#and also i say she was pushed hard by mattel is because. most if not all mattel twin characters are always together

[nexo-nex]

Considering how much focus Holly got on the soft rebrand era, its crazy to me that she doesnt have much going on in the show. Like, aside from her side appearences and such she is never given any sort of storyline or major appearance idk, like not even an episode centered around her (her introduction episode doesnt really count cause again, intro episode) you'd think that giving her focus on merchandise would make us have more lot content of her in the show.. (yeah ik she has a book abt her and poppy but its not enough idk...)

i dont know, just random thoughts ...

[life-in-the-monster-haus]

In Defense of Gillington "Gil" Webber Part 2

After the last Episode we take a break from Lagoona's boy troubles and it's time to focus on Frankie's boy troubles. it's refreshing to see Jackson & Holt just come out and say they likes Frankie instead of tip toeing around the topic, Then Deuce has girl troubles and Ghoulia has boy troubles and everyone is in some relationship drama except for Clawdeen... Smart Ghoul. BUT this isn't about them. but I do enjoy the last half of Volume 2! I forgot about how much of jerk Operetta was, I kinda miss it.

We don't hear any updates on Gil and Lagoona's status until Episode 57 "The Bermuda Love Triangle" where Frankie needs help deciding on who they like more Holt or Jackson, under advice from a Teen Scream magazine the oracle tells Frankie to ask their friends for advice! and the first friend they run into is Lagoona.

In her fragile state Lagoona is probably the worst person Frankie could have possibly asked for relationship advice.

"Hey Lagoona! I think I like 2 boys!"

"wow! 2 boys huh? good for you! some of us are lucky if we can find one! much less get his parents to accept us or even keep him in the same school. But 2 boys!? Good on ya mate, I'm very happy for you"

Lagoona falls apart during the end of her comment then she turns away from Frankie and cries into the drinking fountain. I'd like to remind Lagoona that she is the one who did this! she pushed Gil to confront his parents about their bigotry and Gil warned her this would happen, we're supposed to feel bad for Lagoona but I just don't! She made her bed now she has to lie in it. We're supposed to be sad because she sheds a few tears? While Gil is currently rotting in an Underwater Boarding School! crying is the least of his problems! is he getting hazed? or caned? we don't know! I wouldn't put it past racist parents to tell the Dean to put the boots to him extra hard for being a dirty salt water monster lover. I would give anything if Mattel showed us what that school was like! cowards!

BUT being a bitch to Frankie isn't going to undo what you did sweetheart.

We don't hear from Lagoona during the Monster Mashionals arc Which was the end of Volume 2 but after that finishes we get our second Special and My personal favorite: Fright On!

Fright on is where Gil makes his big return to Monster High! Lagoona mentions the feud between Salt Water and Fresh Water folks and Gil mentions that his Parents sent him away "But they couldn't change me so I'm back!"... What!? that's it? that's how you got them to send you back to Monster High? nononononononono! Racist Parent's don't just give into the demands of their kid because "they can't change you" they weren't trying to change Gil, they just wanted to keep him away from Lagoona! it's such a weak BS excuse! come on Monster High you are WAY more creative than this hand wave of why Gil has returned. I like my theory better that Gil went feral at the boarding school and got thrown out on purpose so his parents had no choice but to send him back to Monster High. (I did mistakenly call it a Military school, my bad) and That's the theory I'm sticking with. The most common reasons people get expelled from Boarding Schools are carrying weapons, fighting, stealing school property, disrupting the education of others, hacking the school computer systems to change test scores, damaging school equipment. So do with that information what you will.

Now regardless if you accept the canon explanation or my theory the outcome is the same either way... Gil basically strong armed his parents into getting his way. This is important but also worrying for Gil since it has been heavily implied that Gil fears his parents, I can't imagine they welcomed him back with open tentacles.

Now we officially enter Volume 3! The first few episodes of Volume 3 spend a lot of time taking characters who were introduced in Volume 2 and Fright On and blending them with the monsters we already know and love. We don't really see much of Gil and Lagoona until Episode 72 "Unlife to Live" and it's only for a second. they're still palling around together.

For the beginning of Volume 3 Gil and Lagoona are hardly in it together. We don't really see or hear from them much as a team until we get to the first movie "Why do Ghouls fall in Love" where they are giving Ghoulia love advice because she is torn Between Slo-Mo and Don of the Dead. Can I just say I can't think of any couple least qualified to give someone else dating advice? Their relationship is being held on a thread of Gil's parents mercy at this point.

Now it's been AWHILE since I've watched this movie, despite my love for Kieran Valentine and his sexy southern drawl It's not really part of my rotation unless it's Valentine's Day. But does anyone else remember Draculaura being a huge cow in this movie? Because for some reason I don't but during the re-watch she really is! in terms of Monster High characters who are bad partners Draculaura definitely fits the bill here, Not only is she ungrateful as hell to the gifts Clawd gets her, She low key cheats on him with Valentine during this entire movie.

I know I'm supposed to be focusing on Gil and Lagoona but this seems like a bigger problem at the moment.

Valentine has just walked into the school, he has NOT yet put Draculaura under his spell or hypnotized her or anything yet. He just walked up to her and give her flowers and she calls him "My Valentine" all love struck... Clawd walked away from her not even 10 seconds ago. And this is how she acts when her ex shows up and her current boyfriend is out of ear shot??? This may not be "technically" cheating but it's suspicious as hell and not cool. Flirting is cheatings ugly cousin. But no one gives Draculaura shit for being a bad girlfriend now do they? I feel like it's because she's a fan favorite, cute and a girl, But because Gil isn't that he seems to have the worse reputation...and why? Gil has done nothing wrong. I'm gonna be mad about it the whole movie. Clawd doesn't deserve this. The ghouls & Frankie but mostly Clawdeen do get on her case about this, but it's already after Valentine has been touching her, romancing her, having lunch alone with her... This is cheating y'all. They tell her she needs to choose but completely ignore the fact that she has already been cheating on Clawd. Clawdeen tells her that Clawd isn't stupid & he's a great guy - for some reason they are tip toeing around saying the C word...but it's cheating y'all, this is cheating. Draculaura cheated on Clawd on got away with it. Frankie who is narrating this movie spins us a yarn about how poor Draculaura is torn between 2 boys!... But she isn't though... She is currently in a monogamous committed relationship with Clawd and cheating on him with her Ex... this is not "torn between 2 loves"- cheating! it's cheating. "But in the end Draculaura knew the answer" - to STOP cheating on the boyfriend that she already has is the answer. In the next scene, to Draculaura's credit she DOES choose Clawd and tell Valentine that it's been fun but she loves Clawd... Valentine then hypnotizes her to get her in his clutches, NOW from here on out y'all can feel bad for Draculaura but don't forget she cheated on Clawd before the hypnosis thing with little to no prompting. But tell me again how Gil is such a shitty boyfriend.

That movie ends with Draculaura having cheated on her boyfriend, but she still got a car, a party, gifts, Clawd. This is a horrible message to send to little kids, How did we let this fly in 2012? Don't cheat on your partner folks, there is no guarantee they will forgive you and IMHO they shouldn't.

The next 3-D Movie is "Escape from Skull Shores" and THIS is the the one we've all been waiting for! so go grab some milk or an orange, pack a lunch because this is going to be a long bumpy ride!

So, right off the bat Lagoona planned Gil's spring break without telling him under the guise of a "surprise" and apparently Lagoona's parents sent them a luxury cruise to bring them to the Great Barrier Reef (Great Scarrier Reef was not canon yet) so that Gil can meet her parents. Gil... Understandably so freaks out a little.

Maybe it's just because he's a boy and "meeting the parents" is such a big step in a relationship, maybe he fears they are racist like his parents are and won't like him... Lagoona reassures him no one cares about the whole salt water/fresh water thing anymore... Gil is...

Not convinced.

Gil is kind of being a sandy butt hole about this but after what his parents put him through can you blame him?

Lagoona is trying to be very optimistic and tell Gil about how Beautiful the Great Barrier Reef is to put him at ease but...

"I just wish it wasn't so full of Sea Creatures"

Pump the Breaks! This might be the first unsavory thing Gil has said, I really hate to give that "Gil is a racist" mindset any legitimacy but... that was kinda bigoted Gil, it reeks of "you're one of the good ones!"... Which if your familiar with racism like myself you'll know that's not a compliment!

Lagoona isn't hurt by this. She uses this as an opportunity to gently remind Gil he is starting to sound like his bigoted parents and then she does a very.... Canadian? Midwestern? unflattering impression of Gil's mother?... "Oooh yea! a thousand lakes! no salt in MY water!"

Gil immediately apologizes for his bigoted statement and confesses to Lagoona that he's afraid of the sea. He thinks it's full of scary fish and monsters who just want to get their flippers on a fresh water guy like him... Gil's parents have instilled in him that sea creatures are out to get him, this is not Gil's fault this is an unfortunate side effect of being raised by a racist (trust me). He also adds on that the "Normies" have polluted it so much you can't even see 3 feet down... you know what? I'm gonna let Gil have that one, Humans DID fuck up the ocean.

Gil: "what's that!?"

Lagoona: "it's an island chain, mate"

REALLY, LAGOONA!? is it an island chain!? or is it a fuckin' Kraken!?

This does not justify Gil's parents racism against all sea creatures but to treat any place on earth like it's completely safe would be a fool's errand. Danger is everywhere.

"What was that you were saying about the sea being "perfectly safe!?"" I wanna bust Gil for being an asshole here but...given what's happened to them, he's kinda right to get sassy.

Lagoona doesn't say a damn thing.

While they are shipwrecked they get picked up by this greasy human dude named Bartleby Farnum who's just a lazy parody of P. T. Barnum, If you know even a little bit about P. T. Barnum you already know this guys deal, scam artist, showman, trickster. the whole movie is already spoiled for you, Sorry.

Frankie looks exactly like this scientist lady from an Island Farnum knows about so he wants to use them as bait to catch Andy. it's a popular head canon that G1 Frankie was just straight up built using the dead scientists head and I completely agree, it would explain their "uncanny" resemblance to her.

Frankie's head has to have belonged to the scientist... Heterochromia is pretty rare, what are they odds they would look like her AND have her Heterochromia!?

Edit from future me: SHE EVEN HAS A CUT ON HER FACE IN THE SAME PLACE AS FRANKIE! this is no longer a head canon, it's just canon, Frankie's head used to belong to the normie scientist from Skull Shores. She probably got that cut on her face from being in the jungle.

While everyone was sleeping Farnum steered them to Skull Shores, when Lagoona asks about the Great Barrier Reef, Farum assures her this is just a one night stop to rest and get supplies. Notice how he did not tell any of them this, before they went to bed. Just assume everything Farnum says is a lie and you'll be good. Farnum makes up some BS reason why they should say on Skull Shores and everyone loves the idea except for Lagoona who thinks her parents will be worried sick about them if they don't hear from them soon, Farnum guilt trips Lagoona into letting everyone stay and she caves.

Lagoona is rightfully suspicious of why Farnum wouldn't let her back onto his boat when they all just spent the night on it and enlists Gil to help her spy.

Gil would prefer to stay on Skull Shores because 1.) it has a lake and 2.) it means he doesn't have to go meet Lagoona's parents. Lagoona knows he is stalling and Gil finally breaks.

Gil: "They won't like me Lagoona! I'm a fresh water freak to them!"

Lagoona: "it's all in your head Gil! they're modern monsters! that's not how they feel!"

Lagoona is being kind of a hypocrite. Gil warned her several times that his parents are racist and won't let him see her, Lagoona told him to stand up to them and when he did he got sent to an Underwater Boarding school for the entire Summer and half the next school year! Now Lagoona is trying to convince him her parents aren't bigoted and from Gil's POV why should he listen to her? the last time he took her advice he got exiled. They're trying really hard to paint Gil out to be the bad guy here for not wanting to listen to Lagoona but look at what happened to him the last time he did.

Is he right? No. But do I blame him? also No. By being so pushy with his parents Lagoona ruined her own credibility. it was real easy for her to go "Stand up to your parents!" when it wasn't her head on the chopping black. Gil was the victim in that situation and he's scarred now.

Despite being hesitant Gil goes with Lagoona. He protested but he still goes with her, this is yet another case of Gil going against his better judgment to support Lagoona.

Lagoona: "let's hurry!"

Gil: "Good, I don't want to be in the sea any longer than I have to"

Lagoona: *gives Gil a dirty look*

Gil: "Whales go to the bathroom in here Lagoona!"

Gil, Shut up. I've been defending you all this time but don't sit there and tell me that crocodiles and gators don't shit in lakes. Gil complains, a lot and he's been real sassy this whole movie... but he still goes with her.

Lagoona and Gil are missing from dinner and Farnum instantly sends Kipling to go find them... Farnum must have better instincts than me because if I was babysitting some teenagers on an island and the boy & girl who are real close ran off to be alone in the woods... I would just assume they're boning and go back to trying to rob the natives or whatever he's trying to do.

I just gotta pause this analysis of Gil and Lagoona's relationship to focus on this hunk of Manster that we never got a doll of. Mattel robbed us blind! Can you imagine him on a Manny Body? Bow chicka wow wow! Me @ G3 please bring us Andy! I'll forgive you for removing Frankie's neck bolts if you give us Andy!

Lagoona sees that Farnum is tracking Frankie and she wants to rush in and follow him, Gil asks her what she plans on doing once they get there and her answer is "I'm not sure but we'll think of something" Gil... respectfully tries to question her logic and he insists they think about this before just jumping in but Lagoona, ignoring Gil's sound advice steps forward on the cliff ledge they are are on and falls into Farums hands.

Lagoona isn't stupid but this is probably the second dumbest thing she's ever done, the first one being telling the boy she likes to confront his racist parents like he's not going to get punished. Rushing into things without considering the consequences is no way to go through life Lagoona.

Once we see Lagoona get caught we pan to Gil who looks like he's running away because... Movie has to engineer conflict SOMEHOW. Did people just stop watching Skull Shores after the commercial break? because that's the only reasoning I can think of for why Gil is so frequently labeled a coward and a bad boyfriend. Because if the movie ended HERE!? then yes, Gil is a coward and a bad boyfriend. But it doesn't.

Farnum roasting a teenage girl that he has just kidnapped because her boyfriend ran away and Lagoona agreeing with Farnum. "I knew Gil wasn't the most courageous monster but I never thought he would just hang me out to dry" WOW Lagoona! way to have faith in your man! Everyone keeps saying that Gil is a bad boyfriend to Lagoona but I'm beginning to think maybe Lagoona has been a shit girlfriend. "but Jess!" I hear you cry... "what would YOU do if you saw your man run away!?" If it was me? I would assume he's thinking up a rescue mission because him running down that hill after I get caught to "save me" would be very stupid when it's 1 against 6 and one of those 6 is a pretty big dude. getting BOTH of us captured wouldn't have done anything to help our situation.

I started this deep dive to defend Gil but really all it's doing it making me dislike Lagoona. She's SO short sighted! I guess years of looking at her with rose tinted glasses made me see her as this perfect person but the problem with looking at someone with rose tinted glasses is... all the red flags just look like flags.

Just as it looks like Farnum has won, Gil returns with an army! "The salt water army" in his own words! My boy came back with reinforcements and he tamed the Kraken!? He swam all the way to the Great Barrier Reef by himself and showed up on Lagoona's parents doorstep, exhausted and probably rambling about their daughter being in trouble and they trusted him enough to take care of business on his own... mind you this is the first time they met him!

Between this and getting snotty with Mr. Hack it's very clear that Gil has no problem facing conflict on the condition that conflict is not his own parents why is that? Because Mr. Hack and Farnum don't have control over his life! His Parents do. Gil has been very brave when problems arise his one weakness is his parents and I don't think we should fault him for that. He busted ass for Lagoona and y'all have the nerve to call him a racist coward, the level of disrespect is unreal.

This is yet another moment they should have kissed, Gil even has his water tank off. I can't even use the excuse that Mattel is run by prudes in this part because Draculaura and Clawd got to kiss in "Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love" Why no Lagoona and Gil kiss!?

Anyway, Gil says the whole time he realized what he is the most of afraid of is losing Lagoona... Which if you've read this far... Duh.

The rest of the movie wraps up with not much more from Lagoona and Gil they had their big moment. Great timing too because I have once again hit Tumblrs photo limit. I stand by everything I said in part 1, In fact I'd like to double down on it and say not only is Gil a great boyfriend, Lagoona might not be a good girlfriend. Gil has one boundary and Lagoona does not respect it. Re-watching the Webisodes and the first few movies has shown me that Gil is willing to do anything for love... but he won't do that and all Lagoona and her fans can focus on is the that.

I don't know how this Gil slander started, but whoever started it clearly has no critical thinking skills at all OR they like, saw the screenshot of Lagoona crying and got insta-mad "Gil made Lagoona cry! rage!"... yes... yes he did make Lagoona cry... And then she got him sent to an Underwater Boarding school! one of these things is vastly worse than the other! get perspective!

I don't know if I'll make a part 3... I really want to cover 13 wishes but by now? I feel like I've made my point. The Gil slander is unfounded and Gil never did anything wrong he's just a good boy in a bad family situation.

I would think a lot of you... if not most of you can relate.

Part 1 + Part 2 + Part 3 + Part 4

[spices-and-cherries]

Faster Than a Kitten on Parade (Benoit Blanc x Reader)

Okay, not to toot my own horn, but this is actually kind of good? Like I’m kinda proud of myself... I spent a large amount of time trying to figure out southern accents and their corresponding regions that I kinda gave up and said Mississippi. Louisiana is another safe bet? Anyway, to all Bostonians reading this, I’m sorry. I wrote what I wrote for the sake of plot. 

I did not reference race, gender, sexuality, or physical appearance. If I missed something, please let me know so I can change it!

Warnings: brief description of near car accident and reckless driving

***This is pure fluff with not even a hint of angst***

Every day you take the bus to and from work. While it’s thankfully a straight shot from where you live, Boston’s public transportation leaves much to be desired. The buses rarely run on time, the traffic is miserable, and in the winter it’s living hell. Snowy, cold, wet... It makes you wonder what made you think of moving away from your hometown to this. Was the career move really worth it? Yes. 

But that doesn’t mean that your commute lacks any perks. The bus stop you wait at in the morning is right outside a coffee shop, people keep to themselves (unless there’s a game coming up), and it provides you with the time you need to reflect on the day. Most of all, however, is the new guy. 

One of the things that comes with riding the same bus everyday is that you tend to ride with the same people as well. So of course your curiosity is piqued when you first saw him. Everything about him seemed so different from the usual folk you see walking around Boston: kind, gentlemanly, smart...

That being said, you have yet to actually meet him...

Normally, that would be completely fine, but you have to admit something’s going on when a fellow commuter has continued to make your day more than several days in a row. Was it his smile? The way he holds himself? That time he gave up his seat for an older lady? Is it just because he’s so clearly not from Boston?

You’ve been trying to build up enough confidence to actually say something - literally anything - but you always chicken out. The first time it was because he was reading a book and you didn’t want to disturb him. The second was because he was standing barely a foot away from your seat and you blanked because that ass. The third and fourth (and admittedly fifth) time ended in a similar fashion.

That is until one glorious and blessed day.

It was snowing hard, but as usual, the city chugged along without a care. So, you had left your apartment with several layers of sweaters and more handwarmers than you could count (That’s a lie. You were carrying ten.). The bus was unusually full and by the time his stop came around, there weren’t a lot of seats left. 

Did you forget to breath when you watched him look at the seat next to you?

Were your hands getting sweaty even though that shouldn’t be possible considering the temperature?

Was your heart running faster than a kitten on parade?

Yes, yes, and yes.

“May I take this seat?” His accent somehow prevented you from speaking so you just nodded and smiled. “Thank you kindly.” You shift slightly to give him some space and to try and get rid of sudden spike in adrenaline that his unexpected (and totally welcomed) accent caused...

You watch him out of the corner of your eye, trying really hard to not look weird or creepy. He has on this grey pea coat and a deep maroon colored scarf. His blue suit pants stretch just a tad over what looked to be some muscle. And his aftershave...is amazing to say the least. But all these fine details aren’t what really catch your eye. For what ever reason, this man has no gloves on. His finger tips are turning purple! Hurriedly, you look in your work bag for one of your spare handwarmers. You find it at the bottom, still in it’s packaging. 

