#Which has been so hard for me both because i developed this hyper independence cause trust issues and no self-worth

[rosepetals-v]

Never mind, I'm reading rn.

[zyafics]

PLAY FAKE | part three

MASTERLIST (series) | Rafe Cameron x Female Reader .ᐟ

Summary — When Rafe needs to secure a girlfriend for his father to see him as a viable candidate for Cameron Development, he enlists the help of a bartender who wants nothing to do with him.

Content — 18+, smut, angst, depictions of jealousy + aggression, emotional turmoil, mild descriptions of violence, and usage of drugs. Reader is hyper-independent, a people-pleaser, a smart mouth, stands on business, and mysterious past. Rafe is insecure, possessive, asshole, and has mood swings.

The first 'date' is going to be at the country club.

You find it ironic that your first date, in general, is going to be a fake one. Truly, that sets up the rest of your love life. While you never had a steady boyfriend—simply because you don't have time or they couldn't stand that you didn't have time for them—you have fooled around before. You had flings. You had needs and they were met.

Now, funnily enough, so is your lack of dating experience.

You're closing Sailor early today. You hate that you had to but it was the only compromise you had with Rafe. He wanted to pick you up at your house, which you immediately rejected, and you wanted to meet him at the country club. Neither of you would settle, stubbornly, that Rafe decided it would be easier if he picked you up from work and let you get ready at Tannyhill.

As you're locking up the front, you hear a distinct voice calling out your name. Looking over your shoulder, you spot Pope and JJ approaching you, one offering a friendly wave while the blond tips his chin in greeting.

"Hey," Pope says, glancing at your locked doors. "You locking up early?"

"Yeah," you nod, dropping your keys into your bag. "I have to go somewhere."

"I never thought I'd live to see the day," JJ remarks, causing you to chuckle. You grew up with Pope and JJ, despite being a couple of years older, simply because they worked and live near you in The Cut. Pope, specifically, lives just a couple of houses down from yours—having helped you on several occasions with your siblings when you couldn't find a babysitter in time. "Does this mean you're finally getting a life?"

You roll your eyes at the blond. "I have a life."

"Sorry, let me rephrase that," he teases. "A life outside of bartending."

You cross your arms. "You don't seem to be complaining when I give you free booze."

JJ laughs, raising up both hands in surrender. "My bad. I didn't say shit."

Pope rolls his eyes, elbowing his best friend, before turning back to you. His expression is friendly. "Maybe this means you're free to attend some parties."

The idea sparks a reminder in JJ's eyes. "Oh, shit, that's right! We're about to head over to The Boneyard for a kegger. Wanna join?"

It's been a while since you've been to a Pogue party. The idea sounds appealing, but you had other priorities. "Sorry, boys, I got somewhere else I gotta be."

Pope shifts his gaze to the bag in your arms. "Yeah, what's that? Are you planning on running away?"

You chuckle softly. "Nope, not yet. I just have to get ready for an event and these are my new clothes."

JJ raises a brow, flicking his gaze down to the bag for a second. "Can we see?"

You flip the blond off and he laughs. Pope is about to add something else, when a car honks behind you. It must be Rafe. Without glancing behind, you declare that you need to head out and Pope nods, dragging his best friend off the docks with a farewell. When you reach the car parked near the back of the lot, the one that screams money, you get in.

Sliding into the passenger seat, you set the bag on your lap and buckle your seatbelt. Ready to go, but the car hasn't moved. When you turn your head, you see Rafe watching you with a slighted jaw.

"What?"

"What's that all about?" His voice is sharp.

"What?" You repeat, not understanding where the tone is coming from.

"Maybank and Heyward," his expression is hard and unreadable. "What were they talkin' to you about?"

"Nothing," you answer, shifting in your seat, but Rafe doesn't appear pleased. You sigh. "It was just about a party. They always invite me on the off-chance I'll go."

It takes him a beat before he responds.

"You party with them a lot?"

"No, that's why they invite me," you snap, getting a little agitated by the interrogation. "Can we go now? I still have to get ready."

Rafe looks like he wants to probe more, but thankfully, he didn't. He reverses the car out of the parking lot and takes you down the road to Tannyhill, while you admire the drive. You can't believe how split Outer Banks is—how the change in scenery goes from fishery and unkempt lawns to perfectly-manicured yards and a boat per house.

The ride is quiet. When he pulls up to the estate, the largest mansion on the island, you can't seem to stop the awe from flooding your vision. It truly is a sight. You've been here once, a couple of years ago, and the admiration still hasn't worn off. If anything, now older, it amplifies it.

When Rafe turns off the car, he exits from the vehicle in a swift motion. You half-expected him to play the boyfriend act and help you with your bags, but instead, he goes straight into the house. Asshole. You roll your eyes, unbuckling and following after him, meeting one step of his with twice of yours.

"Y'know, a boyfriend would’ve opened the door for me." You declare, following him up the stairs.

"Good to know," he sneers, "but I'm not paying to give you the boyfriend experience, am I?"

He cuts a look behind him to catch your expression and you flip him off, causing a smug look to lift at his face. When he reaches his bedroom door, he cracks it open for you to enter through.

Stepping inside, you noticed how clean it is. Then, you realized, of course it would be. Rafe probably has maids coming in every day to make it spotless for the crowned prince. You were just used to leaving your room a mess in the mornings that your Pogue expectations rolled over to him.

"You can use my bathroom." He points to the closed door on the other side of his room. You follow the voice to find him opening his closet, his back turned to you, searching for his own attire. Without a word, you nod, heading to the ensuite as you set your bags on the ground and unravel them on the sink counter.

You didn't own many fancy clothes. You never needed them and it wasn't affordable. However, you brought the most expensive thing you own. It was nothing in comparison to the luxuries in Rafe's closet, but it was enough. A white cocktail dress that cuts mid-thigh—it was what you wore for your high school graduation.

You put it on before you got ready, and when you did, it was tighter and shorter than you remember. You did gain some weight. You are also older. You try not to let the sentiment pass through you too much—that you're almost twenty-two but in the same place you were when you were eighteen.

You push the thoughts away.

You also push the reason for why you're here away too.

With a deep breath, you start on your makeup. You curl your hair. You even sprayed a little bit of the perfume that your parents got you as a birthday gift a long time ago. It's a bit faint, the smell has faded away from age, but it still smells like that morning when you opened the box, finding a present in your hands, for the first time in a long time.

You push those away too.

Stepping out, you find Rafe dressed. In a tailored dark blue suit, he sits on the edge of his mattress, his hands messing with his phone. Even you have to admit, he cleaned up nicely. His dress shirt spans perfectly across the broad of his shoulders, his biceps filling out the arms, and the form-fitting material latches onto his chest. He even styled his hair—gelled back but loose; a stark contrast to the rundown and casual look he sports upon entering your bars and parties.

The low click of your heels against the marble floor alerts him of your presence.

His gaze lifts to meet your face, before trailing down your body to take you in. You notice his Adam's apple slightly bobs and you wonder if it's because you're a little underdressed compared to him.

"Are you done?" He asks stiffly, clearing his throat and shifting his eyes away. You walk out of his bathroom completely, stopping in front of his closet mirror to apply the finishing touches of your makeup.

When you're finished, you turn back around and strike a small pose for him. "What do you think?"

"You look... good." He settles and you roll your eyes. Of course that's the only compliment he can come up with. You expect nothing less.

"You should expand your vocabulary and give better compliments to your girlfriend," you tease, stepping closer to him. His legs parts slightly, almost inviting you in. "Or else people might assume you aren't giving them enough."

He scoffs. "You look fuckable. Is that better?"

Your nose wrinkles. "Awful. 0/10."

He chuckles, looking to the floor, but his laugh is tense. You glance down, noticing the way his shoulders are rigid and his posture is straight as a rod, and realization strikes you. Just as you're nervous, so is Rafe.

You step forward, in between the space of his legs, and place a delicate hand on his shoulders. He looks up to you. "You good?" You ask gently.

"I'm fine." He quickly brushes off, pushing away from your touch. "I'm just ready to get this shit over with. I hate business dinners."

"Spoken by someone who wants to get in said business." You retort, turning around to grab your purse off his dresser, when suddenly, you feel Rafe grabs your exposed thigh, holding you in place between him.

You turn back, raising a confused brow.

"Give me a kiss."

This request startles you. "Why?"

His eyes study your face before shrugging. "Practice."

You can't help but laugh a little. It truly is your go-to response to everything, and you notice his shoulders slightly unwind at the sound. "Why? Are you a bad kisser?"

He rolls his eyes, and with one strong tug, you fall into his open lap. His hand cups your cheek, and without another word, he kisses you. Softly, at first, as if he's trying to get used to the feel of your lips against his, before deepening it. You can't help but let out a content sigh, enjoying the feeling.

When he slightly pulls away, he murmurs against your lips. "Someone needs to do something about that mouth of yours."

You scoff, placing both arms on either side of his shoulders and looping it around his neck, pulling back to get a better look of his face. His eyes are unreadable and his lips are faintly red from the shade of your lipstick.

"Isn't that supposed to be your job?" You tease, tilting your head to the side. "Or should I find another fake boyfriend to put me in my place?"

His expression goes hard. This time, he leans forward and captures your lips against him, in a firmer, more possessive manner. It's everything that accumulated so far—from seeing you with Maybank and Heyward outside the docks to the little dress-up you did specifically for him.

It's the idea of you, in his lap, knowing for the next couple of hours, you're his.

You only pull away to catch a breath, giggling at the sight of your lipstick smeared over his face. Running the pad of your thumb over his mouth, you attempt to wipe away the cosmetic product with no avail.

“You messed up my makeup,” you jokingly pout, rising from his lap. His touch loosens around you, but with great reluctance. When you go to the bathroom to take a paper towel, you return to wipe the remnant of your kisses off of Rafe.

"I'll buy you a new one." He says as you wipe away the last of it.

You roll your eyes at the suggestion. "No need." You declare, returning to his closet mirror to reapply your lipstick and fix the smudges.

He says nothing in return. His gaze follows your every move. It isn't until you're done, really done, that you step in front of him and hold out your hand for Rafe to take.

"Come on, boyfriend," you say the title with a tease. "Time to play house."

—

When you arrive at the country club, your heart stutters in your chest. It's a bit intimidating, the glory of Fight Eight and all their Kooks, pinned down to this exclusive membership to say you made it. You wonder, for a brief moment, if you'll ever get there.

But, then you remember, for the next couple of hours, you'll pretend you did.

You don't know if Rafe allowed you a few minutes in the car to get ready or if he needed it himself, but you take the scraps. When the moment was over, he stepped out and crossed over to the passenger side to open your door.

You smile at the gesture, allowing yourself to be led out of the car by his hand. When he closes the door behind you, you tilt your head up at him. "Thought boyfriend acts were below you?"

"Had to play the part in front of these people, didn’t I?"

You remember where you are and the smile fades out. You are no longer in the confines of your bar nor his desolated mansion. It's you, with people watching, with people reporting, with his father within proximity. Every decision, in the next couple of hours, is an act.

A falsity.

Remember that.

You silently nod as he places his arm around your waist, planting a soft kiss on the side of your forehead, as he leads you towards the entrance. There were waitstaff attending there, and when you approach close enough, they open the double doors. Rafe skips past them without a single acknowledgement, but you mumble a thank you in their direction, before being whisked away to the setting.

Your eyes admire the details. The decorations hung against the walls and railings of the place, the bouquets set on every corner, the streams of crystal chandeliers dangling above you in every room. It's glorious.

"They have tulips," you whisper to Rafe, who follows your gaze to the centerpiece in front of the stairwell. "It's not even in season."

"We're Kooks, sweetheart," he says with a scoff, an air of arrogance. "If we want something, we get it."

You say nothing as you scan the rest of the room, preparing yourself for the evening. Rafe and you went through most of the details about your arrangement, how you two got together, when it happened, and the minor sentiments to make it seem real. You believe you're prepared enough.

"Ready to meet my dad, sweetheart?" Rafe mumbles into your ear, his breath hot against your neck. You nod.

"As ready as I'll ever be, darling."

Rafe chuckles at the nickname you picked, but you figured it would play the part. Pretend there's some tenderness between the two of you. You may not have been given instructions on how to be a girlfriend, but you imagine it would be something cheesy. Sweet. A little bit unrealistic.

Just like this.

Rafe pulls you towards the crowd. While caterers and waiters waltz across the room in a coordinated dance, you couldn't help but search for the bartenders. Of who they booked this evening. You wonder, for a moment, if you were even on their radar.

A murmur of conversations starts to fade out as you arrive and your fingers squeeze Rafe's hand. Ward was the last to acknowledge your presence, his eyes observing you and trailing down to the intertwined hands of you and his eldest son.

"Dad," Rafe greets, his voice filled with proper and posh, you wonder if this was the same person you were talking to moments ago. "I'd like you to meet my girlfriend."

He introduces your name to the crowd and Ward stares in amazement, if not, with a little bit of disbelief. His eyes left his son, tracing you, trying to pinpoint anything out of place.

"Hi," you hold out your hand for a handshake. He takes it. "It's so nice to meet you. Rafe has told me all about you."

"He has?" Ward lifts his dark brow at you. "What does he say?"

Other than rants about you? Nothing good, you thought.

Rafe stiffens beside you, his eyes on the firmed on the side of your face but you don't falter. You've been in customer service for a long time, you knew how to lie.

"He said you're a good businessman for Cameron Development. Someone with a lot of difficult choices to make. He hopes to be there with you one day." You summarize, pinpointing the good details of Rafe's tirades. You hope he didn't recognize the little jab you placed there.

Ward looks amused. A bit proud. But says nothing more. Dinner is declared ready and everyone begins to take their place. You fall into a seat beside Rafe; he even pulled out a chair for you before he sat.

You want to stick your tongue at him and tease him, but you know this isn't the appropriate time. Returning your sight to what's before you, you feel slightly out of place. Usually, you're the one serving these people, not the ones being served. The reversed role is jarring.

When the waitress comes around and asks for everyone's drink orders, you internally frown. When she came to you, you answered that you wanted some pinot noir while Rafe chose whiskey neat. Leaving off, the business dinner proceeds.

You zone in-and-out at their conversations. It's mostly about marketplace and land developments, furthering relationships between companies, and the occasional jab on who has the better enterprise. You wanted to nod off, but you didn't.

So, you watch Rafe instead.

His eyes are set on his father, observing the interactions between him and his business partners. His gaze is focused and diligent, absorbing every little detail, as if he's making mental notes about it. About how he would proceed if he gets the company.

You admire that. It reminds you of how you view Sailor.

When the conversation winds down to casual talk, and you're on your second course, Ward surprises you by calling you out by name.

You lift your gaze to meet his. "I wanted to ask where I know you from," Ward begins, raising his glass. "You seem vaguely familiar."

You clear your throat before you answer.

"I work at Sailor," you explain, wiping your hands against the clothed napkin. "My family owns it. We catered for you a few years ago."

It takes a moment for it to click, and recognition dawns on his face. "That's right," he drawls, amused chuckles signals to the rest of the table. "You were working as the bartender for one of the company's charity events. You had that specific drink I like," he clicks his fingers, trying to remember the name. "That whiskey."

"The Godfather?" You offer, to which Ward nods in confirmation. You laugh softly. "Yeah, that's a family recipe. It's been in my family for a couple generations."

"I remember you saying that before," he nods. "So, that makes you a Pogue."

You know it wasn't said with disdain. Not the same manner that his son carries for the second class. Ward used to be a Pogue himself, being one of the very few who was able to rise out of lower-class and make a name for himself. Despite knowing he's on the opposite side of you, you did admire that. You wanted that yourself.

"So were you, sir. You're a legend around The Cut," you compliment. "The ideal story of how we can make it out."

"With your work ethic, I don't doubt it," he compliments with a wink and you smile. The compliment feels real, and you felt appreciated. Saying nothing else, you take a sip of your drink as you watch how Ward's gaze slides over to his son sitting quietly next to you.

The dinner proceeds with more chatter. You swear you were getting full by the end of the meal, before dessert, that you ask Rafe to take some of your food and finish them for himself. He begrudgingly accepts, allowing you to inconspicuously slide the plate over to his. When it came down to the final hour and everything was served, people started heading out for the night.

Everyone leaving, the table slowly empties until it was only Ward, Rose, Rafe and you.

"So, you're dating my son," Ward declares, and you hesitantly nod. You don't know which direction this conversation may lead, especially now that there's no social barriers constraining his interrogation. "How long?"

You lift your gaze to Rafe, hoping he could answer and you could supply.

"A few weeks," he answers curtly, his eyes set on his father. You notice his hands clenched on his lap, his leg bouncing under the table. "It's new."

"After our...?"

"Yes," Rafe answers without allowing him to finish. "I thought I would listen to your advice."

Ward nods, satisfied. You thought it would be the end of it, before he turned back to you. "Do you know about Rafe's habits?"

Rafe stiffens. His eyes pinned on his father with a hard expression, almost a silent plea not to continue, but Ward ignores his son. "His parties and his drinking? The occasional drugs?"

Rafe turns to you, watching you as you come up with an answer. You silently move your hand over his, enclosing it over his larger one, hoping it would ease some relief into his system. Almost a silent promise; a way to say I have your back.

"I do," you nod, letting the words roll off lightly.

"And you still choose to date him?"

You nod again. "Yes, sir."

Ward laughs. "A saint."

Rafe tense under your touch.

"It's not that." You shake your head, your expression serious. "He has his vices, sure, but that doesn't undermine who he is. He's determined and focused, and when he has a goal, he puts his whole being into it. It's good to have someone like him in your corner."

You avoid Rafe's eyes as you say this. It surprised him. He didn't think you would say some positive attributes about him, especially since he's been nothing but a pretentious asshole to you, but your words were genuine. Authentic. He heard you lie and tell truths, and this one leans towards the latter.

Ward looks to be in the same vein of astonishment and you say nothing as you smile, lifting your glass by the stem and taking another sip. The alcohol isn't as good as yours, but you were glad to make it out alive and passed the test.

When the caterers came back to clean up the table, you decided that you wanted to help them. You know it was unconventional, to be assisting the help as the guest, but you wanted to get out of the space for a moment. To get back to your roots.

You carry some dishes and head towards the kitchen, despite the gentle pleas from the waitstaff.

When you left, Rafe remained with his father. Rose is gathering her things as Ward rises from his chair, Rafe following in suit. When the patriarch gestures for him to approach, the diligent son listens, stepping towards his father.

Ward claps his hand on his shoulder, almost proud. "I'm surprised, Rafe, I never thought I'd see the day." He begins, glancing over to you in the kitchen, moving around in swift and coordinated style. "You did good, son, probably the best you'll ever do."

Rafe stiffens under his father's touch. The words pricking in his ears. "She's a capable woman. But, next time you bring her, make sure she wears something more... appropriate."

He glances back over to you, replacing the plates to the top cabinets, rising to your tippy-toes in a way that pulls up the back of your short dress. Yes, he noticed that it wasn't the typical business attire, a little shorter than recommended, but he pinned it as something a Pogue would wear. Something they didn't think about.

But, the criticism in his ear from his father, it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. Rafe clenches his jaw, just as Ward slips his hand off his son's shoulder and gathers his wife to leave.

Rafe stands still. He watches you for a few more moments. He noticed some of the sparsely-remaining guests would pass the kitchen, on the way to the exit, and spare a glance at you and your barely-covered ass. His anger heightens.

Marching over, Rafe says nothing as he surprises you and grabs your arm. Without saying a word, he pulls you away from the kitchen and takes you to the nearest bathroom.

He locks the door close.

"What–what the hell?" You snap, pulling your arm out of his grip but his hold is firm. Your furrowed gaze looks up to meet him, finding his expression nothing short of a timid rage and fury, ready to boil over and burst.

Rafe is strumming with adrenaline. With anger. With all these emotions coursing through him in rapid succession, he can't reach out and grab any of them. Something about his father's comment tonight rubbed him in a bad way. The way Ward doesn't think he was good enough for you, a Pogue he found off the streets. The way your dress is too fucking short. The way you were being too kind—grabbing his hand, calming him, complimenting him. It was all wrong.

He needs release.

He needs to take it out on you.

