#also i’ve seen the logged out recommended page for the first time in years. it’s terrifying

[sanghost]

i’m using youtube logged out and am avoiding twitter and tiktok at all costs im not taking ANY chances

[kurain-genealogy]

Investigating Glamrock Bonnie, The Mimic, and Why I Think the Mimic Killed Bonnie

The theory that Mimic killed Glamrock Bonnie is one I’ve seen held by a small handful of people since RUIN’s release, but never fully expanded upon or fleshed out. After seeing Twitter argue, once again, over whether or not Monty killed Bonnie, I was inspired to actually make a serious attempt at supporting my theory.

In this, I’ll be using the Tales from the Pizzaplex (TFTPP) books to support my conclusions – specifically the epilogues, GGY, The Mimic, The Storyteller, and brief mentions of others. You can debate the canonicity – and thus, validity – of the books, but they are set in the game’s universe, and at least some of the stories are directly tied to the games (especially in relation to the Mimic). I mainly use the books to construct a rough timeline of events and as supporting evidence so (hopefully) this theory should still be plausible if you ignore all the book evidence (& btw I read all of the books on archive.org, so apologies if any referenced page numbers are off).

This will contain spoilers for book #8’s epilogue!

First, I’ll go over general information regarding Bonnie and his death. Then, I’ll cover why I don’t think it was the other suspects. I’ll end off with why I think that leaves the Mimic responsible.

This is a long one, a lot longer than I expected – nearly 7.5k words, not including this introduction – so it's also available to read on a pageless Google Doc here! It's best viewed on desktop & has more pictures (I had to combine/squeeze some out to fit the tumblr image limit), as well as clearer sections and an outline. I highly recommend reading it there if you're able.

There's a timeline + TL;DR at the end for your convenience :]

& tysm to my friend @clmntne for beta reading this theory for me <3 go look at his art @clementartz ok?

-☆-

If you’re unfamiliar, stories in TFTPP take place over a large time range, ranging from back in the ‘80s to sometime after the events of SB. A handful of stories (including the connected epilogues) take place during the construction of the Pizzaplex or shortly before/after its opening. None of the stories mention Glamrock Bonnie at all, meaning he gets decommissioned very early in the Pizzaplex’s lifetime, likely within the first year or so of operation. To my knowledge, any stories that might take place during GlamBonnie’s lifetime don’t provide any details as to who’s in the main band.

Starting us off with the infamous missing message:

MISSINGSECURITY REPORT - 12:24AM - Bonnie is seen leaving his green room in Rockstar Row heading East towards the atrium. 2:40AM - Bonnie enters the East Arcade. 4:12AM - Bonnie enters Monty Golf.

Something I find extremely interesting about this are the HUGE chunks of time left unspecified, something I feel a lot of people gloss over. In the middle of the night, Bonnie spends a whopping 2 hours and 16 minutes in the atrium – or wherever he is – before entering the arcade. He has to go up to level 3 to get to the east arcade from Rockstar Row (RR), but I don’t think it’d take him one hour per floor to get there. 1 hour and 32 minutes later, he enters Monty Golf. He could be gaming in the arcade for all I care, but what intrigues me the most is the time spent between RR and the arcade. If he was seen entering other specific areas that would’ve been noted in the log, and I imagine if he was being erratic or unusual during that time it would’ve been mentioned, too. Without much to go off of, we really can’t say what was going on or what his reasoning was. With so few security sightings over four hours, to me personally it feels like Bonnie was somehow avoiding the cameras (or was being led by something that was). Another thing to consider is that unlike in SB, the Pizzaplex had multiple human security guards on staff (it’s not until shortly before SB, after Vanessa’s hired, that they’re replaced with STAFF bots). So not only was Bonnie rarely seen on the cams, but he wasn’t caught by a security guard, either.

(shoutout to the person who made these labeled maps of the Pizzaplex, since I don’t own the game myself it really helped me get an idea of the layout)

Prior to Security Breach, the animatronics weren’t normally active during the night. In The Bobbiedots, Part 1, we get this:

Supposedly deactivated by this time of night, Roxy probably wasn’t any kind of threat. But a couple weeks ago, as Abe had been heading to his hidey-hole, he’d gotten a glimpse of Roxy stalking past one of the doorways to the raceway (p. 135).

In the story, this takes place around midnight. It makes sense, too, that the large, power-consuming robots would be deactivated and/or charging while the Pizzaplex is closed. If a security guard saw Bonnie roaming at night, they probably would’ve led him back to his greenroom.

So, Bonnie is up and about while the animatronics should be powered down. This means that:

He is probably the only one who was awake, or at least the only one who left their designated area during the night.

He either woke up on his own with a specific purpose in mind, OR something woke him up.

Now, the crime scene. There is a lot more here to unpack than I expected.

Majority of reference images in this section come from Banden and FusionZGamer.

At the time of Ruin, the only entrances to the room where Bonnie’s body is found are these: A broken piece of wall behind the bowling lane, and a vent high up on the wall.

At the time of SB, the vent was covered with striped wall panels. It probably only became accessible after the earthquake when they fell, or were stripped off during deconstruction.

This entrance is odd; The bricks look deliberately cut or pulled out from both sides, and the inside between the walls is dug through. It’s hard to know when it was first burrowed through, and from what direction – I personally think it was dug from the inside-out, since inside, the hole is high above the ground and level with the boxes, which feels deliberate.

In the room, there’s a bowling ball rail that leads out, the opening to which is boarded up from the inside.

From Fusion’s video, we can see that the rail would lead down the length of the bowling alley through the dingier hall on the right side, visible in the first image. On the left side is the area behind the bowling lanes, presumably where maintenance is done on the machines (more apparent in the second image), and large garage doors on the right that lead to the dingy hallway. 

As seen in the bottom two images, if you go to the fenced off section with the electrical lockers and turn around – hey! We’re in the area behind the ice cream parlor’s stage where they stashed Bonnie’s stuff. From here, we can see the hallway where the ball rail would be and the large doors that lead to it.If this is confusing, I recommend watching Fusion’s video to get a better idea of the layout.

If you wear the VANNI mask in this section, it looks like a headless STAFF bot caught by the arms with cables, and maybe being dragged through the doorway, or something similar? It’s hard to find a good picture of it from other angles since I can’t find a video of someone going out-of-bounds to get a closer look. We get a lot of interesting environmental storytelling in the AR world, but there’s also many seemingly random changes.Could this symbolize or depict something surrounding Bonnie’s death? Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t. I just find it interesting.

So, the only entrance to Bonnie’s tomb is through the hallway behind lane maintenance, accessible only by the garage doors. This hall presumably had a rail that spanned the length of the bowling lanes. I imagine this area was used for storage and the likes. The very end of this hall is where we find Bonnie. The entrance to this section is weird – it’s smaller than Cassie and barely bigger than the Caution Bots – but I digress. As for the front entrance from the lanes being walled off, I feel like that’d render those lanes unusable. In fact, there’s no evidence of there being pinsetters for these lanes, so maybe they were gutted in order to wall off the room. Or maybe they just didn’t feel like modeling all that, I dunno. Not really something that matters. What does matter is how this room is closed off in the first place, having been boarded up from the inside, and the thick ass wall someone excavated through. All of it feels very intentional.

The dirt and debris around Bonnie tells me that this room is in fact the crime scene. This is heavily supported by the impact crack on the wall (third image) and the similar cracks on the floor underneath Bonnie in AR (second image). Bonnie and his attacker could have had encounters elsewhere in the Pizzaplex, but this room is where the final showdown occurred.

I’ll try not to include more images than necessary, so if you want some good looks for yourself, Fusion’s video from before does a good job showing off Bonnie’s state, as well as this FazFriends video analyzing the DLC animatronics, and is where the upcoming screenshots come from.

Most prominently, Bonnie has a massive laceration in his chest and is missing the left side of his faceplate, the latter possibly caused by the bowling ball split in three around his head. The biggest gash in his chest runs from his left shoulder diagonally toward the right side of his waist. With the direction his casing peels and how most of the damage is at the top, I’d say it was a downward strike, most likely done with the left hand. He’s covered in dirt and grime, and wires poke out from his innards. 

There’s some green coloration on his torso, leading many to think this could be paint rubbed off from the attacker. Personally, I think it looks more like patina, a green tarnish resulting from aging metal, similar to the floor and metal shrapnel around him. It could also be his base paint color.

His arms are pulled apart at the joints; the legs are pulled apart at the knees, but I can’t tell if they’re pulled from his hips as well (though, the pelvis is definitely ripped from the torso).

As noted in the fourth image, he lays atop these strange black tubes – I can’t help but think of the AR headless STAFF bot from earlier and the cables it was falling onto. Could it be related?

In addition, there’s several random animatronic pieces scattered around, some of which look significantly older than others. For example, at Bonnie’s feet:

There’s a chunk of relatively clean metal akin to the spine inside Bonnie, but also an older, more corroded, grimier piece next to it. I feel this could’ve come from Bonnie’s attacker, but Bonnie also has one of these yucky pieces sticking out of an arm socket, so who knows.

-☆-

Before I talk about the possible attackers, I first want to take a brief intermission to talk about the books, as they establish an important timeline that will be relevant later. I’ll be talking a bit about The Storyteller and The Mimic, and the animatronics’ behaviors before and after the former.

The Storyteller is a story in the 5th TFTPP book about a creative AI software – called The Storyteller (TS), unsurprisingly – that was implemented across the entire Pizzaplex sometime prior to the game’s events. The purpose of TS was to cut down on costs spent in the creative department by using an AI to formulate new stories based on preexisting ones within Fazbear Entertainment (🙄). TS was connected to virtually everything in the Pizzaplex – including VR, AR, and the Glamrock Animatronics – to create more unique and dynamic interactions with guests. So, instead of programming in new AR/VR experiences or animatronic behaviors manually, TS could continuously change how the games/characters acted. Here’s an excerpt on how TS altered the Glamrocks specifically:

Montgomery Gator also exhibited disturbing changes. The alligator featured in Monty’s Gator Golf was the quintessential rockstar. […] Prone to smashing things as part of his extravagant image, Monty was always dramatic, but he had been harmless... at least until The Storyteller started messing with him. Now the alligator was turning into a sulky shadow of his former self. Monty’s rampages became more violent, and in between tantrums, he withdrew into a depressive silence that was actually driving children to tears. All the Pizzaplex’s other main characters began to undergo similar personality shifts. Whatever trait was normal for them began to skew toward the dark side. The shift wasn’t dramatic. None of the animatronics had turned homicidal or anything, but the altered dynamic was noticeable, at least to Edwin. (pp. 95-96).

Edwin’s story is revealed to us in TFTPP #6 in the story The Mimic. Edwin was the original creator of the endo, The Mimic (TM), 30-40 years prior to the creation of the Pizzaplex. He made it to keep his 4-year-old son, David, occupied while he (a single father) worked. It was a learning robot that imitated what it observed, making it a good playmate for his son; David even made TM a white tiger “doll” out of fabric to match his own white tiger plushie. The program that The Mimic ran on was called Mimic1 (hence, where the endo got its name). One day, David tragically dies in a car accident. Edwin enters a depressive fugue for the next two weeks in which he barely remembers anything. When he comes to his senses and sees the still-active Mimic acting like his dead son, in a moment of intense grief and rage, he beats the everloving shit out of TM. When he snaps out of it, he’s filled with regret and leaves.

By this point, Edwin’s company had been bought out by Fazbear Entertainment, so when he just dips and thereby breaches their contract, they send a team of people to the factory to “clean up a mess.” When the team arrives and sees the crumpled remains of TM, armed only with their vague instructions, they conclude that they’re to finish Edwin’s abandoned projects. TM had only an upper body, so the team fixed him up and gave him legs and a voice box.

Now, remember how I said TM learns and imitates behavior it observes? Well TM just starts fucking killing these guys. And “puts them away” in the fridge and closet, like how he’d learned to put food and clothes away with Edwin and David. Fazbear Entertainment sends another team of guys to do the job when the first team doesn’t return, but they too are killed. This time, TM put on various mascot costumes and pursued them in a more “hide and seek” manner.

Okay, now back to The Storyteller. The AI was allowed to decide its own appearance, since the plan was for TS itself to become a Pizzaplex character – so, its hardware was put inside a white tiger bust.

Edwin, vocally against the project, was purposefully kept in the dark about the workings of TS. He snuck into the Pizzaplex on the night of its installation, and the sight of the white tiger triggered a panic attack. Fearing the worst, he later sneaks into TS’s enclosure to confirm his suspicions.

If you hadn’t guessed already, Edwin discovers that The Storyteller is running on the Mimic1 program.

TS was only in the Pizzaplex for three weeks before it was removed. However, even with all its arms broken and cables pulled apart, the Mimic1 program continued running. I believe it’s implied that it remained within the Pizzaplex’s system, even after TS’s hardware was completely removed.

It’s hard to say exactly when in the Pizzaplex’s lifespan this story takes place. Interestingly, there’s mention of a character associated with Bonnie Bowl experiencing malfunctions (p. 109), yet just a few pages later Montgomery Gator is said to have a room in Rockstar Row (p. 111), meaning he’d already replaced Bonnie as bass player.

Tragedies that occurred at the Pizzaplex early in its lifetime – such as in the stories Cleithrophobia, HAPPS, Pressure, and Under Construction – weren’t because of malfunctions, but more so from human error. In the first two, the robots are behaving exactly as they’re programmed to, but end up causing harm due to the circumstances around the story. Pressure happened because some idiot put a springlock suit in the RolePlay area (combined with the protag having bad friends). You could argue that Under Construction is an exception (that something malicious purposefully altered the AR experience), but to that I argue that the AR attraction wasn’t even finished or intended to have someone use it (nor an employee to keep watch), so of course it wouldn’t be functioning properly and end badly.

All of this to say, it could very well be that nothing in the Pizzaplex’s network, including animatronics, were malfunctioning, acting strange, violent, or purposefully malicious, prior to The Storyteller’s – Mimic1’s – integration.

-☆-

Okay. Just keep that information in mind. With that, let me rule out some suspects.

Suspect 1: Vanny

Whether she controlled Monty, STAFF bots, or did it herself, this follows the idea that Vanny/Vanessa had something to do with Bonnie’s disappearance.

Well, based on the established timeline, she couldn’t have. Bonnie was killed within the first year or so of operation, and Vanessa wasn’t working at the Pizzaplex yet. We can already deduce with SB that Vanessa’s security guard position was somewhat recent, but we also have GGY as further proof.

GGY is the story that all but confirms to us that Client 46 (from the Retro CDs) is Gregory. This story connects the GGY character (Greg/Gregory) to the disappearances of three school counselors/therapists. It takes place about 3 years after the Pizzaplex opens, as the first school counselor was hired before its opening, and had been working at the school for three years before disappearing. (& btw, SB takes place around the 5th year. This is deduced by a Faz Life magazine in SB being labeled #19 in a quarterly release, meaning if it started with the opening of the Pizzaplex, it’d be 4.75 years in). This places the Retro CDs around the same time. In Vanessa’s sessions, she’s clearly at her old job – she sits at a desk on the computer and mentions her coworker Luis, who was also mentioned in Special Delivery’s unused emails from Vanessa’s old job.

Could Vanny still have snuck in to do something? Sure, I just don’t think it’s likely. She’s still working on her costume at the time of these sessions (which remember, is a few years after when Bonnie would’ve been decommissioned), and is clearly still very anxious and reluctant to do as Glitchtrap tells her.

Suspect 2: Monty

Okay, here we go. The most obvious piece of evidence for Monty’s innocence is the fact that he wasn’t given his claw upgrade until after replacing Bonnie. Of course, he still had claws beforehand, he’s a gator, but, the claw upgrade switches the endoskeleton’s hands entirely.

Compare Monty’s sharp fingies to the blunter Glamrock Endo’s. Monty’s original hands could still do major damage, I mean look at what the STAFF bots did to Freddy with their even bigger & rounder fingers. But if you look at the gashes in Bonnie’s torso, they’re much more clean slices accompanied by smaller scratches all over, which had to have been made by something much sharper and pointier.

Also, Monty attacks with his teeth, not his claws. (link leads to gif of his jumpscare)

Further, we have absolutely no reason to think Monty would want to attack Bonnie. There’s no bad blood, and if Monty truly did want the spotlight, he could’ve gone for Freddy.

Monty MischiefERRANT BEHAVIOR REPORT - Monty didn't show up for the main stage performance again. We found him in the same place we always do, the catwalks over Monty Golf. We can't have a repeat of last month. Someone hit the hole in one and the hurricane bucket knocked him down. Both legs were broken and required emergency parts and service work.

This message is very telling: Monty frequently skipped main performances and hid in Gator Golf. This is completely counter to the notion that he craved the spotlight and attention of being in the band. In fact, it sounds like he didn’t even like being in the band. Perhaps his aggression during/before SB – like destroying his green room – was partly fueled by resentment for being taken from his element?

Monty has no personal motives for killing Bonnie, but could he have been controlled? Mmmmmaybe? But I don’t think so. We’ve already established that Vanny couldn’t have been involved. Then there’s Mimic1/TS, which I already established came into play after Bonnie was gone. In fact, the way the book described Monty post-Storyteller is a lot like how he acts around SB: violent, destructive outbursts, and silently sulking (like in the catwalks). It’s even specified that the malfunctioning Glamrocks weren’t homicidal or harming others. Monty – nor any of the other animatronics – have ever been violent towards each other. Monty’s aggression is aimed at his own belongings and like, fences and shit. Never his friends. Plus, Monty disliking Freddy is something only ever depicted in Monty’s arcade game, which TS had access to. I think the arcade game can absolutely give us storytelling via symbolism, but I doubt it’s altered by Monty’s mind and thoughts.

And say Monty did kill Bonnie – why wasn’t he noticed on the cameras either going to Bonnie Bowl or moving Bonnie’s body there from Gator Golf? If an outside force deleted security footage, why leave the incriminating part where Bonnie goes to Gator Golf in the first place? It wouldn’t make sense. Plus, most evidence points towards Bonnie Bowl being where the incident occurred.

Suspect 3: Prototype Freddy

The theory that Freddy killed Bonnie comes from @glammiketrash, and it’s a great theory. Give it a read if you have time, I think it’s definitely one of the more likely theories on this topic and has strong supporting evidence.  

However, there are a few reasons why I personally don’t think a rogue Freddy did it (even ignoring the timeline I established). For starters, the Prototype Freddy in RUIN is heavily implied to be the same Freddy that was left in Fazer Blast in the Princess Quest ending of SB – the ending that’s canon to RUIN (at this point I don’t think I have to explain why PQ is the canon ending, but I’d be happy to explain it in the replies if needed).

The comic for the Disassemble Vanny ending shows us an illustration of how Freddy was damaged by the STAFF bots, and it’s strikingly similar to Prototype Freddy (PF): exposed hands, a chunk taken from the right bicep and thigh. You could even argue that the torso cracking is similar (I’m drawn to how both have the lightning bolt cut off similarly). It feels like PF was designed/modeled after the illustration. He has the sharp claws from the Monty upgrade, and his missing head aligns with the PQ ending where Gregory leaves the Pizzaplex with it. Then of course, there’s the fact that he’s found in Fazer Blast, where Freddy in SB was attacked and left.