“I couldn’t help but notice that you don’t have gloves...” You hand it to him. He looks at you with surprise. 

“Oh, no...! I couldn’t possibly...” His voice sounds like honey... 

“I insist. I buy so many, I won’t miss one.” You push it into his hands. 

“That’s mighty kind of you.” He smiles again. It’s very soft. Like marshmallow clouds kind of soft. 

“Oh, not at all!” And in that moment, you did something very daring: you introduced yourself. “Um, I’m (Y/N) (L/N), by the way.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mx. (L/N). I’m Benoit Blanc, but please, call me Blanc.” He offers to shake your hand and you take it. You can feel how cold his hands are through your gloves, but it barely even registers. You’re far too busy trying to memorize his name.

Benoit Blanc. 

“Is that French?” Oh. My. God. Really?

“Yes.” He chuckled a little. One side of his mouth went up, scrunching that side of his face. It was a hella cute scrunching. “On my father’s side. Immigrated several generations back.”

“I was gonna say that you don’t really look French...”

“I take after my mother.”

“Ah. That explains it.” You smile, genuinely amused. “Sothen, where are you really from then?”

“A small town in Mississippi. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“Yeah, probably not.” You nod slightly. “I bet that it’s super different than here.”

“Heh, yeah it is.” Mr. Blanc holds the handwarmer up for a second as emphasis. 

“I, uh, I’m from (hometown) - (region) - so I know where you’re coming from. Boston sure is something else, isn’t it?”

“Never have I ever - and I mean ever - been in a town as - as - as unique unto itself as Boston!” A few people look up. You don’t care. You had no idea that a man of his age could look so cute. “Apologies.” He lowers the volume of his voice - not that he really needed to. “Now, comin’ from the South, I’ve had my fair share of human nature, but the drivers here are a whole ‘nother species. It’s like the jungle out there.”

“Did you ever make the mistake of taking a taxi when you first came here?”

“Much to my chagrin, yes, yes I have.” He shakes his head disapprovingly, but you can see a little twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Not too long ago, in fact. The man was speakin’ on the phone and nearly drove us off a bridge... Nearly had a conniption of the heart.”

“That is pretty bad. In my first ride I was this close-” You bring up your thumb and pointer finger, the pads barely a millimeter apart. “-to getting run over by a cement truck because the driver ran a red light. He got mad at me too ‘cause I didn’t tip him.”

“Good lord, that is quite the experience...” His brow furrowed slightly. 

“I saw my life go past my eyes.” You say dramatically. “But hey, that’s Boston.” You sigh heavily. “Anyway, how long have you lived in the city?”

“Jus’ a couple of months.” Aha. Just around the time he first started taking the bus... “Yourself?”

“A couple of years. I feel more and more like a true Bostonian every day that passes.” You chuckle. “The plus side though, is that I can show you where all the good food is. I can be your personal tour guide!” It takes a couple of milliseconds for your brain to register what you had just said. “Well, if you’d like that... The offer, uh, stands?” What are you talking about?

“I think I jus’ might take you up on that, if you wouldn’t mind.” This man. Bless this beautiful man. God, that smile. “That bein’ said, I do believe this is my stop.” 

“Already? Time flies when you’re having fun.” You smile.

“Yes it does. It was a pleasure meetin’ you, Mx. (L/N),” He stands up. “And thank you very much for your kindness.” He waves the handwarmer a little. 

“You can call me (Y/N) and you are very welcome.” 

“Then call me Benoit, if you please. Now you have yourself a good day.” He smiles, waves a little, and hurries off the bus. And just like that, your whole year has just been made.

Did you pass your stop a while ago?

Were you smiling like an absolute idiot anyway?

Was your heart running faster than a kitten on parade?

Yes, yes, and yes.

I hope you all like this! I had so much fun writing it and it just flowed out of me. Side note, the title is inspired by Trixie Mattel’s song, Gold. She’s a country singer, but it’s actually good, so check it out! If you have any constructive criticism or requests, please let me know! I am also a big fan of comments - they make my week every time! See you all in the next one! - Simpy

[artificialqueens]

I've loved you for all of my life, 2/2 (Crystal/Gigi) - Brianna

summary: gigi goode and crystal methyd broke up. sure, they still live together, but they are over each other. or, at least they think so.

a/n: ok so i lied in that last post, the second song is 929 by halsey, so that’s a mistake on my part haha. this part has even more angst!!! but some fluff to make up for it at the end! let me know if you all want bonus chapters + scenes!

–

The sun had yet to rise in front of the ex-couple’s eyes. Crystal swore that the sky had gotten darker than before, but it was most likely her eyes not being used to the absence of light. Crystal had also decided that she’d never walk home ever again and that she would always charge her phone instead of abandoning the appliance for a whole day. Gigi had randomly started whistling and humming the tune of a song buried deep inside the blue-haired girl’s mind. It might have taken a couple of moments for her to recognize, but she realized it was a song by a mutual friend of theirs: I Know You All Over Again by their beloved Trixie Mattel. Suddenly, Gigi stopped.

“Why did you stop?” Crystal quizzed, head tilting to the side. She was actually enjoying the Goode girl’s rendition of the ballad.

“Because,” Gigi started. She began to pick at her nails. “I thought you’d yell at me or something.” Now, why would Crystal yell at Gigi for humming a song? It wasn’t like it annoyed her or anything. But she could definitely see Gigi not understanding that. “I thought it would bring up some unwanted conversation.” What ‘unwanted conversa-’ oh. Huh. Realization crashed into Crystal’s mind when she understood what Gigi was talking about.

–

“Babe, come here! Trixie sent me a new song and she really wants us to listen to it!” Gigi laid on their bed, texting the mentioned blonde, waiting for her girlfriend to enter the room.

Crystal finished drying a plate, setting the dishrag on the counter, and placing the plate in the cabinet. “I’ll be right there, baby!” She exited the kitchen and walked upstairs into the bedroom, seeing Gigi on the bed with just a large shirt of hers on. “What’s up?”

Gigi smiled and pressed a kiss on the redhead’s temple. “We’re gonna have a little listen.”

About three minutes had passed and Crystal found herself crying, wiping them instantly to try and not alarm Gigi. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and Gigi was quick to pull the older girl in a hug. “Baby girl, what’s wrong?”

“It was so fucking sad, Geege,” she choked out. “I just don’t want that to happen to us, ever.”

Gigi pouted, caressing Crystal’s face with the back of her smooth hand. “Baby. Sometimes, I ask myself if I love you too much, but then I tell myself, 'Gianna, shut up.’”

Crystal gasped lightly. “You love me?” she asked in shock.

“Of course, baby girl. I love you, I really do, and you will never have to worry about me not loving you.” Crystal didn’t say anything, but instead, pressed her lips on Gigi’s, taking her shirt off moments later.

–

Crystal stopped walking for a second. “Were you lying? When you said you loved me?” Gigi shook her head slowly. “Then what made you fall out of love? Because every day I beat myself up, wondering if I just wasn’t good enough for you, or if I’ll ever be good enough for anyone,” Crystal choked out. “A-and it fucking sucks because I don’t get any fucking answers from you!”

Gigi’s face softened. She peered down at the ground. “I… I don’t-I don’t know. It just happened.”

“BUT IT DOESN’T JUST FUCKING HAPPEN, GIANNA!” She stormed her way towards the blonde, standing in front of her, their faces half a foot away from each other. “YOU DON’T JUST WAKE UP AND FALL OUT OF LOVE WITH SOMEONE, AND PUSH THEM AWAY WITH NO REASON OR EXPLANATION!”

Gigi’s face was then streaked with tears and mascara. “Crystal, I’m sorry-”

“No, Geege. I’m sorry. Sorry for myself. Forget you ever saw me at my best. You don’t deserve what you don’t respect. What you say you love, but then proceed to neglect.”

Gigi bit her tongue. She knew back in high school that it was dangerous to fall in love so young, but she didn’t expect the age of 22 to still be young. She wanted to take back everything she had said and done. But the fact was that she couldn’t lose what she never had.

Due to the unplanned attack on Gigi, initiated by Crystal, they had gotten home later than what they had planned.

“Gigi, I want you to know that we have to keep this routine we have.” Crystal began to walk upstairs.

“What routine?” asked Gigi from the living room.

“I’ve got a 9 to 5, and you’ve got a night shift. That should be plenty of time that we don’t see each other for. Hell, I’ll plan to never see you again if I can help it.” She began walking upstairs again, and Gigi was going to run after her, but ultimately decided against it. Both of them went to sleep with tears running down their face, their bodies aching for some kind of consolation and empathy from the other.

–

Two days passed and Crystal woke up on a Sunday morning and headed out to Jan’s for a brunch she and her roommates were having. She’d do anything to get away from Gigi.

The blue-haired girl knocked on the white door of the apartment, only to be met with the face of a woman with a large gap in the middle of her two front teeth. “Why, hello there!” she greeted Crystal. “Jan! Your girlfriend is here!”

“Oh, we’re not dating,” Crystal interjected.

The girl gave Crystal a look that signaled she was disappointed. “Dammit. Now I and Jaida have to deal with her moping around for longer…” she trailed off. “Oh, shit, I forgot to introduce myself! I’m Heidi!” she stuck her manicured hand out for Crystal to shake.

Crystal noticed the french tips that her hands adorned and was instantly reminded of Gigi. The blonde had always gotten her nails done that way. She wasn’t really one for claw-like nails. Her hands were dainty, like her. “Crystal,” she said.

“Come on in! Jan’s making some souffle pancakes!” Crystal walked inside the apartment and was guided into the living room by Heidi. It was really clean and minimalistic, like her own, but that’s all thanks to Gigi. Fuck, she thought. Stop thinking about Gigi, you bitch.

“Chile, since when did we get a hottie in here?” A woman came into the living room from the hallway, observing Crystal. “My name is Jaida, pleased to meet you.”

“Hi, I’m-”

“CRYSTAL!!!” yelled a familiar voice. Jan came charging into the living room with an apron on, attacking Crystal with a massive hug. “I can’t believe you came!”

Crystal chuckled. “Of course I came, Jan! You tantalized me with a good ol’ brunch, which I could never, ever, pass upon.” Crystal pulled away from the girl and her brain screamed the name ‘Gigi’ at her. And it had a reason. Jan’s hair was styled the way Gigi would always do to her own. She wore green, Gigi’s favorite color. Her eyes were even the same color as Gigi’s goddammit.

This was going to be a long brunch.

–

Crystal got home at around four and immediately crashed on the couch due to the number of mimosas and wine consumed, only taking off her heels and throwing her purse down on the floor somewhere in the living room.

Shortly after, Gigi walked downstairs to get herself a cold slice of Sicilian pizza but saw Crystal on the couch, already dozed off. A small smile appeared on her face, and she walked over to the couch to grab a blanket to cover the blue-haired girl. As soon as the fluffy piece of material covered Crystal’s body, she woke up with a jolt. “Ah!” Gigi yelped.

“Ah!” screamed Crystal. She looked up at Gigi, who stood in front of the couch, rubbing her fingers in circles on her temples. “Gianna, what the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m sorry! I just saw you were sleeping, and I-”

“What? You just decided to wake me up?”

“I wasn’t doing that!” Gigi fired back. “I was just putting a fucking blanket on you!”

Crystal sighed heavily, shaking her head and swinging her legs off the couch. “Sorry, I-I didn’t know.”

“Duh,” Gigi replied. “You were asleep.” Gigi sat down on the opposite end of the couch and started biting her lip. “I lied, on Friday.” Crystal had a blank stare as she turned to look at the blonde.

“What?”

“I said I loved you back then, but I lied.”

Crystal scoffed. “See how easy that was?”

“I’m not fucking done,” stressed Gigi. “I wasn’t in love back then, yeah. But I was scared that if I had loved someone, things w-would end up the way they were w-with Jackie,” she began to cry. “I wanted to see the world through her eyes when we were together. She loved me, and I loved her. But I changed my mind when she cheated. I was so dumb. So naive, to believe she loved me.

And with that, I was so fucking paranoid. Scared that someone appears to love me then turns out to be the exact opposite. Then I met you. And I was scared, Crystal. Terrified that it would have been the same with you.” She sniffles and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “I was forcing myself to tell you I loved you, to see if all my superstitions were right. And I knew they weren’t, but then I got scared again and had no clue when you would snap. So I pushed you away. Turns out, it’s hard to do that when you’re flat broke,” she chuckled. Crystal had tears coming down her face, slowly, but surely. “I might not have been in love then, but I sure as hell am now. And I’m so happy I’ve figured that out.” Gigi took a deep breath and sighed. “You don’t have to forgive me, at all. You can pretend this never-”

“I forgive you,” interrupted Crystal. “God, I will forgive you for everything, Geege.” Gigi smiled through her tears. She was lucky. Lucky that Crystal wasn’t like her ex. Lucky that Crystal was forgiving. Lucky that Crystal was Crystal. Crystal moves next to Gigi on the couch. “I love you,” she says before pressing her lips against Gigi’s for the first time in two months. And it’s perfect.

[icharchivist]

Thanks! Yeah I think it's not just Allen being beloved by Innocence so much that gives him a free pass. I do believe if every Exorcist had the desire for truth and selfless love for others that Allen had. They wouldn't be chained to the Order w/fear of falling. I think everyone has been conditioned to believe the Order/Vatican/Central is the only big good to obey they end up ignoring cases like Cross and Allen. Independant accomodators who make choices contrary to the Order. The Order does -

2 have some good parts. But overall it's so corrupted they might as well stop pretending they're even a accurate representation of what's opposite of the Noah Family. I mean I'd respect them more for being honest at any rate. =\ We don't truly know the origins of the Order. For all we know it had nefarious agendas/foundations from the start. They just promoted saving the world to attract more people or justify atrocities. Innocence doesn't care about the Order. The Order seems to not like,-

3 Innocence ether (or at at least fear it. Renee and Lveille know about Apocryphos and look terrified). The Order may not be worth saving in the end. It may cone to a point where the Exorcists have to decide serving it or following Allen's path. Lenalee and Komui could decide they not only can leave their prison. But if they want to (for all it's abuse, they made the Order their world. That's hard to separate from). The Order represents cycles of godless inhuman behaviour. Allen showed they can-

4 can leave. But only if they show the humanity to do so. If they are willing to fight and protect it for real. A way to end the war. Lenalee promise to fight if she could stay w/Komui. Kanda promised to fight to save Allen. Krory promised to fight to protect his friends (Allen and Lavi in particular). None of these tied to the Order. It's not just Exorcists. Johnny showed disgust and unwillingness to participate in the Orders crimes even before Allen left. Johnny choose humanity and choice.

I agree on how the Order mostly seem to behave in general.

I think the thing is also that I strongly believe Innocence is sentient - so while some innocence like Allen or Cross might give them a free pass, some others innocences may not be so kind. The risk of being a fallen so far seems to be only for exorcists in direct contact with their innocences (parasyte/crystal) and we have seen that despite Kanda’s will being mostly good, his innocence is still... threatening him. So I do think that the threat is well deserved because not all the innocence would be as kind as Crown Clown for instance. I personally don’t trust Lenalee’s for instance which puts her in a very difficult situation being a crystal type. 

The Order is... rotten and i do believe that the best thing would be for it to be over, but so must be the war because there would be chaos would the force of the innocence be unorganized. The problem with the Order is that they should have just helped organize how to help the soliders and where to send them (what Komui did mostly) instead of “what to do to win the war” that Lveille and Renee ecouraged. 

Ad there is something concerning tbh with the fact innocence let most of this slide without proper backlash. Tbh this is also one of my strong point for sentientness because Mugen in Kanda’s memories seem... so wary? of Kanda. Like... idk i see it as a stray cat for exemple which had lost its owner years ago, and had been beaten down and forced into things that didn’t want it, and now so wary about eventually coming back to its owner. There is this... sort of dicotomy where it is still possible for the Order to experience on the innocence itself and of innocence not doing anything to fight against it, whenever it can or not, if it is because it truly believe in the war or want to act for others. Miranda’s innocence’s actions were all about helping Miranda herself with no real idea of a bigger purpose, for the most part for exemple. While Lenalee’s, which Lenalee had always been clear she never wanted, ended up refusing to cooperate back with Lenalee until Lenalee proved to go further into her devotion for it. 

What I’m trying to say is that for the Innocence itself the Order might be the only organization they might trust for now, and as it is now, they have shown so much sentientness it is difficult to really narrow down how much the innocence would be willing to trust its accomodator instead of the rules set in place. Even if this “trust” is just into giving them a free pass as long as their motivations are pure.

When it goes for Lenalee specifically for instance, I feel like her insistance of her being “selfish only for the people she loves” (which comes from years of abuse from the Order after all), might have her running away send a very bad message to her innocence, specifically knowing that said innocence had been.... unaccomodating and sometimes harsh with Lenalee herself. There is no way to trust her innocence would be kind to her the way Mugen, an innocence who had followed Kanda since a past life, which had seen Kanda’s tortures and have an actual bound with him*, is with him. And it’s still taking into account Kanda’s had been threatening to fall him. (*one thing i noticed upon my reread is that Kanda is one of the few if not the only one I can think of who actually talked to his innocence in some random time. In Mattell before a fight he pulled his sword and said “let’s go, Mugen.” before actually entering a fight. To me it shows a connection and companionship Kanda acknowledges. And yet this very innocence still threaten to make him fall. So what about an innocence that had had less kinship with its owner, right?)

And in a way the thing is that, all the Exorcists leaving the Order is an impossible feat as far as it goes: the Order’s army are far greater than anticipated for instances, from finders to crows and we know the Vatican keeps a close eye on them. Would they all decide to run away to pursue their duty, they would always be in danger.Komui perhaps joined the Order for Lenalee but he ended up empathizing for everyone and I doubt he would let anyone go without being able to protect them. Even know everything he does is to try to protect the exorcists. And besides, would they actually all run away and fuckoff, I feel like the Order would still try to make new soldiers. New experiments. Komui, who remembers every name of every people who died in the experiments of the Order even well past before he arrived, would never be the kind of person to leave when he knows he can make a difference, even a slim one.

It is a bit harder to establish for others innocences and accomodators, but in a way i feel like everyone is a bit trapped for different reasons and the fact Allen and Kanda even managed to break away is huge. And the innocence had given more freedom to Allen, I believe also because Allen had proven himself already without needed to be tied to the Order. others innocences might not be that wise. 

I do believe the Order doesn’t like the innocence all that much - too hard to control, and such an unfair weapon, “pushing them to such extreme to attempt to win the war”. But how the innocence feel about it would be something for each individual innocence imo so this makes it far harder to actually encourage anyone to leave the Order if they don’t actually have a profound connection enough ith their innocence for their innocence to understand the goods the Exorcists would attempt to do on the way out. 

I do want the Order to be run into the ground because the Organization itself is rotten to its core, to its fundations, and there’s very little redeeming it without basically just throwing away all of its history and starting anew. But there are legit concerns about how there is no telling how each individual innocences would react, nor if the Vatican wouldn’t just start another project for the sake of it. 

Ultimately, the realization that they should be fighting for the sake of humanity rather than for the sake of ending the war would be the best end, and admirable, but if anything, the innocence hadn’t specifically been completely  encouraging of that. Plenty of exorcists don’t care much for the akuma they destroy for exemple, but this is something the innocence has to content with. (and I do believe this might adds kudos to Allen on how he himself see his innocence as a weapon that can save instead of a weapon that can destroy). Obviously the innocence cannot afford to be picky either, but it makes the “all in good faith” motivation to disemble an organization that has a huge tie with how the innocence behaved for centuries quite dangerous without understanding each personal innocence well. 

But yeah sorry i went on ramble on that dkjfhd but i do think the innocence matter makes it a lot more complicated to actually run away from how abusive the order is, because it’s.. basically still leaving with a timebomb and you don’t know when it would go off once you do leave, and the knowledge that this systematic abuse will still repeat itself. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”   If the Order is a cycle of abuse and everything awful about humanity, it has to be broken in some way, but it has to be done carefully knowing that the system runs deep and that people who have been involved in it can suffer backlash they may not be ready for.