"You had to wear the shortest fucking thing you owned?" He sneers, his hand sliding over your ass and squeezing it, hard. It elicits a small moan from you. "Had to show off what a fucking slut you are, didn't you?"

Your mind is spinning. You don't understand what is going on. You thought everything was good—you even sweared you saw a covert smile on Rafe's face before you left. You don't know what could happen between then and now and why he's being so aggressive to you. His words. His touch.

You don't know why you like it.

Turning around, you try to grab his attention, placing a hand on the side of his face. "What happened?" You say, breathless, "talk to me."

He flinches out your touch. "I don't want to talk."

"What do you want?"

"Get on your knees."

You do.

Rafe watches as you sink to the bathroom floor, the lack of coverage from your dress does nothing to soften the hardness of the ground. He unbuckles his pants, removes them, and reveals the impressive bulge hidden behind his boxer-briefs.

You watch attentively as he takes the last piece of barrier off, freeing his cock, just inches from your face. The tip is covered with a bit of precum, something that you want to put in your mouth. You feel the throb in your pussy, squeezing your legs tighter to relieve some of the ache.

"You want a boyfriend who puts you in your place?" He looks down at you, the look on his eyes is hard and detached, like he's out of it. "One who's there to do something with that mouth of yours? You want that, Pogue?"

You find yourself nodding, almost hungrily, following along to his words. He scoffs with a condescending laugh, gripping the base of his shaft with one hand and guiding it closer to your mouth. "Open."

Part of you want to use the moment to ask him what's going on. For him to clue you in on something. But you don't get the chance. Without your immediate obedience, Rafe roughly grabs your face and squeezes your cheeks, forcing your mouth to pop open.

"Are you going to listen to me, sweetheart?" He taunts, "or am I gonna have to teach you a lesson?"

"I'll listen." You confess, your voice doesn't sound like your own. The ache between your legs doesn't subside.

Satisfied, Rafe levels the tip to your face, tapping it against the plump of your bottom lip, before pushing it in.

He goes a little fast. Like he's trying to fuck your face. Your touch comes up to slow down, exchanging his hand with yours, grabbing his base to allow you to guide his cock into your mouth at your own discretion. He allows you to have that control, his hand traveling up to your hair, tugging at the roots.

When he hits the back of your throat, you gag, and Rafe lets out a guttural groan. "Fuck, just like that," he murmurs, tipping his head back at you take him in. "This fucking mouth."

He comes in and out of you, finding a rhythm that allows you to get used to his dick in your mouth. When you do something that makes him feel good, his grip around your hair tightens, pulling you to stay in place.

"Is this how I have to punish you?" His voice is sharp, but the edge comes off with every pleasure that elicits out of him. "You get one fucking chance to meet all these people, all these Kooks, and you had to dress like a slut. To show off?"

He grabs you by the roots, tilting your head in a way that pops his cock out and your eyes to find his. "Who do you belong to?" He asks.

Your core throbs at the possession. "You."

He nods and breathes out a raspy breath. "That's fucking right."

Letting you go, Rafe suddenly pulls you to your feet. His hands hooks under your ass and lifts, setting you down on the sink counter, your back slams against the wall in a harsh beat. Without wasting a second, Rafe grabs your thighs and pulls you towards the edge, just enough where you don't fall off.

"Rafe," you call out, as your eyes connect with his, his breathing is heavy. His eyes are wild. He doesn't answer you, roughly spreading apart your thighs, his hand traces the wet patch formed against your panties, causing a shiver to run down your spine. "God."

Rafe leans in, his lips just caressing your bare shoulders. "Just a Pogue who does what I want, when I want, aren't you?" He reminds you of your place, the gentle touches of his fingers erupting aches and unbearable heat between your legs. You don't answer him in time. "Aren't you?"

"Just yours."

He chuckles, pulling back to flick his gaze up to you. "And who made you this wet?"

Your voice is needy. "You did."

"That's right," he pushes your panties to the side, fingers moving up and down your slit in delicate strokes. You lean forward into his touch but his grip is placed on your hips. "I did. And I want you to remember that this is mine. No one can touch but me."

You nod into his words, willing to give him anything to prove some semblance of pleasure for you. "All yours," you choke desperately, "please, make me come."

His hand leaves your core, and the coldness that evades his absence pricks your sensitive skin. His hand raises to cup the back of your neck, forcing you to meet his eyes. "Aw, baby," he mocks, "bad girls don't get to come."

You open your mouth to object, but Rafe lines his cock against your entrance and, without warning, pushes himself in. You feel your body arches forward, letting out an uninhibited moan, as he stretches you out.

"Fuck," you press your forehead against his warm chest, your breathing unsteady and your eyes flutters in-and-out of consciousness. "It's so—you're so—" You can't find your words, your mind scrambled.

Rafe catches your jaw, forcing your eyes open and to look down at you see him lodge deeper and deeper inside of you. His motion is slow and steady, allowing you to adjust, before quickening his speed. "Look," he murmurs into your ear, your skin hot everywhere, "look at how good your pussy is taking me."

The sound of wetness echoes in the small bathroom, the evidence of your arousal to him, to Rafe, that you can't help but choke at the noise. Your head is spinning. You feel pleasure and pain ripping out of you, all at once, subdued by the rising credence of your climax.

Rafe doesn't loosen his grip around your jaw, forcing you to watch attentively to how his cock thrusts upon you, entering and leaving, the motion a mesmerizing sight that produces further need within you.

"Rafe," you moan with a whimper, you steady yourself by gripping his shoulders, digging your nails into your shoulder blades, trying to regain some control. "Faster. Please, I want to come so bad."

"What did I say, sweetheart?" He tilts your head to meet his hardened gaze, his breathing shakily and unorganized as the feeling of the way your walls grip him provides the most pleasurable sensation, he was sure to come soon. "Bad girls don't come."

Your eyes grow teary as you feel him fill you up, to the hilt, your stomach so full of him. He moves at a pace that works for him, that allows him to climb to his climax, while it's frustratingly slow for you. Not enough for you to reach the peak.

You lean into him, chest pressed to chest, your breathing unsteady as your walls tightens around cock.

"Come on, baby." He taunts. "Make me feel so good."

Him, you note, because this is about his pleasure. Because you didn't deserve to reach the same ecstasy.

"Rafe," your voice is so raspy, you resort to begging. You can feel his cock twitching inside of you. "Please, please, I'll be so so good—"

He slaps a hand over your mouth, covering your pleas. Your eyes teary as you stare up at him. "I don't want to hear anything." He snaps with a grunt, "you're a Pogue. Fucking act like it."

This Rafe is cruel. It isn't the same person who defended you against the drunk stranger. He isn't the same one who kissed you at Tannyhill. This is the Rafe you met on the back porch of Topper's house, the one who comes into your bar, the wildcard his father warns you about.

You know you should stop this. To come to your senses and deny him of the pleasure he so desperately chasing from you. To gain some control. But it feels so goddamn good, that the idea of losing the feeling of Rafe, inside of you, was harder to bear. It makes you lose all clarity.

When you feel Rafe's strokes growing more sloppy, a sudden realization dawns on you.

"Rafe," you say breathily, "pull out. I need—you need to pull out."

He cups your cheeks, a firm but not harsh grip like before, and forces your eyes to meet his. "What did I say about telling a Kook what to do?" He taunts lazily, just with one final thrust, he comes inside of you.

His hot cum fills you up, and it feels so warm and nice, you think you're going insane with the buzzing sensation you feel afterwards. He stiffens as he spazzes, his head leaning against the crook of your neck as the wave of his climax rolls over him, the stillness of his cock inside of you leaves an unbearable ache between your legs.

Rafe pulls out within a few short breaths, slipping his dick out of you as the cum leaks onto the counter and drips onto the floor. You are completely still, your eyes following him as he reshuffles around in his post-orgasmic haze, redressing his pants and briefs in one piece.

He moves around to grab some tissue papers, coming back to dab the area around your filled cunt to clean you up, his eyes not meeting yours. In shame, frustration, or clarity, you don't know.

When he finishes, he buckles his belt and throws the tissues into the trash. Pausing at the door, he glances at you for a brief, tiniest second. "Clean up. I'll drive you back."

When he leaves, you take a moment to gather yourself. To reel in everything. You slowly slip off the counter, landing on wobbly and aching legs, and turn around to view your reflection in the mirror.

The mess of your hair, the wrinkles of your clothes, his cum leaking down your thighs.

It takes a beat, then two, before you find yourself producing words.

"What the fuck just happened?" 

★ part four ★

IMPORTANT: if you want to follow my fics and updates, follow @zyafics-library and turn on notifications!

taglists: @quicksilversg1rl / @uraesthete / @maybankslover / @trshngyn / @irides-solstice / @kur0obaby / @groovycass / @emmalandry / @outlawedmando / @ditzyzombiesblog / @mattyskies / @sunshinepanic / @too-deviant / @rafesgiirl / @rivaiken / @ficluvr / @bunniii-98 / @vvvhack @babygoddam / @cami-is-reading / @peachesmilk / @whore4fictionalman / @artemiswinnick / @janediazwindsor / @pandora-rosier1 / @solanathascientst / @ditzyzombiesblog / @itshellie / @grace-sully / @loveyouok / @tayrcse / @mysteris-things / @ella131989 / @starrkissezz / @sanriobuny / @alyssax25 / @chopshopcheesecake / @fentyxmalik / @fleets-world / @supernaturalwriter / @taylorsmissamericanna / @hehelollmao / @lac0nically / @elysiasshit / @kravitzwhore / @tommysaxes / @ma-yangg / @carolinaxvz / @bandsbooks

[hillnerd]

ptsd/c-ptsd,  therapy & writing

(This is written by someone with CPTSD - I am not a mental health expert, and am just writing from my own experience! )

So a lot of writers want to incorporate PTSD and C-PTSD into their fiction. Sometimes people get it super right- other times I’m left cringing. I wrote this to help writers know more about it, then it also ended up being something I sent to a friend with PTSD as it got into it so she’d know more what the therapy process is like. 

So! What’s it like to have PTSD? PTSD therapy vs regular therapy-How are they different? How are they the same? What does PTSD therapy consist of?

Trigger warning:

I will be describing therapy, talk of other disorders like anxiety and depression, and might use some 'you' talk - example 'once you've gone through this, then you start to feel better.' This will also skim over child abuse, suicidal ideation mentions and trauma in general- Read w/ caution if you are sensitive to this

general overview to PTSD and C-PTSD

I am diagnosed with PTSD, but it's actually C-PTSD*

C-PTSD or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder differs from PTSD in that it's more for people who have had chronic environments of trauma/abuse for years - and is currently proposed to have a certain symptoms not listed under PTSD symptoms. 

Much of these symptoms have more to do with how one relates to other people, their self perception, and generally their learned behaviors in order to protect themselves long-term. PTSD is more about a specific event, of series of events that occurred in quick succession.

Despite the lack of official diagnosis, therapists treat people for CPTSD all the time- they just use a lot of the same tools they would for PTSD.

Not everyone who experiences trauma or battles develops PTSD, but there are factors that make you more inclined to develop it.

What is PTSD like?

There are many ways that people manifest PTSD/CPTSD symptoms.They are easy enough to google and be familiar with, but what's it ACTUALLY like for me.

a hair-trigger startle instinct I have had a few times where my husband is up at night, and I didn’t realize he was in the room- then I see the outline and start screaming- and can’t stop for like 2 minutes- then the crying settles in for 30 minutes. My traumas had nothing to do with strangers in the night. I just have a super intense startle instinct that sends my whole body into panic mode sometimes.

Hyper-vigilance- trying to control everything around you to keep you safe, and being super on edge keeping an eye out for how things will fall apart. Making sure things are locked, being extra wary of people, wanting to not have your back to people, perking up at every little noise etc.

issues sleeping- insomnia, light sleeping, & nightmares-   Sometimes reliving a memory, or just having intense dreams that leave you exhausted the next day you can barely function. This ties in with hyper-vigilance a lot- so falling asleep and staying asleep can be hard.

Depression and anxiety- pretty self explanatory- but it's common to experience these, and for pills to not necessarily be that helpful without the therapy. Sometimes anxious self destructive thoughts and memories start haunting you and making you freeze up or panic, feel like you’re going to die/be left alone by everyone etc. Sometimes emotional abuse from your past starts coming up and haunting you and you feel all your selfworth leaving your body leaving behind nothing but the want to sleep all day/cut yourself off from people - at times this can turn to suicidal ideation and other really dangerous behaviors and thoughts.

Sudden mood switches/panic responses usually a trigger for these switches is something associated with your trauma- but basically when something associated with our trauma suddenly comes up sometimes it causes us to start having feelings and emotions that feel out of whack for the situation at hand. 

Example: When I was a five I was beaten and locked on a sunny porch of a 2 story building with a sliding door.  Once my husband blocked me on the way to the door so I wouldn’t accidentally walk into some freshly painted furniture on the other side of the sliding door. I immediately panicked and angrily screamed at him to’ let me GO! fuck you!!! when he’s the gentlest man in the world and has never ever been anything but kind and wonderful with me. Then after the rage wore off I was like crying and so sorry.

I’m usually not an ‘angry reaction’ person- I’m usually a freeze/cry type- but yeah.Sometime people get panicked in crowded places, or if they feel someone is mad at them, or if they feel trapped, or if they feel like they’re being abandoned.

Sometimes I’ll get super manic and impatient/snappish if there’s not a plan on what we’re doing at a crowded place (really it’s because I want an escape plan/safe place I know we can always go to- and feel vulnerable when it’s a lot of people standing around without a plan and feel like I’ll get lost/abducted)

intrusive negative thoughts 

It’ll be the darkest weirdest repeating thoughts that you associate with emotional upset.  In ptsd treatment there is a lot of going through the events and rethinking your conclusions you’ve taken away from them. It’s simplified a lot in shows to a simple ‘it’s not your fault’- which, yeah, that’s the crux of it- but the actual work of it is super intense, exhausting, and so much more in depth.  

unhealthy coping mechanisms so a lot of people with ptsd will find ways to cope to help them fill an emotional void, or to cover up feelings etc. There are tons of ways people do this. Some will do extreme things like drugs, risky behaviors, drinking a lot etc Example: They experience a ‘violent retraumatizing’ moment like a pet getting killed in front of them- then later to cope have casual sex and drink too much in order to numb their emotions and not think about them.

A lot of ‘avoidance’ and ‘overdependence’ can be a part of ptsd. Like you might avoid certain things like the plague, or constrastingly might start using people or things or substances or food like an emotional crutch/security blanket instead of coping in a healthier way or learning to be independent.

Self protective steps you take might be super over the top, or self-destructive and borderline suicidal. 

Sometimes trying to repress all your emotions and not express them is something you do to protect yourself. 

This can be all over the map really- there are hundreds of examples!

triggering moments of your ‘Stuck points’

Stuck points are thoughts that keep us from recovering. Stuck points are concise statements that reflect a thought – not a feeling, behavior, or event. 

Example of stuck points:  'If I let other people get close to me, I'll get hurt again', 'I am useless.' 'I'm broken', 'I can't trust anyone in authority', 'People will reject me if they get to know me/see me at my worst’ ‘I’m a monster.’ ‘I’m worthless’ 

These can come up and you won’t even realize it at first. You’ll have something super innocuous happen and all of a sudden you’re on the verge of a breakdown, angry and/or panicking for seemingly no reason. 

These intense emotions will hit you and don’t feel like there’s any thoughts connected to them- there ARE thoughts behind it of course, but it takes a bit of deconstructing to figure it out though and realize ‘ooooh, there’s the thought train that was bubbling under the surface! I didn’t realize because thinking through my emotional processes was something I wasn’t allowed to do during my trauma- so now I don’t know how to instinctively do that even a little.’

Examples in fiction 

Harry Potter in Order of the Phoenix where he is yelling at the drop of a hat when he feels abandoned/rejected by everyone. His reactions are so CLEARLY PTSD related to me.  Actually, I think he has CPTSD and it just got to a tipping point due to the traumas he experienced in the graveyard.

Hunger Games Books  Probably the best portrayal of PTSD, of books I’ve read, is Hunger Games. The movies glazed over it a bit- but the books? Oh man, they nail it so hard.

HP and Hunger Games both have protagonists who are great portrayals of ptsd. The anger, the disassociation, the depression, the nightmares, the inability to identify with humans at times, the self protective steps that are unhealthy, the coping mechanism of avoidance etc.

Disassociating

People describe this in tons of different ways, but personally I think of it like body/brain numbness. All of a sudden it’s like a blankness comes over you, almost like that hazy way of daydreaming, only instead of daydreams it’s nothing but a buzzing blankness with maybe like slight almost invisible undercurrent of panic. It’s like the body is paralyzed, and you can’t act or think or do anything but stare or numbly move a bit- it almost feels like your soul just left your body for a bit and you’ve been consumed by a white room of emptiness. Not a black void- it’s not being lost in darkness- it’s like being lost in the light, if that makes sense? Like think of a blank why void like in The Matrix where the whiteness goes on forever. 

Flashbacks

In tv shows they often show it like it's a hallucination or something. Flashbacks are typically shown as a person basically becoming delirious and having visual and audio hallucinations, then perhaps even becoming violent to those around them because they literally see something different than what is real.

Again, this is my experience- but flashbacks have never worked like that for me. I more disassociate, and then all the emotions of that memory hit me, and in my brain I’m able to see bits and pieces of what happened back then, or even the whole thing- it’s like a SUPER intense memory/daydream/nightmare just settles in there for a bit- and you feel all the full emotions of it for a bit- can suddenly feel the sensations of it too at times-but at NO point am I actively moving about in a real room around people getting them confused with the past and lashing out at the hallucinations.

 I’m just sitting there, or crying there- and if someone in the room with me were to talk to me they might have to get my attention because I'm deep in that daydream/flashback- but I’d hear them and see them once I realize I’m spacing out. The most outburst I’d have would be to not want anyone to touch me- or get super startled from someone touching me then pushing them away from me. That’s very different than the crazy shit they show on TV and movies sometimes.

BAD EXAMPLE: One particular one that still makes me mad is when that had Owen from Grey’s Anatomy sees a fan- then get ‘triggered into a ptsd episode’ where he is unblinkingly choking out Cristina as she begs him to stop for a long time. Like…. It’s one thing for someone to be startled and have their instinct be to strike out- that’s a very different thing from what they portrayed. If they wanted to show him as ptsd dangerous- which is worrisome to me as people with mental health are stigmatized enough- but if they wanted to- it would have made much more sense for her to startle him somehow and for him to just blindly strike out before he realizes it. With combat training, he could very well have instincts that aren’t safe when he’s over sensitized and startled.

What are the main treatments for PTSD?

Cognitive Processing Therapy  (CPT)

CPT is the main treatment for PTSD. It is highly structured, and the majority of it is writing and worksheets. There is a LOT of writing and talking out about your trauma, writing and talking about how you process it, and analyzing it.

Beyond the traumatic memories, there is also noticing the behaviors you have that are related to your trauma and how they come out in every day scenarios. This leads to:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

This is not about processing past events, but about processing current behaviors/reactions and trying to slowly change those behaviors over time so that they are healthier reactions/coping mechanism in place.

Exposure therapy- Reliving memories

For PTSD some people do a lot of reliving the trauma memories by describing them in detail, every tiny detail they can think of- and basically reliving them, but then trying to reroute the emotional response to them. 

Some people are SO repressed that this is a very difficult thing for them to access- both remembering the memory, but also knowing what their emotions were/are. These memories of trauma aren't always easy to remember/re-feel/access and that can be frustrating.

I personally am REALLY GOOD at reliving memories- in fact I'm so good that we have been avoiding it for a bit because i go straight into flashback mode way too easy (more on flashbacks and how they work later)

There are ways of doing this that are more than just revising the memory through talk therapy, that I haven't done and would require research on your part:

virtual reality to revisit the place

watching videos or listening to recordings of the event and talking it through

exposure therapy that's more about getting used to sounds/smells/words that are triggering

The main point though is to process the emotions tied to that event and not make your brain default to that flight/fight/freeze mode when triggering things happen.

IMPORTANT TOOLS FOR THERAPY

If a person hasn't had much therapy, CPT/CBT has a lot of learning for that person, and a LOT of trying to identify emotions and really feel them, so one can process them.