Yes, I believe that the Glamrock Freddy in SB was a prototype model the entire time. We still don’t know why Freddy glitched out in the beginning of the game, but it’s entirely possible that Parts & Service simply booted up a new/temporary endo while they dealt with whatever broke Freddy. He’s on reduced power for safety measures because, as an older version, they don’t know how unusual or erratic he’ll be – a justified precaution, since we can see that when he runs out of power, or is under maintenance (you know, when his head’s off), he attacks Gregory. It would also explain why Freddy in SB isn’t connected to the network or infected by the virus – he literally just got switched on.

And holy shit, at the time of writing this, FazFriends just uploaded a video showcasing the animatronics’ endoskeletons, and it happens to support my theory!

Freddy and Bonnie both share an endoskeleton unique to the other Glamrocks. Monty, Chica, and Roxy all share a basic endoskeleton. The Glamrocks would all be kept up-to-date and modified throughout the years. Since Bonnie is one of the original ones, we can assume that’s what their endos looked like when the Pizzaplex first opened. It doesn’t make sense that Freddy, being who he is, wouldn’t be upgraded the same way the others are… unless this is an older Freddy. SB Freddy having a unique endoskeleton that matches Bonnie’s signifies that he was in a Prototype model from the beginning.

Freddy has a lot of personality for sure, but still seems a bit sterile and stilted at times, especially if you compare him to someone like Roxy. In the books Freddy’s personality is changed on a few occasions, such as by The Storyteller (in which he’s adopted a “spoiled brat” personality) and by GGY (in which he’d acted eerie and followed/stared at the protagonist). He’s completely wiped clean of all this though in SB. He still has a distinct personality, memories, and feelings, but it feels kind of like it was reset to default. That could just be me, but it supports the idea of him being PF.

Prototype Freddy looks like that because of the events of SB. Prior to that, he looked just like a normal Freddy. In the timeframe that Bonnie was destroyed, none of the robots were acting violent and there was no AI or virus to control him, which rules out any last possibility of PF being Bonnie’s killer to me.

There are definitely holes in this line of thought; It’s just speculation that makes sense to me. I’m also generally forgiving when it comes to changes made to SB from RUIN; SB seemed to go through a lot of changes in development and was released in a messy state, so I wouldn’t blame them if at this point Steel Wool was establishing things that would retroactively apply to SB.

Suspect 4: THE MIMICCCCCCC

FINALLY, over 4k words in, we are talking about the thing I promised. I’ll start with some more information on the Mimic itself (yup, there’s still more!!!).

Every TFTPP book has an epilogue, all of which connect together into one narrative that tells us the story of how The Mimic ended up in the FNAF6 Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Place beneath the Pizzaplex.

The Pizza Place was originally intended to be refurbished into a Fazbear museum in conjunction with the Pizzaplex’s construction. There was a small team working there to clean the building, particularly to pick up and disassemble all of the remaining endoskeletons littered throughout the place. One of the guys on the team (Gil) hates his job and goes outside to take a break just in time to see a shipment arrive containing the Glamrock Animatronics – and, for whatever reason, The Mimic. Since TM was clearly older and the odd one out of the bunch, Gil drags TM inside with the intention of uploading a cleanup protocol into the endo. He instructs TM to remove the limbs and heads off of the endoskeletons and pile them up at the door. The Mimic does this quickly, and when it runs out of endoskeletons, begins to dismember the renovation crew. Construction workers from outside rush in when they hear the commotion, which only adds to TM’s victims. The youngest of the renovation crew manages to escape and desperately convinces nearby cement workers to seal the entrances to the pizzeria (Epilogue #1). (This massive pile of animatronic parts and murder victims is theorized to be the origins of Tangle/The Blob, btw.)

Sometime later, a group of 8 teens sneak into the Pizza Place via a vent opening in the roof. Once they discover the gruesome mass murder scene, they realize that they aren’t alone, that their way out was crushed, and that they’re trapped (Epilogue #2).

Over the course of the next few installments, the teens are slowly picked off by TM. It uses mascot costumes to trick and murder the teens (similar to what TM did in Edwin’s factory) in a twisted hide-and-seek type game. When the group finds an old radio, TM intercepts the signal and pretends to be someone else within the Pizza Place calling for help, attempting to lure the kids into a back room. It also could disrupt electronics, as the lights and electricity as a whole often flickered and went out when it was near. A manual found in the office tells us more about TM:

The one we saw is either a Mimic Model 1 or 2. […] They have retractable and expandable limbs and a contracting torso so they can fit into pretty much any mascot costume. […] The tech in the Mimics was pretty clunky. […] If you encounter one of these things, you should immediately disconnect its power source and disassemble it (Epilogue #4, pp. 219-220). [...] When the team created the Mimic line, they didn’t want to have to program in every show routine, step-by-step. That was a lot of coding, so they just programmed the Mimic to basically watch and learn. Not only could a Mimic fit into any costume, it was designed to observe the other routines and then mimic them (Epilogue #6, p. 183). I wish I could read all of this, but it seems like the original Mimic began mimicking not just the other animatronics but also people. And it did it in ways that weren’t intended. I’m not sure what it did. I can just make out the words misconstrue, scared, potential disaster, and deactivate remaining Mimic endos (Epilogue #6, p. 184).

It's kinda unclear, but this is the narrative I’m picking up: Once Fazbear Entertainment was finally able to “clean up [the] mess” left by Edwin and get their hands on The Mimic, they were like “hey this programming is actually genius” and started making their own Mimic models based on Edwin’s, claiming it as their own engineering (classic corner-cutting Fazbear Entertainment). However, due to its primitive programming (Edwin was an engineer, not a coder) and the nature of Mimic1, Fazbear quickly realized how faulty and unreliable the Mimic animatronic line was, so they decommissioned them. The Mimic in the Pizza Place is likely Edwin’s original, considering its costume-wearing, hide-and-seek style murders.

Enough backstory for now. I’ll be addressing more book stuff later (sorry, sorry), but I’d like to bring this back around to Bonnie and how TM qualifies as a suspect before getting into the how and why.

Think back to Bonnie’s corpse and the diagonal swipe to his chest caused by sharp claws.

Get a load of this guy.

Very sharp fingers on the left hand. Returning to the analysis of Bonnie’s corpse – facing Bonnie, a downward right-to-left swipe is likely achieved by the left hand. Supporting this is TM’s jumpscare, in which it grabs with the right hand and attacks with the left.

In its costumed jumpscare, TM attacks with its round-fingered right hand in a fist. Bonnie, along with several scratch marks, is also covered in dents, meaning TM could have used both of its attack methods.

“But TM has 5 fingers, and Bonnie’s slash marks look like they’re from a 4-fingered hand.” I hear ya. Here’s some possible explanations:

With the angle of the motion and the curvature of Bonnie’s torso, the pinky finger didn’t pierce the casing, instead merely scratching it.

TM wears 4-fingered costumes – you can see it is in the jumpscare above. Who’s to say TM didn’t travel in a costume from the Pizza Place, or even found Glamrock casing to put on?

It can just like, shapeshift. I wouldn’t think that extended to details like the fingers, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The left palm does have holes in it, so maybe the fingers were designed to contract to fit various gloves.

Another obvious connection is that TM famously tears off the limbs of its victims – and wouldn’t you know it, Bonnie’s arms and legs are dismembered. TM, noticeably old and described as discolored in the books, could also be the source of all the extraneous, out-of-place metal parts that surround Bonnie.

Out of all the suspects, TM is the only one that’s known to be violent towards animatronics, has the physical capabilities to have done it, and would be awake while the rest of the Glamrocks were deactivated for the night. When it comes to analyzing the crime scene itself and the events surrounding it, The Mimic fits the bill the most out of all the suspects. Isolated, it’s the most likely option, in my opinion. Determining how this happened is a bit trickier; expect a bit more speculation in that regard.

I know what you might be thinking: How did The Mimic get into the Pizzaplex in the first place if it was sealed underground?

It’s not all that unusual if you think about it. For starters, the Pizza Place was not sealed very well (it was done in a panic, after all). The teens were able to enter through a vent in the roof, multiple characters attempted to leave through a vent blocked by a giant (moving) fan, and Lucia (the protagonist) was finally able to escape through a window in the bathroom that had less concrete blocking it than the others. There are various means of escape in which TM can contort its body to fit through.

Briefly, while on the subject of the latest epilogue, it’s worth noting that Lucia was able to deactivate TM by trapping it in a springlock costume and flipping its off switch. To this, I remind you that the Epilogues aren’t over. The book series is still ongoing, as is TM’s story. Plus, by the time of SB/RUIN, TM is clearly awake, so it’s possible that it was reactivated by the time of Bonnie’s death.

Prior to that, Lucia briefly restrained TM with rope. It reminds me of the AR STAFF bot hanging over cables, and the weird tubelike things underneath Bonnie’s body. Could they all be connected? Could TM have learned the rope tactic from Lucia and then gone on to mimic that when attacking Bonnie?

Anyways, another important aspect of all this is TM’s connection to the Pizzaplex. We know that TM and TS share the same program, Mimic1 (it’s unclear if TS’s programming came from the original Mimic or one of Fazbear Entertainment’s copies. My own opinion flip-flops). TM is also connected to the VANNI mask and the AR world – whether you believe the theory that Glitchtrap is Mimic1 or not doesn’t matter, since it doesn’t change that The Physical Mimic Under The Pizzaplex Somehow Connected Itself To The Mask, even after the PQ ending got rid of Glitchtrap and its control over the robots. TM could also interact with the security feed and get in contact with Cassie, who was outside the Pizzaplex. Of course, none of these things are relevant to the time period we’re working with, but it shows how TM can connect itself to electronics, even long-distance, and possibly without the help of shared software. If it can interfere with radio signals, I wouldn’t be surprised if it could at least view security footage, maps, employee messages, and whatever else from the Pizzaplex.

Okay, now think waaaaaayy back to the beginning when I was analyzing Bonnie’s behavior: “He either woke up on his own with a specific purpose in mind, OR something woke him up.”

Returning to these two options with the information we have now, it turns to:  “Bonnie either knew something suspicious was afoot and wanted to investigate, OR The Mimic woke him up (purposefully or not).”

There could be alternatives, but these are the most obvious conclusions.

While what we know about GlamBonnie’s death is limited, we know even less about his personality. We don’t have any hints on why Bonnie in particular would be acutely aware of something unusual, or on the contrary, why he’d be targeted by TM. But we do know that on this occasion he was awake and later murdered, and TM is looking guilty.

Again, think back to Bonnie’s strange behavior caught by security the night he went missing; The long spans of time between very few appearances on camera, almost as if he was avoiding them, either on purpose or as a result of following something. If Bonnie was doing something he shouldn’t’ve, he probably would be sneaky about it. If Bonnie was being lured by TM with the intent to Get Him, it makes sense that it would lead him where he can’t be tracked. If it’s possible TM could access security and maps, of course it would know how to not be seen – and if it plays hide and seek, it would want to stay hidden. 

(I’ve been speculating under the assumption that TM can’t alter the Pizzaplex network, just view it. If it’s possible that it can alter the network, i.e. delete security footage, then that’d save us a lot of assumptions. If that were the case, then TM could just delete any security footage of itself, which is why we’re only left with random sightings of Bonnie on camera. The rest – the missing pieces – would fill in the blanks). 

TM may have an impressive AI, but it’s nothing near the Glamrocks’ level of self-awareness. Its actions are all motivated by the Mimic1 programming and what it’s learned/observed. It doesn’t try to escape because it has the desire to get out, but because it was not designed to be confined to a room. It doesn’t dismember people because it enjoys killing, but because it’s reacting “the way it had learned to handle all endoskeleton-like objects,” (Epilogue #7, p. 169). We don’t have reason to believe TM resents or envies Bonnie. Bonnie became a victim because he entered the crossfire of TM’s programming.

I personally believe Bonnie had suspicions something Strange was happening and began to investigate (either over a period of time, or simply was woken by TM skulking around one night, and was like “what the” and searched for the source). TM caught on and entered “hide-and-seek mode,” in which it was hiding from a pursuing Bonnie. Persistent and stubborn, as all Bonnies tended to be, GlamBonnie pursued TM all night. TM, in its previous killings, would hide, lure, then ambush. I think TM finally cornered Bonnie by luring him to the end of the long hallway behind Bonnie Bowl and finishing him off. Sunrise is approaching by this point, and the Pizzaplex would be opening up soon, so TM retreats back to the Pizza Place to avoid being found.

AC Inspection Thank you for contacting Low Budget Building Contractors. We have done a preliminary inspection and find nothing wrong with your ventilation system. The 'loud clanging', 'banging' and 'scraping' noises which were reported don't appear to be reproducable. Call us if it happens again. Invoice attached. - Keith

This might be nothing, but I want to include it anyway. The AC Inspection message from SB is most likely referring to the wind-up Music Man that chases Gregory in the vents. I think I’ve seen some speculate that this could be The Blob snaking through the vents (I’ve heard a theory somewhere that The Blob is what’s stealing from Rockstar Row). Personally, the language reminds me of the noises described in the Epilogues of TM crawling through the vents. Just skimming through Epilogue #7, the words and phrases “scraped,” “grinding,” “metal-on-metal scratches,” “thrum and thunderous rattle,” “sonorous clang,” and “screeches,” are used to describe the sound made by TM in the ventilation system.

There’s nothing in this message that dates it, so the cause could be anything, in theory. It's possible that TM used the Pizzaplex’s ventilation system to avoid the cameras while traversing, entering, and exiting the premises.

-☆-

OKAY. THIS IS THE LAST SECTION. YOU’RE IN THE HOME STRETCH –

WHY A COVERUP?

Why completely hide GlamBonnie’s existence and opt for a rebrand?

Option 1: They literally couldn’t find him. Hidden in such a hard-to-reach location, Bonnie’s body was simply never found. It doesn’t help that security logs pointed staff to Monty Golf. Left only to speculate, Fazbear Entertainment had to be ready for any possibility. Could he have been stolen? Thrown out? Hacked? Imagine if someone had stolen and hacked Bonnie, and he reappeared acting inappropriately or in any way unregulated by Fazbear Entertainment. If they’d gone ahead and replaced Bonnie, not only would there suddenly be two Bonnies, but one of them would be acting weird, outside of their control, and Fazbear would have to do something about it. No, as long as they’re unsure what happened to him, it’s easier to just have the understudy replace him. Precursory damage control. Bonnie was never a character in the Pizzaplex, so whatever a rogue Bonnie is doing or saying isn’t their fault or responsibility.

Option 2: They deduced what happened and couldn’t let word get out. Perhaps Bonnie saw something he shouldn’t’ve. Perhaps he knew too much. Easier to get rid of All the evidence, pretend it never happened, cover it All up, than to attempt damage control afterwards. Fazbear Entertainment surely knew about TM sealed up in the Pizza Place beneath their mega mall. If it’d gotten out, that’d be bad. If Bonnie lived to tell the tale, that’d be bad. Don’t even move the body, just seal up the room best you can so nobody can find him. Secure all entrances to the Pizzaplex so that Thing can’t get back in and do more damage.

Option 2 seems most likely. Clearly, he’d been found by someone – the Caution Bots found him, after all, and the room was boarded up from the inside. The only thing I can’t explain is the weird tunnel through the wall leading to the room from the bowling lane. Genuinely what is up with that. It could’ve been the escape for whoever was boarding up the main entrance, but if that was an official effort, I feel like it’d be easier to remove the wall panels and leave through the vent rather than create a new, messier entrance.

The hush-hush surrounding his disappearance indicates that some employees had a general idea of what happened (or at least that Fazbear wanted him replaced, refused to elaborate, and didn’t have an explanation).

AR Glam Bonnie Plush Dad wouldn't tell me why they replaced Bonnie.

This inventory description from Cassie tells us all we need to know: Not that her dad didn’t know what happened to Bonnie, but that he wouldn’t tell her. He knew what happened to Bonnie. Being the daughter of a Faz-Technician, Cassie was often exposed to the behind-the-scenes of the Pizzaplex. The fact that her dad refused to tell her the truth could mean any of these three things: 1) He was on very strict legal orders to not say anything; 2) Bonnie being his favorite character, dad couldn’t bring himself to tell Cassie what really happened; or 3) He didn’t want to upset the empathetic Cassie, who would’ve been nearly half the age she was in RUIN, by telling her that Bonnie was literally killed/destroyed and wouldn’t be fixed.  

Combined with the fact that Fazbear Entertainment didn’t have an official response regarding Bonnie’s whereabouts until sometime after the rebrand, I get the impression they Knew Something and had to deal with That first.

Understudy MANAGEMENT REPORT - With Bonnie out of commission, we are making Monty the new bass player. Parts and Service has already done the proper adjustments. This could be a good thing. Monty could be even more popular than Bonnie.

“Monty could be even more popular than Bonnie.”

I don’t think they were wrong with this one. Like I said earlier, we don’t know anything about Bonnie’s personality. I’d harbor a guess, though.

Bonnie, across all games/iterations, is generally characterized as a stereotypical rock musician: active, boastful, and a confident performer. The unused Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Theme Song from Help Wanted portrays Bonnie similarly, but with a laid-back hippie sorta voice. The Freddy & Friends: On Tour! web series promoting Security Breach characterized Bonnie as deadpan, casual/laid-back, and mute. Steel Wool-era Bonnie leans more into the chill, hippie-type rockstar stereotype, so I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that Glamrock Bonnie would’ve retained some of these elements.

Monty, as shown in the book excerpts earlier, is a dramatic, guitar-smashing rockstar. Loud, hyper, destructive, eye-catching Monty. I’ve no doubt that Monty was popular due to all these traits that made him unlike Bonnie. Bonnie is “go with the flow,” while Monty is “my way or the highway.” Monty's excitement and energy would also freshen up the main band – none of the other members steal the show the way Monty does.

Their coverup works. Monty’s popularity is soaring. Everyone forgets about Bonnie.

-☆-

ROUGH TIMELINE

Construction

The Mimic is brought to the Pizza Place during the Pizzaplex’s construction.

Pizza Place sealed with concrete, teens later sneak in.

Pizzaplex construction completed.

Pizzaplex Years 1-2

Bonnie is decommissioned.

Monty becomes bass player and GlamBonnie imagery is removed.

Pizzaplex Year (???), but after Monty rebrand

The Storyteller is installed; removed 3 weeks later. Mimic1 continues to alter technology in the Pizzaplex.

Pizzaplex Year 3(ish)

Events of GGY and the Retro CDs.

Pizzaplex Year (???), but pre-SB

Vanessa becomes Chief Security Guard by recommendation.

All remaining staff are replaced by STAFF bots.

Pizzaplex Late Year 4-5

Freddy malfunctions onstage and is temporarily booted up in his prototype in safe mode.

Events of Security Breach.

PQ/Free Vanessa ending.

Post-SB

RUIN

-☆-

TL; DR (EXTREMELY simplified)

Bonnie was decommissioned within the first year or so of the Pizzaplex opening.

Any outside virus/programming couldn’t have influenced another animatronic to attack him, and Vanny wasn’t working at the Pizzaplex yet.

Bonnie was last seen wandering the Pizzaplex for several hours in the middle of the night when he should’ve been deactivated. Only spotted on camera three times, no mentions of a security guard encountering him.

Bonnie’s body is in a small room at the very end of a maintenance/storage hall behind the bowling lanes, which has been boarded up from the inside.

Due to the environment, this room must’ve been the crime scene.

The state of Bonnie’s body aligns most with The Mimic’s killing style.

