not that amazing, I’m just doing my work »

Soon the classic music returned and people began to chat between each other’s again. You gazed to the next standing table to see San with Wooyoung, champagne glass in one hand. Your roommate noticed you and made sure to lift his glass to you, which you imitated for him. After a moment, you began to think this party wasn’t so bad, until you heard the same voice earlier from the mike addressing to your boyfriend.

« Seonghwa, you came ! »

You turned quickly to see that CEO Kim was here, giving your boyfriend a brotherly embrace, his hand tapping his back as Seonghwa looked slightly surprised but soon gained his composure again. You felt your body froze suddenly.

« Congratulations, Mr. Kim » he said genuinely happy for his boss.

« I told you already to call me Hongjoong » said the blonde with a wide smile, showing his white teeth.

Then his dark eyes soon switched to your persona. You quickly bowed to your boyfriend’s boss, feeling his gaze scanning your whole body.

« You must be Y/N…I’m glad to see the dress I’ve sent you fit you so well. Not to say, you’re beautiful »

You straighten up to mumble awkward words, but the blonde took your hand to do a hand kiss, making your heart flutter.

« I…It’s nice to meet you Mr. Kim, and you shouldn’t have for the dress » you quickly said in a choked voice, making him laugh.

« It’s nothing, it was my pleasure. I hope you will keep it. »

His eyes fixed yours, making you drown into their intensity, as he softly let your hand goes. You heard your boyfriend’s greeting someone else who was no one but Hongjoong’s sister. Seeing her close, you could tell she was gorgeous. Beauty was running into the family genes you thought as your gaze hadn’t left Hongjoong’s figure.

« Hyewon, this is Seonghwa, my manager into my team, and his girlfriend, Y/N »

Hyewon smiled at Seonghwa, bowing her head slightly and to you as well.

« It’s nice to meet you. I heard a lot from my brother about you Seonghwa. »

You looked at your boyfriend who seemed fluttered by her. You had no doubt about your boyfriend’s work, and you felt proud for him. But you soon felt like about to faint, not really knowing how to follow the conversation. Unless you excused you politely to join San’s table.

« Hey, how is it going Cinderella ? » he asked you teasingly.

« Stop it » you groaned lowly once you were next to him. « Wooyoung ? »

« Went to the bathroom » answered your friend, taking a sip to his glass. « You met him right ? »

San was indeed talking about Hongjoong, and you nodded, also taking a sip of your golden liquid.

« Yeah…He…He seems nice but, he has such an aura…so charismatic » you told San openly.

« No wonder, have you heard his speech earlier ? He probably is our age, but act like a king » San chuckled before Wooyoung came back.

« Everything’s good for you Y/N ? » asked your roommate’s boyfriend, probably worried not to see Seonghwa by your side.

You nodded in confirmation as you nudged your chin behind you where Hongjoong was still talking to your boyfriend with her sister.

« He’s incredible right ? » asked Wooyoung enthusiastically.

« Yes, indeed, he’s a genius in a sense » you hummed.

« Thank you »

You gasped when you heard again Hongjoong’s voice behind your back, making you turn quickly to face him. You’ve turned so fast that you almost stripped on your dress, Hongjoong carefully stretched his arm to hold you back if you were falling. But fortunately you didn’t.

« Wow, be careful, I didn’t mean to scare you. I apologize. »

« No no, it’s fine, I’m the one who should apologize haha » you nervously croaked back, making him slightly smirk.

Wooyoung and San bowed to the impromptu visitor. Hongjoong greeted them back but it was obvious he wanted to talk to you alone, so Wooyoung gently dragged your boyfriend away, pretexting the appetizer were better at another table. Once you were alone with Hongjoong, you didn’t dare to look at him in the eyes, to shy to do it as you could feel his piercing gaze on you.

« Are you enjoying your night ? » he asked softly, his hand gently turning a darker liquid on a glass.

« Yes, absolutely, it’s…wonderful. » you answered, trying to appear as calm as you wanted.