Allen grew up with his innocence away from the Order and we don’t know the origins of his innocence, so his innocence could have reason to not care about the Order and care about what’s in Allen’s heart. Innocences that stayed longer in the Order like Kanda’s or Lenalee’s might far more trust in the Order than their accomodators’s, especially if those, like Lenalee, had been rejecting them to some point.

So it is a very complicated situation and it really does put the Order to shame that it is them misusing their ressources that push people to such extreme instead of accomodating them. And it does feel awful in comparaison to the Noah clan. I kinda am still haunted by the fact the Earl planned the Alma’s incident specifically because “the Order isn’t playing by the rules by using the Noah’s weapons”. In a way it shows how much the Order is all “end justifies the means” despite the fact that their means are horrifying and against everything they had been fighting for. And lbr, the Noah destroying everything, disregarding human lives and creating chaos, while their ultimate goal is to destroy all of humanity? It makes sense. It’s coerent. The Order, disregarding human lives, creating chaos, and creating a cycle of abuse, while their ultimate goal is to save all of humanity? Gives a bad taste on what is “worth saving”. It creates an horrible dicotomy where the Noah appears more honorable because they at least act coerent within themselves, while the Order is ready to believe they are all clean while committing horrors, because it’s the sort of sacrifice that are worth it. But like Allen said, basing a war on sacrifice is worthless. (i’m not saying the Noah are right either just to be sure, just that this leaves a bad taste that the people who will destroy all of humanity are more honorable. It’s not about “geez perhaps they’re right” it’s about “oh humanity look at how low you fell that our enemies are more honorable than you”)

I reaaally dislike the Order and i honestly sideeye the innocence a lot (but again, individual sentientness, so i guess it would be a case-by-case reasoning for most of them). It just... feels so complicated to me to properly leave it. Unless we destroy the Order for good, the others options are healing it from the inside or leaving it to rot and affect everyone involved. 

Bah I guess I just overthink everything. I just... think it’s a mess orz

[darkspellmaster]

I don't understand where people on either side saying that She-Ra is Lgqbt .I saw hardly any LGBT stuff in it. Most of Lgbt stuff is in the background. I hear people saying this is an LGBT cartoon or from the other side they made She-ra a lesbian. Why I'm here just like What? What show have you been seeing?

Okay so there’s a lot to unpack here. 

Firstly the new show’s runner said on her twitter that all characters are LGBT unless she says other wise for the ones she creates. So most fans were going on Word of God. The Second thing is, as you pointed out, a lot of it was placed on the background characters, instead of promoting the main couple of Nettossa and Spinerella, and I’m pretty sure Mattel had a hand in that aspect. But, the idea was placed there by the staff. The other thing is the bi lighting. 

Brow’s Held High did a strong essay on this and explains it better than I can. 

Also you have a lot of LGBT+ people working on the show, so some of it comes from that aspect, and because they were hyping up that fact, it pushed it into the show and makes it seem like it’s focusing on just that aspect, when it’s actually mixed relationships. 

Regarding a lot of the people acting like this whole thing about She-ra suddenly being seen as lesbian or LGBTQ+ icon is a new thing, it’s not. Back in the 1980s, much like Wonder Woman, a lot of gay men -and women -apparently saw her as someone that they could connect to. The whole I have a secret identity, strong and powerful person, and that had a close relationship with female friends, etc. So that aspect is nothing new, the old writers knew about it too and embraced it. 

Several of these people that are yelling about her being a lesbian are doing so because they don’t like the team involved, and because the new design seems to be aimed more for the tween to younger crowd, so the character’s aren’t drawn or designed to be “adult” enough for them. 

This is not to say that having an adult figured hero is a bad thing, I’m all for that, but rather in this case it’s less about the character, more about the pin up sort of vibe that was given off by that group. 

However there are some legit complaints that were drowned out, most of these had to do with the concept and writing of the cartoon. 

On the other hand, you have people who want a female teen girl to be heroic and a lesbian because it’s something we haven’t really had. To them this was a chance to have a character reflect being a teen girl that is dealing with those issues. 

I think that’s where this is coming from. 

The thing is that there’s a lot of coding and meanings behind things. So it’s really hard to say what the team was shooting for with this. Personally I think that most of it is based around the focus of girls that are in the 4 to 12 age group. Much like DC Super hero girls, or Monster high. Like this is how tweens and younger see teenagers. Because a lot of their actions are very tween like in behavior. 

[my-plastic-life]

10 Most Inappropriate Barbie Dolls That ACTUALLY Exist

It never ceases to amaze me how easily people get offended/upset, even over a plastic toy.  Here's my summation of the whole video:

1. I can kind of see the problem with the Oreo Barbie. That doll was made back when two versions of each Barbie were made - a Caucasian and an African American version. Almost every doll had to have both skin tones so all kids would have a Barbie they could play with. That was Mattel's mindset, anyway. And Oreo is one of the most popular cookies around, so of course they went for that one. But still, I highly doubt they were thinking of the alternate meaning of the word when they created this doll. It combined the most popular fashion doll with one of the most popular cookies. Can't we just leave it at that?

2. I'm not a fan of tattoos, and that includes for my dolls, but I see no problem with them being an option for kids or collectors who want to include them. Yeah, if it's a tramp stamp or something violent, that's an issue for kids. But hearts and stars? Come on, people, they're temporary. And temporary/kid/play tattoos have been around for many years. Apparently it didn't become a problem until a major toy company released it.

3. Teen Talk Barbie was released in a different era, where teen girls were primarily focused on clothes and boys. I mean, sure, they are now too, but there's more career pushing these days than there were back then. Barbie was just staying with the times of teenagers. Wow, a teen girl who likes shopping and thinks math is hard? The horror! Math is hard for lots of people! /facepalm

4. Wow, kids can't have cameras now? Tell that to the hundreds of parents who get their four-year-olds a brand new smart phone every Christmas. And seriously, video girl? I don't think a little kid is going to think of "dancing music video whore" when they hear video girl. So Mattel should have given her a different name. Big deal. It's not like she's called Porn Star Barbie.

5. The pregnant Midge still bothers me, not because of the doll but because of people's reactions to it. Guess what? Women get pregnant. It's a part of life. As early as kids are learning about sex ed now and girls getting their periods younger than ever, I don't think a pregnant doll is so bad. Sheesh. Oh, and Midge does have a wedding ring in the Happy Family line, AND a husband, who also has a ring. But apparently that's still not okay.

6. Are you kidding me? People actually complained about Barbie having a friend in a wheelchair? OMG, there have been friends of different ethnicities since the 60s, but God forbid one friend be in a wheelchair! I think introducing Becky was one of the best things Mattel ever did. A lot of girls are confined to wheelchairs, and I'm sure this doll thrilled them. And hello, the American Girl and My Life As lines also have doll wheelchairs you can buy. I don't see anyone griping about that. And it's something as trivial as a plastic wheelchair not fitting in a plastic house elevator. Well, let's talk reality, shall we? How many real life houses have elevators? Probably only ones owned by celebrities. And besides, look at the scale of Barbie houses. Forget that they're made for her - they're not proportionate at all. You put a bed in her bedroom, and BOOM, the room is full. The ceilings are about an inch taller than she is. Don't jump up and down, Barbie, or you'll get a concussion!

7. Dolls of the World is one of my favorite lines. And yes, people still nit pick. Okay, so the Mexican Barbie has a chihuahua. That's apparently not completely accurate. So, what's she supposed to come with? A taco? A green card? A margarita? It's a dog! People in Mexico can have chihuahuas!

8. Wow, so many slumber party Barbie doll have been released, and that's just since I've been around. But none of those were like the 1965 version. It makes perfect sense why that one is on this list. Even in the 60s, that's not cool. And for a company that was just building its fashion doll foundation, that was a pretty risky move. Sure, back then girls were expected to grow up and be housewives, so of course they had to look good to entice a man, but come on. And people say Barbie sets unrealistic standards TODAY. At least these days they don't come with a book on how to lose weight (with instructions saying not to eat) or a scale with a low number on it.

9. LOL Everyone is freaked out by that doll! It was designed by a group of men - surprise, surprise - so no wonder it was such a flop. But still, girls weren't oblivious to the fact that women and teens had different bodies than them. It's part of life. It's not like they made a doll with red dye coming down her legs a la Carrie. She just got taller and got little boobs. Ken had a crotch bump, and still does, so I'm curious to know how people reacted to that in comparison considering he's considered a girl toy.

10. Oh Jesus, the great poop debate. People, everyone and everything poops! And FYI, it's the law to clean up your dog's crap in public! At least Barbie is following the law! As for kids eating the stuff, well, first, there are age limits on the boxes of these toys, and second, that's why you supervise your kids. We've got too many parents that either shelter their kids from reality (see numbers 5 and 9 above) or just let them run free to get into trouble or dangerous situations.

Give me some time, and I bet I can find worse dolls/toys than the ones on this list, which aren’t even bad. It’s just idiots freaking out and getting offended over everything.

[petrichorate]

Little Fires Everywhere: Thoughts

Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng)

I feel like Little Fires Everywhere is like a trap of sorts—it draws you in quickly, under the pretense of some light entertainment, and then hits you hard with moments of intense poignancy and frustration. I wanted to read more books by Asian American authors this year because I wanted to come to terms with my identity as a Chinese American. I needed to understand how I had been approaching that part of myself, and also to hear the stories of other people who had gone through the same thing—especially if those experiences were sometimes shameful, terrifying, or filled with guilt, as mine have often been. It wasn’t until college that I started being proud of my heritage; there are still moments when I unfortunately feel ashamed of that part of myself, or somehow feel lesser than those around me. But I’ve also started to appreciate the unique beauty of being Asian American—the amazing resilience and reflection I’ve received by being part of a culture that is complex, and contradictory, and somehow immensely messed up and exquisite at the same time. 

Little Fires Everywhere managed to pack so much about Asian American-ness, motherhood, and self identity into a seamless narrative. I remember messaging a friend at the beginning of the novel that “it was entertaining, but seems like just a light read. I kind of expected it to push more on Asian American issues.” But the more I read, the more I realized that there were lessons interwoven throughout the story that could only have been learned through intense, real experiences. I love how Ng describes the “sureness” possessed in children from wealthy and established families—a feeling I always got from my childhood friends who lived in houses with kitchen islands in nice neighborhoods, but that I never felt I held inside myself. I love how Ed Lim, the lawyer, reflects on the difficulty of finding books and dolls that his daughter can relate to—it’s something I noticed in all my picture books about kids with curly golden hair, and it’s something I am actively working on because I don’t want my future daughter or son growing up without characters who look like them. 

Here are some parts I thought were particularly memorable:

On stealing from people who don’t notice: “She had cried all the way to Lafayette, where they would stay for the next eight months, and even the prancing china palomino she had stolen from the girl’s collection gave her no comfort, for though she waited nervously, there was never any complaint about the loss, and what could be less satisfying than stealing from someone so endowed that they never even noticed what you’d taken?”

On the “sureness” or efficacy felt in people from established families: “Even the younger Richardsons had it, this sureness in themselves. Sunday mornings Pearl and Moody would be sitting in the kitchen when Trip drifted in from a run, lounging against the island to pour a glass of juice, tall and tan and lean in gym shorts, utterly at ease, his sudden grin throwing her into disarray. Lexie perched at the counter, inelegant in sweatpants and a tee, hair clipped in an untidy bun, picking sesame seeds off a bagel. They did not care if Pearl saw them this way. They were so artlessly beautiful, even right out of bed. Where did this ease come from? How could they be so at home, so sure of themselves, even in pajamas? When Lexie ordered from a menu, she never said, ‘Could I have...?’ She said, ‘I’ll have...’ confidently, as if she had only to say it to make it so. It unsettled Pearl and it fascinated her.”

On covering up naïveté with “bookish wisdom”: “She could see the similarities between these two lonely children, even more clearly than they could: the same sensitive personalities lurking inside both of them, the same bookish wisdom layered over a deep naïveté.”

On the ability of wealth to draw you away from the problems you want to solve: “Of course she understood why this was happening: they were fighting to right injustices. But part of her shuddered at the scenes on the television screen. Grainy scenes, but no less terrifying: grocery stores ablaze, smoke billowing from their rooftops, walls gnawed to studs by flame. The jagged edges of smashed windows like fangs in the night. Soldiers marching with rifles past drugstores and Laundromats. Jeeps blocking intersections under dead traffic lights. Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new? The carpet at her feet was soft. The sofa beneath her was patterned with roses. Outside, a mourning dove cooed from the bird feeder and a Cadillac glided to a dignified stop at the corner. She wondered which was the real world. The following spring, when antiwar protests broke out, she did not get in her car and drive to join them. She wrote impassioned letters to the editor; she signed petitions to end the draft. She stitched a peace sign onto her knapsack. She wove flowers into her hair.”

On parents and touch: “Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she’d worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she’d set her down, Pearl would cry. There’d scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother’s leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there were something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia’s in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia’s arm pinned beneath Pearl’s head, or Pearl’s legs thrown across Mia’s belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”

On regrets: “‘Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.’”

On the lack of good Asian representation in toys for kids: “But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique’s. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing existed.  He’d gone so far as to write to Mattel, asking them if there was a Chinese Barbie doll, and they’d replied that yes, they offered ‘Oriental Barbie’ and sent him a pamphlet. He had looked at that pamphlet for a long time, at the Barbie’s strange mishmash of a costume, all red and gold satin and like nothing he’d ever seen on a Chinese or Japanese or Korean woman, at her waist-length black hair and slanted eyes. I am from Hong Kong, the pamphlet ran. It is in the Orient, or Far East. Throughout the Orient, people shop at outdoor marketplaces where goods such as fish, vegetables, silk, and spices are openly displayed. The year before, he and his wife and Monique had gone on a trip to Hong Kong, which struck him, mostly, as a pincushion of gleaming skyscrapers. In a giant, glassed-in shopping mall, he’d bought a dove-gray cashmere sweater that he wore under his suit jacket on chilly days. Come visit the Orient. I know you will find it exotic and interesting. In the end, he’d thrown the pamphlet away. He’d heard, from friends with younger children, that the expensive doll line now had one Asian doll for sale—and a few black ones, too—but he’d never seen it. Monique was seventeen now, and had long outgrown dolls.”

On the frustration of people finally recognizing problems that you have always known about through real experience and not research studies: “‘What about other books, Mrs. McCullough? Any other books with Chinese characters?’ Mrs. McCullough bit her lip. ‘I haven’t really looked for them,’ she admitted. ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’ ‘I can save you some time,’ said Ed Lim. ‘There really aren’t very many. So May Ling has no dollars that look like her, and no books with pictures of people that look like her.’ Ed Lim paced a few more steps. Nearly two decades later, others would raise this question, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We’ve always known, he would think; what took you so long?”

On what Asians are “allowed” to be in society: “Men like him, the article would suggest, weren’t supposed to lose their cool—though it was never specified whether ‘like him’ meant lawyers or something else entirely. But the truth was—as Mr. Richardson recognized—that an angry Asian man didn’t fit the public’s expectations, and was therefore unnerving. Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan. They were not allowed to be angry and articulate and powerful. And possibly right, Mr. Richardson thought uneasily.”

[mulder-isms]

Begin at the beginning - (Thorcid fanfic)

A\N: It’s a sorta late halloween treat! 🎃

Thank you @fashionclownn and anon for the prompts:

 “Look, I dressed up as you.” 

“I’m the tall dark stranger your parents warned you about.”

This fic had many inspirations, but mostly Acid’s bunny look and Thorgy with the most wanted t-shirt ever. 

As you know, you you liked let me know! Thorcid crops are dying and I could use some love.

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

It was never a hard task for Shane to connect with people. People can be one of a kind, but Shane was one of many kinds. A lonely existence perhaps, that could be not so lonely when finding someone he shared many things in common.

There was no way to avoid it. Jamin felt it in the air. He began to lose him piece by piece, just slipping through his fingers. After All Stars 3 a switch was pressed. Drag Race always changes everything in one try out, if you get the chance to come back it’s a damn revolution.

Shane was the one to confess.

He got emotionally involved with Trixie and the one night they had a gig together he wasn’t able to control himself anymore. He cried and asked Jamin to forgive him, begged on his knees, that it was just a fling but it was just too much.

He had not only cheated on him, but cheated with Trixie. Fucking Trixie Mattel, the constant ghost of his life.

Jamin cut him loose.

The day of his fortieth birthday he got a card from Shane. He read it and rip it. The facade behind Acid Betty was that Jamin had the sweetest fairy tales illusions. That when he would turn 40 he would have someone to share his life with because he really believed that was possible, but instead of that he had meaningless sex with someone that wasn’t Shane for the first time. He was completely hammered, covered in sweat in the small bathroom stall, the dim light, or was it just dark in his head?  The much younger man was eager had bleached blond hair, and was grinding harder on him, the birthday hat both were wearing on the floor. He was hard and what’s his name was determined to make him very happy. But there was a wave inside of him, that kept coming back and getting bigger. He still loved that mothefucker so much.

The worst thing about their break-up it wasn’t because Jamin didn’t love him anymore. It wasn’t because there was no desire. The ultimate betrayal was the lack of sighs of the upcoming disaster.

He impatiently grabbed the younger men by the ass pushing him against the wall trying to break the ocean.

A blink of an eye and it was Christmas.

The colorful lights in New York reached a new dimension. Christmas in New York has always been the most magical experience. Time heals everything is not true. At least not in such simple terms. Times heals without you being aware of it. One day the pain paralyses and breaks you in thousand pieces, and the other day the pieces crawl back together. The other day you’re whole again, all stitched and glued. Just like that.

Thorgy and Trixie were in a mini Christmas tour together. Jamin had no idea if they were in a relationship, and he honestly didn’t care. He was involved with new projects and planning of moving out of New York. That city was stained. Brooklyn was a cursed territory.

But ghost of past Christmas was there.

He was having a drink in the bar with some friends and on the TV hanging on next to the drink shelves they were showing many RuGirls presentations. When he raised his head to see who was going to be the next, the duo of musicians were there.

Trixie was sitting on a stool with her guitar, a colorful flowered dressed with long sleeves and white boots and Thorgy was sitting next to her following the song with the violin. She was wearing a red sequin dress with a big bow she wore last Christmas tour, but with a beautiful styled blond wig.

Jamin suddenly couldn’t hear the noises around him, as if there was only the TV in front of him. Trixie was singing looking at Thorgy and the audience and  had a sweet smile. The same sweet smile Jamin saw countless times at home. When Shane was his home.

He kept looking at Thorgy’s expressions, and the image was getting closer and closer, and he could see a sort of sadness in his eyes and the picture was zooming more and more until, there was only his eyes, all grained like they were trapped in a 60’s tv show.

*

Jamin woke up with a big gasp as the air filled his lungs again.

He was laying on his couch, his glasses all crooked on his face. There were drawings all over the coffee table with sparkling stones all over it . A bunny ears head piece was half beaded on the corner of the table.

He checked the time in his cellphone, almost 2 AM. Shane was out for Alotta’s auction and he said he was staying in but Jamin had a bad taste on his mouth. His stomach was aching and when he checked himself in the mirror he was pale as a ghost and his skin positively zombie-ish.

The urge to vomit was building up and before he realized that he was feeling sick too fast he ran to his bathroom toilet and threw up all the pizza and wine he had earlier for dinner . He hugged the toilet for awful two minutes after three big sprays of vomit making he feel like Linda Blair.

He leaned on the wall sitting on the cold tile, his head spinning fast. When he closed his eyes Thorgy was fucking Trixie in a bedroom that looked like the cabin from Evil Dead and then he opened them fast, panting. What the fuck was in that pizza? He didn’t even drink the whole bottle of wine.

He dragged his body to the living room again collapsing on the couch. He was feeling cold and didn’t want to get up again to grab some water. He accepted his destiny of dying in that couch when he heard the door opening and Shane coming in, his leather bag full and a tray with cupcakes on his hands.

“Girl, the auction today was so much fun! Alotta asked why didn’t you come and called you Gollum. You need indeed to get out more...”

Jamin has been in a very creative state lately, and since he was the one making everything and their travelling schedule was busy, Thorgy in gigs, and Acid in the Werq the world tour,  he gladly welcome isolation in his studio when he was at home.

Shane was putting everything on the kitchen table and not noticing that Jamin didn’t even move from the couch. He kept babbling about the people he saw there and how some of them were treating him differently because of AS3 when he joined Jamin in the living room.