Sharp claw marks

Dismembered limbs

Old, corroded metal parts around Bonnie that could’ve belonged to the Mimic

Possibly was lured to a secluded location.

The Pizza Place underneath the Pizzaplex wasn’t properly sealed, so The Mimic could have escaped and possibly entered the Pizzaplex.

The Mimic can interfere/interact with technology, so it could’ve had access to information about the Pizzaplex.

Knew how to avoid security.

Bonnie pursuing TM caused it to respond with its “hide-and-seek” style of attack, eventually luring Bonnie to an isolated location and ambushing him.

Fazbear Entertainment knew their murderous basement creature is what killed Bonnie and covered up the incident.

They didn’t want any chance of the incident getting out, which is why they sealed Bonnie’s tomb and replaced him instead of repairing him.

[moonlitkilljoy]

Lo and behold! i’ve finally finished making it, the promised list of Pacific Rim fic recs for anon :-) everyone thank @ihavenomoralsss for proofreading this for me!

There’s a good chance most people who've read any amount of newmann fanfiction will have read the first two on this list, as they’re found on the first and fifth pages of the newmann ship tag on ao3 when its sorted by most kudos descending– however i’ve included them anyway because they’re there for a very good reason (which is that they’re FANTASTIC). also, i've grouped all of the "pov outsider" fics together at the end of this post, as they pretty much make up one third of the list– which feels like it warrants it's own section. feel free to dm me or send me an ask to let me know of your thoughts about any of these (or just pacific rim in general!!)! without further ado, may i present to thou, 10 fantastic newmann fics

It’s All in the Hands of a Lazy Projector by patster223

“Hermann is cursed as a child so that he may never remember anyone he meets. Theoretically, this should make falling in love impossible, but then he meets (and meets and meets and meets) Newton Geiszler.”

~10k words, 1 chapter, rated T; exactly what the summary says, it’s an au in which hermann is cursed to forget everyone he meets, it centers around newt and hermanns interactions and how they manage to grow close despite this

if i had to choose a single favorite pacific rim fanfic it’d probably have to be this one. it’s gorgeously written and tackles some themes that hit very close to home for me, personally. i’ve struggled with memory loss for a very long time now, and this fic manages to encapsulate that experience through the lens of magical-realism in a way i’ve never seen captured in any context. i left a comment to that effect (under a pseudonym because i rarely log into ao3 on my phone) and the author’s response is something that still makes me emotional pretty much every time i look at it, “I wanted to imagine a world where memory still mattered, even if it wasn’t remembered. And now, years later, I think that it does. You and I and Hermann hold memory in our bodies and our minds, even if what’s being held isn’t an exact picture or description, but rather an emotion or a question. Memory still has to matter to those with memory loss, even if we end up experiencing it differently.” so, this is not only a recommendation for quality, but also from a very personal place— it’s a fic that addresses the concept of memory loss through a lens of comfort and hope, which it is so rarely seen through, and does it phenomenally. if anyone looking at this post were to read one fic and only one fic from this list i’d want it to be this one. it also characterizes newt and hermann very well and i love their dynamic in it, it’s PHENOMENAL

Letters From Berlin by spenshi

“Newton keeps in touch with his family when he's shipped off to the Shatterdome. Jacob and Illia send care packages to the K-Science Lab.”

~12k words, 1 chapter, rated T; once more, exactly what the summary says– newt sends letters to his family and they send him packages. eventually hermann starts sending them letters (+ emails) as well :]

i read this one most recently out of all the others so it’s the freshest in my memory :-) it’s extremely homely and heartwarming!! additionally, it includes some really fun and sweet interactions between newt’s family and hermann. OH! and, of course, some very fun characterization of newt’s family

Plausible Possibility by cissues / @cacaesthesia

“Newt and Hermann experience some odd post-drift effects.”

~1k words, 1 chapter, rated G; a little exploration of ghost-drift

short and sweet! absolutely fucking adorable too. plus, this contains some headcanons/a discussion of sexuality that i was delighted to find very relatable (as an aromantic person)

Red Patent by highseize

“It's been months since the ocean closed up. Nothing will take this from her now.”

~2k words, 1 chapter, rated G; a snapshot of what mako’s life looks like after the events of the movie ^^

a rare non-hermann-and-newt-centered fic on this list!! this one actually centers around mako :D it’s adorable and i love mako with my entire heart, especially this depiction of her

fool by kaijusalad

“Newton is going to die thinking no-one left on this Earth loves him. (Fool.) He can't have that.”

~6k words, 1 chapter, rated T; hermann believes that seeking out hannibal chau and drifting with a kaiju brain once more will kill newt, and acts accordingly

i LOVE the way this fic is formatted and written– the word choice and unique use of italics and parentheses is incredible and works so well. it describes every action and scene so gorgeously and it just. man. here’s a small except devoid of context that i think showcases this perfectly: “His words are hollow, anyway. They hang in the air, lies filled with helium, a new year's resolution, an 'I'll quit smoking'. (God is real in belief; maybe if he believes in them hard enough they'll come true, and isn't that something for a man who works in numbers to think?)”

One day from lonely by Raehimura

“Hermann is standing outside Newton Geiszler’s private quarters, bony ankles poking out from under too-short standard-issue sweatpants, his hair a wreck and his red-ringed eye still sore, with a lifetime of stolen memories in his head. What if Newt isn’t there? What if he’s sleeping? Or, worse, what if he is waiting on the other side of the door with his own stolen memories fresh on his mind? Above all he remembers, sudden and frighteningly clear: This is not what they do.”

~2.5k words, 1 chapter, rated G; another very interesting exploration of newt and hermann post-drift

i disagree a little bit with some of the characterization in this fic (particular, newt thinking hermann hates him. i think newt very well knows that hermann’s very fond of him) but it’s a great read nonetheless! the best word to describe it would probably be “cozy”

This is a Totally Normal Thing for Friends to Do by SolarMorrigan / @solarmorrigan

“Hermann and Newt don't talk about it (until they do)”

~21k words, 4 chapters, rated T; a fake dating au in which hermann’s dad nags him about not having found a partner yet and hermann panics, telling him that he actually does have a partner just to get him to asking about it, but it backfires when lars expresses interest in meeting him. newt offers to play the part of partner, hijinks and relationship progression ensue. this fic also has an explicit sequel, if that’s your kind of thing

THIS FIC IS SO FUCKING GOOD. there were multiple times where i reacted out loud to things that happened in the fic– most notably a series of “holy fucking shit”s while eating lunch with some friends. it’s adorable and includes some transmasc newt content :3 this fic also includes hermann snapping and standing up to his shithead dad and its GREAT. one of my absolute favorite pacrim fics ever, i can’t recommend it enough

POV OUTSIDER FICS:

HR Complaints by IDoNotBitMyThumbAtYou / @idonotbitemythumbatyou

“Manny Flores has been with the PPDC for nearly a decade by the time he’s transferred to Hong Kong. He just wants to do his job. And he’s good at it. But when he receives the 15th complaint from one Dr. Hermann Gottlieb in only three days, he finds his patience running thin. He wonders which of the two scientists would be more of a nightmare to cohabitate a working space with: Dr. Gottlieb - sender of endless petty complaints, or Dr. Geiszler, their hapless subject. (...)”

~3k words, 1 chapter, unrated (probably G or T); hermann and newt’s relationship through the eyes of someone reading the (non-serious) complaints that hermann sends to hr

i spent three uninterrupted hours looking for this fic to link it here and it was ABSOLUTELY worth it. this fic is so fun, and it uses my favorite trope of all time!! i’m an absolute sucker for “pov outsider” type fics <3 the characterization is phenomenal, i love the oc from whose pov we view the story, and some of the lines made me actually audibly laugh. definitely another one of my absolute favorites. i think i sent a screenshot of the first sentence from the following lines to virtually everyone i know: “After another few weeks of complaints (“Dr. Geiszler asked me if I have any tattoos.” “Dr. Geiszler made an offensive tweet alluding to my personal style. I have attached a link.” “Dr. Geiszler has named his invention ‘the milking machine.’”) And continued insistence that no disciplinary action be taken, Manny was starting to suspect that the latter was closer to the truth: these were the missives of someone deeply, inconveniently in love. Christ, Manny was half in love with the guy himself at this point.” this fic rocks, do yourself a solid and please read it

On The Outside by combeferrer

“Petra Gottlieb, Hermann's mother, watches the first PPDC press conference after the world is saved and notices her son, particularly his relationship with his fellow scientist.”

~1k words, 1 chapter, rated G; for the third and final time, exactly what the description says! newt and hermanns relationship through the eyes of hermann’s mother, who watches a press conference with her son– who she hasn’t really interacted with lately– in it

ANOTHER GREAT FIC!! I love this characterization of newt and hermann’s relationship, and i find the premise and extremely enticing in and of itself so i won’t be saying anything more here <3

Disconnect, Connect Again by cypress_tree / @cypress-tree

“Raising Newt Geiszler has never been easy. Seeing him fall in love can be harder. The development of Newt and Hermann's relationship, from Jacob Geiszler's point-of-view.”

~13.5k words, 4 chapters, rated T; newt and hermann’s relationship through the eyes of newt’s father, over the course of 12 years

LOVE LOVE LOVE this author’s take on newt’s family. it works so well and is very enjoyable to read about. i wish i could articulate how much and why exactly i love this fic in a better manner, but i can’t quite find the right word’s ^^; i’m just going to leave it at “i love it dearly and i adore it’s depiction/interpretation of newt and hermann’s history (and present + future!)”

thank you for reading!! have a lovely day/night ^^ <3

[starlight-loki]

Precautionary Surveillance (Loki x Reader)

Or, That Time You and Loki Became Friends

Word Count: 2.8k

Warnings: none :)

A/N: this is platonic (and gender neutral! :D )

As this is my first imagine, I kind of just wanted to establish how the reader first meets Loki, but I’ve got plenty more fluff in the works! ;)

also this takes place post-Ragnarok, but Infinity War doesn’t exist here, shHHHH

Despite the long list of risks and expectations that came with living with the Avengers in their compound, you never thought that babysitting Loki would be included. And yet, a mere two weeks after having moved into the compound, Tony sheepishly approached you with the news.

He didn’t word-for-word call it ‘babysitting’ of course, but you knew it was definitely implied. 

“Think of it as... precautionary surveillance.” Tony had explained to you that morning as he packed a small backpack, supposedly containing enough supplies to last for a week-long mission. “Or if that’s too much, just be normal roommates. But check in on him every few hours. Make sure he’s not destroying anything. And don’t let him go out. Or to my lab. Or Bruce’s. Or the roof-”

“Okay, I get it Tony,” you rolled your eyes as you heaved out a sigh. “You want me to babysit Loki.” 

Tony shrugged, and patted your shoulder empathetically before zipping up his backpack. “Your words, kid. Not mine. Like I said, it’s just precautionary surveillance, we’ll be back before you know it.” 

“I don’t understand why you can’t just bring him along with you!” You protested, throwing your hands up in the air. “His fighting skills and abilities would be really useful for your mission, you know that right?”

You were fine with the fact that Tony and Steve weren’t confident enough in your fighting abilities to bring you along on missions just yet -- frankly, you were completely happy staying behind and burying your nose in a book. But now Tony wanted you to babysit Loki, going so far as asking you to log any ‘suspicious activity’ from the god. You thought the entire thing was ridiculous.

“You know why, Y/N.” Tony began sternly, slinging his backpack over his shoulder and starting towards the quinjet hangar. He was walking briskly, and you scowled as you had to practically run after him. “The New York Incident? The two-hundred or so times he’s betrayed Thor? That time he stuck his dad in an old folks home here and just paraded around Asgard in disguise for two years?”

“New York was nearly ten years ago!” You protested. “Look at him now, all he does is putter around the compound in sweatpants because you won’t let him out-”

Tony sighed loudly, cutting you off mid-sentence. “Look, I know you’re new here and you mean well, but we don’t trust him Y/N. Thor dragged him here because Asgard’s gone and there’s nowhere else for them to go, but Loki is not one of us. It’s going to be a damn long time before any of us think anything different of him.”

You glowered at Tony, fighting the tiny glow of anger that sparked in your heart when you heard him talk about Loki like that. 

You had stolen glances at Loki last week when he thought no one else was looking, and you knew he was far from the dysfunctional maniac who tried to take over New York all those years ago. Sure, the dysfunctional part may still remain, but he was far from a maniac -- you could see that in his features when he sat on the couch alone that day, flipping through a small worn book. 

He looked... lost. Empty almost, as if any possibility of a joyful life had been stripped from him. It hurt your heart to see someone sit with their own melancholy the way Loki did. The fact that no one else in the Compound trusted him -- evident from the fact that you were being put on babysitting duty this instant -- didn’t make things any better. 

“Take care of yourself, kid.” Tony said, pulling you in for a fairly awkward one-armed hug. “Keep an eye on Loki, but don’t do anything stupid.”

You frowned. “What does that mean?” 

“Just... keep your distance from him.” 

Tony’s words brought the image of Loki sitting alone in sadness back to the front of your mind, and you decided right then and there that you were going to do exactly the opposite of what Tony was suggesting. 

The first day felt like an eternity. Loki remained in his room with the door shut, and with no one else to chat with and pass the time, time seemed to crawl at an eerily slow pace. 

You made pasta for dinner. You figured the sound of pots, pans, and kitchen utensils clanging every now and then as you cooked would summon the lonely Asgardian out of his room to eat at the very least, and you couldn’t help the little sting of disappointment that appeared when you finished your meal as alone as you had been earlier. 

After placing your own bowl in the sink, you grabbed Loki’s portion you had set aside and padded down the hall to his room. You tried to ignore the slight tremble in your hand as you knocked on his door. 

“Loki?” You asked gently. “You there?”

You were greeted with a faint shuffling noise, but otherwise there was nothing but silence. 

“I made you dinner. I haven’t seen you all day, you must be hungry... um... I mean, you don’t have to eat of course if you don’t want to, but I’ll just... I’ll leave this here at your door if you want it. No pressure.” 

You felt fire rush to your cheeks as you cursed yourself silently for rambling, and carefully set the bowl of pasta on the floor. 

“If you want anything,” you added quickly in a voice that was barely louder than a whisper. “More food, tea, some company... I’m in the other room.” 

You stood frozen at Loki’s door for a moment, waiting for any sort of response. Earning nothing but more silence, you nodded to yourself before turning on your heel and heading back for the kitchen. 

You looked back over your shoulder before you rounded the corner at the end of the hall, and the pasta bowl was gone. You couldn’t help but smile to yourself. 

The second and third day passed much like the first. If it weren’t for the fact that Loki was constantly on your mind, it would’ve felt like you had the entire place to yourself. You would have enjoyed the quiet, but there was a part of you that couldn’t stop worrying about Loki. 

After the god failed to leave his room once again, you brought dinner to his door which was hastily accompanied by another short little babble of an invitation to join you in the living room if he wished. Just like day one, you were greeted with silence and a meal that vanished out of the hall just before you turned the corner. 

On the fourth day, you couldn’t get Loki out of your head no matter how hard you tried. Was he lonely? Bored? Did he sleep the entire day? Did he even sleep at all? The rooms in the Compound were just about the same: spacious, yet minimal in decoration. Everyone got a TV and a small bookshelf in the corner, but that was about it. Judging by the fact that Tony and the rest of the Avengers weren’t allowing Loki to leave the Compound, you figured he probably didn’t have much for entertainment. 

Before you could convince yourself otherwise, you dashed off to your beloved little bookstore in the city. You ransacked the shelves for anything you felt Loki would’ve liked, as well as books you adored and would’ve wholeheartedly recommended to anyone else. If Loki was going to spend all day in his room, he deserved to have new books to keep him company, at the very least. 

Two hours later you returned home, your shoulder aching from the countless books that were weighing you down in the best way, and to your surprise you found Loki with his back to you in the kitchen. 

Was he... doing the dishes for you? 

You dropped your tote bag of books to the ground in surprise, and Loki flinched almost imperceptibly at the dull thud that echoed throughout the open space of the Compound. 

“Hi,” You managed breathlessly as the god turned and looked at you with wide eyes for the briefest second. You blinked, and just like that Loki had regained his cool composure. “You’ve finally come out of your room.”

Loki opened his mouth to reply, his eyes scanning the room as he searched for an excuse. After a moment of silence, he sighed. 

“Thank you for the meals. I appreciate it.” 

You took off your coat and hung it on the chair as you approached him. Your heart sank ever so slightly as you caught Loki take the smallest step back. 

“Of course, I mean... we all gotta eat right?” You laughed quietly and looked away as you ran a hand through your hair. “You don’t have to clean up, I can do that.” 

“It was the least I could do in return.” 

The silence that grew between the two of you seemed to amplify with every passing second. Loki nodded, almost out of resignation, and began to walk back to his room without a word. 

Now was your chance, if you wanted to make him feel welcome like you had hoped to. 

“Wait!” Your voice came out more as a squeak and you tried your best to ignore the fire that rose to your cheeks. “I, uh, I got these for you.” 

As you bent down to retrieve your fallen bag of books, you heard quiet careful steps as Loki approached you cautiously. He kept his distance, but leaned a little closer to you as you began laying all the books out on the table for him to see. 

“I picked out a few books I’ve read and love dearly. I figured you could give them a try. And... I, uh, saw you reading Shakespeare last week, so I thought you might like these two.” You gestured to the novels closest to him. “They’re  Ancient Greek tragedies.”

You glanced at Loki, and noticed how he picked up Oedipus Rex and began flipping through the pages carefully, as if the book were to vanish from his hands at any moment. 

“I’ve never read this one before,” Loki mused quietly. Your heart skipped a beat as his steady gaze moved to meet your eyes. “When would you like me to return these to you?”

You blinked in surprise. “They’re for you to keep.” You smiled. “I bought them for you.” 

You watched as gratitude, then confusion, then what almost looked shame flash across Loki’s features. He almost seem to clutch the book tighter in his grip.

“...Why?”

You pulled out the chair that you were leaning against and sat down with a sigh as you looked up at Loki. 

“I don’t like how everyone’s been treating you.” You admitted quietly.

“So this is out of pity?” Loki asked cooly, nodding at the books on the table with narrowed eyes.

 “No!” You exclaimed, shaking your head rapidly. “No, Loki, that wasn’t my intention at all. I mean, I’ve only been here two weeks and I could see immediately that everyone keeps their distance from you. You’re not allowed on missions-”

“Neither are you.” Loki cut in. You dismissed him with a wave of your hand. 

“Yeah, but I’m the weakest link at the moment. I don’t count.” You replied quickly, trying your best to ignore the intrigue on Loki’s face as he gazed at you. “I saw you last week, reading your book. You looked so lonely. I thought maybe you just wanted some space, but I’ve noticed how the others treat you. Tony and everyone else, they leave you out of everything! They don’t try to include you in conversations at dinner, you wear the same two pairs of clothes everyday because no one’s bothered to get you any decent clothes besides sweatpants. Hell, Tony kept me off this mission to babysit you and it makes me so mad! You’re an adult! You deserve your own freedom, Loki!”

You slammed your hand down on the table in frustration, and winced as your words replayed in your head. You definitely went overboard this time. You should’ve just given Loki the books and left.

You were certain Loki was going to retreat back to his room as he moved away from you and around the table, but to your surprise, he sat down in the chair across from you, his hands clasped carefully together.