« I’m glad you like it. I don’t like sort of …formal gathering, but Hyewon says it’s important for the employees and she’s right. »

His eyes hadn’t left you from the beginning of this conversation.

« Seonghwa is lucky to have you by his side » he commented, making you surprised to ear this from him.

After all, he was the CEO, the almighty here. He could have any woman he wanted, anything could be his in a flash. But seeing one of his close friend having such a cute girlfriend like you made him slightly jealous. Cute and beautiful. He was subjugated by your beauty as soon as his eyes landed on you.

« I’m the one who is more lucky to have him » you explained in a shy smug smile. « He is very capable in every thing. »

« Indeed…I agree » hummed Hongjoong, finally departing his eyes from you to see his sister still talking with your boyfriend.

The night went well, since Seonghwa came to find you not a long after with San and Wooyoung, Hongjoong already had left since he had more people to talk with. You were somehow in a daze. Talking to Hongjoong kind of relieved your stress but at the same time left a deep impression on you.

« Are you alright baby ? » whispered Seonghwa to your ear since your cheeks were bright red.

« I’m fine ! »

« It’s because she’s drinking her fourth glass of champagne ~ » teased San while you gave him a deathly glare.

Seonghwa frowned at your roommate’s words.

« Y/N, you know you cannot handle alcohol very well »

He wasn’t angry or anything, just worried about your current state. Actually you weren’t that drunk, just enough to be dizzy and mostly feeling the urge to go to the bathroom. You just smirked and said:

« Let me go to the bathroom, and I’ll be back. »

« We should go after. » softly said Seonghwa before watching you leave the hall.

It would be a lie to say you were walking straight, or at least in your head you were. But while you were gone into the hallway, you went to the bathroom to relief yourself and also try to refresh your face. Once you were done, you came out from the bathroom, expecting to see people, but no one was here. The silent corridor made you uncomfortable so you decided to go back to your boyfriend until you heard footsteps coming right at you. You froze when you saw Hongjoong in front of you. He looked a bit tired, but his elegant face was still expressing the same charisma as earlier. He looked up to see you and a slight smirk appeared on his face.

« Oh…isn’t it Y/N ? Are you alright ? » he asked politely.

« I…I’m doing fine, thank you sir. » you answered quietly, the ambient silence making the conversation awkward since there wasn’t music as before or people to break it.

He arched a brow at your answer as he took a step closer, now facing you. He was so close that you could smell his cologne. Suddenly, you wanted to leave right now, your heart pounding hard into your chest.

« Really ? You look a bit red. Did you drink a lot ? » his voice was soft, but somehow different.

« I maybe had too much champagne » you chuckled nervously, trying to avoid his gaze.

He didn’t answer, instead his gaze was gauging your face. God, you were so pretty. It would be difficult to deny he tried to see you each time he was near you, but he couldn’t due to others circumstances. He really like how you look gorgeous into this dress he had bought for you.

« You’re gorgeous …You know that ? »

His remarks make you gulp, your eyes slightly looking up to see his, still fixed on you, his hands in his pocket.

« T-Thank you. I’m really grateful for the dress you’ve gifted me.»

He took a moment of silence before the corner of his lips went up.

« Are you ? Well, will you do me a favour ? » he asked, still contemplating your gorgeous, so tempted to do a dangerous move.

You were kind of puzzled. A favour ? What possibly could you do for a man who had almost everything ? You slowly nodded, unsure of what you just agreed to do if you could.

« Just stay still » he said faintly.

It happened very fast. Even before you could realise, Hongjoong had you pinned on the wall nearby, his lips crashed on yours for a heated kiss. In shock, you didn’t react fast as one of his hand groped your thigh firmly. Your body was frozen, but your brain soon snapped, making you push the man who was kissing you.

« S..Stop ! What do you think you are doing right now ?! » you yelled, panting as if you’d just ran a marathon.