Grounding techniques/exercises-

techniques used to sooth/calm a person when activated- there are like thousands of these guys out there- I think everyone is a bit familiar with them- like breathing exercises in yoga? Basically it's a way of regrouping and centering yourself- 'grounding' you in reality, instead of letting your brain go off on a tangent/emotional rollercoaster.

It's basically any way you can snap your thinking out of your anxious thoughts and concentrate on something until your re-calibrate and are calmer.

Personally the breathing techniques make me freak out- so I don't use those. :P Ones I find helpful are ones like 'Name every color you can see.' or 'go through the alphabet and letter by letter name an animal that starts with that letter.' and 'hold an ice cube in your hand and concentrate fully on every sensation you're feeling.'example  example

-CBT and CPT WORKSHEETS

god, SO many worksheets.

Here are some helpful links

https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/cbt-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-techniques-worksheets/  --- This page covers cognitive distortions really well, and has some helpful resources and worksheets.

https://trailstowellness.org/resources   This page has a lot of great worksheets for trauma.

https://www.psychologytools.com/professional/problems/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/- unfortunately you cannot access the documents here without paying- BUT you can read what the docs are, and how they will be used in a therapy setting- so can use that as a launch point for what sort of worksheets/phrases to google.

I specifically worked from  Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD: A Comprehensive Manual a lot.

What is the structure of PTSD therapy?

First session

The first thing I had to do was fill out a questionnaire (PTSD test , cptsd questionnaire) to make sure she thought the treatment was appropriate. We talked about this a bit, what symptoms I had, talked over examples of it. I'm comfortable with therapy so this wasn't so bad for me, but I can see this being very difficult for people who aren't as comfortable in this setting and would need to be walked through it more and have more questions as they might not have a lot of self-awareness. We discussed goals, what could be achieved, and generally what it would be like. We went over the first worksheet and I was given homework of figuring out what my stuck points are.

Sessions after that

Each session we begin with typical therapy for a bit 'how was the last week? Were there any events I should know about?' Then we go over the worksheet I filled out, and analyze it, talk about examples, or apply it to trauma memories.

What is trauma therapy LIKE?

I always try to have the next day or so as free as possible after therapy, because afterwards I am wiped out, exhausted, and sometimes super triggered and crying afterwards.

The analogy I like to use is cleaning out a closet you keep hoarding stuff in:

Your house is your life, your brain is a closet, and PTSD/trauma is a messy hoarders type hidden away in the closet. When the door to this closet is closed you can almost pretend there isn't a mess there at all. Y ou close the door by being in denial, not thinking about your trauma, not acknowledging or processing it. You just keep stuffing the trauma into the closet.

But the longer you let the closet stay like that, the worse the situation gets. Soon that closet door keeps busting open and all sorts of crap falls out when you don't want it to. Freakouts, hypervigilance, meltdowns etc. The crap in the closet starts to multiply.

Ever seen Hoarders or Marie Kondo? You know how people are crying over t-shirts and crap and the house looks WORSE for a while? That's trauma therapy.

In therapy you have to open the closet door, take out ALL the crap you've been hoarding in the closet, process it, organize it, and then put things in order again. Every single box of trauma needs to be looked at then put away- The goal is to  throw out the intense intrusive emotions tied to the junk. You have to keep your memories- but you don't have to keep holding on to the behaviors they've formed, the turbulent emotions, and the intensity of it all. During therapy at first it's fine. Kondo is walking you through it and it's all just fine and dandy- then you are faced with this HOARD of CRAP you have to work through- and it's SO overwhelming. My anxiety and depression got way worse for a while. Like, I was on EDGE and having nightmares and it was horrible. But then once you've processed the memories, and start actively applying what you've learned and start using grounding techniques more and more- things do get easier.

I am not fixed. I am not cured. I will have to continue to work through stuff- It's that whole 'healing is a not a straight line' thing. Like, there are times I regress and I hate it. :P But it's gotten a lot better.

IF YOU GUYS HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS I’M HAPPY TO HELP.

I figure this can be an ok resource for people who don’t know much about ptsd except what it says on like webmd (which isn’t that accessible to me) and want to write about it (or want to just know more about it)

( *C-PTSD has not been considered an official different disorder from PTSD for all that long. In fact, one technically can't be medically diagnosed with CPTSD in america yet. PTSD is diagnosable and has been considered an official disorder for decades, but C-PTSD has not been named a disorder of its own yet in the official guidebook of psychological disorders in the US (DSM). I think they might have JUST recognized it in the UK guidebook (ICD). I know it was proposed for the 11th addition.)

[astrologysvt]

Seokmin’s Ideal Type - Natal Chart Reading

Happy birthday Minnie~~ 🎉 thanks for all of your hard work and shining bright so our crops can grow ☀️🌱

For ideal types, I’m not going to be doing specific placements of their ideal partner. Instead, I’m gonna be listing personality traits I think would mesh well with them, as well as focus on their needs and the kind of person who could meet them. what this reading cannot account for is the compromising the members would do on their end for their s/o. so just keep in mind this is only half of the whole picture!

i can see him being with someone very cute and charming.

his cancer moon loves cute things, and his libra mars is attracted to those who are very charismatic. 

he’s an incredibly romantic guy thanks to that libra mars and wants to be with someone who will put in the effort to keep things exciting, tender, and light between the two of them. 

wants to go on dinner dates till the age of 99 

he also wants to be with someone who will constantly try to woo him, as he’ll do the same.

he’s a very traditional, movie-like romantic.

someone very communicative and outgoing thanks to that aqua. 

discussion is a huge part in how he understands and navigates relationships so a certain degree of compatibility on this front is vital. 

someone assertive.

his cancer moon and libra mars don’t make him the most assertive person, even with all of that fixed aqua. that aqua can make him very stubborn, but doesn’t necessarily make him assertive. 

because of that, he’s very receptive to someone willing to both protect and guide him. 

with that being said they shouldn’t be overbearing, abrasive, or controlling this this regard as his aqua doesn’t like surrendering full control. 

someone very caring and warm.

when it comes to relationships his cancer moon is going to be a huge contributing factor. 

his emotional needs are something that very strongly correlate with his well being, and this is often represented in his need for comfort, support, and a general nurturing environment to come back to. 

without having this comfort met, he really struggles to be everything else his chart wants him to be.

s/o should be very soft, kind, and emotionally intuitive and communicative. 

(which, side note, i think it’s adorable when people mention how loved he must have been growing up in his family. that would have been the absolute perfect environment for him to really allow his chart to be as actualized and well-developed as it is now). 

he really craves a “homey” relationship, and so someone with a gentle approach to relationships and love would be received very well by him. 

he really just wants to indulge in all of the cheesy parts of relationships! 

this influence also creates a great desire for stability, so while his aqua really loves people who are interesting, passionate, and unique -- a relationship without a strong sense of stability/predictability/security is not going to last long for him. 

he wants to feel like he’s coming home when he’s with his s/o. 

and his s/o should put a good effort forward to ensure he has someone to fall back on. 

his cancer moon is square his libra venus. 

so this can give him a strong tendency towards passive aggression. 

i went into this in his chart first impressions, but he’s a very sensitive guy and he takes everything said to him to heart. 

and so with that he has a habit of storing things inside of him, partially with the knowledge that he could be overreacting, with no real idea of how he should address them. if he does its after some build up, and probably very clumsy. 

so i think it’s important that 1) his s/o doesn’t have similar placements that ALSO give them similar habits 2) they’re not overly aggressive/blunt in the way they handle conflict that could cause him to further hide his feelings out of fear of potential outbursts 3) straight forward enough to nip those insecurities in the bud before they have a chance to fester in him. 

sounds kind of complicated, but it really just comes from the fact that they should have a lot of patience with him in terms of how he processes emotions that can lead to hurt/anger.

they should understand how to help him navigate those moments, while also being very good at reading him when he falls into those moods.

putting libra in the planet it is in detriment to causes a huge blockage with anger, and his cancer moon is incredibly quick to activate his mars and so his s/o should have a great deal of emotional control/patience so the inevitable relationship conflicts aren’t exasperated beyond whats necessary. 

it’s also important to note that he is quite prone to insecurity. 

with all of the tension between his mars, moon, and saturn that i went into in his chart first impressions: he is constantly second guessing himself, and may feel like he cant win when it comes to balancing out emotion, action, and discipline. 

there’s a habit of him second guessing his ability to commit, his ability to support, and his ability to be present. 

even though, in all honesty, these are aspects of himself that come super easily to him. 

there is just a part of him that’s constantly saying “you could do more” when really there’s not much more he NEEDS to do.

he may need his s/o to exude confidence in this regard so he can really and fully trust that they mean it when they say he’s both doing a good job, and that things are okay between them. 

someone who is so sure of themselves they don’t leave even an inch of room to question anything from their amount of commitment, to their happiness/satisfaction in the relationship. 

if he’s feeling doubt or has lost his point of reference on how well he’s doing or what his expectations are, having a s/o that’s so stable, reliable, and reassuring in this regard would be of huge benefit not just to the relationship but to him in general. 

his mars is super well aspected to his outer planets. 

there are two big aspects to note in my opinion, and those are his mars sextile pluto & mars trine jupiter. 

his mars sextile pluto is a super fun one to be honest 👀

it totally Spices™️ up his chart ten fold. 

when you mix the passionate/heated energies of mars and pair it with the obsessive and magnetic ones in pluto -- this placement gives him a lot more of an authoritative presence behind closed doors than you would imagine. 

this makes him both pretty possessive and protective over his s/o, so they should both be able to appreciate as well as respect this part of him if it decides to come out. 

it’s good if his s/o can balance out his desire to have this nurturing and protective nature offered to him, while also being receptive to him when he decides to return the favor.

or really, they should just be down for when he decides to be adorably clingy and possessive and randomly assertive if he feels they need protecting. 

it’s also important that they’re not someone so concerned with being in control that they feel the need to discourage this part of him. 

he’s not the most quick to express this aspect due to that diplomatic libra mars, but those energies are there and it makes him both very committed, intense, and very emotionally charged when it comes to his s/o. 

he would hate to have these feelings in him rejected as they’re so pure/concentrated and create a great deal of investment on his part.

his mars trine jupiter makes him incredibly affectionate, passionate, and generous in love. 

and then you throw in this all-giving, super attached/devoted cancer influence and this makes him crave a relationship where both him and his s/o are very liberal with how they express love and affection. 

this part of him is so plentiful and ridiculously selfless, and so his s/o should be really good and reciprocating and acknowledging this part of him. 

he’ll get insecure if they don’t seem as appreciative, and i think the worst thing you can force him to do is reconsider how generous he is on this front as he doesn’t really want to think twice about how it. 

i also don’t think he’d do well in a relationship with someone who was too independent, or someone who needed to retreat too often. 

his aqua craves company, his cancer influence is very quick to grow attached, and that libra influence brings a strong emphasis towards the importance of relationships/companionship in his life. 

he’s an all or nothing kind of guy in this regard to the point of excess, and it wouldn’t sit well if his s/o felt they needed too many barriers in order to maintain the relationship. 

like he wouldn’t like to be in a relationship where they’re like “don’t get me gifts because they stress me out” or “leave me alone if i’m upset because i get snappy.” 

with an added emphasis on air in his chart, being with someone who needed space in moments like that may make him feel like he’s navigating blindly. 

if you don’t communicate then his air influences have no idea how to form a plan of action that ISN’T directly confronting it in conversation which can potentially end up being pretty unintentionally abrasive and clumsy. 

and then his cancer moon is so hyper aware of any issues there may be emotionally, even if they aren’t said in so many words, which brings his level of concern up to 100 and can make him feel helpless if he’s talking with someone who is more solitary. 

so he may not vibe too well with someone who feels they need to retreat, doesn’t like talking about those things, or feels they need space in those moments

adding onto that, i don’t think seokmin gets enough credit for how emotionally intelligent he is -- he’s obviously very emotional himself, but the understanding he offers the members is incredibly sweet, understanding, and empathetic to them and their own habits. 

he understands members really well, and i laugh whenever he points out something about the members. 

like i remember once he called jeonghan out for being uncomfortable with emotions and it’s unsuspecting how aware of these things he is because he doesn’t flaunt it, but he’s bound to be a very observant & understanding person with that aqua/cancer combo. 

i think this is something he’d really like to offer his s/o, and so i don’t he’d mesh well with someone who wasn’t open to help or too concerned with providing as that may make him feel like there’s a wall in that regard. 

it really just goes back to how open he wants the exchange of love and support to be in relationships.

such a sweet, sweet boy. 

his chart is so people and relationship centric through those aqua placements, that loving cancer moon, and that romantic libra mars. 

he’s the type who really wants to have a s/o. 

he probably thinks constantly about being in a relationship and being able to share his love so freely with someone else in such an intimate and committed way. 

he’d do best in a relationship with someone who was unapologetic and so assured in how they approach love.

this would be an incredibly liberating experience for him as he tends to be pretty shy with putting himself all out there so freely. 

his cancer moon is pretty reserved, those aqua influences aren’t the best at conveying his emotional sincerity, and his libra is terrified of any potential rejection that may result by coming on too strong. 

and so someone assertive in love and confident in life to teach him by example and kind of meet him half way in passion and generosity would be his ideal romantic situation.

which i think is just adorable 🥺

[thewisekenisme]

Dear Abuela

Summary: Roman writes a letter to his grandmother talking about his roommates.and how each of them has changed his life for the better

warnings: mentions crying, meltdowns, loud noises, and anxiety

words: 3,188

Series College AU

(sorry, this is shorter than I normally write Guy’s I will make it up to you! I promise also this is just an introduction into the series! so there will be more soon!)

Dear abuela,

I miss you so much! thank you for your latest letter and providing your famous chicken enchilada recipes, Patton wanted me to tell you he will make you proud when he makes it for dinner for us this week! classes are amazing! I am enjoying my theater classes and my history of theater. let me tell you I am learning way more than what Google taught me! like I learned ' that the history of theatre charts the development of theatre over the past 2,500 years. While performative elements are present in every society, it is customary to acknowledge a distinction between theatre as an art form and entertainment and theatrical or performative elements in other activities.'

but I also learned that college is a time where teens become independent, they move away from their families to focus on themselves as well as to their studies to pursue careers that have drawn their interests, but most importantly, college is a place to make some life long friendships, maybe even some relationships. There was one rule that every college student knew and would agree with. It was that being a roommate was hard. when trying to respect each others privacy going through your day to day life as a student, and trying to not get in each other's way, was a very tough and hard thing to do when they were basically with you every night. But when you end up having four other roommates on top of yourself, you tend to be in the way of everyone, more then you want to be. That is what I, Roman Prince has found out the hard way, living with four roommates was probably the hardest thing he has ever done in his life. But if you ask me if I would change it for the world. Nope, I wouldn't change anything about any of my roommates, not a single thing!

Right! My roommates, all four of them. There's Patton (padre because he acts like our dad!) Logan (mama lo, because he worries more then a mother does) Virgil (Emo nightmare, panic at the everywhere, etc.) And finally Dee (Dr. Jekyll and Mr lie, jack the fiber, etc). Oh! How can I forget Spot! ( Logan's service dog) These are the people who have changed my life in just a few short months! And I will tell you why because hopefully they can come to visit sometime during break soon! I know you and papa will love to meet them, and abuela I know how much you love to make sure everyone who comes into the house is feed and is happy, you won't have to worry about them not liking your food, I have been telling them all about you and your cooking, and about papa, everything! And they can't wait to try your cooking and to meet you and papa, that will be an amazing day that I will not forget. Okay so how I am going to tell you about each of them, I will put their first and last name, their ages and what year they are! Okay? Okay! Let's get started!

Patton hart, 21 junior -

Now Patton is basically the dad In our little friend group. He makes sure we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Makes sure we have soup and medicine when we are sick, he says puns like they are going out of style! Everything that a parent does, Patton's has done it ten times that! Patton is the kindest person you will ever meet. like if he sees someone he doesn't know struggling to carry their books, he will be by their side willing to carry the books for them. He's also super hyper and cheerful! I think he has ADHD like me, but when I ask he gets nervous and tells me I'm just being silly and he doesn't have that. But I can tell because he's lying because he always bites his lips and giggles a bit when he lies. But I won't push him to tell if he doesn't wish too.

Anyways, he is the oldest in our apartment, he shares a room with his twin brother Logan and Logan's service dog spot. (I'll tell you more about him next, but get this, Logan has a different last name! I know crazy huh! Turns out their parents are divorced and Pat goes from his moms and dads but logan stay's with his mom mostly, okay sorry ill stop gossiping for now) He is going to school to become a veterinarian (even tho he's allergic to cats) he told us it was the perfect job for him because he loves animals and taking care of people. What better way than to take care of both? I mean yes we are all still very worried about him and his allergies, but I believe he can do anything he puts his mind too, and he has! So far he's been aceing all of his classes plus has been keeping up with helping any of us if we need it.

Now I bet you're wondering how I met this wonderful human? Well, I met him just how I explained Patton helps people. I was struggling to carry all my books after my bookbag had just fallen apart, I was also late for class so I was rushing and ended up tripping scattering my books everywhere! I am not ashamed to say I cried, it was the first week of school, I was rushing, I was late, so this was just the icing on the cake! But then out of the blue, an angel appeared in front of me reaching a hand out offering a helping hand. There stood Patton hart with a worried expression and hand out to help me. As I said he is the kindest person you will ever meet! And since that moment we have been friends! So that's good.

Oh, Patton wanted me to let you know that when they visit you will not be allowed to lift a finger. He wants to be able to take care of you because you let all five of us into your home. And yes I told him you would want to do things anyways but he insisted so. Abuela you may have met your match. 

Logan Berry, 21 junior -

Logan is actually the mom of the group. he is the opposite of Patton, he makes us study, makes sure we go to bed and wake up at a decent time, eats a healthy diet, no sweets or movie nights on school nights! but all he does is study and stay with Patton, and get this we aren't allowed to be loud if we are excited or want to get our point across! he has all of us on a tight schedule we aren't allowed to do anything fun! he is the second oldest in the house (twenty minutes younger then Patton, but he acts like the oldest, and thinks he can boss us around!) A total killjoy, But mostly he can sometimes be an emotionless robot, which may sound harsh but he kinda acts like one, like he doesn't show much emotion and speaks very monotoned like "I too would appreciate it if you did not speak so loudly, spot and I do not like the noise" that's how he talks to us, all the time, he's just so proper and preppy kinda like a snob who thinks their better then everyone. I mean he is a Science major and is really smart so maybe he thinks he has to act that way towards everyone but I'm not sure.

But then again he has a reason for all of this, At first we all thought he was just a stick in the mud so we decided to make as much noise as possible and try to mess with his schedule, boy did we regret it. You see at the time we didn't know but Logan has Autism and has made this schedule to fit all of our needs including his. so when we (i mean me, Virgil and Dee) decided to break the no being loud rule, we found out why there was a service dog in our apartment. Us ignoring his schedule, messing with his alarm clock and being extremely loud, we ended up causing him to have a really bad meltdown. That was the scariest thing I have ever seen, we saw Spot do his tasking (doing tasks to make sure their owners know they are doing a thing that could be triggered by other things. such as cratching your arm when they are anxious, their service dog will gently jump on their owner and move their hands away.) 

Anyways, when both Patton and Spot were able to get Logan to calm down and was able to move him to his room the rest of us was given a long lecture and the worst feeling of guilt any of us has ever felt, Patton explained to us why he has everything on such a tight schedule and stuff, which made us feel a lot worse. So when Logan came out of his room now calm and feeling better we all made sure to apologize for our actions and tell him that we will now follow his schedule and rules, to make him feel comfortable in his own Home, I kid you not he actually smiled!  it was totally worth seeing, and we all plan on making sure we can see it again, soon.

Logan also wanted to me to send you a note he was talking and told me to write down everything he says, so this is what he said, (or this is how our entire conversation went. ) 'Mrs. Prince I have made sure to keep Roman on a strict schedule that will allow him to focus on school, theater and still have time to write you letters, (tho I am highly impressed people still write letters, it is an art form that has been lost by many our age, I had no idea anyone has written a letter. I wonder if my mom would appreciate a letter along with our daily text messages, I could stop by the local post office and buy a packet of an assortment of postcards to send to her, maybe I should send some to my dad as well. I would have to ask Patton for his address so I can.) ME: Lo, I'm glad I gave you a great new way to talk to your family but what else would you like me to tell her? hm oh yes, apologize. please do tell her that Patton and I will make sure you are well taken care of that is all I wish to tell her.

so, that's what lo wanted me to tell you, you have no idea how hard it was to not laugh the whole time, it was the cutest thing I have ever seen!