“Perhaps Stark is right, this is what I deserve.” He said quietly, breaking the silence that resided between the two of you. “I haven’t exactly been... welcoming to anyone.”

You shook your head. “You lost Asgard, your family... Thor brought you here with the intention of this being your new home. The least everyone could is treat you like a person, not a hostage. This isn’t a prison. You deserve so much more than that.” 

“They don’t want me around.” Loki said simply. 

“I do.” You held his gaze unwaveringly, and reached out to place your hand gently over his. To your surprise, he didn’t pull away. “I want you around. You matter to me.” 

Loki sighed, his eyes fluttering closed for a brief second as he took in your words. 

“Thank you.” He spoke slowly. “Your words -- and your actions -- mean more than anything Stark or anyone else has done in the time I’ve been here.”

You smiled in response, giving his hand a gentle squeeze before pushing his books towards him. 

“You’ve got plenty of things to do while you’re in your room now.” You grinned nodding towards the books on the table. Anyone else would’ve missed it, but you caught Loki return your smirk for a split second. 

“I think I would prefer to read my books out here... with company.” 

The following day was nothing like the others. To your surprise, Loki greeted you with a small smile from his spot on the couch as you trudged bleary-eyed into the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

“You look tired.” He remarked quietly as you began searching the cupboards for something to eat. You managed a shrug.

“I don’t sleep that great most nights.” You admitted. You heard Loki get up from the couch, setting his book down on the coffee table gently before approaching you. He still kept some distance -- the kitchen counter did a good job of separating the two of you -- but he leaned in, almost grateful to be in the presence of someone who truly saw him. 

“Me neither.” Loki chuckled. “Thor sleeps like the dead, but I rarely sleep well. That’s how my love for books began, actually.”  

“Me too!” You exclaimed excitedly. “I’d stay up reading till 1 or 2 AM some nights as a kid. I’d have to use a flashlight and hide under the covers so I wouldn’t wake anyone up.”

That earned a genuine laugh from Loki, whose smile suddenly began to look like sunshine in your eyes. 

“I used magic to see in the dark, but hiding under the covers was the only way I could read at night without waking Thor up.”

“You shared a room with Thor?” 

Loki nodded, scoffing a little. “My mother thought it would help reinforce our bond as brothers. A lot of good that did.”

You leaned in towards him, your posture mirroring his as you rested your arms against the kitchen counter. 

“Thor still loves you.” You said quietly, a small smile touching your lips for a brief moment. Loki rolled his eyes.

“Sure he does.”

“No, really. He wouldn’t have brought you here to live with him if he didn’t. You guys got here before me of course, but I’m sure he had to pull a lot of strings to get Tony to agree to have you live in the Compound.” 

There was that silence again, like the day before, settling down gently between the two of you. You lowered your gaze to your hands. 

“Sorry. I meddle too much. I should stop.” 

This time, it was Loki who placed his hands over yours gently. 

“No,” he replied softly. “You speak your mind, I admire that. It shows you have strength.” 

“I don’t always feel strong.” You admitted quietly. 

“Only the foolish admit their own strength.” Loki whispered.

“...Does that mean Tony’s a fool?”

“Your words, not mine.”

A laugh bubbled up out of you at Loki’s words, and as your eyes met his, you noticed the loneliness you had seen before was gone. 

In their place was the warmth of a thousand suns. 

The two of you stood there, hands intertwined almost as if to keep the other afloat. Loki’s hands made yours seem small, but his were warm and soft and surprisingly gentle.

You closed you eyes, taking as much of this moment in as you could.

“I wish they’d let you outside.” You sighed quietly. “There’s so many shops and restaurants I think you’d like. You’d love Central Park, too.”

Loki frowned. “When is everyone due back?”

“In two days. Why?” 

You got a smirk in response. “Let’s go now.”

You let out a surprised laugh at Loki’s suggestion. It thrilled you to see this side of him.

“We can’t! Tony’s got cameras around the building, he’ll see us if we leave.”

Butterflies filled your insides for a brief moment as Loki suddenly winked at you. He raised his hand, which had begun to glow with a green hue, before snapping his fingers. Green sparks flashed briefly from the windows as he did so. 

“I believe Stark will be needing to replace his cameras once everyone returns. Where do you suggest we go first?” 

[tiramisiyu]

Tears of Themis: Lu Jinghe’s Birthday - 6.13 “Decision to Compete”

Translation Masterlist

Event Story: 6.13 Decision to Compete | 6.15 Personal Instruction | 6.17 Building Block Dolls | 6.19 Participating in the Competition | 6.21 Birthday Celebration

Event Story Interviews: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Art Gallery Boss: Young miss, all pieces displayed at the Rembrandt exhibition this time are priceless authentic versions. Your request is very…

MC: But he really is my very special friend. Just like you, boss, Rembrandt is also the artist that he holds in highest esteem.

Not long ago, I found out that June 21 was Lu Jinghe’s birthday. To give him a birthday surprise, I came to Stellis City’s antique art gallery, where they were about to hold an exhibition on authentic Rembrandt works. 

With Lu Jinghe’s current identity, if he were suddenly appear in a well-known art exhibition, aside from garnering attention, it might also cause additional problems. So, letting him enjoy the works of the artist he so admired without disturbances should be an excellent idea. After a sincere, long conversation, the boss finally agreed to rent out the venue for me before the exhibition opened.

Art Gallery Boss: You absolutely must be careful – do not bump into or damage them.

MC: I will be careful, don’t worry.

After confirming the venue, I opened my notes, checking over the other things I needed to prepare.

MC: Cake… I’ll order taro mousse, but what should I give as a gift? Watches, leather belts, ties? Lu Jinghe definitely isn’t lacking on these.

I logged into the shopping app, and “Today’s Main Recommendations” on the gift recommendation page caught my attention.

MC: These are… building blocks?

On the product pictures, hundreds of building block components piled together, creating a flowing, miniature city. In an instant, the scenes of what happened at the Lu Mansion played in my head…

--

Three days ago.

 Lu Mansion

Lu Jinghe: Careful!

In the Lu Mansion, gift boxes of all sizes were piled up, making it easy to trip if one weren’t careful. Good thing Lu Jinghe caught me in time.

Lu Jinghe: Jiejie, you’re too careless.

MC: It’s clearly because you have way too many gifts here. So is it almost your birthday? Otherwise, why would so many people give you gifts?

Lu Jinghe: Sure enough, I can’t hide anything from you. There’s still over half a month until my birthday, so those people came running over in a rush.

MC: “Those people” are…?

Lu Jinghe: Past business targets, children of other major families, plus some entertainment stars. Lots of people want to get in on the Lu family’s good graces.

MC: (As expected of Lu Jinghe – even his birthday’s got to shake up all of Stellis City.)

Seeming like Lu Jinghe had seen through my thoughts, he laughed quietly.

Lu Jinghe: So… shouldn’t you also send me a gift?

MC: Lu Jinghe, you’re not lacking on gifts, are you?

Lu Jinghe: For those sent by others, of course I’m not lacking on them. But ones sent by you…

MC: Ahem ahem.

After receiving Lu Jinghe’s hint, I faked a cough. Turning my head around, I saw the “main offender” that had just tripped me. This was a meticulously-wrapped box of building blocks, with modern-looking buildings printed on top, with “limited edition” written on in conspicuous text.

MC: Lu Jinghe, you play with building blocks?

Building blocks were a toy invented by the Austin family. They became popular worldwide as soon as they were launched, and now have nearly a hundred years’ worth of history. If they didn’t suit someone’s tastes here, toys like this would not appear here.

Lu Jinghe: I have played with them before – someone probably remembered that up until now. Although, I haven’t played with them in a long time.

MC: Why?

Lu Jinghe started to speak, then stopped, a troubled look emerging in his clear eyes.

--

Building Blocks Room

MC: So many… did you build them all?

Lu Jinghe took me to a room on the second floor of the Lu Mansion. What appeared before my eyes were innumerable building blocks models. From rich, colourful flower fields to the little roads of a foreign country’s streetscapes – there was even a proportionate reconstruction of Stellis University.

MC: Amazing! You must have spent a lot of time to make so many works, right? You’re so talented, so why didn’t you continue?

Lu Jinghe: Because…

Lu Jinghe walked to the French windows, sinking into a short silence. Golden sunlight shone on his side profile, creating a dappled light effect.

Lu Jinghe: On certain levels, I can no longer continue creating with building blocks…

MC: (What… Certain levels means…)

Lu Jinghe: My mother passed away right after I was born.

Lu Jinghe slowly began to speak, his voice quiet. I suddenly regretted asking a little.

MC: If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t need to force yourself. Everyone has their own secrets.

Lu Jinghe: It’s fine. I have no secrets in front of you.

Lu Jinghe’s words were indescribably gentle, but my heart felt like a little like it had been yanked.

Lu Jinghe: Though I lost my mother, my father and older brother loved me dearly. Compared to others, I’ve never been lacking in anything. I even had more than them. Until I noticed that for both oil paintings or building blocks, I couldn’t create anything related to “family”…

MC: (How could that be… Speaking of which, “Z” has indeed never made anything related to “family”.)

Lu Jinghe: Are you feeling sympathetic? Looks like not being able to create “family” is no big deal, because it’ll at least make you sympathize for me.

MC: … Lu! Jing! He!

I faked anger, but my sad feelings had been swept away by Lu Jinghe’s seemingly joking words.

Lu Jinghe: Alright alright, don’t be sad. I thought about it after – perhaps I can’t create anything with a “family” theme because I’ve never had a major female figure around me, ever since I was little. If…

MC: If what?

Lu Jinghe: Ahem ahem… nothing.

MC: …

--

After coming back to my senses, my fingers slid over the screen.

MC: Since Lu Jinghe likes building blocks, I’ll send him a building blocks set as a gift. Although… which set should I send?

--

Home

To find a suitable gift set, I looked up lots of information online related to building blocks after getting home. Among them, an article titled “The first Stellis Building Blocks Competition will be held soon” caught my attention.

MC: Building blocks creator Mr. Austin’s out-of-print posthumous work – the “Future” series’ first public reveal; only one set worldwide. Cabin in the woods, a glass flower room, and an open-air art studio that faces the mountains. This work is called… “Future Home”?

Note: “Home” and “Family” are the same word in Chinese.

MC: (This set… looks like one that Lu Jinghe would like.)

I couldn’t help thinking of joining the competition, but I froze after scrolling to the next article.

MC: “Z” will appear at the building blocks competition as an evaluator, and many fans have signed up… “The Shepherd Girl” may become a competition topic.

MC: (Lu Jinghe’s going?!)

The theme of this competition was “World-Famous Artworks”, where people were to reconstruct world-famous artworks using building blocks. With Z’s works being so famous, becoming a topic of the competition wasn’t out of the question.

MC: (If he really is an evaluator, my participation will definitely be exposed, and I won’t be able to give him a birthday present.)

But would Lu Jinghe really appear in public under Z’s identity? Though this might be something made up by the hosts, I still decided to call and ask Lu Jinghe, just in case.

Lu Jinghe: Hello?

MC: I-it’s me.

Lu Jinghe: What’s the matter, did something happen?

MC: Nothing, I just wanted to ask – do you know about the building blocks competition being held next month? I heard that “Z” was going to be a competition evaluator.

Lu Jinghe: There’s actually this sort of news, huh. The host probably was probably afraid of being low on hype and let out fake news. If you’re suddenly asking this… did you want to participate? Then I can teach you for free.

MC: (Since Lu Jinghe’s not going, getting taught by him is indeed the best introductory method.)

MC: Is that alright?

Lu Jinghe: Of course. If you need it, I always have time. Besides, after today… Z’s appearances may become very rare.

MC: ?!

MC: I-is it because of Pax?

I brought up the guess I had. Sure enough, Lu Jinghe signed almost inaudibly on the other side of the phone.

Lu Jinghe: Yeah, balancing studies and Pax already expends too much of my energy. After graduating, similar impediments will only continue to increase. To an artist, it’s really easy for these sorts of conditions to cut off creativity, so…

Lu Jinghe’s voice had an exhaustion in it that was impossible to ignore.

MC: Lu Jinghe, if you’re working too hard, you can stop for a bit and rest.

Lu Jinghe: … I understand. But unfortunately, no one will give me time to rest. Before being “Z”, I am first and foremost Lu Jinghe of Pax.

--

After hanging up, Lu Jinghe’s words echoed in my head.

MC: So many people clearly like “Z”. Can Lu Jinghe really give it up?

MC: Right! It just so happens that lots of “Z” fans will be participating at the building blocks competition. I should gather some things that they want to say to “Z” and give them to Lu Jinghe! Even if he really can no longer create in the future, the fans’ encouragement would be memories worth treasuring.

--

That night, I submitted a registration form on the building blocks competition official site, as well as an application to interview the participants to the hosts. After registering, a participant list, including methods of contact, was sent to my inbox.

MC: (Next, I’ll practice building blocks as I interview people for what they want to say to “Z”.)

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Rachel Nobel / Rae Lynn

Rachel Nobel, aka Rae Lynn, has 2 fics at Gossamer, but she’s written many more X-Files stories than that. You can also find fics by her at AO3 and various other archives. She’s one of the rare, special authors who’s posted numerous fic during the show’s original run and again in recent years. Big thanks to Rachel for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)? Absolutely. I joined a Facebook group for fanfic writers where someone recognized my name and asked about some of my stories that have disappeared from the Internet, and I almost fell off my chair. On the other hand, I go back and read original-run fanfic all the time - the Wayback Machine is my best friend for all the late great fanfic archives. Like fine wines, they get better with age! What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it? I was fairly young during the peak of the fandom - I was only 12 when I started watching the show and discovered the fandom online. A few years ago, right around the time we learned the revival was coming, I wrote an essay I called "How 'The X-Files' defined my adolescence," in which I wrote: "If you think about it, 'The X-Files' is a lot like adolescence: You start out thinking it's going to be a little hokey, NBD, and then you end up in its thrall, captivated and occasionally hugely let down. A lot of people behave strangely, and no one gets out unscathed. Mulder, in his own weird way, is the perfect mirror for an adolescent: He doesn't fit in; his life careens between being utterly consequential to the fate of the known universe and being completely pointless; he's socially awkward and can't quite nail it down with the girl of his dreams."

So for me, the fandom is inextricably bound up with adolescence, that feeling of vacillating between desperate loneliness and being on the verge of something enormously significant. Take romance: I was a bit of a late bloomer, and when all my friends were exploring their first relationships I was watching Mulder and Scully navigate this beautiful, complicated, soulful relationship without ever even kissing. That was deeply affecting for me as a teen.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)? I started out on mailing lists - there was an EMXC mailing list and one that I think was called X-Angst. [Lilydale note: There was a mailing list called XAngst Anonymous.] This was back at the dawn of the Internet when I only had 10 hours of AOL access a month, and I remember using what AOL called a "FlashSession" to log on, download all the fanfic from the mailing list and log off to read it. I vividly remember the excitement of watching all that new fanfic flood my inbox! Later on I was on atxc. During the long summer between "Gethsemane" and "Redux," it felt like fanfic was at its peak. There was a group of about a dozen women who got together (virtually) to discuss a work in progress by Lydia Bower called "Primal Sympathy." We called ourselves the "Primal Screamers," and we had our own website with fanfic recommendations and other discussions (it cracked me up to locate us as an entry on Fanlore.org). I was still in high school at the time and I was the youngest member; I felt like I had been accepted into a cool underground club. I worshipped these women, who were fanfic writers themselves. They taught me everything I knew about how to be a decent, respectful, enthusiastic consumer and writer of fanfic and fandom. [Lilydale note: I’ve talked enthusiastically about the Primal Screamers here before, including their fanfic primer.] What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general? In the '90s, I would have been embarrassed to tell anyone I read fanfic, let alone that I was writing it. Now, I look back on it and realize how talented and smart and passionate we all were. It's something to be proud of. What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show? The first episode I ever saw was "Shadows," which was on in reruns between the second and third seasons. I don't think "Shadows" is an episode that anyone today would consider thematically significant, but something about seeing those office supplies float spookily through the air - it wasn't like anything I had seen on television, and I wanted in. What got you involved with X-Files fanfic? I've always been a person who, when I am interested in something, seeks to learn more about it. So I guess I got online as a 12-year-old with this new interest and discovered fanfic. It was thrilling to find out that so many talented people were taking characters I loved and bringing them to life for me. When the screen faded to black each week and I wondered, "That's it? What next?", fanfic was always there to fill in the blanks and take Mulder and Scully to the next level. As a teenager, I was self-indulgent enough to think I had something to contribute, too. Most of what I wrote in the '90s would today make me cringe. I remember literally paging through the dictionary in search of erudite words I thought Mulder and Scully would say! But occasionally I'll feel brave enough to read an old story and I feel encouraged to see a spark: a turn of phrase or a fragment of dialogue that I still feel proud of. I write professionally now, but I've never written fiction that isn't X-Files fiction, so it's something that has really allowed me to hone my creative juices in a different way. What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom? Sometimes I feel like the Statler and Waldorf of the fandom, like I'm sitting up in the balcony grousing "Back in my day...!" Because the fandom is remarkably robust, and I've gotten involved with it to an extent on Twitter and AO3, and now all these young whippersnappers idolize Mulder and Scully just as much if not more as I ever did! Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files? Not really, no. I've of course consumed a lot of media since The X-Files that I wanted to discuss with others - I'm a huge "Harry Potter" nerd, and I was outraged when Netflix canceled "The OA" - but strangely I've never had the urge to read or write fanfic about anything other than "The X-Files." Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully? Every Thursday night! I watch a chosen episode with a group of fans on Twitter and tweet about it - #tbtXFiles. That's great fun. There are episodes I've seen dozens of times over the years and episodes I think I only ever watched once, and it's always enlightening to watch them again with a certain critical eye. When I was a fan during the original run, I really idolized Mulder; I loved episodes where we saw him in all his cracked genius glory. Scully was a trailblazer of a character, of course, but I think the fandom has evolved over the years to give Scully her due. Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom? I was fairly stunned when the revival came around and I realized that people were still writing X-Files fic, and that a lot of it was so good. So yes, I do read fic on Archive of Our Own. But my heart is always with the early days of fanfic. In the revival when Mulder says "I've always wondered how this was going to end" - that felt to me almost like a love letter to fanfic authors who had been trying to answer that question for 25 years. Surprisingly, I've never had the urge to read fic in another fandom. Every time I try, it just feels like I'm cheating on Mulder and Scully. Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors? My favorite author back in the day was Kipler. Her stories were just like real episodes of the show I could vividly imagine in my mind. I adore syntax6, particularly "20" and "The Birthday Stories," because of the way she perfectly and poignantly captures vignettes that span the entire series. Another favorite is Dawn and her "Blood Ties" series - I started out as a "NoRomo," and Dawn was one of the authors who made me believe Mulder and Scully could have a romantic relationship that really worked. And I always had a soft spot for Profiler!Mulder stories, so to this day I mourn the unfinished state of the great Kronos fic "Ascent to Hell." One fic I always come back to that captures profiling Mulder really well is "Domination of Lies," by cslatton. And then there are stories that I consider classics: "Corpse" by Livengoo, "Oklahoma" by Amperage and Livengoo, the "Revelations" and "All Hallow's Eve" series by Windsinger. What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise? I have a soft spot for a story I wrote called "Human Credential." I was attempting, a quarter-century after the first season of the show, to set a story in the very early days of the partnership (which these days is one of my favorite kinds of fanfic to read), and I felt like I nailed it. Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online? I have been doing both of these, as a matter of fact! Or in my case, they are oldies that made it online but vanished when Geocities went belly-up, for example, that I sometimes go back to and reshape. Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work? As the swallows return to Capistrano, I seem to always return to writing fic at periods of transition in my life. The first time I "retired" from fanfic, I wasn't even in college yet! If one can be nostalgic at 21 years old for something one gave up at 17, I was nostalgic for fanfic, and I picked it back up again in grad school. Then I became a teacher and a wife and a mom and years passed, and the revival seduced me back into it again. But the vast majority of fanfic I've written is firmly planted in the first seven seasons of the show - poor Mulder and Scully never seem to get to grow up in my stories. What's the story behind your pen name? I wrote under a lot of pen names over the years! When I first started writing fanfic, no one knew anything about Internet safety and it didn't occur to me that it wasn't wise to use my real name. There was a period when I would have been mortified if anyone discovered my stories under my real name - now, at least I can write it off as a youthful indulgence! When I finally grew into a more mature writer, I started using the name Rae Lynn, which is almost-but-not-quite my real first and middle names. Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions? As far as I know, unless my friends and acquaintances have done some sleuthing, only my husband knows I still write fanfic. And he's never read it, though he's kind enough to give me a glazed-eyes indulgent smile if I ever talk about it. Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now? I am xraelynn on AO3! I have about a dozen stories there - some of them I wrote 15 years ago and some of them are brand spanking new. Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Fanfic is a true labor of love. Fanfic authors don't write fanfic for money or fame; they do it because they love it. Sites like AO3 and Tumblr have made it so much easier to show your appreciation to writers (::gruff reminiscing voice:: back in my day, you had to send them an email, and now you can just click the "kudos" button!). I can only speak for myself, but I really thrive on that feedback - otherwise I'm just Mulder in his cramped hovel of a home office waiting for Scully to nag me to shave my beard. Every so often I think about the fact that there is so much high-quality writing about these characters I've loved for decades just available on the Internet for free and it feels like a true gift.