Your boyfriend’s boss just kissed you while he clearly knew who your boyfriend was. Astonishment soon left place for anger. Hongjoong dark eyes glanced at you with a devilish tint. You felt like a pray, caged by the predator who could eat you in a second and you hated that feeling.

« Somehow, I couldn’t help it. I wanted to kiss you as soon as I saw you. » he explained in a nonchalant tone. « Of course I know, you have Seonghwa and everything, but…You must have heard about it. I love women, and when I want something, I get it. »

His words made you shiver in horror. What kind of man could do this without any guilt ?? It was enough for you, that a neat and loud sound of a slap echoed in the empty hallway.

« You’re crazy. » you just muttered after you faced Hongjoong’s, head turned on his right as he just got slapped.

Without any words, you hurried to join your boyfriend, horrified by what happen. But you also realised you couldn’t say anything to him. You could, but it wouldn’t be a good option for him. You knew how close they were, but knowing this, he would surely fight against his boss and be fired within the next days. That’s why you decided to take the best normal face you could have and found Seonghwa at the entrance of the hall.

« Are you alright Y/N ? I almost thought something happened. » Seonghwa asked in a worried tone.

« N…No everything’s alright. I just…took time in the bathroom, sorry. » you muttered, lowering your head. You couldn’t watch him in the eyes at this moment.

Seonghwa looked also puzzled, noticing your cheeks were abnormally red. He thought it was because of the alcohol so he didn’t try to ask for more.

« Let’s go home. » he said, his hand gently pushing you by the back towards the exit.

You nodded maybe too fast, but at least he wasn’t suspicious of anything.

« What about San ? » you asked while you exited the place to your relief.

« Wooyoung drove him home too. He was quite…tipsy. » said Seonghwa next to you.

You appreciated the fresh air brushing your face, happy to head your roommate would be here once you would be home.

The trip back to your home happened in silence, your head dropped on the head back of your seat, just watching the lights and neon passing by your eyes.

« So…Did you like it ? » asked suddenly Seonghwa, making your heart dropped in a second.

« W-What ? »

« The party » he said, his eyes on the road.

« Oh…It was alright I guess…But I don’t think I would go again » you muttered, the reason was pretty clear for you but your boyfriend could think another reason.

« Sorry, I know it made you uncomfortable. Next time I won’t force you to go. »

« No it’s alright, it was fine…It’s just that …it’s a different world to me » you forced a smile for him, your hand gently pressing his shoulder.

Soon, you arrived in front of your building. Seonghwa made sure to get you safely to your door.

« Thank you for tonight » he said lowly, maybe because it was late and didn’t want to wake anyone asleep. « You did well, I’m proud of you »

His praise made you smiled genuinely while you tried to erase the flash of Hongjoong kissing you.

« I’m glad…Thank you for tonight. »

Seonghwa’s warm hands gently cupped your face, pulling you to him for a sweet kiss. This time you were relaxed, because it was him. Because his lips were the only ones which had rights to kiss you and no one else. But why your head kept sending you back to Hongjoong’s lips feeling ?

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[hopeshoodie]

go off in those tags mama

Ok no but I want a dedicated post to talk about characterization in cmm because as much as I’m actually enjoying playing it, the characters are clearly written by different writers.

Or at least, they’ve done that thing where a show goes on for too long and the characters become caricatures of their most extreme traits in the later seasons. These are all my interpretations of the S2 characters, feel free to check me or share yours in the reblogs or replies-

Lucas: They straight up made him a prick, and not even in a logical way. Lucas was a little pretentious in S2 (using a varied vocabulary, being picky about how he presented himself, preferring expensive drinks, etc) but he made a clear effort to skip over it and be polite to everyone. But in CMM he straight up is rude to people, threatening to leave and shutting jokes down. Honestly, that would be more in-character for Rahim to do, because Lucas never openly disliked the humor of other islanders like Rahim did. And you’re telling me that the dude who was established as wealthy doesn’t know what octopus looks like, doesn’t like horses? It’s fine if he does, but no one addressed the dissonance between it and his personality. I’m fine with Lucas being a little gruff with anyone, but he’s not doing it in a nuanced or in-character way.