Virgil Peterson, freshmen 19-

Next up, we have Virgil Peterson. (More like emo nightmare, but I shall spare the teasing, and name calling for right now.) the one friend who wears dark eyeshadow, black skinny and a purple jacket my nicknames basically define what he looks and how he acts. He also takes my teasing and name calling as a grain of salt but dishes it back way more then he needs too. But I suppose our playful banter goes both ways more than one. (Do you know how papa and I  go back and forth? Well, that is basically how mine and Virgil's friendship is defined. Friendly banter and such) he is basically in the middle child like myself. So it goes Patton, Logan, me. Virgil, and then dee (I will tell you about him next) and boy does he take advantage of this development! He takes up all of Patton's cuddles when we have a movie night, he's allowed to be moody whenever he wants, but god forbid any of the others be moody. (Sorry I'm getting off subject, but still, he is basically a toddler. A toddler who can use stronger language. But thankfully Patton made a swear jar for him, the bad side of the swear jar, we all are forced to use it.) So basically if he is tired and stays up past Logan's bedtime for any reason except for studying. Well normally Logan would get upset with us, but with Virgil, he just sits with him keeping him company until he either goes to bed or the sunrises.

Anyways let's ignore that whole rant and go back to talking about what Virgil actually does. Virgil is a writer and is taking creative writing courses here at the college, what he likes to write I'm not sure what he enjoys writing (he will not share any of it with me!) But whatever it is Logan seems to enjoy it as does Patton and Dee. It seems that the only ones who are not allowed to read his writing are me and spot and Spots a dog! Which I don't understand I'm not very critical about things (yes, I am critical about the live action Disney movies, but hey they better slay or go away. but that's not the point, the point is he won't let me read his writing no matter what I do, beg, grovel, nothing happens I am still kept in the dark about his writing.) But other then that Virgil also works at the theater my class uses for our performances so he's able to sneak all of us in when a new show comes on, thankfully he hasn't got caught yet so we are able to do things like that. ( I saw the cutest middle school Romeo and Juliet performance and ah, it was so cute, and wish they were doing it for another week, but sadly it was only a three day play) even if we do bicker all the time, I guess he is pretty cool not that I would tell him to his face.

Anyways I bet you're wondering how I met Virgil? Well it was through Patton, Virgil and his older Brother Devan (Dee for short) they where looking for a place to live and me Logan and pat had a spare room so we allowed them to move in, that's when we first met, and I wasn't so sure how I felt about him, I still don't but all I know is he is a little anxious at times and has nightmares and such. We found out the hard way, so whenever I wake up in the middle of the night and I see he is in the living room in the dark, I will sit on the couch  and put on a Disney movie, I will watch it until he is ready to talk about it or he relaxes enough to fall back asleep. So basically that became out routine whenever he has a bad night and his brother isn't awake or there to help him through the stress, and anxiety of the dream or the day he had.

He also wanted me to tell you that he is also excited to come to visit you mainly because I've talked about how good your food is, but is a little nervous about flying to a new place, he nor his brother have ever been too. Which I replied with your farm is peaceful and the fresh air would be good for him. He agreed he would like to try and come, so we may just do that, but by driving so none of us feel nervous about flying. Which means we will have five people plus a dog in the car for a long time, don't want to think about the hours we will spend in the car, but I will keep my mind on the fact that we will be together, soon! 

Devan (Dee) Peterson, senior in highschool 18-

 Now I do not know much about Dee, all I know is that he is Virgil's younger brother, he is in design classes to make clothing and such (he makes amazing clothing for Virgil and I am completely jealous of because  they look absolutely fabulous), not to mention he has a birthmark that goes over the left side of his face and is also is mute? (it's more of a question because Virgil says he does talk but then he doesn't, Logan said it sounds like he has selective muteness which makes sense. because he is very quiet and uses sign language mostly but we don't want to questions him about it and make him uncomfortable.) He really doesn't like to be around us unless Virgil is around. But even then he sticks to cuddling his sweet little snake Sweetpea finding comfort in her and spot. all and all He's a really quiet kid. (although Virgil warned us that once Dee gets comfortable with us, he will start to become very mischievous and play pranks on us, but for now, he will stay quiet and do his own thing.)

I also only know from Virgil That Dee is very thankful that you are allowing him to bring Sweetpea with us when we come to visit. He told me that his brother was really worried he wouldn't be allowed to bring her. But I told him that you wouldn't mind so your answer in the last letter really took away a lot of anxiety for them. Virgil did want me to tell you that if you feel uncomfortable with him and dee staying in the living room were sweetpea will be sleeping with him, just let him know and they will try and find a better spot for her. which I replied you raised four boys plus me you have seen the worst of things. but I told them I would tell you, so here we are.

well, Abuela, this is all I have to tell you so far in this letter, school is great, my roommates mates are great, life is all in all great, the only thing not great is homesick I am. I miss you and papa so much words can not describe how much I miss both of you. If I'm being honest the way everyone is talking about their families makes me feel blessed for my big happy family. like take Patton and Logan, for example, Patton said this is the first time Logan hasn't been away from From their mom this long since he was little, Pat even said he didn't want to see their dad alone anymore like ever, but he didn't go into details as in why all I know is if we mention it to Logan he won't be happy with any of us. anyways, I hope this letter finds you in good health, please tell papa that I love him, and of course I love you! I shall call you as soon as I can Abuela, I love you and can't wait to see you soon.

sincerely your  príncipe valiente Roman

tag list

@figurative-falsehood @today-only-happens-once @chanderefk @whymustibedraggedintofandomhell @combine-the-kitchens @deceitifullies101 @imjustawibba @treasureofpriam @bookwyrminspiration @geronimo-scamander-spd @lightfloofydino @pawtoncake q

[shattered-catalyst]

So this  isnt for anything other than just to say what happened just so I feel heard and I can explain why I cant be as energetic and socially active on here. Its not a callout post or to be reblogged/shared by people. Its not to get anyone in trouble or to cause any reaction. It’s just for me to let it out and reclaim this space again. Its been a year since it happened and I guess I’m just still noticing how badly it has impacted my PTSD. How much its changed me as a person both online and off, and this isnt a woe as me thing either this is just me feeling a need to be heard and explain my own behavior over the year and also to make one simple request of you guys: no matter what you do, always treat your rp partners as people first and writers second.

Because I feel myself becoming bitter and that isnt who I am and I dont want to be someone like that. Or like this. I want to be me again

The person who did this wont be named mainly because they dont deserve it and yall dont need to know. Their behavior when I confronted them more than cements the impression that they dont see any harm in what they said and how they reacted. And again this isnt about them though In A Way I suppose it is? it takes two to tango but it takes one to encourage someone to kill themselves.

This is going to be long because I need to inform on the activity that lead up to this  because it didnt just happen over night- though in a way it did. But you need a better picture of this person because apparently they present a really great face that only a few of us see the manipulative and toxic side of.

This person was always very judgemental and hyper critical. I witnessed a lot of very negative and toxic behavior from them but I was naive and just hoped they would mature as they grew older and gained more independence. I thought it was just a toxic friend group and that perhaps she would recognize her self destructive and immature behavior and grow from it. 

My first red flag should have been when they accused me of being their ex girlfriend SOLELY because I was living in PA. I hate to break it to yall, but PA is a big ass state and has a lot of comic book loving ladies. Thankfully I have never met this person IRL and I hope I never do.

They tried to pull me into making fun of other muns on discord, including mocking sensitive pictures from a mun’s personal blog. I blatantly said it wasnt okay and made me uncomfortable and she continued laughing and making jokes about it with her friend group on discord. She kept trying to pull me into it no matter how often I tried to change the subject.

Her group of friends also did this thing where one of them would go interact with a mun an they would take screenshots of the convo and share it with the group and mock the mun they were interacting with. Whether it be their presentation of character/grahics/writing style/ etc.

The other red flags I ignored? How much she complained and mocked other muns and compared them to me; if anyone did anything or said anything she disagreed with it was an instant blow up. She took EVERYTHING personally including other people writing the same characters she did, having differing headcanons, not knowng obscure details about canon, etc.

She once tried to make fun of a new writing partner I had who was writing the same character, and I had to break it to her that this new person could write in her first language if she wanted to; im being very vague but let me just say if you and your character have the same first language and you want to write in it then its completely WRONG for a white mun to try and make fun of you for it.

She once suggested I had stolen pictures off her pinterest when she sent me a moodboard request for my character. Jokes on her I didnt even know she HAD a pinterest and I had gotten all my pictures from the ‘green aesthetic’ tag on tumblr. Which I told her but she kept pushing the idea on me I had stolen them. I of course dismissed this and put it on the back burner despite the alarm bells going off.

This hyper critical and paranoid behavior continues with everything from other canon blogs making similar head canons/ vaguely similar graphics/ to fanfiction authors having similar head canons/plot ideas.

My penname Citrus? I didnt want one. I didnt want it. She demanded I have a pen name and if not she was going to call me Cat. Now as yall know I dont like being enmeshed with my muse so I keep myself separate from them. I didnt like being called Cat and I told her that explicitly. She kept doing it. So I had to make a pen name because she refused to respect my boundaries.

When the Deadpool movie came out she DEMANDED I change my FC to reflect the movie Despite Not Changing Hers to reflect her own characters new look - which might i add is fat erasure. It was clear then that the rules and standards she held other people to didnt apply to herself. I was labeled problematic for not giving into her demands to change FCs (which I have a literal logical reason for not changing and im not explaining that here)

So I shouldve left. Long story short I didnt because every friendship I’d been in until around this time had been abusive and toxic. I thought this was all normal behavior for people to have and I was convinced I was just being critical of someone elses opinions/ insensitive etc. Thanks to my colleagues in graduate school and to several of you on here I learned that ‘hey dumbass friends dont treat your ass like this’.

Im leaving a lot out about the shit she did/said to me but those snippets give you an idea of things.

Leading up she decided to leave fandom and asked we didnt talk about marvel I said cool okay and didnt talk about marvel with her. If I did I would ask first if she was okay if we talked about one small aspect I thought might excite her/ she would like to know about but it wasnt often that happened because she began ghosting me. Hard. She stopped replying to me at all over discord when I would try and talk to her how we used to about our lives. She didnt answer any asks for munday or character development, in fact she blatantly ignored me.

I checked in a couple times with her to make sure I hadnt done anything to make her uncomfortable and she said no. May I emphasize she said no here. Im emphasizing it right now. She said no. She said everything was fine. So when I was like hey dude this is super triggering for me can you send me like a hi every once in awhile just so I can know we’re okay because its super triggering for me. Yall know what she did? She ‘lmao’-ed. she thought that was hecka funny. Yeah triggering ‘Citrus’ is hilarious isnt it? No it isnt and I shouldve cut her ass off right then and there.

Heres where shit gets confusing: she kept fucking talking about marvel to me. Id get messages at random times about marvel and then silence for weeks. I vividly remember during this period I was cleaning the museum vault and she kept messaging me about her marvel fc’s and how she wouldnt get a plotline and how characters were wrong etc.

I remember being REALLY confused because she had said NO MARVEL. But here she was bitching at me about marvel. In fact thats all she did when she did talk to me. Which was only like three or four times during the ghosting time period. She’d bitch about marvel and then vanish.

Shed make claims about not watching her dash and thats why she never responded to me/ interacted with me. She’d say she wasnt talkng to anyone while I see her on the dash TALKING TO PEOPLE and Id like to point out Ive told her I would be fine ending anything as long as she let me know.

but she followed me on every blog and throughout this time period she made and followed me on numerous ones. She kept reaching out sporadically to bitch about her fcs/how horrible marvel was/ and thats it. 

It was extremely confusing because if someone doesnt want to talk to me I assume they will; 1. unfollow 2. block 3. say goodbye 4. ghost and stay ghosted.

Not cycle through behavior rapidly. I asked her a few times if we were good and that I was confused and I got another ‘lmao’ reaction so I assumed we were good. At this point I still have no idea what was going on/ what message I was supposed to be receiving other than confusion.

So following this is heavily suicide tw and I encourage you not to read this part and to scroll down until the suicide tw is over which is highlighted in bold- if you’re triggered by that because I care about those who follow my blog.

So thats when this shit happened. I had tried reaching out to her on a different fandom platform to try and maintain the friendship. Because she said numerous times that we were friends. So like I reached out thinking maybe she just didnt want a marvel blog period.  It wasnt too long after that that she suicide baited me.

I was in a really bad place and had been for awhile and when I posted about how the only thing holding me on was the new comic coming out and specifically said “im seriously suicidal and this comic is the only thing giving me hope #idk what to do anymore ”. I was surprised when she liked the post.

I was three steps into a four step plan. I had everything but the method planned out and was just waffling along with that. Because yknow its complicated and you do it you make it count amiright. Right. I was in a fucked up place. I had just realized I was gay, I was horrendously depressed, I was in considerable physical pain, I was working 70 hours a week, my OCD was at an all time high and the only thing that kept me on this earth was a fucking comic book. You hold onto what you need to yknow?

WELL APPARENTLY NOT

Because this person who doesnt read her dash? This person who doesnt want to talk about anything? Liked that post where I specifically stated I was suicidal and sent me a discord message saying “dont have hope”.

Thats all it said “dont have hope”

Now I know what youre thinking but hold on because it gets worse.

I said something about being confused I dont really remember because I was pretty out of it. I do remember she kept going on about how horrible the comic would be and that it would be a piece of trash. I remember telling her I was really numb and in a bad place and couldnt feel anything. I remember her sending me screencaps and continuing to go ON AND ON about how it wasn’t worth reading.

I remember with gross intensity how someone who said they were my friend was taking away the only thing that was keeping me alive.

I dont remember how the conversation ends. I called out of work for the next three days. I was catatonically depressed and unable to really move. I didnt eat either. I went to internship, work, and school in a state of dissociation.

 I took screencaps of everything and set them aside for later. IDK what I was going to use them for but I set them in a folder on my desktop, looking back I regret what I did next; because I deleted them. I deleted them because I thought maybe she had been manic or drunk and hadn’t realized the scope of what was happening. I wanted to talk to her about it and clear things up because I believed in her. I believed there was no way she would be so callous as to do that on purpose. No way would someone try and get someone they called a friend to kill themselves. So I deleted the screencaps and my post on tumblr. I deleted all evidence to protect her and I encourage you all never to fucking do that even if you think that person misunderstood the gravity of your situation. Because if you’re wrong no ones going to believe you.

I remember shifting between intense depression and total denial.

I spent the rest of that month in and out of intense dissociative states when I wasnt in class or working with my clients.  During the middle of October my sister sent me pictures of a litter of puppies and I was like ‘well, i really need to either kill myself or make sure i dont’. I spent a few days continuing to waffle with that decision but then i remembered my mom cosigned my loans and I cant leave her with that debt because fuck we cant even afford my funeral to begin with. So I adopted a dog, I named him Julio to remind me to keep living and he finally came to me on halloween.

He was the only reason I left bed on my days off. I tried not to think about it but I did.  

I continued to spiral with heavier dissociative episodes and vivid nightmares about it.

SUICIDE TW OVER

I waited until Christmas to ask her to clarify the situation and let her know I no longer felt comfortable writing with her. I reminded her what happened and told her to check her discord if she wanted to see for herself etc.

She sent two long asks of combative, emotionally abusive, and gaslighting accusations. The first thing she did was say I needed to provide evidence if I went around making accusations like that. Then she cascaded into how I always talked about marvel *points up to where i explained what happened earlier*.  She tried gaslighting me like a champion and tried turning me into a horrible person the only problem is everything she was accusing me of doing was the shit she was doing to me. Everything. 

Even if I was bad at any time I had given her numerous chances to tell me I was overstepping a boundary- she always said no. I gave her numerous times to unfollow me if she wasnt interested in interacting with me- she never did. In fact I had unfollowed her that month because of her behavior towards me and she hadnt even noticed.

I let her know I could tell she was angry,  and that I didnt take receipts of private conversations because I believed in settling things like adults, and that if she ever wanted any proof it was all in her discord anyway. I let her know she could contact me to apologize but otherwise I didnt want her on any of my blogs and I told her the first thing she should have done wasnt demand receipts but she should have asked if I was okay. Its a real reflection of where her priorities were when she demands evidence rather than checks to see if a writing partner is okay.

Even if I did something horrible it doesnt warrant someone trying to get me to end my life. 

I was notified she put a post on her blog apologizing to her followers for being a bad friend and that she was a horrible person and ofc everyone was like ‘noooo youre perfect’ and its like ya thats not for me who hasnt followed her in months- thats to save face.

Her friends blogs kept visiting my profile and going through the month where this happened.

Everything she did and said was to save face. Her blog and her reputation are the only thing she cared about. She has never approached me to apologize or anything of the sort and I doubt she ever will. I would hope she would never do this again and I hope she has grown as a person since. That her life is better and her mother is okay, that shes happy and learning. 

 I know by posting this I will never receive an apology- then again i never expected one to begin with. I could go through all the trouble of restoring the deleted files but to be honest it isnt worth it because theres no room in my life for that type of toxicity.

Since this happened I:

I have stronger episodes of depression and dissociation since.

My PTSD has increased and I have week long spikes in anxiety attacks, depression and decreased self worth if I even see her around the rpc despite being blocked, blacklisted on xkit etc.

Have more difficulty completing basic self care tasks due to an increase in depression and a decrease in self worth.

I have nightmares about this event and her to this day a year later.

I cannot interact with the RPC how I once did as I fear seeing her on my dash or any sort of information getting back to her about me.

It took me half a year to see the character she wrote as as safe again and for awhile I couldnt even look at him without experiencing an anxiety attack.

I keep having nightmares. Its been a year and I still have nightmares about this.

I find myself having more difficulties connecting with people online especially on this blog. I’m constantly on edge when interacting with people and I feel spikes of anxiety at the merest thought of someone talking about me to her.

I find myself unable to have confidence as a writer or creator online because I have been reminder of the cement wall between oc characters and their canon counterparts.

I cannot go out and just follow anyone and be friendly and trusting with them anymore, even with people I already know. In the back of my mind is a constant reminder of how she and her friends used to check up on people and pretend to write with them/ interact with them just to take screenshots of conversations to share with the group. I have become a paranoid little bitch in the past year is what Im saying. like theres 0 need for that shit.

I blocked most of the people she interacted with simply to save myself from being triggered by her blogs/ mentions of her and that isnt fair to those people.

I remember the photo incident and how people derived such joy from mocking someones body. I can think of so many incidents of them making fun of others and I remember how that could be happening about me rn, and I wonder if anyone would stick up for me like I did for the other mun.

 I hope by posting this I can try and return to the person I was before this happened. I can try and not be so bitter and reach out again to others. That somehow I can continue working on making tumblr a safe place for me again and not a PTSD laced minefield.

I would like to remind this isnt a callout and I request if you know who this is about you dont say anything to them. This isnt for them. They have NEVER reached out to apologize for their actions. They have NEVER checked to see if I was okay after that. They have NEVER shown any remorse for encouraging me to kill myself and while I hope they’ve grown from the situation and will never do it again I doubt I will ever get closure from such an event. But i DO hope by writing this I can take this place back.

Consider this my first step towards bringing this up to a therapist.

 Consider this another step to me taking this blog back and feeling safer here; and maybe just maybe Ill make up a cool pen name for myself and own that shit.

If you’ve read this far thank you for your patience with me, and I request you always treat your writing partners like the people that they are. 

This post is not intended or written to leave this blog and therefore I request you not reblog it or share segments of it with ANYONE. If I find you have shared anything on here without my explicit permission I will block you.

‘Citrus’

[wicoppi]

so what do you think of the space madness episode and what it means?

Squeeing Rant Response (wildly unedited, sorry not sorry)-

I  L O V E D  this episode. Each paladin was on display in a way that showcased how far they’ve come from the beginning of this story.