(Posted by Lilydale on May 4, 2021)

[lady-of-disdain]

Operation: Sunset

(Cheesey operation title aside, here’s my Take Action Masterpost)

OK! So @krysmcscience has a fabulous contact list located here, and @yashahimewasamistake​ has some great example messages located here. I wanted to help out and do my part by adding some more Copypaste messages, and other people to contact about this trainwreck of a show once I started sending out my own complaints.

Please note that this post will change as I edit it to add more, so keep checking back. Also please share this because with all the outside links I’m posting I doubt this is going to show up in the anti tag.

Hulu: Now this one is not as easy for everyone because Hulu is a paid service, and it also doesn’t have just a simple email address to send a letter out to, and I am avoiding any form of contact that would require me having to call and talk to someone on the phone.

I DO however have a hulu account, so I used my account to create a Community Help Center topic located here: https://community.hulu.com/s/question/0D53h000018m7FaCAI/can-the-age-rating-for-yashahime-please-be-changed If you have an account please feel free to log in and back me up, maybe it will actually draw the attention of moderators there.

Disney: I emailed both addresses provided on Krysm’s post with the following message, please feel free to use it if you would like to do the same:

Title: In regards to children's programming on Hulu portraying a child-grooming relationship

There is a children's show called Yashahime being aired on Hulu currently that portrays a romantic relationship between an adult man, and a young girl who he's known since she was 8 years old. In the most recent episode it was revealed that this young girl gave birth to the man's children at approximately 14 years of age. Considering that this is the age range for the target demographic many find this to be in very poor taste. We are asking that at the very least the age rating for this show be changed, or that the program be pulled from Hulu's lineup. Thank you very much for your consideration. ~A Concerned Citizen

Crunchyroll: This is an interesting route because on one hand anyone can actually make a free Crunchyroll account to contact them about this show, however on the other hand, I feel like Crunchyroll as a whole would be less concerned about the themes of pedophilia and grooming featured in the show because the app is not really intended for kids to use.

HOWEVER, they cannot afford to turn a blind eye to people who report triggering content. A request for a Content Warning to be put on the show is not asking much.

Yashahime contains clear and distressing themes of pedophilia and grooming. The latest episode featured an approximately 14-year-old girl giving birth to babies fathered by the adult man she's known since she was 8. Now I'm not new to anime, I know that there are many genres with different age demographics and as such different levels of graphic content. However, most of the time the rating, target demographic, and any content warnings that are given in the description can help people navigate what content they are looking to be exposed to. There is absolutely no warning or indication that Yashahime should contain such triggering content. Please put a content warning on this show!

Note: Crunchyroll is also a great place to drag the show in terms of reviews as it’s one of the main review sources Google pulls from when you do a search for the show. Ya’ll have NOT disappointed, and the first almost 3 pages of recent reviews are ALL doing the lords work, it’s hilarious, and if you haven’t seen it yet I recommend it. I’ll get more into review-bombing later in this post.

Sunrise/Funimation/Viz: Krym didn’t link a contact form for Viz Media. I’m not gonna lie, at the end of the day I don’t really know if Viz and Funimation are basically the same entity, but I went ahead and contacted Viz too just to be thorough: https://www.viz.com/company-contact

I sent this same message to all three companies.

This show that has been heavily marketed for children, and has main characters that are 14-years-old, features a pedophilic relationship as romantic? Sesshomaru knew Rin since she was 8-years-old, and she gave birth to his children at approximately 14-years-old, THE SAME AGE AS THE MAIN PROTAGONISTS AND MARKET DEMOGRAPHIC! How is this appropriate content for children? How are we supposed to teach our children that inappropriate attention from adults is wrong if their favorite shows feature it as good? Yashahime needs a new age-rating and a content warning.

~Review Bombing~

When you Google Yashahime there are 3 main sources that Google lists when showing review scores, Crunchyroll, MyAnimeList, and IMBD. Making accounts for these platforms is free, and I encourage anyone who had a few extra minutes on their hands to roll up and help us tank this show’s ratings.

https://www.crunchyroll.com/yashahime-princess-half-demon/reviews/newest/page1

https://myanimelist.net/anime/41911/Hanyou_no_Yashahime__Sengoku_Otogizoushi/reviews

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12287748/reviews?ref_=tt_ql_3

~Brand Advertisers~

This section is still going to be under heavy construction, but the idea is a similar one to what brought about the YouTube Adpocolypse. Now let me just be clear that while I disagree with how YouTube handled this situation (and is still handling it) it did shed light on a lot of terrible content on YouTube that was flying under the radar, so as a plan of action I think it’s entirely valid.

Basically the idea is to contact any brands we see being advertised during Yashahime on Hulu and Crunchyroll. This phase of Operation: Sunset is going to be much easier to pull off on Twitter, so I have not yet started it (getting a Twitter account and blocking the horde of shippers over there so they leave it alone and don't get all my tweets removed is the next phase in my plan).

PLEASE MESSAGE ME, OR POST HERE WITH ANY BRANDS YOU HAVE SEEN RUNNING ADS ON YASHAHIME!

Basic idea of a DM or tweet to a brand being:

Hey @[Insert Brand] do you really want your advertisements running on a children’s show that has heavy themes of child grooming?

-or-

@[Insert Brand] Did you know your ads are being run on Yashahime on @[Insert Platform], a children's show that features a grooming relationship?

Brands seen advertised so far:

Lexus

Progressive

Campbell’s

Eharmony

~

OK! That’s all I’ve got for tonight, stay tuned friends.

[project-pnf-404]

Checkpoint and important updates 2!!: Electric boogaloo!!

Heyo guys!! Long time no talk. So, I’ve got some cool update stuff to show you guys. I’ve been doing a lot of blog “housekeeping” since the end of the last event. (don’t worry it hopefully won’t be boring update stuff lmao as it includes some new supplementary content). So, first and foremost, thanks to the inspiration from @koppais-smallest-nerd I’d like to let you guys know that I am now adding screen reader access to all future posts!!! This one included. At the bottom of each post under the, “read more”, image descriptions for all images will be added! Screen reader accessibility will also be added to all previous asks on the blog. However, getting through all of them will take a tiny bit. As, of this update, the first 4 asks have had image descriptions added. As well as all the supplementary content in between where applicable.

I’d also like to show you guys some supplementary content for the blog. Between these dashed lines are in character day 1 log entries written by the rest of the crew. 

———————————————

———————————————

I originally wasn’t sure if I wanted to put these extra day 1 logs on the main blog or not. But, I’ve decided that all supplementary content that may be story related will remain on the main blog for the foreseeable future, while BTS content will end up on PNF-404-Plus.

That being said since the end of the 1st event and my time away from the blog a lot has been going on when it comes to the blog.

For one the entire desktop version of the blog has had a large overhaul. A new theme has been added to the main page.

But, not only that but new side pages with supplementary content have been added!! This includes an event list, a bio page for the crew members of the S.S Drake, a Piklopedia page for the new Piklopedia, and a music page to top it all off!!

The Event List will show each new event as they are added! You can click on the current known events to go directly to all posts tagged with that event tag. Speaking of which all Event 01 posts have now had their tags updated with the Event 01 tag making it much easier to navigate.

The new Crew Members page has bios for all the members currently on the mission or known in the story so far! These Bios are pretty in line with cannon with some fanon, and light headcanon added  in for good measure. I recommend taking a look as it does have some interesting info in there. Also quick note: all of these bios are written as if it is prior to the beginning of the blog.

Then there’s the Piklopedia!! Here you can read each of their findings as they explore PNF-404! Currently the findings will be on each area they explore (not each creature they find) as they haven’t found any new creatures yet. There is also a map of places they’ve discovered and more!

Lastly, a new music page has been added. On this page, I’ve created event-inspired music playlists. Some of the songs have been mentioned in the past. But, here you can listen to them all in one place and see which songs are for which part of the events. As well there’s a secret songs playlist. This playlist has nothing to do with the blog directly but is filled with music given to me by people I’ve met from this community while I’ve been here!! Currently, there are 5 songs there, however, there will be more added in the future! What makes it secret is that you won’t know who gave me the song XD. (well unless you’re the one who gave me the song lmao) who knows if you’ve ever shared music with me before you may find your song there!! (There is also one song I’m sharing with you guys in there too so have fun figuring that out lmao. )

As well the table of contents has been once again updated with a lot of this new stuff as well as some other new information!! As for mobile users as of now, all of this is on separate Tumblr pages. However, in the near future, I will be uploading much of this stuff , such as the Piklopedia entries and Crew Bio’s, as individual posts! However, in the meantime, if you feel like you can always check out these pages on your phone browser instead if you’re a mobile-exclusive user. (Though some pages don’t look as good on phone)

Welp, I think that’s it as far as updates go!! I should be back with brand new ask posts soon (likely within the next week or so!) so keep a look out!! I’ll see ya guys again soon and thanks for reading!!!

{{ Screen reader image description is under “read more”}}

In the first image,  Alph’s Day 1 Log entry is shown. His log says, “To think I thought the first day would go well. Then again I didn’t think I would get sucked out of the ship either so maybe I should stop being so surprised. At the very least Louie and I were able to find our way back despite some obstacles and I was able to fix the ship in time. Though if it weren’t for Chunks we would have never found the pikmin we did. That little guy sure saved the day. 

However, Then there's what happened to Brittany… To see her in a situation like that... I can’t even bear to think about it. Tomorrow I will be checking over the entirety of the Drake to make sure a crash like that doesn't happen again. I can't help but think that the crash was due to me overlooking something during maintenance... However, The only thing I can do now is to make sure something like this never happens again for all our sake, especially Brittanys’. “ It is then sighed by Alph

In the second Image Charlies Day 1 Log entry can be read it says, “I should have been on top of things. As this crew’s captain, everything that went wrong was under my watch and things should have gone much smoother. That being said I am very glad that all of my crew have made it out alive. Though I am still worried about Brittany. If only I was able to keep her safe…

 But, at this point, we all must press forward. We have a task to complete and after seeing how devastated some areas are, we must get to the bottom of what’s wrong with PNF-404. Nothing will get in my way, not with my steely fists that is!!” It is then signed by  Charlie

In the third image Louies’ day 1 log entry can be seen it says, 

“

Going back to the pikmin planet wasn’t at the top of my list of things I thought I’d be doing anytime soon. Yet somehow I find myself back here and stranded again…. At least I wasn’t fully alone this time…

Alph and I eventually found a pikmin that we later named Chunks. He sure acts differently in comparison to any other Pikmin I’ve seen before. But, even still, if it weren’t for Chunks, we wouldn’t have been able to help Brittany or find any other pikmin for that matter. So, we should thank him for that.” It is then signed by Louie

In the fourth image the updated version of the Project: PNF-404 Tumblr is shown. It now has a bright cyan futuristic aesthetic to it. In the fifth image a picture of the new events page, listing all the past and future events planned so far is shown. It has 1 known event Titled Event 01. The other 3 are titled Event unknown. In the sixth image, the new crew members’ character page is shown. A picture of Olimar is shown along with a description of his traits and a biography. It reads as follows, 

CAPTAIN OLIMAR

AGE 38

ALIAS(ES)Olimar

SPECIES Hocotatian

GENDER Male

TITLE(S) Employee of Hocotate Freight, Xenobiologist

AFFILIATION Hocotate Freight, Planet Hocotate Government

Fatherly, well-meaning, and resourceful, for an almost 40 year old Hocotatian he has a lot of bravery and guts. Olimar first and foremost loves his family and cares deeply for others around him. A Hardworking employee of Hocotate Freight and family man, Olimar tends to try and stay level-headed while looking out for others.

Having been one of the first to visit the Pikmin planet Olimar has extensive knowledge of the planet's life. Lucky for him he just so happens to have gone to college for xenobiology. Many of his findings can be found within his many log entries known as the Piklopedia.

But, for as much as Olimar tends to be on top of things, his trips to the pikmin planet have had him face many dangers and life-threatening events. Though these issues are not something he brings up…

In the seventh image, The new Piklopidea page is shown, In one section it displays a map of PNF-404 with 2 marked locations. The first of which is highlighted in blue is named the “Silent Stream” the second, is highlighted in orange, Its title is “Glacial Gardens”. To the right of that is a description introduction for the Piklopedia. It says” To help ensure the progress and success of this mission all crew members must write down their findings in this log. Overview: 

CAPTAIN Olimar: Writes In-depth biological analysis of fauna and how the ecosystem affects said fauna.

LOUIE: Writes about Recipes and ingredients that can be found in each area. ALPH: Looks at the area with the eyes of an engineer. He uses this insight to discuss the benefits and flaws of what he’s analyzing. BRITTANY: Uses her botanist skills to look into the flora of the area along with talking about the aesthetics of things and adding in her own general opinions.

CAPTAIN CHARLIE: Writes about combat strategy and how one can use the environment in an area for a tactical advantage.

To the left is a map showing the current locations discovered by the crew. The one highlighted in orange has yet to be explored.

The final image shows the new music page! 6 playlists can be selected on the left each having 5 songs. To the right is an image of the event 01 cover art. With (from left to right), Brittnay, Charlie, Olimar, Louie, and Alph all looking up with a distressed expression on their faces. 

END ID

[demi-shoggoth]

COVID-19 Reading Log, pt 18

Man, this past month has been a heck of a year, hasn’t it? I’ve still been reading books, but my pace has ebbed and flowed, and I forgot to update this for a while. So here’s my thoughts on ten of the most recent books I’ve read.

91. The League of Regrettable Sidekicks by Jon Morris. I had no idea this book existed until I was doing image searches for this project for the other “League of Regrettable X” books. This one covers the sidekicks, minions and goons of comic history. Unlike the other books by Jon Morris, the spread is more even of Gold/Silver/other ages of comic books. After all, the 70s is when Jaxxon the green rabbit appeared in Star Wars, and the 80s had a shape-shifting penguin named Frobisher in the Doctor Who comics. It also feels like it’s a little looser about what makes a character “regrettable”. Some of the sidekicks in its pages, like Woozy Winks and Volstagg the Voluminous, are legit great characters.

92. Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were by Michael Page and Robert Ingpen. I wanted to like this book; I really did. For one thing, it was recommended to me by @listmaker-lastcity​, who I was working with on commissions. For another thing, it was fairly pricy used. Thirdly, to its merit, it is gorgeous. Michael Page, the illustrator, is credited first, and rightly so. But for an “encyclopedia”, it makes up a lot of stuff. It opens with a disclaimer that “the creators of this book have… unlocked their own fantasies”, which means that it invents Arthuriana and Greek myths wholeheartedly. Several of the entries do not exist outside this book, and others are so distorted that their actual folkloric origins have been clouded and obscured by people using this as a source. For material I’m not familiar with the primary sources of, like Gulliver’s Travels, I have no idea if it’s reflecting the source material accurately, or making things up whole cloth. As a fantasy, it’s intermittently fun; some rather nasty misogyny does sneak in and the book is wildly anti-science. As a reference work, it’s useless to the point of actively harmful.

93. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh. I was a huge fan of the “Hyperbole and a Half” blog back in the day, and knowing Allie Brosh’s history of mental health problems, I was worried when she seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Her release of a second book was a pleasant surprise, but also showed that some worry was appropriate. This collection of essays, cartoons and heavily-cartooned essays is sadder than the first collection, as it was written during and after a series of family tragedies. It is still very funny in parts, however, and has an overall message of self-care and love that turned out to be extra relevant in the nightmare year that is 2020. It’s the only book for this project that I read in a single sitting. Highly recommended.

94. Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. This book is half memoir, half biography. The composer Mozart owned a starling during some of his most productive years as a composer, and even wrote an elegy to it when it died. The author used this as a launching point to adopt her own starling, and to examine how this invasive species is seen in American birding culture. The writing is humanistic and charming, and very self-aware (the author worries that her starling is going to die, because that’s what always happens in “this animal changed my life” books). The message is one of respecting all other creatures and of valuing the lives of animals, which is not much of a surprise from the author’s other books (I covered The Urban Bestiary earlier in this project.

95. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris. The subtitle says it all; this is a biography of Joseph Lister, focusing on his research into antisepsis and promotion of sterile technique in surgery. It takes ample digressions to talk about other major surgeons of the time, the state of hygiene and disease theory in Victorian England, France and the United States, as well as things like labor conditions and women’s rights. These bits and pieces are woven in successfully, so they feel like appropriate context setting. Fitzharris is empathetic despite the often grisly subject matter, but readers with a sensitive stomach and a low tolerance for gore might want to skip this one.

96. Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills! by Bryan Senn. This is a big book, 400 pages in full sized paper. It is an overview of the horror/SF double feature, covering every movie released initially in that format between 1955 and 1974 in the United States. As such, it reviews more than 200 movies, with behind-the-scenes anecdotes, critical opinion and box office, and general coverage of trends and themes in genre cinema at the time. I enjoyed this book greatly, especially since it covered some movies I’d never even heard of. The timing is perfect, too, as I read this book just before @screamscenepodcast​ covered the first entries in it, Revenge of the Creature/Cult of the Cobra. My one complaint is that the author seems biased against Japanese films. He discredits the special effects and monster suits in kaiju movies compared to even movies like Attack of the Giant Leeches and The Killer Shrews, and complains about acting and scripts in Japanese films much more than he does for other dubbed films. He also consistently refers to Ishiro Honda as “Inoshiro Honda”, which is how his name was misspelled in the 60s. That level of disrespect for some of my favorite genre pictures is a constant low-level irritation in what is otherwise a fine resource.