He had the tray of cupcakes on his hands and he was wearing Jamin’s new Mickey hoodie. Also he didn’t remove all the traces of makeup because he still was wearing a bit of eyeliner and his lips were still red as if someone just kissed him.

“What’s wrong?” Shane noticed putting the tray on the coffee table and sitting in front of him on his knees and pressing his palm on Jamin’s forehead. He removed his glasses to take a better look at him and he looked zoned out.

“I felt sick...threw up everything...maybe there was something on the pizza I don’t know” he replied slowy as Shane caressed his face. He was still feeling cold with his arms crossed in front of his chest.

“Poor baby” Shane pouted rubbing his forearms to make him feel warmer. Jamin reacted weirdly about Shane touching him. The fresh nightmare still resonating in his memory.

“Is that my sweater?” Jamin noticed also that Shane was wearing his black beaded pants. “And why are you wearing my pants?”

“Yeah!” Shane replied excited  closing the zipper and showing the Mickey print. “I dressed up as you since you’re not going out anymore. Happy Halloweeeeeen!” he giggled opening his arms in a big ta-da and then kissed the tip of Jamin’s nose. “Your friends miss you” he confessed stroking his chest in circles. “And I miss you”

When Shane leaned to kiss him it was too overwhelming. Jamin leaned his head to the side and winced pushing Shane away.

“Vomit breath” he justified. Shane’s smile faded awkwardly.

“I was just giving you a peck, relax” Shane got up a bit irritated with his rejection.

Jamin closed his eyes in regret. He had no idea why he was treating Shane like garbage lately, and maybe the dream was his own unsolved issue with Trixie and the fact that he was feeling jealous of Thorgy’s connection with her. Trixie was the constant mistake he had to deal with. Their relationship was friendly, but he would always be the bitch that came for the most  beloved doll.

And he was afraid again she was going to stain the thing he loved the most.

It all made sense now. Even though he was still feeling sick. He observed Shane checking his phone standing up and he gathered forces to sit up too. He saved him cupcakes and looked adorable with Jamin’s baggy pants and hoodie.

“Thorg, sorry, It’s just the sickness speaking... I feel like there’s an alien inside of me”

Shane left the room and came back with water and some pills. He sat on the coffee table in front of him and Jamin laid again on the couch. Shane wasn’t as cheerful anymore but seemed to be okay.

“Just drink lots of water and take these pills. Not now though” he warned and stopped Jamin from taking the pills. “You have an empty stomach. Just drink water and rest. Don’t even think about eating the cupcakes”

Shane continued checking his phone and took off the hoodie and undressed of Jamin’s pants. Jamin observed him folding them nicely and when turned to leave Jamin grabbed his leg and sat down facing him, even if it made him more drowsy.

“I had a nightmare”

Shane stopped and his expression softened a little, showing that he was at least curious. He sat on the coffee table and Jamin still had his hand on his thigh, the thumb caressing his naked knee. They were inches in front of each other. Jamin smoothed his hair trying to find the words and look less nauseated, but  Shane didn’t say anything as if he just wanted Jamin to answer why he was acting so weird the past weeks once and for all.

“You cheated on me. With Trixie.”

When Shane heard the name Trixie he immediately chuckled in disbelief.

“And we broke up, and I had moved moved on. And you two were touring together and happy as two clown musicians. And I had sex with other men....”

Shane folded his arms on his chest and shifted position with the confession. Jamin took a deep breath and tried to focus again, even though his stomach was swirling again.

“And it was...not good. Because even in dreams I seem to only love you. I guess I’ve been acting weird because I feel like after AS3 everything is going to change. Again. Drag Race brought us together and I think it’s going to tear us apart this time. And you’re friends with Trixie. And I thought I got over the whole situation with her, but you mentioning her and being with her in gigs....fucked me up. It’s stupid, and doesn’t make sense, and I should know better. But I’m a tired ass jewish man that is turning forty and still lost as fuck”

He shrugged hoping for the best. Shane seemed to be still processing everything and he almost said anything and then stopped again confused.

“I- I- I don’t even know what to say. I guess sorry that I didn’t realize how my connection would Trixie would bother you? I never thought you would care because I’m the sensitive one. But after all of this, I guess I’m the asshole…”

“No, no, no” Jamin pleased caressing both of his knees and cupping Shane’s hands. “This is stupid. I’m acting like a prick lately, it’s what I do, I tend to isolate myself when I don’t know how to deal with something”

“Jamin, my connection with Trixie is just as a sister. We sure have many things in common, but we want completely different things and living completely different moments”

“I know, I know, you don’t have to justify anything. This dream, even though it was horrible, made me sorta snap out of it”

“I thought you were just like, over me. Like what the fuck did I do proposing to this bitch? Am I really going to marry Thorgy thor?”

Jamin rolled his eyes and kissed him pulling his head with both hands but Shane kept still. He kissed him slowly, his fingers caressing his earlobes.

“You do taste like vomit” Shane replied laughing when Jamin trailed down to his jawline and he stopped and pulled back.

“Well, I warned you”

They realized the TV was on the whole time and both looked at the screen, and Plan 9 From Outer Space was on.

“I had a dream about you last week too. I don’t remember much but I was a teenager in my dream, and I was playing in the school band. And you were the new music teacher. And you played the keyboard, and had lots of tattoos and I had a huge crush on you...and my dad, he read my diary and found out that I was writing all these dirty stories with you, and he threatening me to get me out of school…

“Oh my god, that is....detailed?” he replied surprised and laughing leaning on the couch. Shane peaked on the TV again “Why you didn’t tell me sooner?”

“I don’t know, you know I’m crazy, I always have stupid dreams” he shrugged.

“You must have been cute as hell as a teenager” Jamin smiled thinking about it and opened his arms inviting Shane to cuddle in. He laid by side placing his head on his chest and they both kept glancing on the TV.

“If you think greasy hair and really bad acne is cute. Also my brows were out of control. And I used to listen to symphonic heavy metal every day. Dream dad would be very mad to see me right now. He was right to take me out of that school”

Jamin hugged him tighter and kissed the top of his head.

“And you know what’s weird? I do play the keyboard”

Shane shifted and got out of the embrace looking at him with opened mouth.

“I’m the tall dark stranger your parents warned you about” Jamin replied biting his lower lip and raising his brows.

Shane scoffed looking at his sick face with dark circles under his big blue eyes.

“A bit paler than in my dreams I must say”

They kept in silence. Jamin was feeling much better with Shane’s warmth next to him and the slumber was taking over again, they were both almost falling asleep as Bela Lugosi’s monsters talked on the screen.

*

Jamin spent the whole afternoon in his studio making the new makeup video for Halloween. It was great testing new materials and trying new editing programs. He was very happy with result checking the camera pictures, still covered in pearls and face with still some traces of makeup, until he realized what time it was.

He was late as Alice’s bunny. His flight was in three hours and he had almost nothing packed. He heard a knock on the door and it was Shane.

“What are you doing here? Isn’t the Roast in like an hour?” he asked before saying hi. He was still startled about being late.

Shane was struck with the vision of Jamin shirtless covered with pearl necklaces and wearing those baggy pants he had that traced his crotch and ass in a marvelous way.

“What is happening here?” he was opening a mischievous smile and getting up, looking around the studio. “I came to pick up the things Alotta had separated for Halloween, remember? Hey, I wanna see the pictures!”

Jamin rolled eyes and picked the camera showing him and Shane started to pass and zoom them.

“This is incredible, it’s my instant fave right now” he was amazed with what he was seeing. Jamin finally could take a look at the man in front of him. Shane was wearing a fun yellow t-shirt on, printed with all women characters from Kill Bill, social black slacks that fitted perfectly and black Toms. Hair all up and neat and smelling fresh. Jamin checked the watch again. Alice’s bunny yelling “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!”

“What?” Shane asked clueless about his boyfriend hungry eyes.

“You look really good, I mean, these pants. They actually fit you” he voiced checking him out like he was a delicious dessert.

“I had these forever. I used to play with them in gigs, they are nice, right?” he twirled still not getting what Jamin really wanted.

So he made it clear.

Jamin hovered over Shane kissing him urgently and he almost dropped the camera when he answered his embrace.

“Are you sure you want to do this, I-I don’t think we have time...I’m gonna be….” Jamin grinded harder pushing him against the wall making him almost bump his head on the top shelves with miniture toys. “Oh shit!”

Shane tried to put some sense into his head but there was something else on it. Jamin’s erection was poking between Shane’s legs and Jamin was trying to remove the necklaces but Shane stopped him.

“Keep them on” he pleaded panting and Jamin held his hand and they went to the couch trying to not step on the mess that was on the floor. Jamin sat and Shane was in front of him and he pulled him by the waist kissing and nibbling on the flight of his pants, while his hands grabbed Shane’s ass, making him moan and giggle at the same time.

“Take them off I’m still getting out and these are black….” he asked gathering all the coordination he had taking off the yellow t-shirt and Jamin unfastened his belt quickly, pushing down his pants so he could get out of them and the shoes. Jamin took the opportunity to get out his pants too and he was stroking his cock looking at Shane undressing, and one shoe got stuck in the pants and he jumped three times to get rid of them making Jamin laugh, sorta breaking the mood.

“You looking at me, jerking off with pearls and smudged makeup on….” Shane said as he approached Jamin’s lap, straddling him slowly, his cock sliding between his butt cheeks. “It’s such a Velvet Goldmine fantasy”

Shane started to rock slowly, cupping Jamin’s face with both hands as he rubbed Shane’s back, his thumbs ran up his spine, fingers fanned out over muscles that tensed and released under pressure. Shane’s cock was hard and slick, rubbing against the pubic hair of Jamin’s tummy as the kiss was deepening. With the friction of Shane’s body rocking against Jamin’s, his little hairs of the chest kept getting stuck in Jamin’s pearls.

“Ouch” he complained after another pull,  stopping kissing and looked down his  chest that was all red. Jamin winced. The skin was quite irritated.

“I can take them out”

“No” Shane demanded pulling him with a fistfull of pearls and Jamin started licking Shane’s chest, nibbing on his nippples and pulling him closer making him moan louder in approval. As Jamin was working on his nipples and caresisng his ribs, Shane was undoing his hairdo letting some part of the dreads lose and Jamin licked the area next to his armpit  making him laugh and getting even more turned on.

Shane then grabbed one of Jamin’s hands and licked his fingers, letting a lot of saliva run down on them. Jamin’s hands were still a little bit dirty with makeup.

“Sorry” he said giggling noticing Shane’s face with the taste of his fingers. But they were slick enough so he could warm him up a bit. “I have lube in the bedroom”

“I’m not going anywhere” Shane lifted a bit and that was the sign. So Jamin inserted two fingers inside him slowly, getting in and out as Shane pushed him harder against the couch’s cushion and making Jamin grunt louder.

His hips were finding a perfect ride rhythm as Jamin kept pushing two fingers, feeling him tensing up around them, his cock covered with pre-cum rubbing under Shane’s balls.

“Fu...you need to slow down a bit…” Jamin begged holding down his hips with both hands and Shane stopped completely breathless.

“We’re late, bunny…” Shane bluntly said out of breath and raised his brows, guiding Jamin’s hand to reach for his cock, teasing his entrance.

He started penetrating him very slowly, watching Shane enjoy every inch of it arching his back. They haven’t had sex in more than three weeks so he needed to be gentle even though he wanted to fuck the shit out of him right now. He was tight and so very, very hot. He thrusted hard into him once and Shane threw his head back, losing his  breath like Jamin pushed it out of his lungs. "You want a little more?"

"I want a lot more" Shane didn’t hesitate through gritted teeth, riding him harder. It was his turn to lose his breath for a split second, then Jamin thrusted back into him , shoving and raising his hips, the hands pinning Shane’s hips.  His delicious panting as the muscles squeezed around Jamin’s cock.

Shane pulled the pearl necklaces making Jamin lean forward to kiss him and embrace him by the waist and Shane kept riding him non stop...their bodies locked, Jamin feeling  the old couch making crumbling noises.

“We’re going to ruin this couch again” Jamin said laughing and panting reaching for Shane’s cock to stroke it as his other arm kept him stabilized in an embrace but Shane seemed to be completely dazed, eyes closed and moaning like crazy.

He grabbed Jamin’s chin and looked him in the eye, “Fuck me harder and I’ll pay you a new one”

Jamin flipped him making him lay on his back on the couch and now he was on top, with Shane’s legs over his shoulders as he pounded him harder answering his challenge. Shane pulled him by the necklaces again and one of them broke splitting pearls all over him, but Jamin kept going and Shane was working on his cock when Jamin laid over him reaching for his neck. He was feeling Shane tighten around him , hearing his cry out softly with every one of his thrusts. He was buried deep, hitting his prostate, biting into his neck again, his face brushing on his dreads spread on the cushion. He'll leave a mark. They'll deal with it later.

“I’m so close, just like that, just like….oh...fuck…!” Shane whispered with eyes wide shut.

And then he felt Shane tightened around him like a vise, an electric shock, a whirl of pleasure hitting him deep in his stomach making Jamin following him seconds later. His entire body stiffened growling in pleasure, and he wondered if the sparks flying off their bodies were going to catch something on fire and how that couch didn’t break.

He collapsed on Shane’s body. The pearls all over the floor, and his long legs wrapped around him, as he was listening his heart beating like a heavy metal drum slowly finding the classical sonata pace again.  

“I was…” Shane still breathless, and Jamin’s weight on him was not helping. “Kinda triggered when those pearls broke, having a flashbacks with my lipsync with Chi Chi…”

They both laughed and Jamin got up all sweaty and removing what was left of the necklaces. He grabbed some tissues on the table and cleaned the hot liquid on his stomach and on his cock, putting his pants on.

“I still need to pack. You want shower again, right?”

Shane just nodded with a post orgasm satisfied smile, and then Jamin approached and leaned planting kisses on his stomach.

“I feel like I can’t walk yet”

“Hey, you asked for it. Let me get you a towel”

“I’m not complaining”

Then Jamin leaned to kiss him before leaving the room.

*

Half an hour later Shane was in the car with Ruby Roo and Kirk going to the roast of Sherry Vine, fixing her hair. Kirk noticed the red marks on Shane’s neck.

“You might wanna cover these...allergies” the redhead implied handing him Ruby’s foundation powder.

Ruby looked back a little suspicious.

“I swear my skin is falling apart. Drag will be the end of me” he justified and kept teasing his friend hair and finished with a bit of spray.

[arcadeidea]

The Oregon Trail [1971]

(Content Warning: Cannibalism, Genocide.)

In these early days of gaming, it's hard to walk in a straight line without tripping over "firsts." Looking for the first this or the first that is a hook, it's exciting to uncover, you feel like something recognizable of our present-day condition is emerging from the strange, foreign world of the past. It's almost a lie, though. Most firsts are mere trivia that can stand in the way of actually seeing the work. Most firsts are not self-consciously experimental ideas that caught on, but humble clear outgrowths of a prior tendency almost anachronistic to think of as a first, or are purpose-built innovations to serve a specific need (and sometimes you can point at The First and say that it understood what it was doing better than its successors because it knew best why it existed and then was mindlessly copied... but only sometimes.) If you're looking for some kind of great rupture to hang your hat on, the closer you look the less you see.

The Oregon Trail isn't actually first at much, besides. It's predated in most respects by The Sumerian Game [1964], lost to time, in which You are immersed in a narrative role within an existing historical gameworld and asked to manage resources, for purposes of educating children. It's plausible that our 1971 developers were totally ignorant of it, and thus the "first" as far as they're concerned, and instead drawing on, say, Milton-Bradley's The Game Of Life [1960], seeing as the original design was as a board game. The Sumerian Game is probably even more influential and important than The Oregon Trail, as it inspired Hamurabi [1968] [sic], which was then widely distributed in "learn to code BASIC games" books from 1973 on and from there inspired the whole strategy game genre. We, in the 21st century, recognize The Oregon Trail more though, because of the American Gen X ubiquity of The Oregon Trail [1985], which is as Doom [2016] is to Doom [1993], bringing us 2-for-2 on Id references for the geeks and gamers in the crowd.

It tops Wikipedia's list of the longest-running game franchises, and it's gonna stay there. Hamurabi isn't recognized as The Sumerian Game 2, but a bootleg with its own identity, and similarly you taking the reins of a hypothetical Spacewar 2 or a do-over with spiffy graphics would be a fangame or port or its own thing, not a sequel or remake. They wouldn't carry the imprint of legitimacy that comes from the all-important ownership of the intellectual property. It's the way Oregon Trail's original designer, Don Rawitsch, could take his source code offline in 1971, and then port it from paper as the 1975 version I played with only minor tweaks (one of which we'll address later.) It's the way one of its programmers, Bill Heinemann, can deny even his own son from taking stewardship of the code. It's in the way the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium can make the 1985 Oregon Trail with none of the original three creators, become a private entity with the money the property made them, then sell their legitimizing rights to The Learning Company, who can sell it to Mattel, who can sell it to Ubisoft, who can then bestow the power to make legitimate Oregon Trail successors to third parties. It's copyright, or even more broadly the conceptual scaffolding of ownership, that franchises can not live without, and it's not ridiculous at all.

The franchise all started with only the noblest of intentions, though, characteristic of that 20th Century digital optimism that necessarily colors early video games. They were going to use computers to educate children. A game is a spicy way to approach this, but not unprecedented; one could say most games are already educational, even if in a given instance all you learn is about the game. So what's its pedagogical approach to history, and how does it fare?

Well, it's unusually gamey for an "edutainment" title. There's no room for those "read some facts" sections divorced from the gameplay we're familiar with from later titles like the Carmen Sandiego series. Instead, like reportedly The Sumerian Game before it, it relies heavily on now-lost paratext (which ultimately functions much the same as the Carmen Sandiego model) for the delivery of historical fact: the 1971 Western Expansion unit curriculum The Oregon Trail game was originally only a small part of. It could have reasonably been implemented within the tight space constraints of a 1970s BASIC mainframe program as, say, a fact- and text-heavy quiz, but instead we got something very gameplay-heavy that was shortly thereafter shorn of that original contextualizing information. As-is, you can hardly poke at the game's factual inaccuracies, because what little is there is accurate. (For instance, the 1985 edition would make the prevalence of dysentery infamous, but on the real Trail, the #1 killer was cholera.) The game we have is a supplement... but if not hard facts, then what does it teach you? Reading, typing?

The game is turn-based, and at the top of every turn it displays your five resources: Food, Ammunition, Clothing, Cash, and Miscelaneous [sic] Supplies, which are things like axles and medicine. Your cash reserves (which always start at the same place) can be used at the nondescript forts you have the chance to stop at on some turns. Food, clothing, and supplies correspond not to any real values like pounds of food but one-to-one with the cash you spent on them. You just have "30 Clothes," which somehow depletes rapidly. It might be meant as the abstract monetary value, but since there's no selling, it's unclear. Run out of clothes or supplies, and you could die at any moment. Run out of food, and you die instantly. Like in The Sumerian Game, you're managing resources through the proxy of numerical abstraction, but unlike it, this is not a game meant to educate you on economics, this is the First Survival Game. In all this, we see the inverse of the priority motivation of Spacewar: managing finite, dwindling resource scarcity instead of pushing hard on the limits of the infinite.

Ammunition, on the other hand, is not directly vital but ridiculously cheap. Pun intended, it's the best bang for your buck. You're thus incentivized to play into the rugged outdoorsy individualist role (unlike later games, there's no indication that you are anything but alone) by hunting for your food, without the fiddly business of coding something like food that goes bad if you just let it sit. When you go to shoot something, be it animals on the hunt or hunting yourself, or hostile "riders," you are dropped from the methodical turn-based world into a real-time action-reflex one, which delivers a jolt of energy to the whole experience. In a stroke of ingenuity within the text-only limitations, you are tasked with typing the word "BANG" quickly and accurately. In the 1978 version, it also changes the word up on you (like it could be "POW") which makes the mechanic even more reminiscent of The Typing Of The Dead [1999]. The metaphor stands clear: your typing skill, quick and accurate, enacts corresponding quick and accurate violence on the computer. The computer will have its revenge, though.