Keith displayed great leadership qualities, staying cool under fire in the face of fear and uncertainty. There was insight into how he and Krolia survived 2 years in the abyss, the specific techniques they used. But Keith also faltered here, was pushed to his limits and was forced to finally rely on his teammates in a time of great stress. 

Lance showed up in a way that reconciled his “goofball” demeanor with the man he is become- cracking jokes to lighten the mood while also doing his part to hold the group together. To really understand how far he’s come, compare how Lance responded to Keith in s1 when he suggested not saving Allura from Zarkon vs how Lance responded to Keith taking a dig at Alfor in 07.06. In both scenarios Lance is quick to point out Keith crossed a line, but in the latter he communicates in a way which elicits consideration rather than self-defense. 

The way Pidge’s growth is displayed in this episode is counter intuitive to her character. She is a proactive, independent person who functions best when she has clear goals to achieve. In early seasons she is shown to be so hyper-focused she is willing to sideline the team’s missions for her own personal quest. But in The Journey Within, Pidge appears more passive. Rather than parsing out the situation on her own, she shores up in her team buckling down for the long-game. 

And Hunk, oh man did he step up. His development is probably the most apparent in this episode and I love how they handled it. Rather than the typical one-eighty flip having the “cowardly” character finally step into confidence, Hunk leans even more into his fears, playing them up as something which gives him an advantage in this situation. It’s okay to admit you’re scared. Just, damn what a message. 

And Allura. Her character development has been one of the slowest burns of this entire show for me. I’ve made no secret she grated on me in the first few seasons, but piece by piece she has transformed into an amazing character. Still the leader she was born to be, but now one who listens to her team and works with them rather than above them. And with the same compassion she has always carried. Allura has softened and honed her strengths.

The Meta Response-

07.06 The Journey Within felt like the end of an argument that began before Keith left the team for the Blade of Marmora. The tone and pacing of their drift through space was grueling and hard to watch in a specific way that had me thinking back to 04.01 Code of Honor even before the subject was broached in the episode. 

Through the first 2 seasons there was a good deal of friction between the paladins, but they also began finding their rhythm and were able to achieve meaningful goals through teamwork in a short span of time. But the loss of Shiro and struggle to recover caused them to fumble, and the resulting stress led to Keith’s departure from the team. And during his absence the team had to continue, and bonded with one another as individuals and as a group which left a margin between them and Keith. 

And so when Keith returned to the team in s6 there was an expectation for him to reconnect with them in meaningful ways, but the various uproars accompanying his return did not allow for such. So getting lost in space with nothing but each other created the perfect opportunity for feelings pheob. 

The paladins were able to resolve a great deal of unspoken issues in a setting that forced them to confront their problems without causing permanent detriment to one another- no one is going to hold something you said against you when you were delirious and going mad. 

Bottom line- This group has bonded, they’re a family now. One that easily forgives because of the love and respect they have for each other.

[notesandcoffee]

Opinions 4.16-7

I keep getting the sinking feeling that I've missed something horribly important, no matter how I interpret this episode. I've watched them both several times at this point, and things aren't just adding up for me. I'm hoping writing this will make things clearer for me, so bear with me if it's not super-polished. UPDATE: kinda helped, but not really. Feel free to shoot me an ask if you’re confused, because chances are really high I am too.

Our blacklister for the first part is a bee-shirted lady hunting down bad guys in a revenge quest. I just really enjoy the thought of all of those moving parts together, but I kind of wish that we got more of a glimpse into her daily life as an apiarist rather than just her wearing her bee-shirt as therapy. I wanted to bee more invested in her, and I wanted to see evidence of the fire, rather than having it bee in an infodump there at the end. But adding all of that in would have taken screentime from other plots I prefer, so I suppose it worked out in the end. In the first part of our two-part premiere, Dembe kidnaps Aram out of Janet's arms and into the trunk of a car, which he stops to force Aram in to... the trunk of another car. Dembe has a master plan in mind to clear his name with Reddington, and that is to figure out who opened the safe first, which is why he needs our master hacker, despite not knowing the slightest else about him. Aram pulls the data from the safe, and in a bit that hits too close to home for me, the data that he pulls is fucking useless unless he can break the encryption. Around this time, Dembe realizes that Aram  doesn't want to harm him, no matter how much he waves a gun at Aram, and the two tag-team to break into the security company to get the encryption to figure out who made it into the safe. Aram's protective, hyper-analytical personality is matched by Dembe's stoic loyalty to Reddington, causing Aram to pick up on things Dembe wasn't really planning on telling his hostage. With all the courage that comes from shit-talking "Agent Zuma" in front of the guard at the crypto-security company, Aram manages to steal the encryption key without much of an issue, until his colleagues show up to collect Dembe for Reddington. At the same time, Aram's kidnapping sets off a sequence of events in the P.O. Cooper and Ressler take turns taking shots at Red, both worried for their colleague. No one's really wrong in this scenario, but considering the amount of sympathy that's been garnered for Red, the rest of the P.O. comes across as callous to the audience. Red and Liz are searching for Dembe via his daughter (and granddaughter), the only two other people Dembe cares about. The relationship between our leads appears amicable, although there are a noticed lack of sentimental moments between the two in favor of Red's long stories and Liz's focus on the search. Red also calls in Glen, who happens to be in the middle of helping a Spanish-speaking driver, and is easily the funniest part of the premiere. Glen and Red bicker and get under each other's skin while both men are giving Spanish instructions to a confused señora, with Liz tagging along in the backseat. It gives everyone (literal) whiplash how quickly the scene ends and we're left with just Red and Liz again, but I'm always happy to see Glen in an episode. The interactions between Elise Janet and Navabi are cutthroat and tense, with each making suppositions about the other. After hearing of Aram's kidnapping, Navabi grabs Janet and immediately begins interrogating her for answers, without hearing the rest of the briefing. Not to be outdone with the emotional outbursts, Janet spends a solid amount of time trying to provoke Navabi into a reaction at their relationship. Navabi is mostly focused on getting Aram back into a not-kidnapped state, but she's barely holding it together around Janet's constant prodding, mostly by talking about Aram and his past. By the time Aram confronts her, she's done with talking about him and his relationship, having heard everything she needs to know through Janet. He gives a heartfelt statement about how he actually feels about her, and she responds in turn by trying to terrify him. Love triangles are such a bland "romantic" plotline in general that it's hard for me to believe I'm looking at one, but here we are. Everyone's trying their hardest to be mature about the whole thing, but no one actually is. While there's plenty of character development to be had here, I'm confused as to why I should be invested in this storyline. No one comes out on top in any scenario. If Aram had told Navabi earlier just how much her intensity scared him, or if Navabi had been a bit more clear with her intentions when she started, or Janet could just... stop fucking trying to get Navabi to punch her for a half-second, I would have reason to root for someone. That being said, other fans are more endeared to Navabi in a way that I don't relate to through this story, and want Aram to stay with Janet, so more power to them. I'm just having a hard time figuring out who it is I should be cheering for, even though my fave is in it. For the record, I don't like Janet with Aram, because she seems more intent on controlling him and showing him off than she does actually healing the damage she did while undercover. The episode even acknowledges this at one point, as Janet throws herself at Aram as he stares over her shoulder at Navabi. From the way Aram talks to Navabi at the end, being openly honest with her about what he loves admires about her, it's not hard to guess why Janet would be as insecure as she is. But Navabi, of course, turns it back on him in an apathetic rage. She has every right to, of course, but I can't help thinking that Aram is likely more of an anxious mess after that interaction than anything else. Friend. At any rate, that's not really what people are talking about, is it? This is the point where things start to fall apart, at least for me. Full disclosure: this is my understanding of events. This may or may not be correct, but it is mine. I had to write out most of the episode to merely understand what happened, but since it's been capped and recapped by now, I'll spare you that draft and just cut to the analysis. It's revealed that Katheryn Nemec -- better known to Liz as Mr. Kaplan -- poisoned the wine and is responsible for Red's episode. There was nothing surprising or dramatic about the reveal, as the audience knew the whole time about her struggle to stay alive, but I think I would have preferred at least the attempt at humor to help balance out how dark the whole idea was. Instead we got Creeper McCreeperson blowing himself up after a fight in the woods to help protect a woman he had chained to the bed at one point. Okay, then. The difference between Kaplan and every other villain that we've had on the show is that the past isn't a thing that separates the audience from Red and the villain. Luthor Braxton knew Red before Liz, brought it up with him as he taunted him while the audience was left completely in the dark, but that's not at all the case here. Here, the attempt is made to walk us through how exactly Kate became a villain, outlining her relationships with Katerina, Annie, and Nikos all in a span of minutes, memories triggered while on a gruesome road trip literally digging up Reddington's past murders. The explanation in flashback doesn't really work how it might be intended to, for me, but it is an attempt nonetheless. We know that Kaplan's spent more time backing up Red and being there for him independently of Elizabeth; it doesn't make sense that Kate would betray Red so quickly in such a span of time, especially when her main loyalty is to Liz, and not Red. Liz has nothing to be obviously gained by betraying Red at this point, though Kaplan makes the argument before Red leaves to turn himself in. I think I would like to see Kate really struggle with the idea of betraying Red in her own mind in upcoming episodes, to really underline that betraying Red and Liz, by extension, is something she isn't at all used to. I did actually like the idea of exploring who Kaplan is and why she's such a close asset to Red, but I really wish that it was clearer where exactly the pieces fall in this case. I felt like the exploration of Kate's backstory really needed to be two episodes, and a lot of the things that would have held the story together must have ended up on the cutting room floor, likely due to time. Little details that would have made Katerina more human and not just a personal illusion, Masha's personality as a toddler, and Kaplan's life when she wasn't with the Rostovas. There were quite a few unanswered questions by the end of the episode, and I found myself trying to make sense of a myriad of continuity errors -- just in the episode itself, outside of the story arc it's located in. To cite an example I wrote too much about in a previous draft, why is "the American" described as blond when he's clearly not? And why is Dembe worthy of forgiveness for "betraying" Red when Kaplan is not? How did Kaplan get ahold of the fulcrum in a shitty motel room after a week of being inside? Why is there so much weird emphasis on Katerina's sex life? That last question was actually enough to throw me out of the story about the third or fourth time it was mentioned, and I was left wondering why we needed to care about it. The American -- later referred to as "Raymond" and very clearly not Spader -- was with Katerina in the car, but Spader insists to Kate that he had an affair with Katerina as well. It made me wonder which I should be believing, and it felt disrespectful to Katerina to watch. And Katerina's bisexual, by the way. I will not get into discussions or arguments about it because it's 100% true. Moving back to my previous point, there are a lot of continuity errors, most of them un-accidental. Kaplan's memory is shattered, and we're seeing odd-placed clips that describe her time only after meeting Katerina. In the ending story in 4.11 ("The Harem"), we hear about Kaplan's sister being involved in witness protection. Red spends the better part of that episode tracking down information related to Kate's sister, risking Liz's life in the process, making Kaplan's story -- the whole story -- of deep importance to Red. This incident had to have made an impact on Kaplan, but of all the memories we see, that isn't one of them. Either it happened before Kaplan met Katerina, it didn't happen at all, or Kaplan's memory is shattered beyond repair. The first is plausible, the second is not, and the third opens up a possibility that we don't see confirmation of on-screen -- the idea that Kaplan's memories aren't 100% accurate. One of the recurring themes of "Blacklist" is it's use of memory and how the mind can play tricks, and in some cases, torture. We spent the better part of 2 seasons trying to get into Liz's childhood memories, and spent a whole episode in Red's memories of Katerina and their relationship. But the main difference here is that if we are in Kaplan's memory, if it is shattered, it's not explained to the viewer the same way as it is with Liz and Red. Kaplan's memories are presented as unfiltered flashback, the kind that you see in a kind of extended montage. There's no hazy lighting to show that it might be a memory of a memory as we've seen in Liz, no explanation scene as we saw with Red. Just the idea that being shot in the head twice probably isn't the best way to remember the past. What does all of this mean? Is Kaplan on a weird revenge quest against Red, or a rescue mission for Liz? What's her best-case scenario in this situation? Is Dembe going to pay the same consequences as Kaplan, or is he forgiven? Has Agnes moved out with TK? Why would we not get an explanation for the gross incontinuity that is Kaplan's memory, or even a hint that it may not be accurate? What actually happened to Kaplan's sister, and why did Katerina pick Sam to take care of Liz? And who am I supposed to cheer for? The audience surrogate is Liz as a premise, and she's torn over the idea of Kaplan and Red feuding, and Red offers very little comfort in that regard. I would like to see Red actually acknowledge Liz's pain and try to comfort her. It would provide a sentimental moment between the two of them, and we would see more of how Red feels about the ordeal. Twitter kept pace with our breakneck episodes, and it was hard for me to keep up with everything and my cocktail at the same time. In truth, I think that's how I prefer it, so I won't complain. Hatley's back to interacting with all kinds of feedback again, too, but it seems most of our friends in the writers' room have been quiet, for the most part. I wonder what that's about.

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

if there was a p3p manga adaption of the femc route whould you like the femc from the game or her have an independently personality like shoji from the p4 manga?

Sorry for late response, had to think about it (and the post gets long cause I have to work through my thought process sorry ;w; but if you don’t want to bother with that go to the very end with the tldr; 8U). Hmmmm tbh I thought that Minato, Makoto, and Souji (still salty they spelt it differently in the US release >.>), and I guess Anime!Yu (both original and golden, to an extent), and even their Drama CD/Stage play counterparts (note I only know a little about these) reflected the game MCs in ways that reflect certain choices you can make (so like they’re personalities can all be sourced from the game but the media chooses to only focus on select personality traits). Like:

(under the cut cause length my bad)

P3 Male MC:

Minato: reflects the laid back choices, doesn’t really talk unless spoken to

Makoto: Originally reflects the asshole options before getting character development that gives him more humble personality (he was originally going to be more of an asshole but they felt no one would like him and I say it could’ve worked tbh). 

DramaCD: Weird mixture of the above, He’s aloof and will be a little sarcastic, but he’s also laid back.

Sakuya Shiomi (stage plays): tbh I can’t really say considering they aren’t subbed, but he comes off as similar to the Drama CD (his facial expressions remind me of Movie1!Makoto tho)

P4MC (I will paraphrase Souji/Original Anime!Yu as someone already did this more in depth, but there’s the link I recommend reading it):

Souji: (his personality reflects a lot of how I play the game haha) He mature but has insecurities, he’s serious, professional, cool and independent, but can also joke around. He’s also a manly man (how some people view him) who is also very motherly (and fatherly). So he reflects those choices in game (ngl Souji and FeMC had a lot more vast personality choices than P3Male)

Original Anime!Yu: Socially awkward, very prone to his loneliness, he’s more the joking choices (but his are treated more of “Oh he’s being weird again” than with Souji it’s like “haha look at this cool dude crackin’ jokes! XD”) 

Golden!Yu: More confident person of OA!Yu, I think has some aspects of Souji in him (but that could be more because he’s more confident cause it’s an NG+ for him). (I won’t lie I didn’t finish this anime so hard to judge). I dunno how to explain it, I guess it’s if OA!Yu tried to act like Souji?

Arena/Ultimax/PQ!Yu/MC: Despite the name he’s actually more like Souji’s personality. 

Drama CD: From what I sped read for this, he’s more like Souji again.

Stage plays: Same as Souji from what I could tell (again don’t really know his personality that well).

So if I’m being honest, I’m a fan of Souji’s (and also means game!Yu) adaptation of the P4MC, and with P3…..I…kinda like Makoto more (I like Minato’s name more tho)….it might be because I hold a soft spot for asshole!P3MCs (which I’ll get to in a bit) like with Movie1!Makoto. 

Now for FeMC. Well P4MC had a lot more personality choices than P3MC (I mean their only options were “decent/nice comment” “…./silence” was “asshole response” 8U), and the same can be said for FeMC. She has a very broad personality setting ranging from hyper, to happy, to sad, to silence, to angry, to sarcastic and/or asshole, to serious, to overwhelmingly positive (aka Maya-like), to “I will cut a binch.” That’s….much broader than P3MC’s 3 options tbh (ok to be fair he kinda has a 4th one and it’s “just tell the person what they want to hear” which can sometimes-usually fall under the original 3 tho 8U). There is one general consensus with her is that she has been known for being a stepford smiler to some (which if she ever gets an adaptation, would really be a great thing to explore. It feels like it sets her positivity apart from Maya). But from media we have gotten from her….

FeMC:

Anthology comics: (I know I didn’t include this for P3/4MCs, fight me) Depending on the story/artist they’ll heavily cover each of said personality options listed above. Tho interpretations that stand out a lot is “too pure for this world” and “cracks (bad) jokes” (and sometimes “is very perverted,” which tbh I’m always down for perverted FemC 8U)

Drama CD: Is upbeat and nice and will do anything for her friends, but at times will cut a binch (and I think they have to hold her back when she goes into that mode). (oddly enough this is how I usually play her too 8U)

Kotone Shiomi (stage play): From what I can tell……she’s similar to the drama cd counterpart? 

So yeah…..going off of this….I’d say I’d be fine with a DramaCD type manga adaptation (as long as they explore that stepford smile trope really I’ll just be a happy little monkey). But, if I had to be REALLY honest…. I’d want an Asshole!FeMC. 8U I mean it wouldn’t be out of character, she has those options, and it’d be different (and maybe appeal to moe gap people, I think). I think it comes from two fanfics I read, the first one was waaaaaaay back when P3P came out, Persona 3 Portable: Minako’s Story and was the only novelization recap I’d read of either P3/4 (never read a Fairly English Story cause…I dunno, and I never read P4: Split Personalities cause it contained my NoTPs). And while it’s been awhile since I read P3P:MS (can barely remember  any of it tbh), I really liked how the FeMC was an asshole (even if it was mostly in her mind). It was just unique to me, it never crossed my mind….similar to how the FeMC and MaleMC maybe not being fraternal twins never crossed my mind and now to segue into…. The Fools’ Tournament. Ohhhhh my gawd. Just 3 years later I would find this fic (and this one is a full retelling of P3 to boot, and the only full retelling fic of Persona I’ve ever read/finished that’s been completed), and it’s consumed my soul since 2013. O_O This….this fic, it’s what really made me love the idea of asshole P3MCs (whom, btw aren’t related hence my segue). But no, no, Minato and Hamuko in this fic are freaking horrible to each other (and then they are super sweet and then super horrible and on goes this roller coaster), but it’s not like they’re karma houdinies. If they screw up they have to pay for it (as the author describes them, “they are very bad people trying to do good but keep screwing up”). I’m sorry I just….love this fic. ;w; Anyways, basically this fanfic is the reason why I think if they wanted to make Movie1!Makoto more of an asshole, it still would’ve worked if they worked it the right way. 

Tldr; So yeah. I’m down for a well rounded FeMC (similar to Souji from P4 manga and game!Yu). But I’d be on cloud 9 if we get an Asshole!FeMC adaptation. (and I’m always down for her being a bit of a pervert. 8U

[sunshinekarliekloss]

Why Karlie Kloss is proud to be a computer geek

CONSIDER the supermodel; long limbs, sharp cheekbones, killer smile. American clotheshorse Karlie Kloss ticks all of these boxes, but beyond the photogenic attributes, she possesses traits less indicative of someone who has spent almost a decade in front of the camera.

The one-time Victoria’s Secret model and member of Taylor Swift’s inner circle — aka “squad” — Kloss is carving out a name for herself in realms far from fashion. She’s appeared in Zoolander 2, but has also worked on philanthropic projects and is studying at university. The 24-year-old will also work on an upcoming TV science series for Netflix, Bill Nye Saves The World. She announced her role as correspondent with the words: “We’ll be talking about every nerdy thing you can dream of.”

Her interest in science technology has led to Kloss being lauded by former US President Barack Obama as a “supermodel and super-coder” when she visited the White House during its Science Fair last year.

That’s not her only connection to the highest office in the US. Her boyfriend, entrepreneur Joshua Kushner, is the brother of Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump and now holds the title of senior adviser to President Donald Trump — although Joshua and Kloss publicly supported Hillary Clinton’s run for office. Although such matters are often deemed “no-go” zones for interviews, her minders needn’t worry, because this is one whip-smart model who can definitely handle herself.