Priya: Of all the islanders, her and Rahim are the most out of character imo. Priya was established in S2 to be a super interesting character- on her face she’s pretty basic, enjoying boy bands and perfumes and basic chat. She’s very confident and states multiple times that she’s mature, despite doing a lot of immature things when her feelings get hurt. She’s careless with other people’s feelings and likes being pursued more than she likes being intimate. She had taste (according to the other islanders), she was a little bit goofy. We see like… None of that in CMM. In fact we actually see the opposite- they took her affiliation with sunflowers, which she explained as deeply meaningful, and made it a throwaway joke about asking people to wear “only sunflower print” to her funeral. Priya would die in S2 before wearing sunflower print- all of her clothing is un-patterned and she clearly cares about fashion. They stripped every personality trait from her and replaced it with horny.

And that’s the other thing- I’ve wanted Priya as an LI for a year. We wanted her to be the softer sapphic option to contrast Marisol’s slowburn angsty route. But I replayed the wedding episode yesterday, they didn’t edit it to make Priya seem like she was questioning. Instead, they just made her 180 on her sexuality in cmm and made every other line she says just her lusting after MC. It would’ve been so easy to fix, too. Just tone down her “I’ve been thinking about you” every line to be a couple of her being super excited to see MC. Maybe they kiss once in the bedroom, but we cannot have her be ready to commit to dating MC by episode two. It just doesn’t make sense. And the way the justified it by having her say ‘lol didn’t you notice how I always complimented you, I was attracted to you’ felt like a slap in the face rather than a callback. Like Fusebox was saying ‘lol we queer-coded her but then made her straight, remember that?’. I just… Hire a sapphic writer, please. I would believe Priya examined her sexuality after the villa or even after the wedding, but the way she talks about it isn’t nearly conflicted or in depth enough to make sense. Yes, this spinoff is supposed to be fan service, but… It’s a yikes from me.

Gary: They just straight up made Gary a bumbling idiot in cmm. Yes Gary was slower on the uptake than other islanders in S2- he didn’t recognize jokes right away and took things too literally- but he wasn’t outwardly stupid. In fact, two different times we saw him get quiet and try not to admit it when he didn’t understand things. And even then, he always laughed it off. In cmm he’s just brashly stupid in a way that’s not really funny or endearing (to me).

Rahim: This one bothers me the most because I love Rahim so much and because no one’s talking about it? Several people say things to the effect of ‘that’s just our crazy Rahim LOL’, but??? Was he ever established as the unpredictable wildcard in S2?? The only thing I can think of is that he surprised everyone by spending lots of money on dates (but that’s in-line with his character because he’s super awkward until he’s in love and then he’s SUPER romantic), but other than that he was literally never an endearingly unpredictable sort. Everyone agrees the horse thing was weird, but a lot of his other dialogue has this ‘lmao I’m craaazy’ vibe. Rahim was always quieter, avoidant of conflict, nerdy, and awkward. You could argue that his awkwardness goes away as you get to know him, but even if you were with him from day 1 in S2 he never gets this outspoken. Plus he was picky and judgmental in S2, but we see him in cmm just be super comfortable and supportive of everyone else. I love that Rahim’s here, but he’s so ooc he might as well be Henrik if they wanted a ‘goofy, outgoing, friendly’ character on the cast.

Noah: This is the only change that I really liked, but clearly we have to acknowledge that Noah is way more forward. I believe this change, because he’s had time to self-reflect and also he’s not on tv being scrutinized this time. It makes sense for him to be more flirtatious now that he knows everyone and is more comfortable, especially if he and MC are happily married.

I feel like Bobby, Marisol, Chelsea, and Lottie are all pretty in character, but maybe that’s because they just haven’t had a lot of lines yet. And Rahim/Priya are really the only characters that bother me. Don’t confuse my being critical of the writing with the series being bad- it’s not!!