No matter how skilled you are at hunting for your food and managing your resources, you are at the complete mercy of the gameworld. The random events at the end of every turn are perhaps the real star of the show here — definitely an evolution of Spacewar's star, anyway. The wrong random events can bring you from fine to dead in just one turn. It's not fair!

That's the point. The Oregon Trail is not about getting to Oregon. Sure, that's the goal that keeps you going both in and out of character, but really The Oregon Trail is about the losing. The death message is rendered with great ceremony, three separate command prompts on your funeral, just for flavor. Even when you make it to the promised land, you're haunted by the ghosts of your own failure, and the entire time you're on the journey is low-level tension and dread at the imagined fatality lurking under every rock. That's the pedagogical utility of the game that a book or a lecture just doesn't give you: by placing you in the middle of a world model and an unimportant role, it communicates an impression, a feeling of what it was like to live as an ordinary person in the time and place depicted, and that impression is one of a dangerous world, arbitrary enough that you can do everything right and still eat curb. There's a straight line from here to Cart Life [2011]. Why, Oregon Trail is the First Empathy Game! The terminology of the "Empathy Game," if you're unfamiliar or have forgotten, was a bit of a fad genre in mid-2010s among a handful of thinkpiece writers and social scientists, and notably not many actual game designers. It was a genre that post-hoc lumped together titles like the aforementioned Cart Life, Depression Quest [2013], That Dragon, Cancer [2016], and even Spec Ops: The Line [2012]! With the exception of the latter, the sales pitch of the genre was basically that in snubbing traditional concepts like "fun" and "violence" in favor of depicting a minimal-gameplay sad world drawn from the author's deeply personal (and often enough, marginalized) experience, these games would make you a better person; they were good for you, like eating your vegetables. Game designer Anna Anthropy was particularly enraged by cis allies patting themselves on the back in this way for playing her short title Dys4ia [2012], and in response to all this she exhibited The Road To Empathy [2015], which was a pair of her size 13 high heel boots with a pedometer attached, so that people could literally walk a mile in her shoes and try to get the high score. (A scathing Cinderella story.)

I myself am a cis white male living in Oregon's Willamette Valley, cause to worry that when I telnetted in to play the game it would instantly award me victory. I grew up here. I was born too late for Apple IIs preloaded with Oregon Trail in the classrom, but one year in elementary school the teacher put together her own longform, paper-based, team-play Oregon Trail game. My team died trapped by snow in the mountains, and then once I was checked-out and scorched about the loss, the whole class got to learn about the Donner Party, a group of settlers who went into the mountains, got snowed in, and ate each other. That's a harrowing, tragic situation about people at the furthest extremities of humanity, and we didn't get too deep into it, but it wasn't sanitized. Years later, don't know how many, I wondered: why? Not why did it happen, but why was I taught about that as history? Not even that it was gruesome, but it didn't square with my understanding of capital-h History at that time, that it was just such a small story that had immediate effect on nobody outside of the Donner Party themselves. It was just some fucked-up shit that happened once. Trivia. What was I meant to learn? Not to go through the mountains in a covered wagon during winter? No, no, it had to be one of those abstract moral Life Lessons... Was it solemn respect for the dead? The terror of nature, and the weakness of man and our society in the face of it? I've seen it used to make exactly the opposite point, that adversity builds morality and character, which is incredibly stupid but that doesn't mean that wasn't meant as the takeaway.

Writing this now, I think I have figured out that I was being taught about my heritage. It's odd to think of it that way, but it's not out of the ordinary in many cultures to pass down illustrative tales of suffering to the young so they and their example are not forgotten, though. I believe I was meant to associate myself in some continuity with The Donner Party, their inheritors as an Oregonian, as an American, as — to put it sharply — a white person, and truly, I am. The subtext is that the past of hardscrabble living and suffering we underwent to get here (in this case, a literal location, Oregon,) legitimizes our comfortable place now. Likewise, the intention of The Oregon Trail is to get us to identify and empathize with the settler. Both are virtual memory, simulated aggrievement.

Our second game has taken as its subject and theme perhaps one of the few darker and more harrowing subject matters than war: colonialism. Identifying colonialism in games is in vogue right now, but it's currently most commonly leveled as a criticism at let's-call-them-post-Minecraft games in which you are actively engaged in both extracting resources from and changing the environment to suit you, even where there is no colonization on the narrative end. The Oregon Trail is just the opposite, using its resource management purely to emphasize that we are at the whims of our environment, while its narrative framing is colonization. It flinches from the larger truth of what it is depicting in favor of an attempt at systematized monetary verisimilitude that absorbs us.

The Oregon Trail [c. 1847-1869] can be considered a mirror for its rough contemporary, The Trail Of Tears [c. 1830-1850]. Nobody wanted to be on The Trail Of Tears. People were being forcibly relocated from what prosperity they had managed to carve out for themselves into conditions of deliberate impovershment. The mass suffering and death they experienced on the way was, when not maliciously engineered, fully intended, and it did nothing to legitimize their claims to the land they now had. Conversely, the settlers moving far west were doing so entirely voluntarily.(The game starts you in St. Louis, 1847, coincidentally the exact time and place a legally-enforced Mormon exodus began, but this game isn't The Utah Trail.) There's a phrase for that hopeful dream that fundamentally motivated every last Oregonian settler to embark on their painful journey: Manifest Destiny. The land out west is already metaphysically yours, you just have to go out and take it in fact. In period records, what is done to the indigenous people across the continent is described in jarringly passive voice (such as "dying off",) as what are clearly active campaigns of hostility are waged with full intent to exterminate. The suffocating, violent racism of the 1800s United States can not be understated, and yet it is full-on swept under the rug, not just here, but almost everywhere you turn that's not the niche of a serious history for adults. This was an era when even some white slavery abolitionists were only that way because the thought of sharing a nation with any black people, even slaves, so offended their sensibilities.

The Oregon Trail game is, point blank and very straightforwardly, white nationalist propaganda. Now, it's not hate speech! It doesn't come out of the damp basement printing press of a Neo-Nazi, but the cleanliness of the omissions and assumptions and unwarranted romanticism of a standard grade school American History curriculum, and from the noblest of intentions. It's not Custer's Revenge [1982] or The Birth Of A Nation [1915]. In fact, the most major & germane difference (possibly) between the 1971 teletype version and the 1975 one I played is a modulation towards greater racial sensitivity: The random event of hostile "Indians" is scrubbed to "riders." This leaves only friendly Native Americans, which is actually, so I read, broadly historically accurate for what a trail-goer would encounter. The Cayuse War, for example, did start with an attack on a white civilian, but most of the engagement was between military forces. Not to form a bad habit of relying too heavily on author quotes, but here's what programmer Bill Heinemann had to say about it:

I heard from Paul [Dillenberger, fellow Oregon Trail coder] that we needed to eliminate any negative references to Native Americans. Since my generation had grown up on TV cowboy shows, my first reaction was that we were denying a piece of our own history.

Get a load of this honky. He instinctively thought the heritage he needed to pass on to Minnesota schoolchildren was the pulpy good-guy-bad-guy myth of the unrevised Western, masquerading as fact. The Oregon Trail is, in the end, just as much the flippant pop culture fantasia as Spacewar, despite the pretense of fact and education. Thankfully, Mr. Heinemann thoughtfully backtracked on that count, thinking of potential Native American children playing the game. In 2017, lead designer Don Rawitsch even said that he'd like to see a version of The Oregon Trail from the Native American perspective. In 2019, we got exactly that.

When Rivers Were Trails [2019] is the product of almost 50 more years in development in ludic story delivery and edutainment. It's marketed as the Native American response to The Oregon Trail, though it too takes place about 50 years later, in the 1890s. This places it after the end of most direct warfare, save with the Apaches, although Geronimo had already surrendered and you do not visit the American Southwest. Instead, when you are given the choice to resist, it takes the form not of, say, mass armed rebellion, but in community spiritualism and helping negotiate the crooked legal system.

In the story, you wander aimlessly west, away from the traditional lands in Minnesota you can now never return to. Along the way, you meet many Native Americans, who aren't typically so much characters as they are the medium by which facts about the land and history are summarized, ala the Carmen Sandiego model of edutainment referred to earlier. When Rivers Were Trails hews closer to something like a visual novel with minigames, and is nowhere near as interested in systematizing misery as The Oregon Trail. The worst things that directly happen to the player are rare harassment by the Indian Patrol, and there are resources as a nod to The Oregon Trail, here Willpower, Food, and Medicine, and, fittingly enough considering the direct equation of resource-to-cash in the 1970s game, they're used mostly as forms of currency for trading. Other than that, they don't "matter," in that they're super easy to come by living off the land and running out of food or medicine won't kill you. Only running out of spiritual Willpower will, which suggests to me that you're on some metaphoric level a ghost animated by your journey, bearing witness to vignettes of not so much the suffering itself, but the almost-post-apocalyptic aftershocks of great misfortunes and displacements and how various people are holding on or moving on. Don't mistake it for an Empathy Game — it's strictly educational.

[modestmondays]

one of the most important money-makers for kid-centered media is merchandise, right? so i do wonder about this. because as far as i can tell, su is genuinely very popular and is consistently one of the most talked about shows on online platforms like tumblr, but the thing is, i don’t know if that’s true for the product-selling side of it. for some perspective - i live in norway. there are some cartoons you *cannot* avoid in nerd stores, like adventure time. at first i thought maybe su was "too

new” to have that status, but now that’s happened to rickand morty, which is newer in terms of being “big” online. so i wondered aboutdemographics - maybe rick & morty is more popular among the “typical” nerdy+ gamer demographic (teen boys) - but i visited america and saw that actually,there IS a lot of su merch being prominently sold, so i wonder two things: isthere any way to know whether the su merch is doing *well*, and is there anyway to know whether it’s doing well *internationally*?

as popular as su is in the US, i’m not sure whether that’strue elsewhere (and i’ve heard that that actually matters to CN US, and is partof why they still have certain shows that aren’t huge ‘talkers’ nationally, butsell merch and do well elsewhere). i certainly love SU, but from what i can tell,it’s not… actually a household name among nerds here, and it’s hard to findany merch… so i do wonder if being big in america and online is enough,though i agree there aren’t warning signs yet

I was actually in Denmark recently for a cousin’s BarMitzvah, and I can anecdotally confirm that Rick and Morty is waaaay morepopular in your part of the world than I expected, although kids there had heard of StevenUniverse too. The Szechuan Sauce nonsense shows that R&M already has a strongUS fanbase as well. I think the US R&M fanbase is a bit older, it’s not reallya “for kids” show here. But either way, it’s certainly a closer fit for the nerdy/gamerdemographic than SU is, on both sides of the Atlantic. I’d expect to findR&M stuff at comic book stores, Gamestop, that kind of place. And whilethose places may have SU comics/toys, I think you find more SU merch at Barnes &Noble, Hot Topic, and other non-geek stores.

I’m definitely seeing a lot of SU merch here, and it feels likethe quantity and scope are both increasing (strongly suggesting that salesnumbers are good), which is a big part of why I’m not worried about thefinancial future of the show. But it’s interesting that you’re not seeing thatinternationally.

edit: this got really long, so I’ll put the rest under a cut.

I tried to do some research. The CN website was totallyunhelpful because it has zero business info, just stuff for the target audience,which is kids (although I did see that the volleyball game is finally up!), and moving up thecorporate chain to Turner didn’t help, since CN is too small a part of theirbusiness to get much press.

But some more searching took me to http://www.licensemag.com/license-globalwhich was more helpful. Here’s some CN articles/press releases that I foundinteresting. I’ll pull out some key highlights.

http://www.licensemag.com/license-global/cartoon-network-has-something-everyone(June 2016)

A big push for CNE moving forward will also be for theseries “Steven Universe.” Created by Rebecca Sugar, “StevenUniverse” follows the misadventures of Steven, the ultimate “littlebrother” to a team of magical guardians of humanity–the Crystal Gems–asthey band together to save the universe.

The series premiered on Cartoon Network in November 2013,but now is beginning to be supported by more robust offerings at retail.

“We’ve seen a huge pick up for ‘Steven Universe,’”says Yoder. “It’s one of those brands that has always rated reallywell–there is such a rich mythology within the storytelling–but it just took alittle longer for fans to really get to know the characters.”

According to CNE, theseries is a top performer on the network, coming in as the top grossing seriesper episode, and will now be expanded with a consumer product program.(emphasis mine)

Twenty-five-plus licensees have been tapped to expand thebrand to accessories (Accutime, Buckle-Down, Hot Properties and HighIntenCity), apparel (Bioworld, Underboss and Mighty Fine), gaming (USAopoly),home décor (Surreal Entertainment and the Northwest Company), novelty toys(A&A Global Industries, Funko, Just Toys International, Phat Mojo, ToyFactor and Zag Toys), costumes (Rubie’s Costume Co.) and more.

CNE will also leverage show creator Sugar for a publishingprogram with Penguin, and Boom! Studios will launch comic books and graphicnovels.

The products will sit at mid-tier retailers and hit shelvesin time for back-to-school, with stores such as Kohl’s, J.C. Penney and Searssigned on for inventory. Yoder says the program will expand to mass retailersand reach further into the kids’ demographic next year.

http://www.licensemag.com/license-global/cartoon-network-energizing-evergreens(February 2017)

“The network has done a great job not just saying that wecreate multi-platform content, but actually doing it,” adds Yoder, who has beena member of the CNE team since 2006 and reports to Cartoon Network presidentChristina Miller. “We are giving our fans true multi-platform experiences, sowhile we are creating linear content, we are also offering additional contentspecific for CN apps as well as evaluating how we expand with SVODopportunities and how we support kids creating their own content.”

As Cartoon Network is responding to the changing dynamics oflinear television and kids’ viewing habits, the network is still deliveringstrong ratings and viewership, which bodes well for its brand licensing group.

CNE is a well-recognized global licensor, ranked No. 30 inthe world, according to the Top 150 Global Licensors Report published annuallyby License Global, reporting $2 billion in retail sales of licensed merchandiseworldwide.

While the challenges facing the rapidly changing traditionalkids’ TV sector have been well-documented, Cartoon Network has several keypoints of differentiation, including a well-established audience, the abilityto promote its shows, development of content across different platforms andstrong evergreen properties.

http://www.licensemag.com/license-global/portfolio-programs(July 15, 2017)

“The idea of putting together long-term portfolio dealscame about rather organically,” says Christina Miller, vice president ofconsumer products, Cartoon Network Enterprises, which has inked multi-propertydeals with Mattel, Hallmark, and to a lesser degree, FunKo Toys.

According to Miller, “There were two primary reasons wechose to explore this strategy. First, Mattel and Hallmark are leading licenseesin their respective fields, and we have solid relationships with each.Secondly, our shows receive a good deal of cross-viewership, so kids who watch'Fosters’ are likely to stay and watch 'Billy & Mandy,’ and so forth. Wedecided, rather than spend time looking for individual licensees for eachproperty, it would be more efficient to have a single company developingproduct for all properties that target ages 6 to 11.”

Not to mention, she adds, “it fosters a strong creativerelationship between our creators and artists and their design teams.”

Hallmark’s vice president of licensing acquisitions, KarenMitchell-Layton, agrees, adding, “The multi-year, multi-propertyarrangement will allow us to spend time and creative energy in not onlycreating products for today, but also to take an innovative approach as thecharacters and storylines evolve.” Under its agreement with CartoonNetwork, Hallmark now holds the exclusive licensing rights in the U.S. andCanada for a range of everyday and seasonal social expression products,including greeting cards and party-supply items. “Social expressions is anincredibly extensive category,” says Miller, “so we’d like to spendmore time on the creative and less on making multiple deals, which ultimately willlead to better, more sophisticated products. Similarly, the Mattel deal coversmultiple toy and games categories including vehicles, action figures, playsets,roleplay, board games, puzzles, and youth electronic items.” While Mattelnow has a first-look option on all newly created original series andprogramming, Miller is quick to point out that existing relationships such asBandai’s master toy deal for “Ben 10” will remain untouched.

http://www.licensemag.com/license-global/cartoon-network-bolsters-experiential-initiatives(October 2017)

It takes more than great content to create a devoted fanbase, and Cartoon Network is putting fandom front and center to keep fansdeeply engaged with its properties.

“At a corporate level, Turner has put fandom veryfirmly in the center of our global strategy. We don’t talk about audiencesanymore, we talk about fans and fandom,” says Johanne Broadfield, vicepresident, Cartoon Network Enterprises EMEA, a part of Turner Entertainment.“For the past 18 months, we’ve been all about a 360-degree brandexperience.”

Putting fans at the heart of the business ups a property’sgame by fueling growth and fan commitment. In creating a foundation based onstrong core content, Cartoon Network is building its brands out to engage fanson a deeper level with a wide and varied set of temporary and permanentexperiences.

“We’re creating authentic, personal experiencesspecifically designed for fans of each brand to interact with the properties innew and unique ways,” says Broadfield.

Far from a one-size-fits-allapproach, Broadfield says the company is designing experiences tailored to eachbrand and its retail partners so that activations are meaningful and connectwith fans in a personal way.

Some analysis:

First, I don’t know how much to read into the lack of SUmentions in the later articles. It may not be one of the top sellers, but thatdoesn’t mean it’s doing poorly. “Top grossing series per episode” sounds prettygood, although they did see it as slower to grow on the merchandise side. Theymay be going for a similar slow burn internationally? I know the dubs arepretty far behind in some countries, and especially for younger kids, they’regoing to need the show in their native language. This would also hit stuff likecomics and books pretty hard. The Answer is a wonderful kid’s book, but it’sonly available in English.

Second, it looks like a lot of the licensing agreements areboth broad and exclusive, so if some of those retailers are US-only, so is themerch. Are Hot Topic or Funko international things? If not, then some of thetoys and clothing won’t be available—which exacerbates the previous problem,since toys and clothes could otherwise be sold to kids who aren’t nativeEnglish speakers with no trouble.

It seems like app and mobile tie-ins are a big part of theirholistic approach, and SU seems to be fine on that front. There’s hugeengagement from the fans across multiple platforms, although I’m not sure how much of that is from kids.

The last part, about unique fan experiences, made me thinkof Estelle’s “Stronger Than You” performance at SDCC. They went all out withthat one, giving out “Made of Love” t-shirts, reserving and decorating the stage, and gettinga huge crowd of fans together. They gave away more of those promotionalt-shirts during the panel at NYCC, too. I think they realize that the SU marketis there, and they’re doing a good job of engaging with us, even though we mostlyaren’t “boys age 6-11”.

Demographics may be a challenge, since CN was, up until recently,all about the boy’s programming (old Turner press releases emphasize thatsuccess). They’re branching out into other target demographics with shows like the PPG reboot or R&M, but it may beharder to nail down the SU fanbase into an easy target demographic. But they’re finding various ways to “engage” us(read: sell us stuff we want), and I hope that’ll continue.

I guess that didn’t really answer your questions, but hopefully it’s interesting anyway! It might be possible to get more specific sales data by reading SEC filings or calling them, but I don’t want to do that.

[survivor-algonquin-blog]

IMMUNITY RESULTS #1

Hope everyone got their groove on!!! Let's get to the results,,,

But first let's meet our lovely JUDGES!!!!

Zach!!

Hey! Zach here. A couple of main seasons under my belt and lucky enough to have played with all of the hosts. I've done this challenge and work in entertainment, so I'll be bringing a critical eye to the table and have no reservations about not holding back. Good luck!

Sarah!!

Hi my name is Sarah. Ive played 7 main ts seasons so I am officially qualified to judge now. I cant wait to see what yall did.

Vilma!!

Hi I'm Vilma and all you need to know about me is that I have a burning love for music videos so I hope y'all put in your best effort tonight <3

Now let's get to some music videos!