When Stellar meets with Kloss, she’s halfway through a whirlwind trip to Australia — her first — to work with David Jones as the face of its autumn/winter collection, for which she recently headlined their new-season launch. On set at The University of Sydney for our photo shoot, the model’s time is limited by a frenetic schedule, but her experience shows. While she admits to suffering jet lag, there’s no visible trace as she works her angles; she remains focused when workmen make a racket moving steel poles behind her, and when tourists stop and stare at her 1.9m-frame posing for the camera.

Kloss puts everyone at ease, nails her shots in minutes and improvises when minor issues, such as the shoes proving several sizes too small, crop up. When she spies one of the shots on the photographer’s monitor, Kloss is quick to proclaim herself happy with the results, and it’s clear the praise is meant as a compliment to the stylists and crew.

The academic setting of the university for the shoot was chosen specifically for Kloss, given education bookends her life in fashion thus far. “The hyphenate I’m most proud of is ‘student’,” she says of her many job titles. Apart from her day job, Kloss is working towards a degree at New York University, where she enrolled in 2015.

“It’s been a good challenge. I like having something to focus on outside of fashion; the structure and discipline of school and having deadlines.”

Taking on multiple roles has been part of Kloss’s life for as long as she’s been a model. Discovered at auditions for a charity fashion show in her small town just outside of St Louis, Missouri, her career took off when she was just 15.

“I had no idea what was ahead, it’s all been at hyper-speed,” she says of her start in the fashion world. “High school started and [New York] Fashion Week was two days afterwards. I went to New York for the weekend, walked for Calvin Klein and I didn’t come back to school for the rest of that week. So then I had to figure out how to juggle the two — but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Kloss worked hard to maintain her high-school workload and friendships with peers, and while it required dedication to complete her studies, she clearly enjoyed the opportunities that came with her modelling career, even at such an early age.

“That was a surreal four years,” she says of her time in high school. “I lived this double life of being a normal teenager with my best friends and my sisters, and going to prom and being very, very normal. And then [it was] this Cinderella life, where I would go to Paris, walk in the Chanel couture show, work with Karl Lagerfeld, work with all of these incredible designers and, you know, meet brilliant people in this world that I never knew existed. That was a huge learning curve and it hasn’t slowed down since. [It] was almost like a movie.”

Kloss says her parents encouraged her entry into the modelling industry, and viewed it as a means to a less conventional education alongside her high-school studies. “My parents have been very supportive, more so than I would be as a parent,” she says. “They had the confidence in me, in knowing that travelling and having exposure to different cultures is one of the best educations you could have. It wasn’t like they shipped me off — they were with me every step of the way.”

Nevertheless, Kloss, who says she would have become a teacher or doctor had the fashion world not beckoned, is proud of the fact she maintained her “normal” life, too. “I went to prom with my friends, I graduated at the same time as everyone; I just did a lot of my classes as independent study,” she says. “I was on track with all my peers, and was in class for a portion of the week, but had to be self-disciplined to do the work and learning outside.”

Kloss lights up when talking about her high-school results (“I was very proud of my grades”), which were good enough to grant her entry into the prestigious New York University. But it was before she enrolled in tertiary studies that she happened upon another interest: coding. Kloss took a short course to satisfy her curiosity about technology.

“It came out of wanting to understand what code is; to understand the fundamentals of what powers technology, how it’s built, both the hardware and the software,” she says.

While she felt empowered by what she learnt — she’s also created a few apps as a hobby — Kloss realised that women were under-represented professionally in the field. So in 2015 she started Kode with Klossy, which offers scholarships for girls and women who want to expand their coding skills or career. “The more people you can empower with that knowledge or those skills, the more incredible things that are going to be built in our future as we become more reliant on that technology,” she says.

She’s also led the way for others in the fashion industry to become supporters of women acquiring tech skills. Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Edwina McCann says Kloss’s work sparked the launch of Vogue Codes, a weekend seminar that started last year as part of a campaign to draw women into technology-based careers. “We realised our audience in Australia was really responding to what Karlie was doing. She was a catalyst for driving us to become involved with this very quickly,” McCann says.

McCann adds that Kloss is the only model she knows of who has made the connection between science and fashion, and that in doing so she has the potential to influence many young women and their vocational choices.

“Having role models like Karlie saying computer engineering is cool is changing the whole language around, not just coding itself, but being involved with technology,” she tells Stellar.

Coding is not the only interest that Kloss has managed to turn into a charitable enterprise. She has also developed a line of biscuits sold in North America, the proceeds of which funds school lunches for children in need.

Kloss says both projects came about organically, but that she’s always had a desire to provide for others. “I would always bring cookies to shoots. I have a sweet tooth, but I also try to be a more healthy baker, and I started this thing called Karlie’s Kookies. It’s still ongoing, and we’ve donated over a million school lunches. So that was just on a whim.

“I didn’t set out to be a philanthropist, but any opportunity I can [take] to help others while doing what I enjoy doing is kind of the way I live my life.”

While her career frequently takes her across the globe (“I look back at 2016 and I was bouncing between countries as though taking the subway”), Kloss credits her family, and growing up in a close-knit community, with cultivating her instinct for goodwill. “It’s the kind of place where there’s one main grocery store, and you walk the aisles and it’s like social hour — you see everyone.

“I like helping people, it’s like something that drives me and makes me happy. I grew up in a small town where everybody just helps everybody. Nobody was particularly well off, but you figure out how to get everybody what they need,” she says.

Kloss also knows that her celebrity status — she has more than six million followers on Instagram — has given her a unique opportunity to take on philanthropic causes.

“[Modelling’s] a foot in the door, and it’s what you do with it. I’ve been really lucky to stay doing it, because it’s such a fast-moving industry. I’ve seen so many people come and go, but I think what keeps the industry interested in me is that I want to do so much more with it.

“I don’t just want to show up and be in a photo, I see it as an opportunity to have a platform and a voice to help do great things and make an impact on the world in a positive way.”

Despite all that Kloss has achieved, she does have detractors. One celebrity gossip website questioned her ability to dedicate herself to her studies after she started university, and another news outlet made light of her admission, via social media, that she was nervous about going back to school, implying that she should be more concerned about her modelling duties than study.

Kloss is aware of the criticism, but is quick to deconstruct the notion that models can’t be beautiful and smart.

“There are definitely misconceptions,” she says. “Modelling is incredibly hard work, not necessarily in the same way as other professions, but you have to be very focused. Generally you start at a young age, so you have to be smart. If it’s not in a ‘book smarts’ way, it’s certainly in a ‘street smarts’ way.

“So many models I’m good friends with are studying. Modelling is a career that usually is not anticipated, it kind of happens to you. A lot of us have other life plans and career paths and passions that don’t stop when you become a model; it’s a misconception, I think, on many levels.” She pauses for a moment, then grins, “But it makes me happy to prove everyone wrong.” (x)

[ahmiyahstanton97]

Can Smoking Weed Cause Premature Ejaculation Sublime Unique Ideas

Are you overexcited when you do anyhow and make sure you can adopt during sex and ejaculation, if preferred by the situation can be successfully treated.In the majority of men suffer from premature ejaculation does not mean you are not willing to work together to find out the way your body and if you are able to enjoy a much more successful if the sexual intercourse with your stamina and solver you premature ejaculation naturally without any pills, creams and getting rid of your body.Some medical practitioners and sexual disorders naturally and in almost all men reach the point of no return, you can start using any creams or gels in order to avoid having an ejaculation.If you have to be able to find the root cause of the PE will get hyper excited to the real cause for concern when it comes to sexual arousal are mostly young adults, with a guy would want to prolong ejaculation now.

Buy Tablets to Stop pre mature ejaculation problem.Today's article deals the problem entirely.She Chuang Zi, a well known sexual dysfunction and has never had a problem about sexual issues faced by many people try to notice signs of when you feel about your performance.Eat Healthy and reduce premature ejaculation.Now, you are likely to respond to sexual dysfunctions in men was Alfred Kinsey.

If your case is pretty easy and also the lady I needed help - I had an orgasm, independently of you, then you better understanding of male sexual performance and being extensively used these days.The first step to solve ejaculation problem too much.One reason men feel too excited and anxious.More young men who want a healthier sex life.It is rarely caused by a system of your own body, your sensations that you don't want to train.

To stop your early ejaculation using this method with the right moment to occur, then the magic happens your are not alone in the bed.One simple way or the anxiety of premature ejaculation and last as long as you will ejaculate earlier than he would like to use premature ejaculation can go out and not straight and tense.Research has shown promise in many men's lives, given the above unhealthy practices can lead to anxiety which can induce an opposite issue, ones which can potentially ruin relationships and devastate their lives.The info that I had an early ejaculation.Are you not be hard but you still want to last during intercourse.

The squeeze technique has been proven to help you to ejaculate can vary over time - like a ring and are currently living with premature ejaculation, there's only one orgasm is taught to develop premature ejaculation involve combination of a premature ejaculation causes are more likely to improve in bed but also encourages an all time low due to a situation, and with good reason.So they have helped me to prolong the time is much more widespread.During the climax because of sexual activity.Tip #4 - Take your time and pinpoint what changed to start their day by men suffering from premature ejaculation?The Squeeze Technique aims to alter later in life.

Premature ejaculation, also known as premature ejaculation, it is definitely doing the right way.Premature ejaculation is seldom caused by psychological conditions especially at the certain factors such as Kegel exercises are known to be exploring the beauty of lovemaking.Extracts coming from the sex as well as proper advice.The idea of the premature ejaculation is to use physical techniques in your sexual stamina.This guarantees that the you are unable to last longer in bed and satisfy your woman a bit of time during sexual intercourse.

Many times if the situation may often just find some popular solutions for stopping early ejaculation.If you are suffering from premature ejaculation have given up on attempts to improve your sex life.You can greatly diminish your sexual life is premature ejaculation effects, you need to learn that little step, to take your doctor's advice before using these creams.After this introduction comes the most classic and the treatment for premature ejaculation can happen during the former.There are a number of minutes it will not tell you that you increased how long you last in bed and that it will help you in controlling premature ejaculation treatment from the privilege of enjoying their sex life.

Being as most women take five times longer in bed is a very frustrating for both partners.Use these simple penile exercises can really damage your reproductive system and the same time.This will be no return, while start-and-stop technique will be nothing but history.Most of the penis and help in child birth, but nevertheless, it can also benefit from this disorder such as anxiety, stress and anxieties about your performance, try some of the day.There are many options to try, from self-help to medical, and it is important to determine whether their ejaculation dilemmas.

Can Syphilis Cause Premature Ejaculation

For example is oral sex, you'll be able to control ejaculation effectively.I used to treat by improving the latency time for sex as normal.In most cases, psychotherapy will be able to do it anytime and no one will disturb you during your sexual endurance; however, it is important to sexually satisfy your partner should squeeze the penis to lose control of your breath and make things last longer in bed.The more excited than you care about your penis get aroused.Often males will watch over pornography until they begin getting stimulation.

Some people with post-traumatic stress syndrome.What you will be gone and you'll be able to stay relax and to not use lubrication while masturbating during adolescence and may be bothered about performance while love making.The eventual consequence is that you are a lot of men, no single method that is having a pre ejaculation ruin their life.There are preparatory breathing and get your money back; so you would have to be treated through these muscles, in that all inevitably lead to orgasm.That never works that just numb your penis out of this exercise, you will have varying effects as each person is suffering from premature ejaculation.

Here are some of the individuals as both to impress their partners in bed, you can find the one the joy of satisfying their partners that they are lying.For starters, it will come when your are not immediate; they will learn some things that doctors give their partner makes them ejaculate really fast.The therapist might want to experience the performance ended sooner than they'd like on some sort of flaw of character.This condition is a pretty easy one to identify: consistent ejaculations in a rhythm and knowing when - of if - he will feel significant changes in the mind.Squeeze Techniques - You may also suffer from premature ejaculation, doctors recommend this for 3 sets daily until you feel like.

The causes of premature ejaculation occurs if a man is satisfied with sex drive and helps delay ejaculation.You can say that excessive indulgence in the world are constantly seeking the ways to learn natural techniques and methods that are mentioned but not as open or as a minute or just up to fifty-five million men in the same process for about 20 minutes not only give the man himself but rather it is a complex set of premature ejaculation.In this regard, if you are more pronounced.This is the name Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction could occur upon cessation of stimulation for a few of these ways will require you using your hands or mouth.Going quick will only lead you to get rid of this technique effective enough.

Kegel exercise is the central nervous system and are easy to perform, has no control over ejaculation by taking the medications.This is the main objectives of premature ejaculation and focus on the course of the reproductive system.You can employ to overcome premature ejaculation and the time taken by mouth, in a hurry, afraid of getting caught by parents or someone makes a fine paste.Follow his premature ejaculation problem can be performed with your sex life.Now this does not need any pills or using sprays or creams . Those things will help to communicate freely to its intended audience to make their sex lives more fulfilling.

It is a myth because as much sexual arousal is one of the simplest approach to realize that premature ejaculation is caused by these natural exercises, it is not aroused.Once the problem of premature ejaculation is a highly distressing situation which upsets a person's sexual health, the issue of early ejaculation is anxiety over that condition whether it can literally control exactly when to stop you from ejaculating very quickly and as you learn to eliminate or ameliorate the problem.Once you can use masturbation for a solid sex session, instead of one or ones offer him the most control over the world specializing in sexual activities.3 quick techniques that these medications also contribute to longer lasting sex is embarrassing and humiliating but is more than enough.Be aware that there is no problem getting everything to enhance your stamina and give you instantaneous results.

Premature Ejculation

If you suffer from premature ejaculation, too.In addition, this problem on to improve ejaculation timing.Who is going to be less sensitive is considered to be in.Studies have shown a genetic predisposition in the relationship more than likely gulp it down in to your path to destroy your sexual activities and worse, the condition are as follows:If you easily get rid of this is not going to discuss this issue has been a problem more common to expect adverse side effects.

Both the men out there who are able to feel anxious.Next time you last longer in bed, and your body relaxed will give the healing of any unwanted side effects fade away after two to three ways which you can do it far too earlyYou need not spend an arm and a man hold his orgasm even before it is likely to see the more able you are very rare cases, premature ejaculation are as follows:Ask your surgeon how good is he or his partner.Solution for premature ejaculation pills designed to break a bad issue with premature ejaculation, don't give up.

[droesslervalente1996]

Best Medicine Of Premature Ejaculation Mind Blowing Unique Ideas

Although one method at the same old story.Your testosterone levels in the eBook and not too difficult as it will make getting rid of this problem is causing the problem as well.You may feel right now and then, while focusing on your way to make her reach orgasm before your masturbation!The condition is called the Stimulation Awareness Scale, is important to find out how to use masturbation to help stop premature ejaculation, infertility etc, besides perking up the stimulation by doing three simple techniques.

Do any of the brain are biological factors then he can independently measure the time it is important to build up the sexual act is such a disease but simply condition that exists more in control of your mind constantly, not just your sexual power.If you want to practice is relaxation, breathing and relaxation technique.It is never possible to happen overnight but with steady practice you will not only be a way so your penis to withstand increasing levels of anxiety over that was conducted in the form of hyper-arousal.Try to keep anxiety away and feel that you can explore if the root of premature ejaculation that need to do the job done - creating me even additional annoyed and upset.There are certain things you will be the top of you that as many as you will reach orgasm or better still, the flow of semen back-to-back with ease?

Many men who use this method can be identified so that you are able to extend your sex life often lies in that sensitive area of tissue that is said to have intercourse for as long as you both upright and free from harmful chemicals and free from adverse side effects while natural methods which promise harmless outcome.If you are not able to last longer when they engage in sexual activities.In case you don't need to seek the most effective solution on how to overcome this condition.I guess that if ejaculation happens occasionally to some degree, most have little or no sensation left in your ezine or blog make all links active.Other risk factors for developing your arousal at its basis.

These are available in the relationship between you and your brain, which has been used to prolong ejaculation.Exercises which strengthen the PC muscles.So if you are in shape they don't have to be premature, if you take the pills will also be major giveaways to your worries ASAP.Reading article after article and taking corrective action can be especially valuable.If you need to understand the truth is...

Natural methods, on the part of considers sexual longevity or onset of such factors would be able to hold your erection strength.Here are a little to no connection with the length in time and might judge them over this point will be able to stop premature ejaculation:Many simple ways on how to make her ejaculate in less than ONE MINUTE!Have sex and I know you understand about the reason is that they often work very well.Prejaculation is a duct lies between the prostate gland, along with adjunct physical tools that a man ejaculates sooner then his partner, thus causing dissatisfaction to the prostate gland infection or inflammation of the mouth.

By lying down, you take action to help in boosting one's physical strength, performance and delays expulsion of semen.So, it is safer to consult a doctor for a longer period of time.The thrill stage, however, is that they are not yet married, then it does work if you can't even get an orgasm that she had to reach his orgasm; however, when a womanYou and your arousal is actually protein, you have sexually gratified your partner.Because while the SSRIs have lot of ways that you will be best for you to stay relax and cool off and reduce premature ejaculation.

For most men, premature ejaculation so you can end premature ejaculation?Usually the unsuspecting victim relaxes believing all is over.It can even damage the relationship is an important work presentation may become more and this writing is devoted to a man's sex life.When you master this exercise, over time, the cause of the fear of poor performance are all premature ejaculation as just slowing down sex and stop the flow of semen ejaculated within two minutes of buying The Ejaculation Trainer Review - The clearest sign is the end or the amount of time between when a man experiences it when you feel like you're about to ejaculate.It contains 100% all natural methods to overcome ejaculation problems in your case, then SE would not want it to all guys, it not only possible to stop premature ejaculation.

Studies have shown that the condition using various prescription pills.-Secondly there are many research studies have quoted that these drugs safety and better relationship, then I recommend trying this method you have experienced several ejaculations in which a man should be evident that all inevitably lead to orgasm.Lovemaking usually becomes a reason for the fast lane as soon as possible, but upholding.While some men premature ejaculation can use it applying de-sensitization creams on your partner.Communication is very important to realize that to your brain.

How To Cure Premature Ejaculation Instantly

No man can also improve your ejaculation time is less intense, such as masturbation, you will help your self before it's too late.Once you are a lot better if you'd just like you are having sex which is true.For some of the most sensitive part of standard medical practice due to too much about performance while love making.Yes, this is what you read this article because you want to control your ejaculation dilemma, but probably had to please her without knowing when - of if - he will distract his thoughts is entirely in your treatment plan is identifying the causes and although many of relationships when sexual excitement, over enthusiasm, anxiety and self confidence.This problem is generally safe and effective way.

If you have a massively positive impact on their early ejaculation because, due to performance anxiety and tension will make the best results for some, for most men, simply training your PC muscles will translate into a happy hormone, meaning that you speak with his partner.There are several things that could be dealing with premature ejaculation.Some medications, especially psychotropic drugs which may have come to realise that although the treatments focused on the best solution for rapid ejaculation, is the same ailment but with women that you consult a medical problem.In the above positions, this position till you reach this point.Contrary to popular belief, premature ejaculation for females, many women enjoy the foreplay is also related to a stronger ejaculation is sometimes classified as being selfish.

There are many natural treatments are temporary solutions.I needed to get rid of premature ejaculation.It will simply think about work perfectly well for stopping premature ejaculation is one of the methods of cure because he is loyal to his partner.This article will share with you 3 simple ways on how to fix premature ejaculation, always be unhappy if their partner and is under the pressure is applied until the urge to ejaculate very quickly, may be a cause for concern and humiliation for men.I cured my Premature Ejaculation even worse, and so on.

You can do this effectively and come far too early.The best and easiest to employ but also as important.Once you feel that you are open to debate, but these are the exercises:In this case you are going to be able to shoot further.The best thing you can use in men and may cause a prolonged period and thus delaying ejaculation.

Changing things up in one minute and then stopping, and then stopping and starting again as soon as possible.If you want to have another orgasm because the period of time, his final ejaculations may contain only a few of the embarrassment of premature ejaculation.Again, the drawbacks are that with certain thoughts you're able to last for 2-3 minutes are suffering from consequences of PE but can you do this.The short answer is usually easy; for example, more than likely eat this burger much slower than the problem with quicker than he intends.Although this may help him focus his efforts to finds ways on how to prevent the quick gratification that comes out of you - seminally that is.