97. Cursed Objects by J. W. Ocker. This is a fun catalog of objects said to be cursed, including the whys, supposed effects and current locations of these artifacts. The book is sorted into categories, like “cursed objects in museums”, “cursed furniture”, “technological cursed objects”. It takes a skeptical, folkloric look at the topic, being more interested in the stories than in any legit supernatural powers. It even talks about things that “should” be cursed because of their odd appearances or eerie provenances, but aren’t, like the Crystal Skull forgeries. The book is a pleasant and breezy read, and the author has a good sense of humor on the topic. He curses the book itself with an epigram against thieves, and buys a cursed dog statue on eBay that sat on his desk throughout the writing process.

98. Death in the Garden by Michael Brown. This book is wildly misnamed, being light on both the “garden” and the “death”. It’s supposedly a social history of poisonous plants, but is more interested in English herbals specifically. It refers to the authors by name extensively as if we should have all of these memorized, and the only place where the prose has any energy is in the biographical section for these herbalists. There’s very little information about the actual plants and their poisons. I would use the word “doddering” to describe the prose style, which is simultaneously rambling and boring. The photography is pretty, though.

99. Ripley’s Believe it Or Not! 1929-1930 by Robert Ripley. IDW puts out lovely volumes of vintage American comics, and this is no exception. Being a kid into weird facts and trivia, and an adult who is still into them, the Ripley franchise was a major part of my childhood. This is the first modern collection organized chronologically, covering the first two years the strip was in national syndication. The strips cover the typical Ripley mix of sports trivia, weird facts, word riddles and puzzles, misleading statements and the occasional outright lie. The book has a warning about the racial attitudes of the time, which is fair, but it’s not nearly as bad as I feared. Ripley’s habit of drawing from photographic references means that people in ethnic minorities look like real people. But the language is decidedly “of its time”, with slurs used to identify foreign ethnicities (particularly Asian ones). So be warned.

100. Unlucky Stiffs: New Tales of the Weirdly Departed by Cynthia Ceilan. I’m ordering material to pick up from my local library again, which is great! This book was actually recommended by the library website based on the morbid slant of some of the other books I was putting on hold. Unfortunately, this book sucks. It’s pitched as a “weird deaths” book, something like a more literary version of the Darwin Awards. But the deaths are often not all that bizarre, instead being typically sad accidents or murders. It just comes off as mean spirited and misanthropic. Not recommended.

[rigelmejo]

My dudes wasabi Japanese is so cool this site is so cool literally my dream site ToT (thank u @yue-muffin for all those free reading links <3 which is what included wasabi Japanese)

I know what I’m doing after I finish reading Japanese in 30 Hours! (I might keep reading Reading Japanese for fun too just cause... I might as well we will See).

So like curse me if, when I say I will, it makes me not lol. I hope I DO actually do this. Because it sounds so much more clicks-with-me right now than my alternate study plan (which was Nukemarine memrise - which I WILL eventually do ToT I plan it ok, and tae Kim’s grammar guide - which I’m happy to replace with any grammar guide I’ll finish fucking reading tbh).

1. Remembered bilingualmanga exists and I am making no commitments to read anything (tho I have 4 mangas open and an urge to read them for the first time in years since I read yotsuba earlier and followed it). But I will say it’s quite cool I could um read and look words up (ditto for just regular iOS word lookup and Japanese scripts... I’d say ditto for Animelon too and I DO recommend it but I’m just not really an anime watcher).

2. Wasabi Japanese has a: a grammar guide. So my ass is gonna try reading it (in my defense it has audio which I find marginally nicer than the other sources I’ve been looking at... like I literally read Japanese in 30 Hours aloud audio helps me... also why I suspect in part Nukemarine’s decks help they make me listen a lot). https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/wasabis-online-japanese-grammar-reference/

3. Even better (to me) wasabi Japanese has b. A grammar drills lesson course that has you shadow and practice SENTENCE PATTERNS AND GRAMMAR. I was literally considering buying a Japanese shadowing textbook for just this purpose (but that textbook was random phrases whereas this is targeted sentence patterns). Also I learn best by just fucking seeing sentence patterns so I kind of suspect an activity like this would click with my brain better than actual grammar guide reading (tho grammar guide reading gives me a useful overview of what to start noticing). Like I literally own the book Japanese Sentence Patterns just cause it was the only thing that clicked... Bonuses about this lesson course wasabi Japanese has: it’s me Doing stuff, I learn best just Doing tbh (it’s why just brute force reading clicks well with me lol). And better, Doing stuff in a streamlined way so I can not bumble as long lol and I have reference if I’m confused (Also why I like graded readers). Info: https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/how-to-proceed-with-the-instantaneous-composition-method/ The lessons: https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/materials-for-japanese-lessons-intensive-reading/

4. Wasabi Japanese has lessons through stories, listening reading and shadowing. Phenomenal. Both the perfect chance to test if Listening Reading works some more (which I’m currently into), and to actually DO some things I wanna do like read and practice listening (versus Nukemarines memrise courses which are just flashcards, or playing Japanese video games which is... doable but too draining to be enjoyable or efficient yet). I’m excited. How to use: https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/japanese-lessons-how-to-proceed-with-read-aloud-method/ Actual lessons:. https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/fairy-tales-and-short-stories-with-easy-japanese/

5. Assuming you’re better at Japanese than me - wonderfully wasabi Japanese has a course I could use, right after finishing that last one, at a slightly more difficult level, with manga: https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/materials-for-japanese-lessons-intensive-reading/

6. Alternatively, want a different N3 course that’s radio program based? Here it is: https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/materials-for-japanese-lessons-read-aloud-method/ so yeah, wasabi Japanese looks like a quite nice alternative to flashcards or a textbook if a babe just wants to learn from stories with audio for a while ToT

7. Also I am again contemplating the benefit of just playing audio in the background more. Will I do it? I don’t know. I’d love to play SpoonFed Chinese audio, Japaneseaudiolessons, and Japanese core 2k audio on in the background. As it’s all comprehensible input I know I’d mostly pickup if I just heard it enough to Review it (whereas rn I just hear each audio file once ever on a walk then never again cause I have little time for focused audio only listening). But I feel bad when I play them in the bg and don’t fully listen ;-;. Ah the dilemma. Truly though they’d help so much if I played them in the background I know it... as of this month as an experiment since reading The Word Brain, I’ve been listening to SOME Chinese audio more. Specifically Guardians audiobook, a random Chinese hp audiobook, Alice in wonderland audiobook, silent reading audiobook. You would not believe how much it’s been noticeably helping. Usually it’s avenuex’s Guardian audiobook and every time I catch a bit of it casually in the bg while working, I’m blown away I understand clearly what I didn’t the time before. In particular I’m probably having the most improvements in this novels comprehension, since I’m Listen Reading Method with it too. But like... the first time I focused listened to it during L R? I caught everything with difficulty during the only-chinese audio but English text step 3. And then listening alone only caught the main story beats/scenes (which was already a major improvement for me). Now when working I can actually catch the paragraphs about Guo Changcheng’s family, his uncle, going to McDonald’s - these are details I very specifically remember being the ones I could NOT catch doing listening only the first time post L R. So after idk 3-6 listening of this chapter, just listening again in the background (since L R takes too much time I’m lazy I only do L R once), I’ve made this much progress. I only saw the full definition of everything ONCE one time during L R step 3 once. But just listening more I catch more and more. And of course, as I catch more the unclear parts become easier and easier to maybe figure out. All I know is I severely underestimated the benefit of repeated listening - at least when (at one point once) you comprehended the material. So considering this... I think now with hindsight, yes listening to condensed audio of a show or just a show, that you’ve seen before with English subs/dual subs/in target language and looked unknown words up, in the background probably could help. If at one point you comprehended it before. (So for me Guardian cdrama is hella on this list lol). With hindsight yeah, repeated audio of an audiobook chapter or audio drama you followed the target language subs for before, or that you could read but not hear alone, would probably help listening skills. Definitely my audio flashcard files where they’re literally Built to be comprehensible since it’s English then target language each line. So... yeah in hindsight more audio, even background audio, can help. Guarantee when I’m not L R with the guardian audiobook I’m barely even listening. And still I find myself catching parts of it.

8. My roommate got too excited about Final Fantasy 14 and informed me it’s free to play now.. which I didn’t know. So of course I foolishly looked up if I could play it in Japanese on a PlayStation and looks like answer is probably yes and I am sorely tempted...

9. It’s gonna be wild for me looking back on may progress at the end of the month because: I did almost nothing I planned, I got demotivated then intensely motivated, I’ve done a ton ToT, I also did a ton of Japanese immersion which?? I’m not even counting?? I don’t track my Japanese immersion yet because like... it’s not my priority right now. I read a ton of manhua the other day and just forgot to log it. I watched some of the woh concert and just did not count it, I read a surprising amount of Japanese this month for someone “not studying it much” yet (aka maybe more than I read last time I studied Japanese??). I did a lot of L R method I didn’t even track, I did a ton of background listening and I’m not tracking just hoping for the best. Did I finish 小王子 this month or last month? Whatever month that was I read like 4 Chinese books. I just remembered I read like 3 Japanese graded readers but didn’t count them cause they felt too simple to count (only 28 pages each). I watched 10 Cure Dolly Japanese grammar vids tho not sure how much help it is long term. Whatever time I did the Japanese video games had to count for something even tho it was draining af. Anyway my point is just... count on me to not do what I planned but be more productive when I do that. All that said: I’m more productive when I set plans even if they aren’t always followed, so I’ll keep making them lol. I think I just needed to hit that turning point of “do anything you want, just continue to do something” instead of “complete this first!” (Although I’m still aiming to complete things - or at least go for progressively challenging things). I dunno... I want to say I want to consider just trying to finish things imperfectly just finish them (to motivate me to finish my Hanzi books, Japanese books, courses I find). But knowing me.. I have no idea what will get me to keep going. Just need to remember it’s ok to do it imperfectly. Just need to remember to place what I will care about and actually do, as priority over what it is I think “must be fully done.”

[bhivetechnology]

Why Investing in Your Online Presence is Important?

Your idea is great, but is it getting the proper audience? Have you ever been able to drive sales exponentially? Or are you merely holding out for the proper time to travel big? Has all this led to a touch of self-doubt and a sense that your idea isn’t the best?

Hang in there…the time is now! The net is your medium to travel forth and acquire the required visibility. It's crucial that you just understand that logging on is the best thanks to moving forward.

Why is an internet presence vital, you ask?

Your online presence includes an internet site and social media. To be concise, it's a whole package of your social profile and inbound marketing efforts which require to be put into motion to get credibility and resource building.

Think of your website as your first interaction with the customer. it's the purpose where you create your first impression. The potential customer judges you and rates your business outfit right there. This can be a window of opportunity to ascertain credibility and you would like to nail it. it's going to be your only opportunity.

Running a startup has its own set of challenges. Getting investments and accurately planning your various budgets are sometimes the foremost challenging aspects of the project. I cannot tell you the way to work your startup, but what I can share with you is a way to identify your marketing needs and plan a marketing budget accordingly.

Some start their business with savings; some with debt. you would like to speculate money to create money. A marketing budget mustn't only be sizable, but also a high priority. Not having money or a budget isn't a decent excuse to forestall you from spending on a web presence.

I will refrain from putting a percentage here because it'll vary from business to business. If the numbers seem daunting, you've got the choice of staging your marketing efforts in phases. there's nothing sort of a well-structured marketing budget. Proper investment is critical.

Contact Bhive Technologies the Software Development Company in Madurai to induce started on your big mobile app launch. 

For greater effectiveness, utilize your marketing budget bit by bit. As an example, phase one may be for the interface, user experience, marketing applications and tools. The later phases are for analytics.

In my experience, I've seen some great quality brands built over the years at reasonable rates. Immense efforts go into such quality products, and it's possible.

You have to confirm right from the planning phase that when your website is being built, it incorporates a proper SEO- friendly framework. If you have already got an existing website, I like to recommend you update it, optimizing it for computer program friendliness. Update it with fresh content regularly to create a robust marketing tool.

The latest buzz is to make mobile apps to catch your users on the go. Alternatively, you may prefer to make your website design conscious of meeting those requirements. consult with our free requirement gathering questionnaires for web development, mobile app development and internet marketing to determine what most closely fits your needs.

As a startup, developing a superb product or service is barely half the battle. Getting it to the proper market and gaining a reputable presence among the audience is simply as important. Contact Bhive Technologies the Web Development Company in Madurai to induce started on your big mobile app launch. 

It is commonplace to appear on the website or a social media page (LinkedIn or Facebook) to verify a brand or a service provider. When someone looks up your company to find out about it, ensure it's up thus far and appears professional. It's easy for a customer to dismiss an unimpressive company instantly. you would like to hit the ball out of the park during this short window of opportunity. Let me reiterate, quality is of the essence here.

Here may be a quick checklist of why an internet presence is important.

It is a vital marketing resource

Your web presence helps you gain credibility; it's a marketing and sales tool. Like I discussed before, it's your first communication and likewise forms a primary impression for a customer. value more highly to impress!

A Branded image takes time to develop

Don’t be fooled by the convenience at which established brands attract an audience. They need to build this reputation over years. It takes time, but your online credentials will increase your visibility and potentially your sales, too. Because the customer will make a judgment call supported by first impressions, your impact must be rewarding and may establish recognition.

It will help build credibility

Don’t be misled by false promises that an internet site guarantees sales or that SEO guarantees sales. Contact Bhive Technologies App Development Company in Madurai who has experienced SEO analysts & developers. The specified outcome should be to make credibility and make a “social” or “web” presence. This helps in eventual lead generation.

It offers a way higher return on investment (ROI)

Depending on your business and the way you perform in your online presence (not what quantity you spend on it), you'll recover your costs very quickly. Compared to most other varieties of advertising, the ROI is way higher. It's available 24/7.

[talkinbouttinygames]

The Witness & The Anti-Hardcore Walkthrough Club

Steam says I have played The Witness for 31 hours. That’s not as much as it could be - I haven’t played it in two years, and never finished it originally after my save got wiped in an accident - but the reason I’m writing about it now is because I recently picked it back up, remembered how much fun it was, and am now intent on finishing it. However, despite how much time I’ve sunk into it (much more than most games covered in this ‘zine), despite the fact that I enjoy it enough to re-do all of my progress from two years ago, I can’t recommend the game, and the reason why is that I’m playing it wrong.

Okay.

For those who haven’t heard of it, The Witness is a puzzle game created by Jonathan Blow (at which point I am legally obligated to quip, yes that Jonathan Blow) based around completing line mazes on panels scattered across a very pretty island. The most simple puzzle at the start entails the player drawing a starting line from the starting circle to the other side, with later puzzles gaining more maze-like shapes, or other requirements, like the line needing to cross over every dot that appears on the board, or separate differently-coloured squares, or outline a drawn tetris shape. Additionally, other puzzles incorporate the surrounding environment: sunlight exposes a smudged line that reveals the correct path on a panel when looking at the right angle, tinted glass exposes the true color of panel squares, shadows from foliage above ‘block off’ incorrect passages, and so on.

A lot’s been said about The Witness: Blow’s design process for its puzzle mechanics, how it silently guides the player into learning mechanics, and what it truly means. But I’m not going to talk about any of those things, firstly because I can’t say anything that hasn’t already been said on those subjects, and secondly because for nearly the entire time I played the game, I had my phone opened up to a full-spoiler walkthrough.

The Witness is far from a casual game. While the game’s been praised for stepping back and allowing players to have ‘eureka! moments’ when trying to figure out how a given puzzle works, that same lack of explicit guidance can make it hostile to a player that isn’t able to connect the dots. Additionally, the line puzzles are the only interactable elements that exist in the game, outside of scattered audio logs around the island. This hyperfocus on the line puzzles (and the sheer magnitude of how many there are) means that in order to truly enjoy The Witness, you really need to be stoked about solving cereal box mazes.

...Don’t you?

When I first googled The Witness, my first thought was not, “wow, those puzzles look interesting”. It was “woah, this shit’s really pretty,” followed by “I think I would buy this game just to walk around in this world”. Evidently, I did - albeit on a half-off sale for 20 dollars instead of the usual forty. True to what I had seen, the world’s gorgeous, a variety of different landscapes with vibrant colours that seemed out of the painting. The way the puzzles interacted with the environment was also pleasant, at least with the ability to look up the answers for any of them at the glance. I took pleasure in screencapping scenes I found to be beautiful and sending them to my friends, and generally just being… present in the world I found myself in.

Perhaps it was a waste, that I refused to engage with the challenges the game presented me, that I cheated my way around obstacles that were supposed to give a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment and instead chose to meander around and treat the game as a glorified walking simulator. Given the common debate of whether accessibility features should disable achievements, and the gaming-originated term of ‘git gud’, it’s clear that the idea of ‘play experience integrity’ is one that a fair amount of gamers stick to. That idea is a complicated one that I can’t cover here, but my experience with The Witness falls on the fringes of it. While the certain type of gamers who scream about ‘casuals’ cheating themselves out of the Real Experience is an debate that deals with players changing the details of their play experience in order to follow the intended final destination of that experience, what happens when someone buys your game for a purpose completely unrelated to what the developer actually focused on? Is The Witness a good puzzle game? Who cares! Not me!

It’s like writing a novel that reveals integral qualities into the human condition, and then someone buys it because the size and paper type of the pages makes for good hamster bedding.

But I still enjoyed The Witness, because I was still playing the game - I completed every single area save for the final one because after that it wipes your save and I’d need to go through all the puzzles again to explore freely. And in the eyes of the game, what difference is there between my save file and someone who actually sat down and solved every single puzzle themselves. 

When talking to a friend about using a walkthrough while playing The Witness, he confessed - with slight guilt - to using walkthroughs in order to avoid missing anything. In response, I proposed we start the Anti-Hardcore Walkthrough Club - a hallowed league of gamers that place themselves highly in their ability to make things as easy for themselves as possible, because sometimes that’s what you’re looking for. In all seriousness, though, there’s a legitimate idea behind the joke - the sort-of  idea of the ‘death of the game designer’, that any way of playing a game is fair under cheats, mods, house rules, and yes, even focusing on a completely arbitrary and besides-the-point facet of the game. As long you’re aware that by doing so you can only speak to your specific style of play - a fact which applies to the hardcore gamers as much as the rest of us. To 100% a game on the hardest difficulty available isn’t necessarily a virtue, and cherry picking what parts of a game you care about and focusing on them isn’t necessarily a sin.

So, if I didn’t actually ‘play’ The Witness in the way a vast majority of people aim to play it, what can I say about it? This:

10/10. Best hamster bedding I’ve ever used.

[birdlord]

Every Book I Read in 2019

This was a heavier reading year for me (heavier culture-consumption year in general) partly because my partner started logging his books read, and then, of course, it’s a competition.

01 Morvern Callar; Alan Warner - One of the starkest books I’ve ever read. What is it about Scotland that breeds writers with such brutal, distant perspectives on life? Must be all the rocks. 