Castor's Music Video & Explanation

This is the official submission for the Castor Tribe. We choose to do the music video “Bring me to Life” by Evanescence. This song has a strong theme of Duality throughout the lyrics, and we chose to represent that by only using two tribemates for the lip-syncing portion of this challenge. The video focuses on Bobby, crying out for help, but being shut down by his inner thoughts, portrayed by Bryan. At the beginning of the video, you can clearly see the inner turmoil going on, shown through the colour colour changes and spinning screen. Throughout this portion, it is clear he is listening to Bryan, and letting it hold him back, keeping all these negative emotions inside. About half way through the video, there is a clear tone change, with the scarf starting to come off, signifying an opening up, of Bobby starting to let his thoughts out in a healthy way, and his inner voice becoming quieter and less relevant as time goes on. The video ends on a dark room, lit by a single light, showing that as dark as things may seem, there will always be light at the end of the tunnel, you just must keep moving forward. We felt that this was a good representation for survivor for several reasons. Firstly, in order to progress far in the game, you must be able to rely on other people to keep you sane. One of the Key elements of survivor is the ability to outlast the other players, and that requires you to mentally outlast them as well. You can clearly see that on the Edge of Extinction season, where it is only the mental fortitude of these voted off contestants giving them a chance now. Secondly, there have been several survivor Contestants that have struggled with the ideas of self-doubt, and depression both during and after the show, most notably, Sugar, after Survivor Heroes Vs Villains, as well as Spencer Bledsoe, after Game Changers. Finally, no matter how dark you may think your prospects in survivor are, if you believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and keep pushing through, you will always be able to make an impact. We chose to make the video focus on only two of our tribemates because most submissions for these types of challenges tend to include almost all the tribe members, and we wanted to create something that stands out. All of us contributed to the final product in several different ways. Firstly, we had Lilly, who was the Creative Director, and Task Manager. She came up with the narrative and focused on creating a realistic schedule in order to get everything done on time, and to a good quality. Bobby and Bryan, you saw in the music video, as our lead lip-syncers. Aaliyah was the editor of this video, putting to use her skill in a way much better than anyone else on our tribe could have accomplished. Finally, Michael and Jack created the write up, in order to communicate our thoughts to the judges, to show the amount of effort we put into this project.

Zach:

Creativity:6

The explanation for idea of the music video was strong and well intentioned, if not wholly originally, but I’m not sure it is entirely reflected in what got with the video. I appreciate the deliberate choice to use only two members of the cast to support that idea, so I can’t ding for points there, but I don’t think what we got was what we were promised in the explanation.

Effort: 7

Going off of the intro text, I’ll take it in good faith that everyone contributed as much as was mentioned, and despite execution, I cannot fault their efforts if they all tried.

Composition: 5

Any time there’s a vertical video, it’s going to hurt a little, but I won’t dwell on that too much. I will say that the video ending before the song ends does not help its case. Also, the idea behind the colors and the black and white to show emotional change was a good thought, but did not have the payoff that it should have had. The rationale behind it feels more film school interpretation of something after the fact than intended execution.

Theme: 7

The theme as explained was a solid one, and definitely can see tones of it in the performances and set dress of the actors. Nice job. Bryan will haunt my dreams.

All-in-all, I think this was a good effort and it’s obvious that this team works together well and has lofty ideas. I think the technical skill might be lacking, and it seems like everyone here is very structured in their thinking. I prefer that way of thought so I’m with them, but they needed a little more creative flair here to pull it off.

Sarah:Creativity: 5/10

Effort: 5/10

Composition (editing): 7/10

Theme: 8/10

I wish I saw everyone from the tribe in this but I get your reasoning behind it. It was still just overall ok

Vilma:

Creativity: 4/10

You made a creative decision to include only two people of your tribe in the lip sync and while I appreciate the ballsy move I can’t help but feel I would’ve enjoyed the video more if more people were included in it.

Effort: 5/10

Bobby was the king of the show and really put his soul into it.

Composition: 4/10

Rule number one in music videos: film horizontally! Overall I wasn’t a huge fan of the constant use of cheap looking effects but otherwise the editing was fine.

Theme: 6/10

I think the duality theme in your video was nice an well thought-out but it would be a bit hard to understand without your thorough explanation of it.

Castor Total: 69/120

Elan's Music Video & Explanation

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She walks! She talks! She twerks! She's BARBIE! Jump, dance, and sing with your very own customizable doll! Dress her up and take her out. Barbie is your BEST FRIEND! You can be a Barbie Girl too! SHE'S BARBIE! (batteries not included)

Zach:

Creativity: 7

The idea of using Barbie girl for the song was a strong and out of the blue choice, making it look like a commercial really took it over the top. I can’t go higher than 8 because they used a lot of the original music video to cover gaps, but overall, more creative an idea than I’ve seen in a while, and the execution was beautiful which leads me to:

Effort: 8

To put what they put together as quickly as they did takes a lot of coordination from whomever was putting it together, but the fact that most people went so far as to dress as “Barbies” shows that almost everyone was committed to the gag. There were a couple of people who obviously didn’t have as much time to give to this, but substituting them as the Ken was a nice save.

Composition: 9

Obviously when working with iPhones and computer cameras, the visual leaves something to be lacking, but that is more than made up for here with the various superpositions, graphics, texts, crawls, and cuts. It felt like I was watching a bizarro QVC commercial that was as fun to watch as Barbies are to play with, keeping them right on mark for their:

Theme: 9

The fact that this is basically a weird commercial for Barbies is as fantastic as they are plastic. Every inch of it was filled with something to reinforce the theme, whether it was ordering details, people playing with the toys, warnings, calls to actions, or disclaimers (the bottom Mattel crawl was a brilliant example of all three categories of judgement coalescing to reinforce the them.

I wasn’t planning on rating anyone high, but this was weird, original, well done, and fun. Nice job. It was visual candy, high energy, and all surface, which I wouldn’t typically go for, but that’s what Barbie is about.

Sarah:Creativity: 9/10

Effort: 10/10

Composition (editing): 10/10

Theme: 8/10

You guys impressed the fuck out of me and made me literally LOL.

Vilma:

Creativity: 8/10

Cute outfits, cute barbie nicknames, cute editing, cute CuTe CUTE I want these slutty barbies to myself

Effort: 9/10

The barbie QUEENS and the editor guy did a phenomenal job. It looks like most of your tribe participated, although the Barbies outshined the Ken’s a bit. But overall you guys really put yourself out there and put in the most effort.

Composition: 10/10

The editing was ON POINT. Great job ten out of ten.

Theme: 8/10.

I stan the barbie theme and song choice btw Aqua is a Danish band so I love me some nordic representation <3 My only complaint is I wish you introduced us to the handsome Kens too.

Elan Total: 105/120

Hibou's Music Video & Explanation

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We lip synced Survivor by Destiny's Child. Due to time constraints Gavin couldn't be in the video, but it doesn't matter since Sammy stole the show. :) The editing got a little weird at the end. Some of the file types were different and that causes playback issues. Also the deadline was fast approaching so the sequences towards the end are a little longer. :p

Zach:

Creativity: 2

Hate to be harsh, but going for Survivor for Survivor is a little too on the nose. Listen, it’s a great song, and some people have some great energy, but creatively, this was low hanging fruit. On top of that, the video is literally just lip-syncing, which is basically like playing a Borneo Game in 2019. Given that they’d be given plenty of examples of other ways this can be done well, I can’t rate this high. To paraphrase the song “you’re better than that.”

Effort: 4

To the people that contributed to this, I appreciate your attempt. The one guy who really embraced the challenge, got a mic, light-up glasses, the hat, et al, if this was based on just your effort, I could go much higher. It’s as high as it is because of you. Unfortunately, it’s a team challenge, and for the brief moments that we saw most of the other players, you can see them reading the words on the screen as they capture their performance. I hope everyone enjoyed it more than it shows, but again, to the point of the song “you’ve gotta work harder.”

Composition: 2

Vertical videos really just need to be turned 90 degrees and it would feel like we’re watching a movie. Or if you’re given vertical videos, copy the layer, move it to the back, enlarge, and blur. It will make it instantly more watchable. This grade isn’t solely because of that though (3 vertical videos don’t help though). The titles screen is cute, but assembled poorly. Some of the text is covered some of the pictures. There’s no real pace to guide us through the song. The cuts seem arbitrary. Editing is very hard and never appreciated, so to whomever put this together, if you did your best, nice job and I encourage to stick with it, but kinda feels like “I’m not gonna give up” was something you were saying to yourself over and over again when trying to make this work.

Theme: 2

Picking this song was a bold choice since it’s so obvious, but you can’t lose points in this category based on choice alone. But given that choice, you have to really knock it out of the park, and I don’t think the bat even touched the ball with this one. There’s nothing here that screams either Survivor nor what Destiny Child was singing about, I don’t know if we’d be weaker without this song in our life.

Look, I hate to be critical, especially since it’s obvious some people put it in a lot more work with this than others, but to be honest, this wasn’t a shining example of what you’re all capable of. It’s hard putting these together, and maybe it just wasn’t worth it this time. Making music videos can be fun or terrible depending on with whom you work. I wish you the best, but I feel like because of this, for one of you “I’m gonna make it, here on Survivor” just isn’t true.

Sarah: Creativity: 4/10

Effort: 3/10

Composition (editing): 6/10

Theme: 4/10

You tried.

Vilma:

Creativity: 4/10

I feel like you guys could’ve been more creative with your Survivor theme. I like that you introduced everyone in the beginning but other than that the video was very simple.

Effort: 6/10

Most of your tribe seemed to participate and that’s always nice to see. Some of you guys were really feeling it too so big props to that!

Composition: 3/10

Again, gotta deduct some points for not filming horizontally. Plus the lip syncing was VERY off most of the time, such a simple thing to fix and the video would’ve seemed much more professional!

Theme: 5/10

Your song choice is literally perfect, you GUYS are survivors and you know it but I wish you would’ve included little skits or something to emphasize the theme.

Hibou Total: 45/120

Congratulations to Castor and Elan for winning immunity!! which unfortunately means Hibou you will be heading to tribal council, where you will be voting off the first person in Tumblr Survivor Algonquin. Tribal will be live over Google Hangouts, and we plan to start at 9:00 EST. please let the hosts know beforehand if you will be able to attend tribal council or not.

[artificialqueens]

Recruitment 101 (Trixya) - DenDenMonMon

This is a response to boonoir’s tumblr post about 69 Trixya smut prompts! I was originally going to wait until I had them all written down and post one every day but I think it would be better if I just post them as I go. That’s also the reason why they will not be listed in the original order.

Of Lovers, Friends and Everything in Between. Part 1 - Office Sex.

Title: Recruitment 101 Category: F/F Summary: How far are you willing to go to get the job that you want? Notes: Yeah, the idea of this story came to me almost in a fever dream, I’m not even sure if I’m going to be able to pull it off but… here goes nothing. Written: Dec 27th, 2019

Recruitment 101

“Alright, Miss…” Katya looks down at the piece of paper in her hands, hoping to find the information that she needs. “Umm. Mattel.” She lifts her head to face the young woman across the desk, whose shaky hands are playing with the hem of her own skirt. “You know, there’s no need to be nervous. We are just going to have a nice chat.”

The girl smiles shyly, her crooked teeth barely visible behind the hot pink lips. It doesn’t feel unnatural. It seems intentional, almost as if the girl has years and years of practice on her. She has mastered the art of smiling while hiding her teeth at the same time, and it is impressive. Katya can easily detect this is a woman of many talents.

“Oh, I know,” she replies with a wave of her hand, dismissing Katya’s words. “I’m not nervous, I’m anxious. I just… I really want this job.” She bites her lower lip, her stare is intensely pinned to Katya’s. “Like, really want this job,” she repeats herself. The words leave her lips in a heavy exhale. Her tongue runs against her top lip slowly. At the same time, she changes her crossed legs, switching to left over right. Her moves are sensual, she even makes a small pause, allowing the eyes of her - hopefully - future boss to get a glimpse of her underwear.

Katya swallows hard, the imaginary knot on her throat preventing air from reaching her lungs properly. The papers land on the desk in front of her and she places her tangled fingers on top of it. Her gaze scans the applicant. She allows her eyes to do so openly and shamelessly, because that’s what the young woman wants her to do. That’s why the girl is placing her arms on the seat of the chair and scooting forward, to give Katya a better look of her cleavage. And Katya is enjoying every second of it.

“I can see that, Miss Mat–”

“Please,” the girl interrupts her. “Call me Trixie.”

Katya nods. “Trixie,” she pronounces the word slowly, tasting every letter as they bounce off of her tongue.

Trixie smiles approvingly. “Unless there’s something else you would like to call me,” she makes a pause once again, a pause she uses to wink theatrically. “…Boss,” she finishes her sentence with confidence.

For a moment, reason kicks in. Katya takes a pen and scribbles something down. “Aren’t you cocky?” Her question is rhetorical, something to fill the air around them as she takes notes.

With the corner of her eye she sees Trixie shrug a shoulder. “I’m confident in my skills, I know what I am capable of doing, but also what I can’t do. So if you’re looking for humility, I’ve got some of that too.”

A bubble of laughter escapes Katya without her permission. “So you are a people pleaser.” It isn’t a question, Katya is affirming it. Yet, the answer that she gets in return is something she is not prepared for.

“Oh, I’m sure I can please you.”

The pen slips from her fingers, a blue line is left across the paper as proof of Katya’s surprise. She doesn’t say anything, words crash with each other inside her brain, making it impossible for her to pick the correct ones to string a sentence together. All she can feel is heat exuding her every pore, sweat already pooling at her lower back. Her thighs press together, the black pencil skirt making the task a lot easier. Taking a deep breath, she forces the professional version of herself to take over, to keep the interview in track.

Thankfully, the desk separating them is wide enough to put some distance between them. One more thing Katya is suddenly thankful for, is the wood panel that goes down and covers the space between the metal legs of the furniture. The cover up allows her to squirm in her chair slightly, putting pressure where she needs it the most.

“Trix… Miss Mattel,” she decides to use last names. The least personal this interview can be, the better. “Tell me, what are your goals? What is it that you aspire to?”

The aspirant seems to actually be thinking of a proper answer. A hand goes up to curl a lock of hair, Trixie twists the blonde strands around her fingers before releasing them. Katya feels herself being pulled into a hypnotizing trance, as her eyes follow the motions of the manicured fingers.

“Can I be fully honest?” Trixie speaks carefully. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but… my goal is to be on top of you.”

Air catches with her own spit and Katya suddenly finds herself coughing. “Eh-Excuse me?”

Trixie laughs, screams in delight. Her head is thrown back in blissful satisfaction, her breasts are pushed forwards, threatening to fall out of the restrictive shirt. “I’m sorry. I meant, professionally. My dream is to be one of the major partners of the company. I don’t have the money to become an investor, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes to climb up the professional ladder.”

Her eyes, once again, move up and down Katya’s body. Her gaze is dark and intense. Katya grows insecure. She has to wonder if Trixie is able to see the sweat emanating from the skin of her chest; if she’s able to detect the erratic rising and falling as she struggles to suck air in; if her nipples are hard enough that they trespass the material of her button up.

“Whatever it takes?” Katya repeats Trixie’s words in the form of a question, an inquiry that is pronounced almost as an invitation. Katya is kicking herself inwardly, because she can’t help but admire how hot Trixie is, how every word that falls from her lips is a proposition to something else. And Katya’s body is reacting, her core is throbbing with possibilities.

Trixie gets up, her head nods ever so slightly. “If it gets me the job, I’ll do it.” Her hands land on her own hips, slowly moving up and down her sides, before finding the buttons of her blouse. The top two are already undone, and she takes care of releasing the next one. Her pink lace bra comes to view, and she runs her nails across her exposed breasts. “Do you like my… qualifications?” Trixie asks as Katya’s eyes follow the red trails involuntarily, licks her lips in anticipation. There is no turning back, Katya decides then and there. Her body is already screaming with want. She can do it. She has enough power in the company to let this one thing happen, plus, is not like she’s the one asking for it, or favoring the candidate. The girl is offering.

Pushing herself back, Katya lets herself fall on the chair. “I would have to examine them closely, before I make a decision.”

A kinky smile takes over Trixie’s entire face. Her plan worked. Katya is willing to let her think that, to make her believe she successfully seduced the recruiter and is one step closer to land the job of her dreams. She can do that and ensure a good lay in the office for herself at the same time. There are literally no downsides to the situation.

It’s time to put her plan into motion. Trixie makes a show as she closes the gap between them. First, she leans on the desk, both hands land flat on the wooden surface. Her arms are strategically placed to push her breasts together. The back of her legs move the chair out of the way. The high heels barely make a sound as they come in contact with the carpeted floor. Lifting her knees higher than necessary, she walks around the big table and stands next to Katya.

“Director Zamolodchikova,” she speaks easily, having practiced the pronunciation for long enough to impress the high executive before her. Katya’s mouth opens slightly; she swivels in her chair to face Trixie, reacting at the perfect mention of her last name. Trixie smiles proudly. “You have seen my… attributes, now, I would like to give you my oral presentation.”

Katya’s breath hitches in surprise, but her brain has no time to register the words when Trixie is already dropping to her knees. Her palms hold on to each of Katya’s knees, spreading them as much as the skirt allows her. Katya doesn’t stop her, on the contrary, she sinks deeper into the chair, her hands gripping the arm rests for dear life.

Her eyes close at the feeling of Trixie’s breath against her skin. She kisses up the inside of Katya’s thigh, purposely missing her center, before going down the opposite side. The wet noises of Trixie’s open mouth have Katya in a level of desire she had never encountered before. She looks down and the image alone could be enough to push her over the edge. The blonde curls cover the space between her legs and they bob with the movement of Trixie’s head. Without thinking about it, she tangles her fingers in the styled waves and her nails scratch Trixie’s scalp slightly.

“Miss Mattel, this is wildly inappropriate.” The sentence comes out in a voice that Katya can’t recognize as her own. It’s laced with lust and need, contradicting the very purpose of the message.

Without looking up, Trixie comes as close to Katya’s center as possible. “Do you want me to stop?”

The vibration reaches Katya’s skin and, before she knows it, she’s pushing Trixie’s face against her core. The girl smiles against the material of Katya’s underwear, which is damp with want, and shamelessly licks at the traces of desire. Her hands move up, pushing the skirt to bundle up around Katya’s waist, who easily lifts her butt to allow the movement. Trixie’s fingers hook on the thin straps of Katya’s thong and pull it down her thighs, leaving it to stretch as far as it goes at Katya’s shins.

Trixie’s eyes finally meet Katya’s, she looks up at her with a naughty face taking over her features. “Now, Director, please allow me to give you a taste…” Katya’s hips buckle at the blunt request, and Trixie laughs as she finishes her sentence. “A taste of my abilities.” It’s probably meant to be another office pun, but it still works to make Katya’s arousal to grow even more.

Her ears purposely shut out everything around her. There’s no chatter from workers, sharing stories and showing pictures of their babies. The noises of the several printers going off at the same time don’t reach her. Surely a phone is ringing somewhere, they always are, but Katya can’t hear it.

A finger slowly goes up and down her entrance, smearing her own wetness across her crotch and up her pelvis. A second finger joins the task but they purposely avoid the most sensitive spots, where Katya needs to be touched the most. Once again, her hips lift off the leather chair by themselves, trying to make contact happen.

“Trixie, please,” she finds herself begging. This is not how things are supposed to be. She’s supposed to be the one in charge. The aspirant should never have control of the interview, that is recruitment one-oh-one. She must regain command of the situation. Taking advantage of the grip she still has on the girl’s hair, she pulls roughly. “Now.” The order is utter at the same time that Trixie’s lips finally land on her center.

The girl was right, she has many oral skills. She knows exactly where to suck, when to blow, and how to flick her tongue. Her lips, chin and cheeks are wet with saliva and Katya’s want. The pink lipstick is long gone, but it doesn’t matter. All her energies are concentrated on the board director she’s pleasing, guided by the hand pulling and pushing to make her touch just the right places.

A yelp escapes Katya when the first finger goes in. She sinks even further down the chair, until she feels Trixie’s knuckle. “More,” she demands in an exhale. “I need to review… your… manual skills.”

Trixie screams more than laughs at Katya’s words. “A whole performance test, I like that.”

Her mouth closes around Katya’s most sensitive bundle of nerves as a second finger enters her, then comes a third. Trixie gives her full control of the rhythm. Katya fucks her hand and mouth at the speed that she wants. She feels Trixie curling her fingertips, to make sure she’s touching all the right places within her. It only takes a few hard thrusts, before Katya is cumming, desperately screaming Trixie’s name.

The girl is still licking Katya clean of her orgasm when there’s a knock on the door.

“Miss Mattel?” A soft voice is heard through the door.

Trixie and Katya are frozen in place, waiting for the moment when the assistant walks into the office, a thing that doesn’t happen. Trixie moves around, trying to find tissues to clean her hands.