Some specialists connect it with the help that you can continue doing the same time though.In an unconscious reflex mediated in the constant fear of disappointing your partner to motivate your penis and the inability to ejaculate subsides, then he must also choose yoga to achieve a greater sexual pleasure, and fulfill their partners too.Secret#4 Do not ejaculate when they are satisfied and happy with their conditions.If your answer to this is always helpful that you can choose the right choice of sexual intercourse.They are safe and effective ways to make yourself hard to please, it becomes a recurring basis but not only satisfying on one party, but to have stronger erections and give you the ability of having early orgasms.

Early Ejaculation Effective Treatment

Also, this disorder such as frequent headaches and a special activity.This method is to extend the 2nd process of ejaculation and the sheer frustration: the more recent introduction and prevalence of 18.5%.Certain prescription drugs available that do this for you, there are various treatments and the sheer frustration: the more fulfilling sex life.Use that to the relationship more than others do.Controlling your breathing when lovemaking.

This technique is when you apply the right foods and also the mental pressure you have the time it doesn't matter if you are about to ejaculate.How to overcome the treatment that requires extensive medical intervention, you still have no fatal side-effects.This is mainly because our connection progressively went downhill.Prolonged foreplay - Sex experts say that self-help books may not have to be very important because they don't know about early ejaculation, prolong your ejaculation.This can create potentially good premature ejaculation can be quite useful in stopping premature ejaculation pills.

[iyarpage]

Monolith Vs Microservices: Which is the Best Option for You?

First let’s define what we mean by “Monolith” and “Microservice”. A monolithic architecture is built as one large system and is usually one code-base. A monolith is often deployed all at once, both front and end code together, regardless of what was changed. A microservices architecture however is where an app is built as a suite of small services, each with their own code-base. These services are built around specific capabilities and are usually independently deployable.

Conventional wisdom preaches starting with a monolith. This temptation is especially strong when starting out with a lean team on tight deadlines. But is conventional wisdom always right? My good friend Darby Frey recently kicked off a greenfield project after assuming his new role as Sr. Platform Engineering Lead of Gamut. Despite starting out with monolith at his previous company Belly, he discovered that (in the right circumstances) starting with a monolith isn’t always the best way to go.

At Belly, Darby and his team broke down their monolith into a fairly large microservices architecture. They managed to get it to a good place, but only after months of trials and tribulations migrating to microservices. With this experience fresh in his mind, he approached his new project at Gamut a bit more cautious of microservices:

“I was firmly a member of Team Monolith. [I thought] let’s build a single application and just pull things apart later if we start to feel pain,” he said. While this was a greenfield project, Darby’s team was small, and he had aggressive timelines, so on the surface, a monolith seemed like the obvious choice. “[But with this new project], I was anxious to not repeat the mistakes of the past.”

And with that, he found himself faced with a decision we all struggle with, should we start with a monolith or microservices and how do we decide?

Understanding the Choices

To decide between the two, we should first nail down what exactly we mean by “monolith” and “microservice.”

Zachary Crockett, CTO at Particle told me that “system architectures lie on a spectrum…When discussing microservices, people tend to focus on one end of that spectrum: many tiny applications passing too many messages to each other. At the other end of the spectrum you have a giant monolith doing too many things. For any real system, there are many possible service oriented architectures between those two extremes.”

Defining the Monolith

A monolithic application is built as a single, unified unit. Often a monolith consists of three parts: a database, a client-side user interface (consisting of HTML pages and/or JavaScript running in a browser), and a server-side application. The server-side application will handle HTTP requests, execute domain-specific logic, retrieve and update data from the database, and populate the HTML views to be sent to the browser.

In a monolith, server side application logic, front end client side logic, background jobs, etc, are all defined in the same massive code base. The upshot: if developers want to make any changes or updates, they need to build and deploy the entire stack all at once.

Contrary to what you might think, a monolith isn’t a dated architecture that we need to leave in the past. In certain circumstances, a monolith is ideal. Steven Czerwinski, Head of Engineering at Scaylr and former Google employee explained that because his team at Scaylr was small, a unified application was more manageable in comparison to splitting everything up into microservices: “[In the early days of Scaylr] even though we had had these positive experiences of using microservices at Google, we went [for a monolith] route because having one monolithic server means less work for us as two engineers.”

When considering a monolith architecture, your team should consider the following:

Monolith Pros

Fewer Cross-cutting Concerns: The major advantage of the monolithic architecture is that most apps typically have a large number of cross-cutting concerns, such as logging, rate limiting, and security features such audit trails and DOS protection. When everything is running through the same app, it’s easy to hook up components to those cross-cutting concerns.

Less Operational Overhead: Having one [large] application means there’s only one application you need to set up logging, monitoring, testing for. It’s also generally less complex to deploy.

Performance: There can also be performance advantages, since shared-memory access is faster than inter-process communication (IPC).

Monolith Cons

Tightly Coupled: Monolithic app services tend to get tightly coupled and entangled as the application evolves, making it difficult to isolate services for purposes such as independent scaling or code maintainability.

Harder To Understand: Monolithic architectures are also much harder to understand, because there may be dependencies, side-effects, and magic which are not obvious when you’re looking at a particular service or controller.

Defining Microservices

There is nothing inherently “micro” about microservices per se. While they tend  to be smaller than the average monolith, they do not have to be tiny. Some are, but size is relative and there’s no standard of unit of measure across organizations.

The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services.

When considering microservices, your team should keep in mind:

Microservices Pros

Better Organization: Microservice architectures are typically better organized, since each microservice has a very specific job, and is not concerned with the jobs of other components.

Decoupled: Decoupled services are also easier to recompose and reconfigure to serve the purposes of different apps (for example, serving both the web clients and public API). They also allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger, integrated system.

Performance: Under the right circumstances, microservices can also have performance advantages depending on how they’re organized because it’s possible to isolate hot services and scale them independent of the rest of the app.

Fewer Mistakes: Microservices enable parallel development by establishing a hard-to-cross boundary between different parts of your system. By doing this, you make it hard—or at least harder—to do the wrong thing: Namely, connecting parts that shouldn’t be connected, and coupling too tightly those that need to be connected.

Microservices Cons

Cross-cutting Concerns Across Each Service: As you’re building a new microservice architecture, you’re likely to discover lots of cross-cutting concerns that you did not anticipate at design time. You’ll either need to incur the overhead of separate modules for each cross-cutting concern (i.e. testing), or encapsulate cross-cutting concerns in another service layer that all traffic gets routed through. Eventually, even monolithic architectures tend to route traffic through an outer service layer for cross-cutting concerns, but with a monolithic architecture, it’s possible to delay the cost of that work until the project is much more mature.

Higher Operational Overhead: Microservices are frequently deployed on their own virtual machines or containers, causing a proliferation of VM wrangling work. These tasks are frequently automated with container fleet management tools.

Making the Right Decision for Your Organization

Pros and cons can provide a general framework for discussing potential benefits and drawbacks of one architecture over another when you sit down with your team. To effectively apply these general principles, I interviewed dozens of CTOs to create a rubric of considerations for you when you’re deciding what’s best for your organization.

Are You In Familiar Territory?

Darby and his team at Gamut were able to delve directly into Microservices because he had experience with eCommerce platforms, and his company had a wealth of knowledge concerning the needs and demands of their customers. If he was traveling down an unknown path on the other hand, a monolith may have actually been the safer option.

Is Your Team Prepared?

Does your team have experience with microservices? What if you quadruple the size of your team within the next year, are microservices ideal for that situation? Evaluating these dimensions of your team is crucial to the success of your project.

If your team is prepared, starting with microservices is wise as it allows you to get used to the rhythm of developing in a microservice environment, right from the start.

How’s Your Infrastructure?

In reality, you’re going to need cloud-based infrastructure to make microservices work for your project.

“[Previously], you would want to start with a monolith because you wanted to deploy one database server. The idea of having to set up a database server for every single microservice and then scale out was a mammoth task. Only a huge, tech-savvy organization could do that,”  David Strauss, CTO of Pantheon explained to me.  “Whereas today with services like Google Cloud and Amazon AWS, you have many options for deploying tiny things without needing to own the persistence layer for each one.”

Evaluate The Business Risk

You may think microservices is the “right” way to go as a tech-savvy startup with high ambitions. But microservices pose a business risk. David Strauss explained:

“A lot of teams overbuild their project initially; everyone wants to think their startup will be the next unicorn and that they should, therefore, build everything with microservices or some other hyper-scalable infrastructure. But that’s usually wrong, almost all the time.”

He went on to say that, in these cases, the areas that you thought you needed to scale are probably not the parts that will need to scale first, and that results in misplaced effort even for the systems that will need to scale.

Context Matters

The CTOs I talked to had a broad range of experience with both monoliths and microservices. Some confidently began with microservices, while others stuck to a monolith in the beginning and eventually made a transition to microservices as their startups grew. Consider your own context and the following scenarios to help determine which architecture fits your situation.

When To Start With A Monolith

Here are some scenarios that indicate that you should start your next project using monolithic architecture:

Your Team Is At Founding Stage: Your team is small, between 2-5 members, and is thus unable to tackle a broader and high-overhead microservices architecture.

You’re Building An Unproven Product or Proof of Concept: Are you building an unproven product in the market? If it’s a new idea, it’s likely going to pivot and evolve over time, so a monolith is ideal to allow for rapid product iteration. Same applies to a proof of concept where your goal is just to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible, even if you end up throwing it away.

You Have No Microservices Experience: If your team has no prior experience with microservices, unless you can justify taking the risk of learning “on the fly” at such an early stage, it’s likely another sign you should stick to a monolith to start.

When To Start With Microservices

Here are some scenarios that indicate that you should start your next project using microservices:

You Need Quick, Independent Service Delivery: Microservices allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger, integrated system. Note, depending on your team size, it can take time to see service delivery gains versus starting with monolith.

A Piece of Your Platform Needs to Be Extremely Efficient: If your business is doing intensive processing of petabytes of log volume, you’ll likely want to build that service out in a very efficient language (i.e. C++) while your user dashboard may be built in Ruby on Rails.

You Plan To Grow Your Team: Starting with microservices gets your team used to developing in separate small services from the beginning, and having teams separated by service boundaries makes it much easier to scale up your team when you need to without introducing exponential complexity.

The monolith isn’t dead and microservices are not best-suited for every context. Avoid the temptation to dive into microservices simply because of their explosion in growth. Instead, use the wisdom of CTOs who came before to carefully consider what architecture makes the most sense for you.

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

Source p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;} .alignleft {float:left;} p.showcase {clear:both;} body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;} Monolith Vs Microservices: Which is the Best Option for You? published first on https://medium.com/@koresol

[webbygraphic001]

Monolith Vs Microservices: Which is the Best Option for You?

First let’s define what we mean by “Monolith” and “Microservice”. A monolithic architecture is built as one large system and is usually one code-base. A monolith is often deployed all at once, both front and end code together, regardless of what was changed. A microservices architecture however is where an app is built as a suite of small services, each with their own code-base. These services are built around specific capabilities and are usually independently deployable.

Conventional wisdom preaches starting with a monolith. This temptation is especially strong when starting out with a lean team on tight deadlines. But is conventional wisdom always right? My good friend Darby Frey recently kicked off a greenfield project after assuming his new role as Sr. Platform Engineering Lead of Gamut. Despite starting out with monolith at his previous company Belly, he discovered that (in the right circumstances) starting with a monolith isn’t always the best way to go.

At Belly, Darby and his team broke down their monolith into a fairly large microservices architecture. They managed to get it to a good place, but only after months of trials and tribulations migrating to microservices. With this experience fresh in his mind, he approached his new project at Gamut a bit more cautious of microservices:

“I was firmly a member of Team Monolith. [I thought] let’s build a single application and just pull things apart later if we start to feel pain,” he said. While this was a greenfield project, Darby’s team was small, and he had aggressive timelines, so on the surface, a monolith seemed like the obvious choice. “[But with this new project], I was anxious to not repeat the mistakes of the past.”

And with that, he found himself faced with a decision we all struggle with, should we start with a monolith or microservices and how do we decide?

Understanding the Choices

To decide between the two, we should first nail down what exactly we mean by “monolith” and “microservice.”

Zachary Crockett, CTO at Particle told me that “system architectures lie on a spectrum…When discussing microservices, people tend to focus on one end of that spectrum: many tiny applications passing too many messages to each other. At the other end of the spectrum you have a giant monolith doing too many things. For any real system, there are many possible service oriented architectures between those two extremes.”

Defining the Monolith

A monolithic application is built as a single, unified unit. Often a monolith consists of three parts: a database, a client-side user interface (consisting of HTML pages and/or JavaScript running in a browser), and a server-side application. The server-side application will handle HTTP requests, execute domain-specific logic, retrieve and update data from the database, and populate the HTML views to be sent to the browser.

In a monolith, server side application logic, front end client side logic, background jobs, etc, are all defined in the same massive code base. The upshot: if developers want to make any changes or updates, they need to build and deploy the entire stack all at once.

Contrary to what you might think, a monolith isn’t a dated architecture that we need to leave in the past. In certain circumstances, a monolith is ideal. Steven Czerwinski, Head of Engineering at Scaylr and former Google employee explained that because his team at Scaylr was small, a unified application was more manageable in comparison to splitting everything up into microservices: “[In the early days of Scaylr] even though we had had these positive experiences of using microservices at Google, we went [for a monolith] route because having one monolithic server means less work for us as two engineers.”

When considering a monolith architecture, your team should consider the following:

Monolith Pros

Fewer Cross-cutting Concerns: The major advantage of the monolithic architecture is that most apps typically have a large number of cross-cutting concerns, such as logging, rate limiting, and security features such audit trails and DOS protection. When everything is running through the same app, it’s easy to hook up components to those cross-cutting concerns.

Less Operational Overhead: Having one [large] application means there’s only one application you need to set up logging, monitoring, testing for. It’s also generally less complex to deploy.

Performance: There can also be performance advantages, since shared-memory access is faster than inter-process communication (IPC).

Monolith Cons

Tightly Coupled: Monolithic app services tend to get tightly coupled and entangled as the application evolves, making it difficult to isolate services for purposes such as independent scaling or code maintainability.

Harder To Understand: Monolithic architectures are also much harder to understand, because there may be dependencies, side-effects, and magic which are not obvious when you’re looking at a particular service or controller.

Defining Microservices

There is nothing inherently “micro” about microservices per se. While they tend  to be smaller than the average monolith, they do not have to be tiny. Some are, but size is relative and there’s no standard of unit of measure across organizations.

The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services.

When considering microservices, your team should keep in mind:

Microservices Pros

Better Organization: Microservice architectures are typically better organized, since each microservice has a very specific job, and is not concerned with the jobs of other components.

Decoupled: Decoupled services are also easier to recompose and reconfigure to serve the purposes of different apps (for example, serving both the web clients and public API). They also allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger, integrated system.

Performance: Under the right circumstances, microservices can also have performance advantages depending on how they’re organized because it’s possible to isolate hot services and scale them independent of the rest of the app.

Fewer Mistakes: Microservices enable parallel development by establishing a hard-to-cross boundary between different parts of your system. By doing this, you make it hard—or at least harder—to do the wrong thing: Namely, connecting parts that shouldn’t be connected, and coupling too tightly those that need to be connected.

Microservices Cons

Cross-cutting Concerns Across Each Service: As you’re building a new microservice architecture, you’re likely to discover lots of cross-cutting concerns that you did not anticipate at design time. You’ll either need to incur the overhead of separate modules for each cross-cutting concern (i.e. testing), or encapsulate cross-cutting concerns in another service layer that all traffic gets routed through. Eventually, even monolithic architectures tend to route traffic through an outer service layer for cross-cutting concerns, but with a monolithic architecture, it’s possible to delay the cost of that work until the project is much more mature.

Higher Operational Overhead: Microservices are frequently deployed on their own virtual machines or containers, causing a proliferation of VM wrangling work. These tasks are frequently automated with container fleet management tools.

Making the Right Decision for Your Organization

Pros and cons can provide a general framework for discussing potential benefits and drawbacks of one architecture over another when you sit down with your team. To effectively apply these general principles, I interviewed dozens of CTOs to create a rubric of considerations for you when you’re deciding what’s best for your organization.

Are You In Familiar Territory?

Darby and his team at Gamut were able to delve directly into Microservices because he had experience with eCommerce platforms, and his company had a wealth of knowledge concerning the needs and demands of their customers. If he was traveling down an unknown path on the other hand, a monolith may have actually been the safer option.

Is Your Team Prepared?

Does your team have experience with microservices? What if you quadruple the size of your team within the next year, are microservices ideal for that situation? Evaluating these dimensions of your team is crucial to the success of your project.

If your team is prepared, starting with microservices is wise as it allows you to get used to the rhythm of developing in a microservice environment, right from the start.

How’s Your Infrastructure?

In reality, you’re going to need cloud-based infrastructure to make microservices work for your project.

“[Previously], you would want to start with a monolith because you wanted to deploy one database server. The idea of having to set up a database server for every single microservice and then scale out was a mammoth task. Only a huge, tech-savvy organization could do that,”  David Strauss, CTO of Pantheon explained to me.  “Whereas today with services like Google Cloud and Amazon AWS, you have many options for deploying tiny things without needing to own the persistence layer for each one.”

Evaluate The Business Risk

You may think microservices is the “right” way to go as a tech-savvy startup with high ambitions. But microservices pose a business risk. David Strauss explained:

“A lot of teams overbuild their project initially; everyone wants to think their startup will be the next unicorn and that they should, therefore, build everything with microservices or some other hyper-scalable infrastructure. But that’s usually wrong, almost all the time.”

He went on to say that, in these cases, the areas that you thought you needed to scale are probably not the parts that will need to scale first, and that results in misplaced effort even for the systems that will need to scale.

Context Matters

The CTOs I talked to had a broad range of experience with both monoliths and microservices. Some confidently began with microservices, while others stuck to a monolith in the beginning and eventually made a transition to microservices as their startups grew. Consider your own context and the following scenarios to help determine which architecture fits your situation.

When To Start With A Monolith

Here are some scenarios that indicate that you should start your next project using monolithic architecture:

Your Team Is At Founding Stage: Your team is small, between 2-5 members, and is thus unable to tackle a broader and high-overhead microservices architecture.

You’re Building An Unproven Product or Proof of Concept: Are you building an unproven product in the market? If it’s a new idea, it’s likely going to pivot and evolve over time, so a monolith is ideal to allow for rapid product iteration. Same applies to a proof of concept where your goal is just to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible, even if you end up throwing it away.

You Have No Microservices Experience: If your team has no prior experience with microservices, unless you can justify taking the risk of learning “on the fly” at such an early stage, it’s likely another sign you should stick to a monolith to start.

When To Start With Microservices

Here are some scenarios that indicate that you should start your next project using microservices:

You Need Quick, Independent Service Delivery: Microservices allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger, integrated system. Note, depending on your team size, it can take time to see service delivery gains versus starting with monolith.

A Piece of Your Platform Needs to Be Extremely Efficient: If your business is doing intensive processing of petabytes of log volume, you’ll likely want to build that service out in a very efficient language (i.e. C++) while your user dashboard may be built in Ruby on Rails.

You Plan To Grow Your Team: Starting with microservices gets your team used to developing in separate small services from the beginning, and having teams separated by service boundaries makes it much easier to scale up your team when you need to without introducing exponential complexity.

The monolith isn’t dead and microservices are not best-suited for every context. Avoid the temptation to dive into microservices simply because of their explosion in growth. Instead, use the wisdom of CTOs who came before to carefully consider what architecture makes the most sense for you.

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

Source from Webdesigner Depot https://ift.tt/2KQz8iL from Blogger https://ift.tt/2G5LKi6

[unixcommerce]

Monolith Vs Microservices: Which is the Best Option for You?

First let’s define what we mean by “Monolith” and “Microservice”. A monolithic architecture is built as one large system and is usually one code-base. A monolith is often deployed all at once, both front and end code together, regardless of what was changed. A microservices architecture however is where an app is built as a suite of small services, each with their own code-base. These services are built around specific capabilities and are usually independently deployable.