02 21 Things You Might Not Know About the Indian Act; Bob Joseph - I haven’t had much education in Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous nations that came before it, so this opened things up for me quite a bit. The first and most fundamental awakening is to the fact that this is not a story of progress from worse to better (which is what a simplistic, grade school understanding of smallpox blankets>residential schools>reserves would tell you), in fact, the nation to nation relationship of early contact was often superior to what we have today. I wish there was more of a call to action, but apparently a sequel is on its way. 

03 The Plot Against America; Philip Roth - An alternative history that in some ways mirrors our present. I did feel like I was always waiting for something to happen, but I suppose the point is that, even at the end of the world, disasters proceed incrementally. 

04 Sabrina; Nick Drnaso - The blank art style and lack of contrast in the colouring of each page really reinforces the feeling of impersonal vacancy between most of the characters. I wonder how this will read in the future, as it’s very much based in today’s relationship to friends and technology. 

05 Perfumes: The Guide; Luca Turn & Tania Sanchez - One of the things I like to do when I need to turn my brain off online is reading perfume reviews. That’s where I found out about this book, which runs through different scent families and reviews specific well-known perfumes. Every topic has its boffins, and these two are particularly witty and readable. 

06 Adventures in the Screen Trade; William Goldman - Reading this made me realize how little of the cinema of the 1970s I’ve actually seen, beyond the usual heavy hitters. Ultimately I found this pretty thin, a few peices of advice stitched together with anecdotes about a Hollywood that is barely recognizable today. 

07 The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton - A love triangle in which the fulcrum is a terribly irritating person, someone who thinks himself far more outré than he is. Nonetheless, I was taken in by this story of “rebellion”, such as it was, to be compelling.

08 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis; Sam Anderson - Like a novel that follows various separate characters, this book switches between tales of the founding of Oklahoma City with basketball facts and encounters with various oddball city residents. It’s certainly a fun ride, but you may find, as I did, that some parts of the narrative interest you more than others. Longest subtitle ever?

09 World of Yesterday; Stefan Zweig - A memoir of pre-war Austria and its artistic communities, told by one of its best-known exports. Particularly wrenching with regards to the buildup to WWII, from the perspective of those who had been through this experience before, so recently. 

10 Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing; Tim Parks - A writer finds himself plagued by pain that conventional doctors aren’t able to cure, so he heads further afield to see if he can use stillness-of-mind to ease the pain, all the while complaining as you would expect a sceptic to do. His digressions into literature were a bit hard to take (I’m sure you’re not Coleridge, my man).

11 The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences have Extraordinary Impact; Chip & Dan Heath - I read this for work-related reasons, with the intention of improving my ability to make exhibitions and interpretation. It has a certain sort of self-helpish structure, with anecdotes starting each chapter and a simple lesson drawn from each one. Not a bad read if you work in a public-facing capacity. 

12 Against Everything: Essays; Mark Greif - The founder of N+1 collects a disparate selection of essays, written over a period of several years. You won’t love them all, but hey, you can always skip those ones!

13 See What I Have Done; Sarah Schmidt - A retelling of the Lizzie Borden story, which I’d seen a lot of good reviews for. Sadly this didn’t measure up, for me. There’s a lot of stage setting (rotting food plays an important part) but there’s not a lot of substance there. 

14 Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy; Angela Garber - This is another one that came to me very highly recommended. Garber seems to think these topics are not as well-covered as they are, but she does a good job researching and retelling tales of pregnancy, birth, postpartum difficulties and breastfeeding. 

15 Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier - This was my favourite book club book of the year. I’d always had an impression of...trashiness I guess? around du Maurier, but this is a classic thriller. Maybe the first time I’ve ever read, rather than watched, a thriller! That’s on me. 

16 O’Keefe: The Life of an American Legend; Jeffrey Hogrefe - I went to New Mexico for the first time this spring, and a colleague lent me this Georgia O’Keefe biography after I returned. I hadn’t known much about her personal life before this, aside from what I learned at her museum in Santa Fe. The author has made the decision that much of O’Keefe’s life was determined by childhood incest, but doesn’t have what you might call….evidence?

17 A Lost Lady; Willa Cather - A turn-of-the-20th century story about an upper-class woman and her young admirer Neil. I’ve never read any other Cather, but this felt very similar to the Wharton I also read this year, which I gather isn’t typical of her. 

18 The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country; Helen Russell - A British journalist moves to small-town Denmark with her husband, and although the distances are not long, there’s a considerable culture shock. Made me want to eat pastries in a BIG WAY. 

19 How Not to be a Boy; Robert Webb - The title gives a clue to the framing device of this book, which is fundamentally a celebrity memoir, albeit one that largely ignores the celebrity part of his life in favour of an examination of the effects of patriarchy on boys’ development as human beings. 

20 The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will be Glad that You Did); Philippa Perry; A psychotherapist’s take on how parents’ own upbringing affects the way they interact with their own kids. 

21 The Library Book; Susan Orlean - This book has stuck with me more than I imagined that it would. It covers both the history of libraries in the USA, and the story of the arson of the LA Public Library’s central branch in 1986. 

22 We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; Samantha Irby - I’ve been reading Irby’s blog for years, and follow her on social media. So I knew the level of raunch and near body-horror to expect in this essay collection. This did fill in a lot of gaps in terms of her life, which added a lot more blackness (hey) to the humour. 

23 State of Wonder; Ann Patchett - A semi-riff on Heart of Darkness involving an OB/GYN who now works for a pharmaceutical company, heading to the jungle to retrieve another researcher who has gone all Colonel Kurtz on them. I found it a bit unsatisfying, but the descriptions were, admittedly, great. 

24 Disappearing Earth; Julia Phillips - A story of an abduction of two girls in very remote Russia, each chapter told by another townsperson. The connections between the narrators of each chapter are sometimes obvious, but not always. Ending a little tidy, but plays against expectations for a book like this. 

25 Ethan Frome; Edith Wharton - I gather this is a typical high school read, but I’d never got to it. In case you’re in the same boat as me, it’s a short, mildly melodramatic romantic tragedy set in the new england winter. It lacks the focus on class that other Whartons have, but certainly keeps the same strong sense that once you’ve made a choice, you’re stuck with it. FOREVER. 

26 Educated; Tara Westover - This memoir of a Mormon fundamentalist-turned-Academic-superstar was huge on everyone’s reading lists a couple of years back, and I finally got to it. It felt similar to me in some ways to the Glass Castle, in terms of the nearly-unbelievable amounts of hell she and her family go through at the hands of her father and his Big Ideas. I found that it lacked real contemplation of the culture shock of moving from the rural mountain west to, say, Cambridge. 

27 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of Lusitania; Erik Larson - I’m a sucker for a story of a passenger liner, any non-Titanic passenger liner, really. Plus Lusitania’s story has interesting resonances for the US entry into WWI, and we see the perspective of the U-boat captain as well as people on land, and Lusitania’s own passengers and crew. 

28 The Birds and Other Stories; Daphne du Maurier - The title story is the one that stuck in my head most strongly, which isn’t any surprise. I found it much more harrowing than the film, it had a really effective sense of gradually increasing dread and inevitability. 

29 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Faded Glory; Raphael Bob-Waksberg - Hit or miss in the usual way of short story collections, this book has a real debt to George Saunders. 

30 Sex & Rage; Eve Babitz - a sort of pseudo-autobiography of an indolent life in the LA scene of the 1970s. It was sometimes very difficult to see how the protagonist actually felt about anything, which is a frequent, acute symptom of youth. 

31 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; Graham Greene - Gotta love a book with an alternate title built in. This is a broad (the characters? are, without exception, insane?!) satire about a world I know little about. I don’t have a lot of patience or interest in Greene’s religious allegories, but it’s a fine enough story. 

32 Lathe of Heaven; Ursula K LeGuin - Near-future sci-fi that is incredibly prescient about the effects of climate change for a book written over forty years ago. The book has amazing world-building, and the first half has the whirlwind feel of Homer going back in time, killing butterflies and returning to the present to see what changes he has wrought. 

33 The Grammarians; Cathleen Schine - Rarely have I read a book whose jacket description of the plot seems so very distant from what actually happens therein. 

34 The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network; Katharine Losse - Losse was one of Facebook’s very earliest employees, and she charts her experience with the company in this memoir from 2012. Do you even recall what Facebook was like in 2012? They hadn’t even altered the results of elections yet! Zuck was a mere MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, probably. Were we ever so young?

35 Invisible Women; Caroline Ciado Perez - If you want to read a book that will make you angry, so angry that you repeatedly assail whoever is around with facts taken from it, then this, my friend, is the book for you. 

36 The Hidden World of the Fox; Adele Brand - A really charming look at the fox from an ecologist who has studied them around the world. Much of it takes place in the UK, where urban foxes take on a similar ecological niche that raccoons famously do where I live, in Toronto. 

37 S; Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams - This is a real mindfuck of a book, consisting of a faux-old novel, with marginalia added by two students which follows its own narrative. A difficult read not because of the density of prose, but the sheer logistics involved: read the page, then the marginalia? Read the marginalia interspersed with the novel text? Go back chapter by chapter? I’m not sure that either story was worth the trouble, in the end. 

38 American War; Omar El Akkad - This is not exclusively, but partially a climate-based speculative novel, or, grossly, cli-fi for short. Ugh, what a term! But this book is a really tight, and realistic look at the results of a fossil-fuels-based second US Civil War. 

39 Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation; Andrew Marantz - This is the guy you’ll hear on every NPR story talking about his semi-embedding within the Extremely Online alt-right. Most of the figures he profiles come off basically how you’d expect, I found his conclusions about the ways these groups have chosen to use online media tools to achieve their ends the most illuminating part. 

40 Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm; Isabella Tree - This is the story of a long process of transitioning a rural acreage (more of an estate than a farm, this is aristocratic shit) from intensive agriculture to something closer to wild land. There are long passages where Tree (ahem) simply lists species which have come back, which I’m sure is fascinating if you are from the area, but I tended to glaze over a bit. Experts from around the UK and other European nations weigh in on how best to rewild the space, which places the project in a wider context. 

FICTON: 17     NONFICTION: 23

[morningdailynews]

Brit Shocked Everyone By Revealing The App Which Makes Him £23K Every Month

"It all came as a surprise to me! I just wanted to make some extra cash aside. I discovered this new money making app by accident while surfing the Internet. Life's crazy! I was going to school and now I'm making money from home, can you believe that?"

By 

Jamie Glaze

UPDATED: THURSDAY, OCTOBER, 8, 2020

Appearing on the 'This Morning' show, Akshay Phillips expressed his gratitude and thanked Trading Platform creators for dramatically changing his life and financial situation. Akshay said he never understood exactly how their algorithm works but that it has been making him profits consistently, from the very first day.

The official website of  Trading Platform claims it can generate high profits for any user by executing a unique trading algorithm. This algorithm enables the user to automatically trade currencies.

In order to start the fully automated process, user needs to deposit an initial amount of £250. The algorithm would then automatically choose the perfect time to buy coins low and sell it high - and vice versa. This way the user profits would always be maximized without any risk.

Akshay said that any credit card can be used for the initial deposit.

Live on the air, Akshay asked Holly Willoughby to register and deposit £250 on Trading Platform.

Holly was hesitating at first but then decided to try it. (Image: Mirror News)

READ MORE

"Yes! I've heard about many coins success stories over the past few years but it was always too complicated for me to understand. Your story moved me Akshay and because of that, I will give it a try!" Holly said.

After she deposited the inital £250, the algorithm started to buy coins and other currencies for cheap and selling them for higher price very quickly. Within only 7 minutes, Holly made £60.24 in profit and had a total balance of £260.24 in her account.

Akshay explaining to Holly how she can track her profits. (Image: Mirror News)

Everyone in the audience, including the production staff, were shocked. Akshay tried to calm down everyone and explicitly said that  Trading Platform is not a magic platform.

READ MORE

"When you take a closer look, you can see around 70-80% of won trades. However, the amount of won trades is higher than the lost ones. So the bottom line: You win more trades with higher profits than you lose." Akshay added.

Before Akshay even had a chance to answer Phillip Schofields question, Holly jumped and said with a smile on her face: "Now I have £177.51 in profit, how is this possible? Can I withdraw it right away?"

At this point, "This Morning" producers decided to step in and stop the program, before we could find out what happened next.

WE DECIDED TO INVESTIGATE TRADING PLATFORM

  If Trading Platform is constantly making money for its users, how does the company earn any money?

We found out that the answer is simple but genius:  Trading Platform keeps exactly 8% of the users' profits. In other words, only when the user makes money, they makes money. This explains why they are so 'motivated' to generate as much profits for their users as possible.

It says on their website that in order to activate the account and start making money, the user would have to deposit a minimum of £250 GBP ($250 dollars).

Currently there are no exchange fees or reductions from the deposit. As soon as the deposit is made, the account and trading algorithm are activated.

We've seen a lot of websites promising similar results over the past year. In order for us to be sure and to give our readers actual results, whether they were going to be good or bad, we had to test Trading Platform ourselves.

OUR RESULTS WITH TRADING PLATFORM:

  To verify Akshay's story, we decided to try Trading Platform ourselves to see if it was really possible for an average person to make any money with it.

Our reporter Anthony Hawkins went through full process:

Step 1: Registration on Trading Platform (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

Registration on  Trading Platform was quick indeed, it took me only 2 minutes to complete the signup process.

I couldn't do anything because the account was not activated. In order to activate it I had to make a deposit. I decided to grab quick coffee with my colleagues and then to continue.

Step 2: Deposit and Activation (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

To activate the account, I've made the initial deposit of £250 pounds using my credit card. My account was activated immediately after the deposit so I decided to turn on the auto trading option and browse around to see if they have any other options available.

By accident, I refreshed the profits page and I couldn't believe what I was seeing!

It really worked!  Trading Platform made me £39.84 in profit, after only 3 minutes of making the deposit!

Step 3: My first profit on Trading Platform (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

It's not a lot, but it took almost no effort! Not to mention that I have no experience in trading or currencies. I've never made a trade in my life before, yet here I was actually making money.

To make £39.84 within 3 minutes is a tremendous performance for any trading algorithm out there.

I kept my initial deposit on Trading Platform account and continued to use the trading software in order to see what was going to happen next. It could have just been a very lucky start.

To my surprise, profitable trades were coming in, slowly but consistently, every day of every week. Akshay was correct, not all trades were successful, 7-8 trades out of 10 were profitable.

I decided to monitor it closely and see what is going to happen in the next 28 days.

Either it will continue to make profits consistently or I'm going to lose my £250 investment. One of these two will most likely end up happening.

I WAS IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE!

After only 4 weeks, Trading Platform displayed a total of £11,394.28 in profit, and I started only with the initial deposit of £250 pounds, this is unbelievable!

At this point, any colleague I would show my account to, would rush to register immediately on  Trading Platform.

£11,394.28 profit in only 4 weeks! (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

  I decided to withdraw most of my profits, so I had Trading Platform pay out £11,000 to my PayPal account. The remaining amount I decided to keep on Trading Platform to generate more money.

7 hours later, I've received an email from Paypal saying that I've received £11,000 from Trading Platform, I checked my Paypal right away to confirm it and the money was there!

£11,000.00 arrived from Trading Platform to my Paypal account. (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

TRADING PLATFORM REALLY WORKS!

Akshay from London was not lying,  Trading Platform indeed works and it will definitely change a lot of lives!

Unfortunately, today they've sent an email to everyone explaining that soon they will have to close down the registrations for new members as they can't keep up with the demand.

If you haven't by now, I urge you and everyone reading this to register right away, in order to secure your spot because they might close registrations at any given point.

Account registration is free and it only takes 2 minutes, you can click here to register.

However, it's necessary to deposit a minimum of £250 GBP (or $300 USD) in order to fully activate the account and the trading algorithm.

IMPORTANT: You will most likely receive a call after signing up, just like I have. Don't ignore it because their managers were very helpful when I was starting out and I highly recommend building a good relationship with them.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER ON TRADING PLATFORM »

For those interested, here's my full 4 week journey with Trading Platform:

4 WEEKS BREAKDOWN:

First Week: £2,838.38 I spent around 5 minutes a day checking results. After three days I already had a profit of £835 in my account. This is a 334% return on my initial investment of £200. On my seventh day I had total profit of £2,838.38 in the account.

Second Week: £5,659.48 In the second week everything happened very quickly. My balance grew faster and faster. After 14 days I had £5,659.48 in my trading account.

Third Week: £8,948.35 The third week went very smoothly too. I even started checking my account only every other day or so because it was working like a clockwork.  Trading Platform has increased my profits consistantly to an amount of £8,948.35 in total.

Fourth Week: £11,394.28 At the end of the test I had a breathtaking profit of £11,394.28. My colleagues and I could still not believe how this app made this much money in just 4 weeks with a £200 investment.

Official website:  Trading Platform

  Also post on Facebook

  Log In to Post

  Kjetil Vandenbulcke

So guys it's my first week on Trading Platform. I got an invite to the system launch! So far it works great for me. In the first 5 days I've earned £3,200 and slowly growing :)

Like · Reply · 98k · 23 hrs

  Vivianne Chan · 

Tauranga

Thanks for sharing your results, looks like it's worth giving it a go! :D

Like · Reply · 252 · 1 min

  Chris Tang

wow sound good bro

Like · Reply · 226 · 3 min

  Axel Guilloux · 

None

easy money on the internet could be finally possible with this, right? :D

Like · Reply · 189 · 4 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Piter Jefferson ·

  Oh boy, it's my 9th day and I have £4340 in my account. I love Trading Platform!!!!

Like · Reply · 387 · 3 hrs

  Marcus Pullido ·

  How does it work? How can you make trades?

Like · Reply · 258 · 7 min

  Piter Jefferson ·

  Richard, it's autopilot. All you need to do is start autotrader. After that you can chill and watch money rolling in. Can't believe it, but it's that simple!

Like · Reply · 227 · 9 min

  Marcus Pullido ·

  wow, sounds good! Count me in!

Like · Reply · 102 · 11 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Maria Moreno

haha, finally startups make something usefull not phone cases or other crap... See More

Like · Reply · 2497 · 2 hrs

  Luiza Azevedo Freitas · 

 , 

how can we fund it? :D

Like · Reply · 571 · 15 min

  Nicolai Mikkelsen ·

  I believe these guys can fund themselves lol

Like · Reply · 1389 · 18 min

  Amanda Karpinski ·

  oh boy I'd love to try it!

Like · Reply · 1239 · 21 min · 

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Cameron Morgan · 

Auckland

Thats an epic idea! How could no one have ever thought of this before?

Like · Reply · 430 · 4 hrs · 

  Márcio Longo

Yes it's funny. Facebook, Twitter could do it themselves but they are just too stupid. They only care about boring ads... ...See More

Like · Reply · 99 · 27 min

  Beth Zaremba

Trading Platform, here I come! Best article on the Mirror News!

Like · Reply · 64 · 30 min

  Norikazu Kakishita ·

  Is this available in Japan?

Like · Reply · 98 · 33 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Florian Di Martino ·

  heh got an invite from my friend. I've been using it for 2 hours and I have made $120 so far, not bad!

Like · Reply · 1584 · 5 hrs

  Ben Plunkett

Good luck m8! I'm here for four days and works perfect!

Like · Reply · 696 · 35 min

  Verônica Aguilera ·

  Should I quit my college? And become full time autotrader? :D

Like · Reply · 412 · 36 min

  Arun Narayan

Thank you guys for this article and thank you Anthony for testing this for us before just publishing the article!