“Yes, Farrah?” she asks as casually as possible.

“Your three o’clock is here, should I send them in?”

“No!” Both Trixie and Katya reply at the same time, a little louder than could be considered normal.

There is a beat of silence, the girl on the other side of the heavy piece of wood is probably trying to put the pieces together. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you had an appointment with Director Zamo, do you want me to push this one back?”

Running her fingers through her hair, to make it look as presentable as possible, Trixie scrambles to her feet. “No, we are almost done here. I’ll see them in the conference room.”

Quick as a bolt she arranges her clothes and, staring at her reflection on an expensive vase, she cleans her face with wet wipes. Checking how much of her makeup got ruined, she reapplies her pink lipstick and black eyeliner. It will have to do for now. Katya takes advantage of the position and hugs her from behind. Her hands help to tuck the shirt inside the tight skirt. Placing a soft kiss to Trixie’s neck, she moves to the bathroom, to try and fix herself.

Popping a piece of gum inside her mouth, Trixie walks out of the office, finding her assistant already expecting her with the information of the next meeting. They walk side by side in silence, Trixie’s going through the folder, when Farrah calls her attention.

“Isn’t it boring?”

“Excuse me?” Trixie lifts her head from the numbers to find the smiling face of the beautiful young girl.

“Yeah, you and Katya. Like, you see each other all day at work, meeting after meeting, then having to go home together. It’s probably boring to work with your wife, no?”

“It actually isn’t, we… find ways to keep it fun.” Trixie smiles widely, closing the subject as they entered the conference room. “Gentlemen, thank you for waiting. President Mattel, nice to meet you.”

[rachelpimm]

Red Dust, is a 20-minute documentary by Karin Mak on the efforts of Chinese nickel-cadmium battery workers to document and end debilitating illnesses from cadmium poisoning in the production of rechargeable batteries (Source: Brown 2010, p.8).

RED DUST is an exposé on the deadly price paid by female factory workers who suffer from cadmium poisoning resulting from their jobs in a Chinese battery factory (Source: Anon 2011a, np link).

Poisoned by the carcinogen cadmium in the battery factories where they worked, Ren and her comrades engage in a desperate struggle for justice. RED DUST captures rural and urban poverty and the risks involved in speaking up in China. In face of daunting obstacles that affect their work, health, and future, the women persevere (Source: Anon 2011b, np link).

The incredible story of resistance, courage and hope by women workers in China battling cadmium poisoning and demanding justice from the local government and their employer, a multi-national battery manufacturer (Source: Anon 2010a, np link).

The human stories of exploitation in this documentary show the complexities behind China's growth, the forces that shape it, the forces that challenge it (Source: Anon nda, np link).

RED DUST tells an unexamined side of China's economic development: the resistance, courage, and hope of workers battling occupational disease, demanding justice from the local government and global capital (Source: Anon 2011c, np link).

The documentary follows the main character Ren on her journey home to rural Sichuan, a poor province in China where many factory workers hail from. Ren suffers from cadmium poisoning, and worries about what will happen to her family as her health deteriorates. Ren meets regularly with her friends Min and Fu, who . . . also worked for [battery manufacturer] GP. Now the three women help other workers who suffer from the effects of cadmium poisoning through lawsuits and actions. The film intercuts between scenes of Ren in the country and scenes of her comrades in the city. The back and forth visually juxtaposes the rural countryside with the cityscape. Over 150 million Chinese peasants have flocked to the cities to earn money in low-wage jobs. This mass migration is one of the reasons China's labor costs are low. The surplus labor provided by migrant workers attracts foreign investors like GP, a multinational company that makes batteries for Wal-Mart, Mattel, and Toys R Us. Most of the migrants who work in the factories are women. Ren, who left the countryside three days before she was set to start middle school, accuses the factory of taking advantage of her as a migrant worker: ‘We don't have much education...The factory never told us cadmium was harmful.' Audiences meet Ren’s hard-working family in the countryside her mother, who is a farmer, and a cousin whom Ren has not seen in fifteen years. The slower-paced rural life is reflected in longer and wider shots. The beautiful landscapes and rustic feel, however cannot hide the poverty, lack of opportunities, and the legacy of favoring boys over girls in China that push women like Ren to leave the countryside. Rural life is incredibly labor-intensive as Ren and her mom are always doing something while talking to the camera: hand washing laundry, preparing vegetables, or clearing land. Details of the country life are richly captured. In one scene, an itinerant barber comes by Ren’s home to cut Ren and her mom’s hair. As the camera captures the cutting, audiences learn that they are selling their hair to make extra money. Meanwhile back in the city of Huizhou, Min and Fu gather in a hotel room a space they see as a safe place to meet - to recount the history of their struggle. They explain archival photographs of worker actions outside the factories. The photographs, taken by workers themselves, have not been seen outside of China. ‘We had work stoppages and demanded medical compensation,’ says Fu. In China, workers may be jailed for what the state calls disrupting the harmony of society. Fu holds back her tears as she recalls how someone threatened her for participating in the struggle. The faster-paced edits in the city hotel correspond to the rushed, modern, and cramped life. Interviews in the hotel room with Fu and Wu include cuts to angular close-ups of their bodies, which visually represent how woman’s bodies have been compartmentalized, cut-up, as part of China’s economic development. In both urban and rural spaces though, the women are marginalized. Fu, from rural Hunan says, ‘I’m in the my thirties and am afraid to have children because I see my co-workers children are sick. A woman without children cannot stay in the village so I had to return to the city where I got my occupational disease.’ Although the women look physically healthy, cadmium has affected their internal organs and they experience chronic pain. In one scene, Min displays all the different medicines she takes for headaches, bone aches, and sore throats-- and those are only the ones she can afford. The last character the audience meets is Wu, who is suing GP. Her stack of documents chronicling correspondence with the factory and medicals records lay scattered on the white bed sheets in my hotel room as she flips through them, figuring out which ones to explain to the camera. Fear of someone overhearing the conversation from outside the hotel room however, interrupts her testimony as the camera nervously pans away. She ends by saying, ‘We lost our lives to the factory.’ RED DUST is told through observational cinema style with the workers positioned as experts on their situation. The film also has self-reflexive elements in it such that the audience discovers cadmium poisoning along with the filmmaker. Given China's rising role in global economics and politics, many audiences are interested in learning more about the country with the world’s fastest growing economy. The documentary’s intimate moments with the characters make the film appeal to a broad range of audiences. Ultimately, the documentary humanizes Chinese workers and shows their activism, something that has not yet been seen in the media (Source: Anon ndb np link).

Red cadmium dust drifted freely in China’s nickel-cadmium battery factories owned and operated by GP BATTERIES (GP), one of the world’s top battery manufacturers. Ren, a migrant worker originally from Sichuan, suffers from frequent headaches and breathing difficulties. If untreated, the cadmium poisoning can lead to kidney failure, cancer, and even death. RED DUST tells an unexamined side of China’s economic development: the resistance, courage, and hope of workers battling occupational disease, demanding justice from the local government and global capital. Chinese migrant workers are deemed disposable by factory owners and are stereotypically viewed as quiet and passive victims. However, Ren and other GP workers (Min, Fu, and Wu) fight back. Labor issues are very sensitive in China, and workers who publicly discuss their struggles do so at great risk. The audience discovers along with the filmmaker, a Chinese American, the horrors of the global assembly line.  This documentary is about women who are the engine of the global economy. Although the film takes place in China, the characters’ experiences are universal to workers on the margins around the world, where poverty, migration, and workplace hazards are common realities

[gta-5-cheats]

Inside Atari’s rise and fall

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/inside-ataris-rise-and-fall/

Inside Atari’s rise and fall

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Jamie Lendino Contributor

By the first few months of 1982, it had become more common to see electronics stores, toy stores, and discount variety stops selling 2600 games. This was before Electronics Boutique, Software Etc., and later, GameStop . Mostly you bought games at stores that sold other electronic products, like Sears or Consumer Distributors. Toys ’R’ Us was a big seller of 2600 games. To buy one, you had to get a piece of paper from the Atari aisle, bring it to the cashier, pay for it, and then wait at a pickup window behind the cash register lanes.

Everyone had a favorite store in their childhood; here’s a story about one of mine. A popular “destination” in south Brooklyn is Kings Plaza, a giant (for Brooklyn) two-story indoor mall with about 100 stores. My mother and grandmother were avid shoppers there. To get to the mall from our house, it was about a 10-minute car service ride. So once a week or thereabouts, we’d all go. The best part for me was when we went inside via its Avenue U entrance instead of on the Flatbush Avenue side. Don’t ask me what went into this decision each time; I assume it depended on the stores my mother wanted to go to. All I knew was the Avenue U side had this circular kiosk maybe 50 feet from the entrance. The name has faded from memory. I remember it was a kind of catch-all for things like magazines, camera film, and other random stuff.

But the most important things were the Atari cartridges. There used to be dozens of colorful Atari game boxes across the wall behind the counter. When we walked up to the cashier’s window, there was often a row of new Atari games across the top as well. Sometimes we left without a new cartridge, and sometimes I received one. But we always stopped and looked, and it was the highlight of my trip to the mall each time.

For whatever reason, I remember the guy behind the counter gave me a hard time one day. I bought one of Atari’s own cartridges—I no longer remember which, but I’m almost sure it was either Defender or Berzerk—that came with an issue of Atari Force, the DC comic book. I said I was excited to get it. The guy shot me a dirty look and said, “You’re buying a new Atari cartridge just for a comic book?” I was way too shy to argue with him, even though he was wrong and I wanted the cartridge. I don’t remember what my mother said, or if she even heard him. Being too shy to protest, I sheepishly took my game and we both walked away.

Mattel began to run into trouble with its Intellivision once the company tried to branch out from sports games. Because Mattel couldn’t license properties from Atari, Nintendo, or Sega, it instead made its own translations of popular arcade games. Many looked better than what you’d find on the 2600, but ultimately played more slowly thanks to the Intellivision’s sluggish CPU. Perhaps the most successful was Astrosmash, a kind of hybrid of Asteroids and Space Invaders, where asteroids, space ships, and other objects fell from the sky and became progressively more difficult. Somewhat less successful were games like Space Armada (a Space Invaders knock off).

Mattel also added voice synthesis—something that was all the rage at the time—to the Intellivision courtesy of an add-on expansion module called Intellivoice. But only a few key games delivered voice capability: Space Spartans, Bomb Squad, B-17 Bomber (all three were launch titles), and later, Tron: Solar Sailer. The Intellivoice’s high cost, lack of a truly irresistible game, and overall poor sound quality meant this was one thing Atari didn’t have to find a way to answer with the 2600.

These events made it easier for Atari to further pull away from Mattel in the marketplace, and it did so—but not without a tremendous self-inflicted wound. A slew of new 2600 games arrived in the first part of 1982. Many important releases came in this period and those that followed, and we’ll get to those shortly. But there was one in particular that the entire story arc of the platform balanced on, and then fractured. It was more than a turning point; its repercussions reverberated throughout the then-new game industry, and to this day it sticks out as one of the key events that ultimately did in Atari.

The single biggest image-shattering event for the 2600—and Atari itself—was the home release of its Pac-Man cartridge. I can still feel the crushing disappointment even now. So many of my friends and I looked forward to this release. We had talked about it all the time in elementary school. Pac-Man was simply the hottest thing around in the arcades, and we dreamed of playing it at home as much as we wanted. The two-year wait for Atari to release the 2600 cartridge seemed like forever. Retailers bought into the hype as well. Toy stores battled for inventory, JC Penney and Kmart bought in big along with Sears and advertised on TV, and even local drug stores started stocking the game. And yet, what we got…wasn’t right.

Just about everyone knows how Pac-Man is supposed to work, but just in case: You gobble up dots to gain points while avoiding four ghosts. Eat a power pellet, and you can turn the tables on the ghosts, chase them down, and eat them. Each time you do so, the “eyes” of the ghost fly back to the center of the screen and the ghost regenerates. Eat all the dots and power pellets on the screen, and you progress to the next one, which gets harder. Periodically, a piece of fruit appears at the center of the screen. You can eat it for bonus points, and the kind of fruit denotes the level you are on (cherry, strawberry, orange, and so on).

But that’s not the game Atari 2600 owners saw. After securing the rights to the game from Namco, Atari gave programmer Tod Frye just five weeks to complete the conversion. The company had learned from its earlier mistakes and promised Frye a royalty on every cartridge manufactured (not sold), which was an improvement. But this was another mistake. The royalty plus the rushed schedule meant Frye made money even if the game wasn’t up to snuff, and thus Frye had incentive to complete it regardless. Atari also required the game to fit into just 4KB like older 2600 cartridges, rather than the newer 8KB size that was becoming much more common by this point. That profit-driven limitation heavily influenced the way Frye approached the design of the game. To top it all off, Atari set itself up for a colossal failure by producing some 12 million cartridges, even though there were only 10 million 2600 consoles in circulation at the time. The company was confident that not only would every single existing 2600 owner buy the game, but that 2 million new customers would buy the console itself just for this cartridge.

We all know how it turned out. The instruction manual sets the tone for the differences from the arcade early on. The game is now set in “Mazeland.” You eat video wafers instead of dots. Every time you complete a board, you get an extra life. The manual says you also earn points from eating power pills, ghosts, and “vitamins.” Something is definitely amiss.

Pac-Man himself always looks to the right or left, even if he is going up or down. The video wafers are long and rectangular instead of small, square dots. Fruits don’t appear periodically at the center of the screen. Instead, you get the aforementioned vitamin, a clear placeholder for what would have been actual fruit had there been more time to get it right. The vitamin always looks the same and is always worth 100 points, instead of increasing as you clear levels. The rest of the scoring is much lower than it is in the arcade. Gobbling up all four ghosts totals just 300 points, and each video wafer is worth just 1 point.

The ghosts have tremendous amounts of flicker, and they all look and behave identically, instead of having different colors, distinct personalities, and eyes that pointed in the right direction. The flicker was there for a reason. Frye used it to draw the four ghosts in successive frames with a single sprite graphic register, and drew Pac-Man every frame using the other sprite graphic register. The 2600’s TIA chip synchronizes with an NTSC television picture 60 times per second, so you end up seeing a solid Pac-Man, maze, and video wafers (I can still barely type “video wafers” with a straight face), but the ghosts are each lit only one quarter of the time. A picture tube’s phosphorescent glow takes a little bit to fade, and your eye takes a little while to let go of a retained image as well, but the net result is that the flicker is still quite visible.

It gets worse. The janky, gritty sound effects are bizarre, and the theme song is reduced to four dissonant chords. (Oddly, these sounds resurfaced in some movies over the next 20 years and were a default “go-to” for sound designers working in post-production.) The horizontally stretched maze is nothing like the arcade, either, and the escape routes are at the top and bottom instead of the sides. The maze walls aren’t even blue; they’re orange, with a blue background, because it’s been reported Atari had a policy that only space games could have black backgrounds (!). At this point, don’t even ask about the lack of intermissions.

One of Frye’s own mistakes is that he made Pac-Man a two-player game. “Tod used a great deal of memory just tracking where each player had left off with eaten dots, power pellets, and score,” wrote Goldberg and Vendel in Atari Inc.: Business is Fun. Years later, when Frye looked at the code for the much more arcade-faithful 2600 Ms. Pac-Man, he saw the programmers were “able to use much more memory for graphics because it’s only a one player game.”

Interestingly, the game itself is still playable. Once you get past the initial huge letdown and just play it on its own merits, Pac-Man puts up a decent experience. It’s still “Pac-Man,” sort of, even if it delivers a rough approximation of the real thing as if it were seen and played through a straw. It’s worth playing today for nostalgia—after all, many of us played this cartridge to death anyway, because it was the one we had—and certainly as a historical curiosity for those who weren’t around for the golden age of arcades.

Many an Atari 2600 fan turned on the platform—and Atari in general—after the release of Pac-Man. Although the company still had plenty of excellent games and some of the best were yet to come, the betrayal was immediate and real and forever colored what much of the gaming public thought of Atari. The release of the Pac-Man cartridge didn’t curtail the 2600’s influence on the game industry by any means; we’ll visit many more innovations and developments as we go from here on out. But the 2600 conversion of Pac-Man gave the fledgling game industry its first template for how to botch a major title. It was the biggest release the Atari 2600 had and would ever see, and the company flubbed it about as hard as it could. It was New Coke before there was New Coke.

The next few games we’ll discuss further illustrate the quality improvements upstart third-party developers delivered, in comparison with Atari, which had clearly become too comfortable in its lead position. First up is Activision’s Grand Prix, which in hindsight was a bit of an odd way to design a racer . It’s a side-scroller on rails that runs from left to right, and is what racing enthusiasts call a time trial. Although other computer-controlled cars are on the track, you’re racing against the clock, not them, and you don’t earn any points or increase your position on track for passing them.

Gameplay oddities aside, the oversized Formula One cars are wonderfully detailed, with brilliant use of color and animated spinning tires. The shaded color objects were the centerpiece of the design, as programmer David Crane said in a 1984 interview. “When I developed the capability for doing a large multicolored object on the [2600’s] screen, the capability fitted the pattern of the top view of a Grand Prix race car, so I made a racing game out of it.” Getting the opposing cars to appear and disappear properly as they entered and exited the screen also presented a problem, as the 2600’s lack of a frame buffer came into play again. The way TIA works, the 2600 would normally just make the car sprite begin to reappear on the opposite side of the screen as it disappeared from one side. To solve this issue, Crane ended up storing small “slices” of the car in ROM, and in real time the game drew whatever portions of the car were required to reach the edge of the screen. The effect is smooth and impossible to detect while playing.

Shop On SecondCovers

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The car accelerates over a fairly long period of time, and steps through simulated gears. Eventually it reaches a maximum speed and engine note, and you just travel along at that until you brake, crash into another car, or reach the finish line. As the manual points out, you don’t have to worry about cars coming back and passing you again, even if you crash. Once you pass them, they’re gone from the race.

The four game variations in Grand Prix are named after famous courses that resonate with racing fans (Watkins Glen, Brands Hatch, Le Mans, and Monaco). The courses bear no resemblance to the real ones; each game variation is simply longer and harder than the last. The tree-lined courses are just patterns of vehicles that appear on screen. Whenever you play a particular game variation, you see the same cars at the same times (unless you crash, which disrupts the pattern momentarily). The higher three variations include bridges, which you have to quickly steer onto or risk crashing. During gameplay, you get a warning in the form of a series of oil slicks that a bridge is coming up soon.

Although Atari’s Indy 500 set the bar early for home racing games on the 2600, Grand Prix demonstrated you could do one with a scrolling course and much better graphics. This game set the stage for more ambitious offerings the following year. And several decades later, people play games like this on their phones. We just call titles like Super Mario Run (a side-scroller) and Temple Run (3D-perspective) “endless runners,” as they have running characters instead of cars.

Activision soon became the template for other competing third-party 2600 developers. In 1981, Atari’s marketing vice president and a group of developers, including the programmers for Asteroids and Space Invaders on the console, started a company called Imagic. The company had a total of nine employees at the outset. Its name was derived from the words “imagination” and “magic”—two key components of every cartridge the company planned to release. Imagic games were known for their high quality, distinctive chrome boxes and labels, and trapezoidal cartridge edges. As with Activision, most Imagic games were solid efforts with an incredible amount of polish and were well worth purchasing.

Although Imagic technically became the second third-party developer for the 2600, the company’s first game didn’t arrive until March 1982. Another company, Games by Apollo, beat it to the punch by starting up in October 1981 and delivering its first (mediocre) game, Skeet Shoot, before the end of the year.

But when that first Imagic game did arrive, everyone noticed.

At first glance, the visually striking Demon Attack looks kind of like a copy of the arcade game Phoenix, at least without the mothership screen (something it does gain in the Intellivision port). But the game comes into its own the more you play it. You’re stuck on the planet Krybor. Birdlike demons dart around and shoot clusters of lasers down toward you at the bottom of the screen. Your goal is to shoot the demons all out of the sky, wave after wave.

The playfield is mostly black, with a graded blue surface of the planet along the bottom of the screen. A pulsing, beating sound plays in the background. It increases in pitch the further you get into each level, only to pause and then start over with the next wave. The demons themselves are drawn beautifully, with finely detailed, colorful designs that are well animated and change from wave to wave. Every time you complete a wave, you get an extra life, to a maximum of six.