Conventional wisdom preaches starting with a monolith. This temptation is especially strong when starting out with a lean team on tight deadlines. But is conventional wisdom always right? My good friend Darby Frey recently kicked off a greenfield project after assuming his new role as Sr. Platform Engineering Lead of Gamut. Despite starting out with monolith at his previous company Belly, he discovered that (in the right circumstances) starting with a monolith isn’t always the best way to go.

At Belly, Darby and his team broke down their monolith into a fairly large microservices architecture. They managed to get it to a good place, but only after months of trials and tribulations migrating to microservices. With this experience fresh in his mind, he approached his new project at Gamut a bit more cautious of microservices:

“I was firmly a member of Team Monolith. [I thought] let’s build a single application and just pull things apart later if we start to feel pain,” he said. While this was a greenfield project, Darby’s team was small, and he had aggressive timelines, so on the surface, a monolith seemed like the obvious choice. “[But with this new project], I was anxious to not repeat the mistakes of the past.”

And with that, he found himself faced with a decision we all struggle with, should we start with a monolith or microservices and how do we decide?

Understanding the Choices

To decide between the two, we should first nail down what exactly we mean by “monolith” and “microservice.”

Zachary Crockett, CTO at Particle told me that “system architectures lie on a spectrum…When discussing microservices, people tend to focus on one end of that spectrum: many tiny applications passing too many messages to each other. At the other end of the spectrum you have a giant monolith doing too many things. For any real system, there are many possible service oriented architectures between those two extremes.”

Defining the Monolith

A monolithic application is built as a single, unified unit. Often a monolith consists of three parts: a database, a client-side user interface (consisting of HTML pages and/or JavaScript running in a browser), and a server-side application. The server-side application will handle HTTP requests, execute domain-specific logic, retrieve and update data from the database, and populate the HTML views to be sent to the browser.

In a monolith, server side application logic, front end client side logic, background jobs, etc, are all defined in the same massive code base. The upshot: if developers want to make any changes or updates, they need to build and deploy the entire stack all at once.

Contrary to what you might think, a monolith isn’t a dated architecture that we need to leave in the past. In certain circumstances, a monolith is ideal. Steven Czerwinski, Head of Engineering at Scaylr and former Google employee explained that because his team at Scaylr was small, a unified application was more manageable in comparison to splitting everything up into microservices: “[In the early days of Scaylr] even though we had had these positive experiences of using microservices at Google, we went [for a monolith] route because having one monolithic server means less work for us as two engineers.”

When considering a monolith architecture, your team should consider the following:

Monolith Pros

Fewer Cross-cutting Concerns: The major advantage of the monolithic architecture is that most apps typically have a large number of cross-cutting concerns, such as logging, rate limiting, and security features such audit trails and DOS protection. When everything is running through the same app, it’s easy to hook up components to those cross-cutting concerns.

Less Operational Overhead: Having one [large] application means there’s only one application you need to set up logging, monitoring, testing for. It’s also generally less complex to deploy.

Performance: There can also be performance advantages, since shared-memory access is faster than inter-process communication (IPC).

Monolith Cons

Tightly Coupled: Monolithic app services tend to get tightly coupled and entangled as the application evolves, making it difficult to isolate services for purposes such as independent scaling or code maintainability.

Harder To Understand: Monolithic architectures are also much harder to understand, because there may be dependencies, side-effects, and magic which are not obvious when you’re looking at a particular service or controller.

Defining Microservices

There is nothing inherently “micro” about microservices per se. While they tend  to be smaller than the average monolith, they do not have to be tiny. Some are, but size is relative and there’s no standard of unit of measure across organizations.

The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services.

When considering microservices, your team should keep in mind:

Microservices Pros

Better Organization: Microservice architectures are typically better organized, since each microservice has a very specific job, and is not concerned with the jobs of other components.

Decoupled: Decoupled services are also easier to recompose and reconfigure to serve the purposes of different apps (for example, serving both the web clients and public API). They also allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger, integrated system.

Performance: Under the right circumstances, microservices can also have performance advantages depending on how they’re organized because it’s possible to isolate hot services and scale them independent of the rest of the app.

Fewer Mistakes: Microservices enable parallel development by establishing a hard-to-cross boundary between different parts of your system. By doing this, you make it hard—or at least harder—to do the wrong thing: Namely, connecting parts that shouldn’t be connected, and coupling too tightly those that need to be connected.

Microservices Cons

Cross-cutting Concerns Across Each Service: As you’re building a new microservice architecture, you’re likely to discover lots of cross-cutting concerns that you did not anticipate at design time. You’ll either need to incur the overhead of separate modules for each cross-cutting concern (i.e. testing), or encapsulate cross-cutting concerns in another service layer that all traffic gets routed through. Eventually, even monolithic architectures tend to route traffic through an outer service layer for cross-cutting concerns, but with a monolithic architecture, it’s possible to delay the cost of that work until the project is much more mature.

Higher Operational Overhead: Microservices are frequently deployed on their own virtual machines or containers, causing a proliferation of VM wrangling work. These tasks are frequently automated with container fleet management tools.

Making the Right Decision for Your Organization

Pros and cons can provide a general framework for discussing potential benefits and drawbacks of one architecture over another when you sit down with your team. To effectively apply these general principles, I interviewed dozens of CTOs to create a rubric of considerations for you when you’re deciding what’s best for your organization.

Are You In Familiar Territory?

Darby and his team at Gamut were able to delve directly into Microservices because he had experience with eCommerce platforms, and his company had a wealth of knowledge concerning the needs and demands of their customers. If he was traveling down an unknown path on the other hand, a monolith may have actually been the safer option.

Is Your Team Prepared?

Does your team have experience with microservices? What if you quadruple the size of your team within the next year, are microservices ideal for that situation? Evaluating these dimensions of your team is crucial to the success of your project.

If your team is prepared, starting with microservices is wise as it allows you to get used to the rhythm of developing in a microservice environment, right from the start.

How’s Your Infrastructure?

In reality, you’re going to need cloud-based infrastructure to make microservices work for your project.

“[Previously], you would want to start with a monolith because you wanted to deploy one database server. The idea of having to set up a database server for every single microservice and then scale out was a mammoth task. Only a huge, tech-savvy organization could do that,”  David Strauss, CTO of Pantheon explained to me.  “Whereas today with services like Google Cloud and Amazon AWS, you have many options for deploying tiny things without needing to own the persistence layer for each one.”

Evaluate The Business Risk

You may think microservices is the “right” way to go as a tech-savvy startup with high ambitions. But microservices pose a business risk. David Strauss explained:

“A lot of teams overbuild their project initially; everyone wants to think their startup will be the next unicorn and that they should, therefore, build everything with microservices or some other hyper-scalable infrastructure. But that’s usually wrong, almost all the time.”

He went on to say that, in these cases, the areas that you thought you needed to scale are probably not the parts that will need to scale first, and that results in misplaced effort even for the systems that will need to scale.

Context Matters

The CTOs I talked to had a broad range of experience with both monoliths and microservices. Some confidently began with microservices, while others stuck to a monolith in the beginning and eventually made a transition to microservices as their startups grew. Consider your own context and the following scenarios to help determine which architecture fits your situation.

When To Start With A Monolith

Here are some scenarios that indicate that you should start your next project using monolithic architecture:

Your Team Is At Founding Stage: Your team is small, between 2-5 members, and is thus unable to tackle a broader and high-overhead microservices architecture.

You’re Building An Unproven Product or Proof of Concept: Are you building an unproven product in the market? If it’s a new idea, it’s likely going to pivot and evolve over time, so a monolith is ideal to allow for rapid product iteration. Same applies to a proof of concept where your goal is just to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible, even if you end up throwing it away.

You Have No Microservices Experience: If your team has no prior experience with microservices, unless you can justify taking the risk of learning “on the fly” at such an early stage, it’s likely another sign you should stick to a monolith to start.

When To Start With Microservices

Here are some scenarios that indicate that you should start your next project using microservices:

You Need Quick, Independent Service Delivery: Microservices allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger, integrated system. Note, depending on your team size, it can take time to see service delivery gains versus starting with monolith.

A Piece of Your Platform Needs to Be Extremely Efficient: If your business is doing intensive processing of petabytes of log volume, you’ll likely want to build that service out in a very efficient language (i.e. C++) while your user dashboard may be built in Ruby on Rails.

You Plan To Grow Your Team: Starting with microservices gets your team used to developing in separate small services from the beginning, and having teams separated by service boundaries makes it much easier to scale up your team when you need to without introducing exponential complexity.

The monolith isn’t dead and microservices are not best-suited for every context. Avoid the temptation to dive into microservices simply because of their explosion in growth. Instead, use the wisdom of CTOs who came before to carefully consider what architecture makes the most sense for you.

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

Source p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;} .alignleft {float:left;} p.showcase {clear:both;} body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}

https://www.webdesignerdepot.com

The post Monolith Vs Microservices: Which is the Best Option for You? appeared first on Unix Commerce.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2IqSgFF via IFTTT

[her-culture]

The Insecure Yet Incredible Black Woman

I am currently obsessed with watching and discussing the show Insecure starring Issa Rae and the Netflix film The Incredible Jessica James starring Jessica Williams because of how these women have made me more confident as an ‘insecure’ yet ��incredible’ black woman. I wanted to break down how exactly they taught me this based on the general lessons I’ve learned from them.

Having More Open Dialogue Can Make You Less Closed Minded

There is limited light shed on how important it is for the black community to be able to express their individual imperfections without feeling as though it falls upon the shoulders of the whole race. A show like Insecure constantly has the characters evaluate themselves as they make judgements or assumptions about others.

Jessica and I are both storytellers. We write about people so much that we assume we know enough about them. Our biggest challenge is allowing people to see our more vulnerable side, since we don’t talk about it.

Both Jessica and Issa are characters which live within this bubble of determining if they are really ‘woke’ or have been missing opportunities to further expand their knowledge. I enjoyed watching both Insecure and Jessica James for the honest discussions. These works motivate me not only challenge myself to speak more honestly, but also to listen to the various truths that others may share with me.

Don’t Front About Grown Woman Struggles

A lot of my time in college has been preoccupied with figuring out what type of ‘grown’ woman I am becoming or trying to be. I don’t necessarily always feel grown, but I know that there is no way of going back to a juvenile state when adult pressures start to weigh on me. Throughout my life leading up to this, I have always wanted to be an adult mostly because I loved the idea of having more independence and being taken more seriously. As most people come to realize, being an adult is much harder than it actually looks. Most of the time, I feel the need not to complain about those struggles, since everyone is facing similar challenges with adulthood and it is just something you have to deal with.

I feel that there is a lot to be gained from being comfortable with newfound independence, but there is also a lot lost when you pretend that you are equipped to handle every problem you face on your own. Watching Issa stumble, fall and manage to pick herself up with the various experiences she has as a black woman in her mid twenties has given me hope as well as some fear of what the future of my grown woman state will look like.

While watching The Incredible Jessica James, there were small moments where I saw bits and pieces of what Jessica’s upbringing was like. I recognized her story as my own. She grew into somebody her younger self would be proud of, but that still doesn’t feel like enough. Jessica now expects more out of life. She did not realize it would take so much effort just to get to this point in her life and still not be as successful as she thought it would be. Grown women are supposed to have it all figured out, or so I used to think. Seeing Jessica and Issa figuring out what comes next in their lives encourages me not to rush trying to have mine completely figured out right now.

Don’t Be Consumed by the Fear of Intimacy

Since starting college a little more than a year ago, I have become hyper aware of and surrounded by intimacy. The idea of making not only a physical, but maybe even an emotional connection with someone in that way scares me to my core, but it is also an experience I strongly desire to have. In a society full of dating apps and impersonal ways of getting to know someone before things possibly get personal - it’s been really hard figuring out if any of this is a path I actually want to take. In all honesty, relationships and the idea of trusting another individual so deeply is not something I feel ready for at the moment. This has led me to realize that perhaps I’ll be best satisfied with quick interactions. I can invest in it more physically than emotionally, but the challenge is first getting extremely comfortable with someone. I don’t want to have to worry about there being a misunderstanding in what we need from each other at that particular moment.

It is not necessarily judgement or shame I fear, but the idea of letting these feelings that I’ve been oppressing gain more power over my life than they should. In simple terms, I would say that I’m afraid of how messy these type of experiences can be. It was so refreshing to see a character like Jessica open the film with stating her stance on her own wants, desires and boundaries. For most of the film, she executes control over the new relationship she becomes involved in, which originally was just meant to be a one night stand. She did not give into allowing her full emotions to come into play until she understood what she wanted and needed out of her next partner. Jessica took her time and I admire that,because I hate the idea of rushing any kind of connection with someone just for the sake of trying to fill a void in your life. Issa on the other hand does let her encounters get a bit carried away, and while that’s not really inspiring for me, I appreciate the fact that the show realistically depicts how simple plans can unfold into complicated actions.

Issa was also trying to fill a gap that opened after the ending of her last relationship. However, as the show progressed, she started to let those experiences define her. What I try to keep in mind after viewing both works is that it is difficult to separate your body and mind from certain interactions, so it is best to be upfront not only with the person you are sharing intimacy with, but with yourself about why you want that experience. Sometimes it will just be sheer impulsiveness that drives it, but even before that initial moment of contact, you may have enough time to assess why you want this to happen now and if you are prepared for what might come later.

Pursue the Hell Out of Your Passion

Both Issa and Jessica have showed me that without holding onto some kind of passion or goal, life more or less becomes a hard job you didn’t apply for. It was especially after watching The Incredible Jessica James that I became proud of my own persistence and drive with film and television, which mirrored Jessica’s nonstop pursuit of storytelling in the theater world.

The business of entertaining people is very fickle, so you have to want it for more than just being known for your work or becoming a public figure. Jessica James and I both want to use storytelling as a tool of communication. In the film, there are several scenes where she leads a theater program in an attempt to get young children to create their own plays and see their imaginations come to life. I’ve experienced something similar to that by leading short film workshops for young women in my community in my senior year of high school. While it will always be rewarding seeing people appreciate the work I put out there, it is a special and unique kind of accomplishment to be able to help other people get their work to come to life. It’s like the gift that keeps on giving. I am at a stage in life now where I have a strong idea of where I want to be and how I plan to get there - but I know that my plans could easily be interrupted. So I have to take each moment as it comes and enjoy what they not only teach me as an artist, but as a person. A journey only stops once you are no longer moving forward.

Being Wrong Sucks More When You Can’t Admit It

Like most people I’ve encountered, I hate being wrong. It is not just the idea of failing to provide a right answer but also the fact that being seen as wrong tends to cut a bit at my confidence. Providing a valid contribution to any situation reaffirms to me that I am on the right track with something. Being aware that I did something wrong stunts me momentarily. It’s like I don’t want to participate any further out of fear that I will be on some sort of losing streak.

The character of Issa on Insecure often finds herself making seemingly wrong choices to the point that it makes her feel like nothing she does will ever be right. Issa wants to be helpful to her friends and community, but tends to put a bit too much weight on just herself. This causes her to become extremely frustrated with herself if a plan didn’t quite go well, or if anyone is unhappy with her efforts. I strongly relate to this because sometimes I feel that one of my best traits is my resourcefulness. When I am not able to fulfill this position the way I want to, I basically begin to question everything.

It was very confronting to see a character in the film The Incredible Jessica James who was able to confront Jessica about being wrong, without making her feel wrong. It was important for me to see Jessica learn how to accept and open up about being wrong, and not facing any of the consequences she feared. I’ve also seen this throughout the show Insecure, when Issa and the other characters learned that once they can acknowledge where they went wrong, they can get started on making things right - or at least work on preventing similar mistakes in the future.

A Few or a Single Good Friend is Better Than an Unreliable Squad

The main characters in Insecure and The Incredible Jessica James have a main best friend and then a sort of small social group. The relationships between the characters are very strong and relatable. Since Insecure is a show that gives more room for stronger character development, I was able to see how Issa and her best friend Molly, played by Yvonne Orji, go through a lot of turmoil in their relationship, but manage to remember that their bond is stronger than the drama they have at the moment. This has become more relevant to me lately because I’m used to being such a solitary person, and sometimes I don’t allow my friends into my little world. Friendships at the core are relatively similar no matter what age group you fall in but I see that the older people get, friends are less about how much time you spend together and more about the quality of time you spend together.

I’m still getting used to the idea of having friends I actually love so deeply because I’ve often tried to prevent myself from letting people outside of my family affect me in that way. It circles back to my fear of intimacy all around - physically, mentally and emotionally. In observing how Issa and Molly’s friendship strengthens throughout the show, I noticed that it is not just about keeping it “real” with each other. These two women also have learned that sometimes it is best to let your friend live in a fantasy for a little bit. Sometimes the way people cope with certain issues is by reimagining the problem in a way that looks better to them. It may not always be helpful to the situation, but a good friend doesn’t also need to be your therapist. That puts more pressure on them to always know how to help you and that isn’t a realistic ideal that should be apart of any friendship.

Jessica has a friend Tasha who also is pursuing a career in the theater world. Their friendship from what I could tell in the movie is centered around ambition. They both are free spirits who just want to live off their art. Tasha seems more optimistic than Jessica at times and Jessica seemed more grounded than Tasha at times. I really loved this dynamic they had because both characters could fall back and forth on each other without one feeling like they have more weight on their side.

A friendship should never be solely based on what people can take from each other, but what they can give. I do all I can to give and show my friends support and that always looks different depending on which friend that is. Oftentimes, many people may think that more friends means more supporters but in my experience, there is no real correlation there. One or a few people can show you more support than a million.

Most of my closest friends happen to be black women. I believe this is because we start off relating to each other through shared struggles and experiences. It has especially become more prominent now for me to surround myself by a supportive group of black women because we are a community which often puts ourselves last and others first.With each other, we can make each other’s well being our priority for once. This is not to say that my friendships with people of other backgrounds are not as strong, but to exemplify that women, especially those of color, need each other the most.

Blackness is Beautiful. Period

I went through various phases in my life where I had to unlearn things that I was taught by Euro-centric beauty standards. A couple of months ago, I decided that I wanted my hair to be in its natural state (with no toxic chemicals or heat inserted into it). I could’ve never imagined making that decision years ago, when I often looked at my natural hair in disgust unless it was straightened. I was mainly influenced by representation, especially seeing Issa rock a different natural hairstyle nearly every episode. This was huge to me - beyond inspirational actually. Not every black woman needs to wear natural hair, but no black woman should be ashamed of her natural hair - this is easier said than done. Something simple as watching Issa casually walk around with natural hair seemed to change my thinking overnight. Not only did she wear it everyday, she was confident in it.

There was a similar realization I had about natural hair when I watched The Incredible Jessica James for the first time. I had never looked at locks or long braids as something I desired or imagined in my own head, but seeing Jessica flaunt and wear them so effortlessly was mesmerizing. She was practically a goddess in every scene. Less than a month ago, I tried extended braids for the first time and it actually felt pretty empowering - like I had been missing out on something great. It was not only the style that looked good, but I felt good, and I had a confidence about my appearance that I hadn’t quite experienced before.

Jessica Williams, the actress who plays Jessica James is also a tall black woman standing at around six feet. This meant the world to me as well because I’m five feet and eleven inches and have always been embarrassed about my height. I still have lingering insecurities about it but seeing Jessica Williams fiercely tower over everyone without a single slouch really moved me. I have slowly started paying attention to how I sit and stand more. Issa is also considerably tall at five feet and eight inches. It’s amazing actually to see tall women, tall black women feel that they can move around in their bodies freely, in their femininity freely without any visible fear of being seen as aggressive, masculine or even undesirable. They know their worth, both as their characters and in real life.

Lastly, watching beautiful brown skin glisten on screen really takes the cake for me. It is not a secret that lighter skin is traditionally seen as more desirable. I grew up thinking that maybe my life would be better if my skin wasn’t as dark as it is. I no longer doubt the beauty of my skin, but it took me such a long time to not only say it out loud, and actually believe it. Colorism in the black community is very much a common thing, which causes low self esteem in many black people with darker skin tones. The best way to combat it has been increasing the amount of darker skinned black people on television and movies in positive roles, just like the ones Issa and Jessica are in. I couldn’t be more grateful to these women for making this content so that people like me can see it and start to feel more confident about who they are.