Like · Reply · 795 · 36 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

Load 10 more comments

  Facebook Comments Plugin

[fuzzydazebouquet]

Brit Shocked Everyone By Revealing The App Which Makes Him £23K Every Month

"It all came as a surprise to me! I just wanted to make some extra cash aside. I discovered this new money making app by accident while surfing the Internet. Life's crazy! I was going to school and now I'm making money from home, can you believe that?"

By 

Jamie Glaze

UPDATED: THURSDAY, OCTOBER, 8, 2020

Appearing on the 'This Morning' show, Akshay Phillips expressed his gratitude and thanked Trading Platform creators for dramatically changing his life and financial situation. Akshay said he never understood exactly how their algorithm works but that it has been making him profits consistently, from the very first day.

The official website of  claims it can generate high profits for any user by executing a unique trading algorithm. This algorithm enables the user to automatically trade currencies.

In order to start the fully automated process, user needs to deposit an initial amount of £250. The algorithm would then automatically choose the perfect time to buy coins low and sell it high - and vice versa. This way the user profits would always be maximized without any risk.

Akshay said that any credit card can be used for the initial deposit.

Live on the air, Akshay asked Holly Willoughby to register and deposit £250 on Trading Platform.

Holly was hesitating at first but then decided to try it. (Image: Mirror News)

READ MORE

"Yes! I've heard about many coins success stories over the past few years but it was always too complicated for me to understand. Your story moved me Akshay and because of that, I will give it a try!" Holly said.

After she deposited the inital £250, the algorithm started to buy coins and other currencies for cheap and selling them for higher price very quickly. Within only 7 minutes, Holly made £60.24 in profit and had a total balance of £260.24 in her account.

Akshay explaining to Holly how she can track her profits. (Image: Mirror News)

Everyone in the audience, including the production staff, were shocked. Akshay tried to calm down everyone and explicitly said that  is not a magic platform.

READ MORE

"When you take a closer look, you can see around 70-80% of won trades. However, the amount of won trades is higher than the lost ones. So the bottom line: You win more trades with higher profits than you lose." Akshay added.

Before Akshay even had a chance to answer Phillip Schofields question, Holly jumped and said with a smile on her face: "Now I have £177.51 in profit, how is this possible? Can I withdraw it right away?"

At this point, "This Morning" producers decided to step in and stop the program, before we could find out what happened next.

WE DECIDED TO INVESTIGATE TRADING PLATFORM

  If Trading Platform is constantly making money for its users, how does the company earn any money?

We found out that the answer is simple but genius:  keeps exactly 8% of the users' profits. In other words, only when the user makes money, they makes money. This explains why they are so 'motivated' to generate as much profits for their users as possible.

It says on their website that in order to activate the account and start making money, the user would have to deposit a minimum of £250 GBP ($250 dollars).

Currently there are no exchange fees or reductions from the deposit. As soon as the deposit is made, the account and trading algorithm are activated.

We've seen a lot of websites promising similar results over the past year. In order for us to be sure and to give our readers actual results, whether they were going to be good or bad, we had to test Trading Platform ourselves.

OUR RESULTS WITH TRADING PLATFORM:

  To verify Akshay's story, we decided to try Trading Platform ourselves to see if it was really possible for an average person to make any money with it.

Our reporter Anthony Hawkins went through full process:

Step 1: Registration on Trading Platform (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

Registration on  was quick indeed, it took me only 2 minutes to complete the signup process.

I couldn't do anything because the account was not activated. In order to activate it I had to make a deposit. I decided to grab quick coffee with my colleagues and then to continue.

Step 2: Deposit and Activation (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

To activate the account, I've made the initial deposit of £250 pounds using my credit card. My account was activated immediately after the deposit so I decided to turn on the auto trading option and browse around to see if they have any other options available.

By accident, I refreshed the profits page and I couldn't believe what I was seeing!

It really worked! Trading Platform made me £39.84 in profit, after only 3 minutes of making the deposit!

Step 3: My first profit on Trading Platform (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

It's not a lot, but it took almost no effort! Not to mention that I have no experience in trading orcurrencies. I've never made a trade in my life before, yet here I was actually making money.

To make £39.84 within 3 minutes is a tremendous performance for any trading algorithm out there.

I kept my initial deposit on Trading Platform account and continued to use the trading software in order to see what was going to happen next. It could have just been a very lucky start.

To my surprise, profitable trades were coming in, slowly but consistently, every day of every week. Akshay was correct, not all trades were successful, 7-8 trades out of 10 were profitable.

I decided to monitor it closely and see what is going to happen in the next 28 days.

Either it will continue to make profits consistently or I'm going to lose my £250 investment. One of these two will most likely end up happening.

I WAS IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE!

After only 4 weeks, Trading Platform displayed a total of £11,394.28 in profit, and I started only with the initial deposit of £250 pounds, this is unbelievable!

At this point, any colleague I would show my account to, would rush to register immediately on .

£11,394.28 profit in only 4 weeks! (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

  I decided to withdraw most of my profits, so I had Trading Platform pay out £11,000 to my PayPal account. The remaining amount I decided to keep on Trading Platform to generate more money.

7 hours later, I've received an email from Paypal saying that I've received £11,000 from Trading Platform, I checked my Paypal right away to confirm it and the money was there!

£11,000.00 arrived from Trading Platform to my Paypal account. (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

Akshay from London was not lying,  indeed works and it will definitely change a lot of lives!

Unfortunately, today they've sent an email to everyone explaining that soon they will have to close down the registrations for new members as they can't keep up with the demand.

If you haven't by now, I urge you and everyone reading this to register right away, in order to secure your spot because they might close registrations at any given point.

Account registration is free and it only takes 2 minutes, you can click here to register.

However, it's necessary to deposit a minimum of £250 GBP (or $300 USD) in order to fully activate the account and the trading algorithm.

IMPORTANT: You will most likely receive a call after signing up, just like I have. Don't ignore it because their managers were very helpful when I was starting out and I highly recommend building a good relationship with them.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER ON TRADING PLATFORM »

For those interested, here's my full 4 week journey with Trading Platform:

4 WEEKS BREAKDOWN:

First Week: £2,838.38 I spent around 5 minutes a day checking results. After three days I already had a profit of £835 in my account. This is a 334% return on my initial investment of £200. On my seventh day I had total profit of £2,838.38 in the account.

Second Week: £5,659.48 In the second week everything happened very quickly. My balance grew faster and faster. After 14 days I had £5,659.48 in my trading account.

Third Week: £8,948.35 The third week went very smoothly too. I even started checking my account only every other day or so because it was working like a clockwork.  has increased my profits consistantly to an amount of £8,948.35 in total.

Fourth Week: £11,394.28 At the end of the test I had a breathtaking profit of £11,394.28. My colleagues and I could still not believe how this app made this much money in just 4 weeks with a £200 investment.

Official website: 

  Also post on Facebook

  Log In to Post

  Kjetil Vandenbulcke

So guys it's my first week on Trading Platform. I got an invite to the system launch! So far it works great for me. In the first 5 days I've earned £3,200 and slowly growing :)

Like · Reply · 98k · 23 hrs

  Vivianne Chan · 

Tauranga

Thanks for sharing your results, looks like it's worth giving it a go! :D

Like · Reply · 252 · 1 min

  Chris Tang

wow sound good bro

Like · Reply · 226 · 3 min

  Axel Guilloux · 

None

easy money on the internet could be finally possible with this, right? :D

Like · Reply · 189 · 4 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Piter Jefferson ·

  Oh boy, it's my 9th day and I have £4340 in my account. I love Trading Platform!!!!

Like · Reply · 387 · 3 hrs

  Marcus Pullido ·

  How does it work? How can you make trades?

Like · Reply · 258 · 7 min

  Piter Jefferson ·

  Richard, it's autopilot. All you need to do is start autotrader. After that you can chill and watch money rolling in. Can't believe it, but it's that simple!

Like · Reply · 227 · 9 min

  Marcus Pullido ·

  wow, sounds good! Count me in!

Like · Reply · 102 · 11 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Maria Moreno

haha, finally startups make something usefull not phone cases or other crap... See More

Like · Reply · 2497 · 2 hrs

  Luiza Azevedo Freitas · 

 , 

how can we fund it? :D

Like · Reply · 571 · 15 min

  Nicolai Mikkelsen ·

  I believe these guys can fund themselves lol

Like · Reply · 1389 · 18 min

  Amanda Karpinski ·

  oh boy I'd love to try it!

Like · Reply · 1239 · 21 min · 

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Cameron Morgan · 

Auckland

Thats an epic idea! How could no one have ever thought of this before?

Like · Reply · 430 · 4 hrs · 

  Márcio Longo

Yes it's funny. Facebook, Twitter could do it themselves but they are just too stupid. They only care about boring ads... ...See More

Like · Reply · 99 · 27 min

  Beth Zaremba

Like · Reply · 64 · 30 min

  Norikazu Kakishita ·

  Is this available in Japan?

Like · Reply · 98 · 33 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Florian Di Martino ·

  heh got an invite from my friend. I've been using it for 2 hours and I have made $120 so far, not bad!

Like · Reply · 1584 · 5 hrs

  Ben Plunkett

Good luck m8! I'm here for four days and works perfect!

Like · Reply · 696 · 35 min

  Verônica Aguilera ·

  Should I quit my college? And become full time autotrader? :D

Like · Reply · 412 · 36 min

  Arun Narayan

Thank you guys for this article and thank you Anthony for testing this for us before just publishing the article!

Like · Reply · 795 · 36 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

Load 10 more comments

  Facebook Comments Plugin

[happilybluellama]

Brit Shocked Everyone By Revealing The App Which Makes Him £23K Every Month

"It all came as a surprise to me! I just wanted to make some extra cash aside. I discovered this new money making app by accident while surfing the Internet. Life's crazy! I was going to school and now I'm making money from home, can you believe that?"

By 

Jamie Glaze

UPDATED: THURSDAY, OCTOBER, 8, 2020

Appearing on the 'This Morning' show, Akshay Phillips expressed his gratitude and thanked Crypto Trading Platform creators for dramatically changing his life and financial situation. Akshay said he never understood exactly how their algorithm works but that it has been making him profits consistently, from the very first day.

The official website of Crypto Trading Platform claims it can generate high profits for any user by executing a unique trading algorithm. This algorithm enables the user to automatically trade crypto currencies.

In order to start the fully automated process, user needs to deposit an initial amount of £250. The algorithm would then automatically choose the perfect time to buy coins low and sell it high - and vice versa. This way the user profits would always be maximized without any risk.

Akshay said that any credit card can be used for the initial deposit.

Live on the air, Akshay asked Holly Willoughby to register and deposit £250 on Crypto Trading Platform.

Holly was hesitating at first but then decided to try it. (Image: Mirror News)

READ MORE

"Yes! I've heard about many coins success stories over the past few years but it was always too complicated for me to understand. Your story moved me Akshay and because of that, I will give it a try!" Holly said.

After she deposited the inital £250, the algorithm started to buy coins and other currencies for cheap and selling them for higher price very quickly. Within only 7 minutes, Holly made £60.24 in profit and had a total balance of £260.24 in her account.

Akshay explaining to Holly how she can track her profits. (Image: Mirror News)

Everyone in the audience, including the production staff, were shocked. Akshay tried to calm down everyone and explicitly said that Crypto Trading Platform is not a magic platform.

READ MORE

"When you take a closer look, you can see around 70-80% of won trades. However, the amount of won trades is higher than the lost ones. So the bottom line: You win more trades with higher profits than you lose." Akshay added.

Before Akshay even had a chance to answer Phillip Schofields question, Holly jumped and said with a smile on her face: "Now I have £177.51 in profit, how is this possible? Can I withdraw it right away?"

At this point, "This Morning" producers decided to step in and stop the program, before we could find out what happened next.

WE DECIDED TO INVESTIGATE CRYPTO TRADING PLATFORM

  If Crypto Trading Platform is constantly making money for its users, how does the company earn any money?

We found out that the answer is simple but genius: Crypto Trading Platform keeps exactly 8% of the users' profits. In other words, only when the user makes money, they makes money. This explains why they are so 'motivated' to generate as much profits for their users as possible.

It says on their website that in order to activate the account and start making money, the user would have to deposit a minimum of £250 GBP ($250 dollars).

Currently there are no exchange fees or reductions from the deposit. As soon as the deposit is made, the account and trading algorithm are activated.

We've seen a lot of websites promising similar results over the past year. In order for us to be sure and to give our readers actual results, whether they were going to be good or bad, we had to test Crypto Trading Platform ourselves.

OUR RESULTS WITH CRYPTO TRADING PLATFORM:

  To verify Akshay's story, we decided to try Crypto Trading Platform ourselves to see if it was really possible for an average person to make any money with it.

Our reporter Anthony Hawkins went through full process:

Step 1: Registration on Crypto Trading Platform (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

Registration on Crypto Trading Platform was quick indeed, it took me only 2 minutes to complete the signup process.

I couldn't do anything because the account was not activated. In order to activate it I had to make a deposit. I decided to grab quick coffee with my colleagues and then to continue.

Step 2: Deposit and Activation (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

To activate the account, I've made the initial deposit of £250 pounds using my credit card. My account was activated immediately after the deposit so I decided to turn on the auto trading option and browse around to see if they have any other options available.

By accident, I refreshed the profits page and I couldn't believe what I was seeing!

It really worked! Crypto Trading Platform made me £39.84 in profit, after only 3 minutes of making the deposit!

Step 3: My first profit on Crypto Trading Platform (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

It's not a lot, but it took almost no effort! Not to mention that I have no experience in trading or cryptocurrencies. I've never made a trade in my life before, yet here I was actually making money.

To make £39.84 within 3 minutes is a tremendous performance for any trading algorithm out there.

I kept my initial deposit on Crypto Trading Platform account and continued to use the trading software in order to see what was going to happen next. It could have just been a very lucky start.

To my surprise, profitable trades were coming in, slowly but consistently, every day of every week. Akshay was correct, not all trades were successful, 7-8 trades out of 10 were profitable.

I decided to monitor it closely and see what is going to happen in the next 28 days.

Either it will continue to make profits consistently or I'm going to lose my £250 investment. One of these two will most likely end up happening.

I WAS IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE!

After only 4 weeks, Crypto Trading Platform displayed a total of £11,394.28 in profit, and I started only with the initial deposit of £250 pounds, this is unbelievable!

At this point, any colleague I would show my account to, would rush to register immediately on Crypto Trading Platform.

£11,394.28 profit in only 4 weeks! (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

  I decided to withdraw most of my profits, so I had Crypto Trading Platform pay out £11,000 to my PayPal account. The remaining amount I decided to keep on Crypto Trading Platform to generate more money.

7 hours later, I've received an email from Paypal saying that I've received £11,000 from Crypto Trading Platform, I checked my Paypal right away to confirm it and the money was there!

£11,000.00 arrived from Crypto Trading Platform to my Paypal account. (Image: Mirror News - Anthony Hawkins)

CRYPTO TRADING PLATFORM REALLY WORKS!

Akshay from London was not lying, Crypto Trading Platform indeed works and it will definitely change a lot of lives!

Unfortunately, today they've sent an email to everyone explaining that soon they will have to close down the registrations for new members as they can't keep up with the demand.

If you haven't by now, I urge you and everyone reading this to register right away, in order to secure your spot because they might close registrations at any given point.

Account registration is free and it only takes 2 minutes, you can click here to register.

However, it's necessary to deposit a minimum of £250 GBP (or $300 USD) in order to fully activate the account and the trading algorithm.

IMPORTANT: You will most likely receive a call after signing up, just like I have. Don't ignore it because their managers were very helpful when I was starting out and I highly recommend building a good relationship with them.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER ON CRYPTO TRADING PLATFORM »

For those interested, here's my full 4 week journey with Crypto Trading Platform:

4 WEEKS BREAKDOWN:

First Week: £2,838.38 I spent around 5 minutes a day checking results. After three days I already had a profit of £835 in my account. This is a 334% return on my initial investment of £200. On my seventh day I had total profit of £2,838.38 in the account.

Second Week: £5,659.48 In the second week everything happened very quickly. My balance grew faster and faster. After 14 days I had £5,659.48 in my trading account.

Third Week: £8,948.35 The third week went very smoothly too. I even started checking my account only every other day or so because it was working like a clockwork. Crypto Trading Platform has increased my profits consistantly to an amount of £8,948.35 in total.

Fourth Week: £11,394.28 At the end of the test I had a breathtaking profit of £11,394.28. My colleagues and I could still not believe how this app made this much money in just 4 weeks with a £200 investment.

Official website: Crypto Trading Platform

  Also post on Facebook

  Log In to Post

  Kjetil Vandenbulcke

So guys it's my first week on Crypto Trading Platform. I got an invite to the system launch! So far it works great for me. In the first 5 days I've earned £3,200 and slowly growing :)

Like · Reply · 98k · 23 hrs

  Vivianne Chan · 

Tauranga

Thanks for sharing your results, looks like it's worth giving it a go! :D

Like · Reply · 252 · 1 min

  Chris Tang

wow sound good bro

Like · Reply · 226 · 3 min

  Axel Guilloux · 

None

easy money on the internet could be finally possible with this, right? :D

Like · Reply · 189 · 4 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Piter Jefferson ·

  Oh boy, it's my 9th day and I have £4340 in my account. I love Crypto Trading Platform!!!!

Like · Reply · 387 · 3 hrs

  Marcus Pullido ·

  How does it work? How can you make trades?

Like · Reply · 258 · 7 min

  Piter Jefferson ·

  Richard, it's autopilot. All you need to do is start autotrader. After that you can chill and watch money rolling in. Can't believe it, but it's that simple!

Like · Reply · 227 · 9 min

  Marcus Pullido ·

  wow, sounds good! Count me in!

Like · Reply · 102 · 11 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Maria Moreno

haha, finally startups make something usefull not phone cases or other crap... See More

Like · Reply · 2497 · 2 hrs

  Luiza Azevedo Freitas · 

 , 

how can we fund it? :D

Like · Reply · 571 · 15 min

  Nicolai Mikkelsen ·

  I believe these guys can fund themselves lol

Like · Reply · 1389 · 18 min

  Amanda Karpinski ·

  oh boy I'd love to try it!

Like · Reply · 1239 · 21 min · 

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Cameron Morgan · 

Auckland

Thats an epic idea! How could no one have ever thought of this before?

Like · Reply · 430 · 4 hrs · 

  Márcio Longo

Yes it's funny. Facebook, Twitter could do it themselves but they are just too stupid. They only care about boring ads... ...See More

Like · Reply · 99 · 27 min

  Beth Zaremba

Crypto Trading Platform, here I come! Best article on the Mirror News!

Like · Reply · 64 · 30 min

  Norikazu Kakishita ·

  Is this available in Japan?

Like · Reply · 98 · 33 min

Show 10 more replies in this thread

  Florian Di Martino ·

  heh got an invite from my friend. I've been using it for 2 hours and I have made $120 so far, not bad!

Like · Reply · 1584 · 5 hrs

  Ben Plunkett

Good luck m8! I'm here for four days and works perfect!

Like · Reply · 696 · 35 min

  Verônica Aguilera ·

  Should I quit my college? And become full time autotrader? :D

Like · Reply · 412 · 36 min

  Arun Narayan

Thank you guys for this article and thank you Anthony for testing this for us before just publishing the article!

Like · Reply · 795 · 36 min

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