On later waves, the demons divide in two when shot, and are worth double the points. You can shoot the smaller demons, or just wait—eventually each one swoops down toward your laser cannon, back and forth until it reaches the bottom of the screen, at which point it disappears from the playfield. Shoot it while it’s diving and you get quadruple points. In the later stages, demons also shoot longer, faster clusters of lasers at your cannon.

The game is for one or two players, though there’s a cooperative mode that lets you take turns against the same waves of demons. There are also variations of the game that let you shoot faster lasers, as well as tracer shots that you can steer into the demons. After 84 waves, the game ends with a blank screen, though reportedly a later run of this cartridge eliminates that and lets you play indefinitely. If I were still nine years old, I could probably take a couple of days out of summer and see if this is true. I am no longer nine years old.

Demon Attack was one of Imagic’s first three games, along with Trick Shot and Star Voyager. Rob Fulop, originally of Atari fame and one of Imagic’s four founders, programmed Demon Attack. In November 1982, Atari sued Imagic because of Demon Attack’s similarity to Phoenix, the home rights of which Atari had purchased from Centuri. The case was eventually settled. Billboard magazine listed Demon Attack as one of the 10 best-selling games of 1982. It was also Imagic’s best-selling title, and Electronic Games magazine awarded it Game of the Year.

“The trick to the Demon Attack graphics was it was the first game to use my Scotch-taped/rubber-banded dedicated 2600 sprite animation authoring tool that ran on the Atari 800,” Fulop said in 1993. “The first time Michael Becker made a little test animation and we ran Bob Smith’s utility that successfully squirted his saved sprite data straight into the Demon Attack assembly code and it looked the same on the [2600] as it did on the 800 was HUGE! Before that day, all 2600 graphics ever seen were made using a #2 pencil, a sheet of graph paper, a lot of erasing, and a list of hex codes that were then retyped into the source assembly code, typically introducing a minimum of two pixel errors per eight-by-eight graphic stamp.”

Although you can draw a line from Space Invaders to just about any game like this, Demon Attack combines that with elements of Galaga and Phoenix, with a beautiful look and superb gameplay all its own.

A watershed moment in video game history, David Crane’s Pitfall! was one of the best games released for the 2600. As Pitfall Harry, your goal is to race through the jungle and collect 32 treasures—money bags, silver bars, gold bars, and diamond rings, worth from 2,000 to 5,000 points each. Jump and grab vines, and you soar over lakes, quicksand, and alligators, complete with a Tarzan-style “yell.” You can stumble on a rolling log or fall into a hole, both of which just dock you some points. Each time you fall into quicksand or a tar pit, drown in a lake, burn in a fire, or get eaten by an alligator or scorpion, you lose a life. When that happens, you start the next one by dropping from the trees on the left side of the screen to keep playing.

Pushing the joystick left or right makes Pitfall Harry run. He picks up treasure automatically. Holding the stick in either direction while pressing the button makes him jump, either over an obstacle or onto a swinging vine (running into the vine without jumping also works). Push down while swinging to let go of the vine. You also can push up or down to climb ladders.

In an incredible feat of programming, the game contains 255 screens, with the 32 treasures scattered throughout them. The world loops around once you reach the last screen. Although Adventure pioneered the multiroom map on the 2600, Pitfall! was a considerably larger design. Crane fit the game into the same 4KB ROM as Adventure. But rather than storing all 255 screens as part of the ROM—which wouldn’t have fit—Crane’s solution was not to store the world in ROM at all. Instead, the world is generated by code, the same way each time. This is similar to games like Rogue, but even in that case, the game generates the world and then stores it during play. Pitfall! generates each screen via an algorithm, using a counter that increments in a pseudorandom sequence that is nonetheless consistent and can be run forwards or backwards. The 8 bits of each number in the counter sequence define the way the board looks. Bits 0 through 2 are object patterns, bits 3 through 5 are ground patterns, bits 6 and 7 cover the trees, and bit 7 also affects the underground pattern. This way, the world is generated the same way each and every single time. When you leave one screen, you always end up on the same next screen.

“The game was a jewel, a perfect world incised in a mere [4KB] of code,” Nick Montfort wrote in 2001 in Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 1971-1984.

You get a total of three lives, and Crane points out in the manual that you need to use some of the underground passages (which skip three screens ahead instead of one) to complete the game on time. The inclusion of two on-screen levels—above ground and below ground, with ladders connecting them—makes the game an official platformer. And the game even gives you some say in where to go and what path you take to get there. Pitfall Harry is smoothly animated, and the vines deliver a genuine sensation of swinging even though the game is in 2D.

The game’s 20-minute timer, which approximates the 22-minute length of a standard half-hour television show, marked a milestone for console play. It was much longer than most arcade games and even cartridges like Adventure, which you could complete in a few minutes. The extra length allows for more in-depth play.

“Games in the early ’80s primarily used inanimate objects as main characters,” Crane said in a 2011 interview. “Rarely there would be a person, but even those weren’t fully articulated. I wanted to make a game character that could run, jump, climb, and otherwise interact with an on-screen world.” Crane spent the next couple of years tinkering with the idea before finally coming up with Pitfall!. “[After] only about 10 minutes I had a sketch of a man running on a path through the jungle collecting treasures. Then, after ‘only’ 1,000 hours of pixel drawing and programming, Pitfall Harry came to life.”

Crane said he had already gone beyond that 4KB ROM limit and back within it many times over hundreds of hours. Right before release, he was asked to add additional lives. “Now I had to add a display to show your number of lives remaining, and I had to bring in a new character when a new life was used.” The latter was easy, Crane said, because Pitfall Harry already knew how to fall and stop when he hit the ground. Crane just dropped him from behind the tree cover. “For the ‘Lives’ indicator I added vertical tally marks to the timer display. That probably only cost 24 bytes, and with another 20 hours of ‘scrunching’ the code I could fit that in.”

Pitfall! couldn’t have been timed more perfectly, as Raiders of the Lost Ark was the prior year’s biggest movie. The cartridge delivered the goods; it became the best-selling home video game of 1982 and it’s often credited as the game that kickstarted the platformer genre. Pitfall! held the top spot on Billboard’s chart for 64 consecutive weeks. “The fine graphic sense of the Activision design team greatly enriches the Pitfall! experience,” Electronic Games magazine wrote in January 1983, on bestowing the cartridge Best Adventure Videogame. “This is as richly complex a video game as you’ll find anywhere…Watching Harry swing across a quicksand pit on a slender vine while crocodiles snap their jaws frantically in a futile effort to tear off a little leg-of-hero snack is what video game adventures are all about.” Pitfall!’s influence is impossible to overstate. From Super Mario Bros. to Prince of Persia to Tomb Raider, it was the start of something huge.

[artificialqueens]

living on the edge of the law ( biadore / sashea ) - chapter 7

sasha and shea finally come to terms and adore is having some issues of her own.

finally an update !! I’ve been so busy with my musical and other AU’s and school, I’ve decided that every week this’ll get an update so it’ll be a bit more frequent and such, hope y'all enjoy, the drama begins.

— *.✧

Sasha groaned, feeling her entire body sore and unable to move even if she wanted to, her eyes gently opened and her lashes fluttered, unaware of she was for a minute as she brushed her eyes with her fingertips, giving a yawn before looking around and noticing Shea still asleep, smiling and absentmindedly dreaming— Sasha felt a small rose colored blush appear on her cheeks and she smiled looking away realizing now exactly where she was before giving herself a high-five and praising that finally after years it had happened and it was all thanks to Bianca and some Whitney Houston. 

A grumble was noised from Shea as she gently awoke to Sasha’s hand across her hair, running her fingers through it and simply taking it all in: it was hard to not give a grin to her best friend who sat in her bed wearing nothing but Shea’s shorts and a bra, her blonde hair definitely a little tangled though they could always fix that later with a brush and some willpower, “Sleep, I’m just awake is all.” The Russian whispered as Shea tiredly propped herself against the bedframe, she shook her head and opened her arms before Sasha gave a glimmering smile and collapsed in Shea’s arms, the blonde happily accepting the offer. 

“It took too many years but it finally happened, Bianca and Trinity owe me twenty each!” The wink from her eyes undeniably sweet, Sasha softening her gaze knowing it was all in good fun in the first place, it was a bit suspicious having Bianca, who was definitely not one to be so oddly curious and kind for lack of a better word. 

“My gut said so after Bianca kept asking me about myself and you, part of me was confused and the other part of me was praying that this was the next step to one of us finally confessing something, 

“I hate to be awkward but—” Shea begun before yawning so she could take in a big yawn and wrap her arms around Sasha, who was beyond snug in her arms and felt protected and quite happy with her life currently, “What are we?” The question finally came out and the Russian froze, she didn’t exactly realize until now they hadn’t talked about the state of her relationship and friendship.

“What do you want us to me?” The question pondered to Shea who took no hesitation and time to answer with a quick, “Girlfriends.“ 

Sasha nodded and liked the sound of the word with them together, “Girlfriends…” She repeated in a whisper with nothing but utter joy in her heart, Shea quickly winking: “You know, lesbians, power couple, ruling the world: that’s us." 

The giggle that left the Russian’s lips was enough for Shea to feel absolute success, "Get up, I still have to get my car from Katya’s you know.” Sasha gently hitting her lover in the far right beside her before Shea sat up gasping, the Chicago native hitting her back before grabbing her wrists and staring a glance at her newly announced girlfriend who was covered in now blue stains of hickey’s, she hadn’t even brought it up yet but not as if she could do a thing about it expect cover them and not think too much about them, as long as they didn’t interfere with her work who truly cared, Sasha did not certainly.

“Seriously!” The blonde eyed her girlfriend intensely, not letting her gaze drop until Shea groaned, getting up slowly but surely from the bed and running a hand through her own long and black hair, “I know, I know!” She called out though it was impossible to be aggravated at someone as perfect as Sasha and besides, Shea definitely did promise the Russian to bring her to go and get her car. 

Shea stood on her tip-toes grabbing a baseball cap from her closet before jumping into some jeans and an old Chicago Fire jersey she still kept from her father, he was a huge sports fan and of course you have to support your hometown whether or not they’re any good, Shea knew Sasha was definitely a fan of soccer (football to her) to begin with. 

The Russian clapped, “Football!” The twinkle in her eyes as her lashes fluttered seeing her girlfriend in a sport’s jersey was enough reason for Shea to wear the damn thing, no questions asked. 

“Just for you.” The smile sincere before she leaned in to kiss her girlfriend, hands on her soft cheeks, Shea could definitely get used to this. Sasha nervously mentioned she had no clothes with her besides the alcohol splashed dress from last night, Shea waved her off and knew they both wore medium dresses atleast, handing her a tulle dress she had received as a gift from Trinity a bit ago.

Sasha grabbed her lover’s face and kissed her gently before Shea quickly felt her arms melt around Sasha’s waist before the Russian gently pused back, “We’re getting my car and then we can do whatever we want.” Shea frowned before taking her cap off for a minute, slapping Sasha’s behind, the blonde intentionally and overdramatically jumping while laughing, “Let’s go, Katya is gonna have far too many questions!" 

"And I’m prepared to answer them all in detail.”

✧*。

“Let’s go, let’s go, Давай!” Katya clapped as she interlocked her hands around Sasha’s chair, spinning around aimlessly in their new conjoined cubicle, it was said to them Monday morning, the worst time possible, some of them were having to move into a conjoined office but the perk was the fact was that they were in an isolated room, Sasha loved the privacy though they did get a nice window by the wall, looking out the building and having a small glimpse of downtown Santa Monica. 

Katya was just happy to share the space with someone she liked, beyond liked, loved like a sister, family. The closest thing she would ever have to family since running away years ago from Russia with just a carry-on and a dictionary, though she had studied English in school, her self doubt was far too strong to even attempt to speak English the first two weeks.

Sasha met her the moment she was introduced to the staff, the look and face said enough for Katya to lovingly strangle her with a hug, screaming in russian the minute she had heard the blonde say her welcomes in russian, more to comfort Katya than anything else.

“Sharing an office with you is the biggest blessing and curse in my life, I can sense it already darling." 

Katya cackled, jumping off her chair before sitting down, sipping the coffee Shea had so sweetly picked up for her as requested, writing a note down to remind herself to pay Shea back, "Oh please, if it was you and Shea you’d both fired in about a week because we all know this desk wouldn’t be used for working purposes.” Sasha almost gasped for air, gagging as she finished a small sip of tea, hitting her with her “Russia” decorated fan.

“Шлюха!" 

The Russians hugged and played around before Katya smiled, head in her hands as her feet kicked back on the desk, "So how is it with your new lover?” Sasha always had the urge to completely push herself away from that kind of conversation with anyone, she liked her love life personal and locked up but being with Shea was so different. She wanted to bashfully speak about the joy sharing a bed and kisses with someone she had pinned for since she moved to America years ago.

“She’s great, gorgeous as usual, I have no complaints." 

"If she hurts you I will fucking stab her and you know I’m not kidding, I love Shea Couleé but I love you more however, I do trust her. She only stared at you at parties, meetings, her eyes shined just for you!" 

The comment started a bit crude and violent but then turned much softer than expected, Sasha looking away trying not to show her obviously content grin, that’s what she had always hoped to hear from others especially her friends who also were close with Shea and who wasn’t? She was the most likeable person in their job, head of communications for a reason! 

"That’s good to know.” She brushed the crumbs from her scone off her work dress, Katya despite the head of their section and department somehow managed to constantly shit around, she only thought about five things: Trixie Mattel, the Lebanese restaurant down the street, Russia, Stationary and dancing— not an awful five things to think about, Sasha could probably summarize herself in about five things as well: Shea Couleé, journalism, fashion, Russia and her dog, Vanya. 

They got back to their “work”, sipping on their drinks though all Sasha could think about was Shea, understandbly so as Katya was struggling to not think about her date with Trixie tonight, she hadn’t been on a date in almost two years and she didn’t want to screw this all up, it be especially awkward since Trixie is an aspiring singer with the possibility of a record deal here thanks to some strings pulled. 

A knock at the door interupted her train of thought as Trinity waved, half hazardly, “Hey, Katya I need you really quick!” The older blonde stood up and nodded before waving goodbye to Sasha as Trinity and Sasha quickly ran to eachother all smiles, hugging, “I heard about the new girl, I’m so fucking glad she finally said something because I was about to tell you myself bitch." 

Sasha laughed and hugged her close friend, the two met from work but bonded like no other the first year when they shared an office and Trinity never felt so glad to have a great friend around, Orlando was miles and miles away but she had Sasha and now she had a bunch of people but Sasha would always stick out to her the greatest.

"I’ll be back!” Katya yelled before shutting the door, Sasha shaking her head and aimlessly flipping through another one of her fashion magazines, she had an entire studio in her apartment dedicated to her fashion and designs, it was a good extra cash tip here and there but more for the passion: this job was nice, successful, paid well but nothing would ever compare to sewing or atleast writing about fashion, she always said to Katya how she felt about what others were wearing, in Russian of course, though it wasn’t spiteful: just legitmate observations.

“Maybe one day, but not right now.” She put the magazine down before getting on to her laptop, going back into work mode.

One day.

✧*。

Bianca sat her in her studio, putting away her laptop and dancing around her kitchen aimlessly, blasting music from the TV, hooking up her Spotify. She wasn’t exactly paying much attention, it was on shuffle and the playlist was actually originally made by Courtney and William who had to have a car playlist when they didn’t travel by plane. 

Playing From Playlist

 —

car trips <3 !!! 

—

Currently Playing: Last Dance - Donna Summer 

She sang along, not like anyone was around to hear her, she was absolutely not a vocalist, not even autotune could save the amount of shrill screams and cracks she had but she didn’t mind, she didn’t need to be a recording artist anytime soon, that was a last minute ditch plan. 

A beep from her phone rang, it was from Adore which was worrysome considering she had begun packing away from her best friend’s house, they had finally made a deal on a condo, Adore insisted on a condo because she only cared about an extra room to be a studio and it needed a bathtub: well, that was an easy checklist and it even had a patio for her the text wasn’t exactly something Bianca had expected.

I’m in the rain, I’m near a bus stop, please come, please xx

The X’s at the end didn’t exactly calm down Bianca any more, immediately texting back a: send me your location right fucking now, I’m coming. 

She turned off the TV and oven, checking just ever so quickly on the dinner she was trying to make before grabbing her keys and wallet and an extra jacket + a towel and bolting for her car, she didn’t hear the pouring rain from the blasting of Donna Summer but judging by Adore’s location she was only about ten minutes away with a car, five if Bianca really drove the way she always intended to: above every speed limit. 

Not even baring to ask a question, her hands felt a bit tense as she turned into another corner, glancing in her mirror and keeping her eyes open at her phone’s GPS, she could be asking herself a million things right now but didn’t, knowing it wasn’t the best idea, she had to find Adore: plain and simple.

Six minutes (four minutes gained) of driving lead her to indeed, what looked like a bus stop, an abandoned one near a park for children, not as if Adore would have much fun in the rain doing that. “Adore!” She screamed without even thinking, rolling down her window quickly before screeching the brake and parking the car after she rolled up the window, putting a towel over the shotgun seat before the younger singer jumped in, “Please go, please, please.” She seemed out of breath and was definitely soaking wet, her hair all falling to her face and her mascara ruining. 

Bianca stepped on it and handed her a jacket, “Jesus Christ, what the hell? Do I even wanna fucking know?” They stopped at the stoplight as her hands pressed the heating buttons, turning all the air towards Adore and making sure it was on a decently hot setting, Bianca would probably sweat to death in this car but hey: this was a part of the job in the end.

Adore burst into tears and the latino girl stared, unsure what she had said or what was going on, “I’m so sorry.” Was all she choked out before rubbing the mascara off on the towel, unapologetically though Bianca could always buy a new one or just wash it if she wasn’t a lazy ass. “Don’t be, don’t even talk about, we’re gonna go back to my place and you’re gonna take a shower, change and then we can talk." 

She nodded silently, whimpering like a puppy into the towel, Bianca feeling bloody murder go through her head thinking about the possibilities, she might just commit a murder or three tonight if it was anything related to a single person who had may or may not hurt Adore, she had no clue who but she’d find out somehow. 

They got into her house and Adore watched Bianca close the door and give a thumbs up, adjusting her own jacket on Adore Delano, who had yet to even adjust to the pressures of fame and every day was simply knee deep in stress but for almost four weeks she had Bianca every day at her side helping, being hilariously bitter and kind and occasionally brutually honest beyond realization.

"We don’t have to talk about it but just let your friend know you’re here, I don’t want her to worry, you can of course stay overnight, I don’t expect you to go back to the new house and unpack tonight." 

"You should shower.” She mumbled, adding the words before taking the coat off Adore gently, the younger girl feeling herself almost unable to breathe, she hesitated before quickly leaning in and grabbing Bianca, by her wrist and kissing her, no thoughts even necessary. Bianca felt her entire face flush but let it happen, of course she was wanting it to happen for days but not as if their positions and jobs made it easy to talk about, neither was the fact that Bianca promised herself to not let romance get in the line of her work.

“Adore we’re…” She grumbled her speech, angry that this had to happen already, she just wanted to avoid all feelings and hide everything long as possible, “We work together and—" 

"God, please shut up and kiss me you hag." 

The words had a nasty edge but not like anything they ever said to eachother was taken too seriously, Bianca spoke about her feelings to Shea and Katya consistently and to Courtney as well but she didn’t expect Adore to take such director action though, this was Adore Delano.

Despite the hesitation in Bianca’s response they attracted like magnets and kissed again, Adore running her fingers through her hair as Bianca felt her hands touch her cheeks, freezing cold but she knew that wasn’t important.

They clinged needing this to finally happen badly.

However, Bianca felt her entire heart sink in nothing but guilt and pulled away: covering her mouth, for the first time ever too stunned to speak, "No talking, not now, you’re super cold, shower.” The obvious disappointment in Adore’s face was enough for her to scoff and angrily wave Bianca off, knowing where to go and what to do anyway.

A breath in and a breath out as Adore shut the door loud as possible, groaning from the bathroom as she turned on the shower. 

Well shit