#be like 10 pages and take me two days to write.....

[filmnoirsbian]

What Comes From Picking Flowers Part 10 (part one)

[flanaganfilm]

Good day Mr Flanagan. please what does "the rest is confetti" mean to you and in the context it was used in hill house??

Okay, here we go. Buckle up for a long read.

To answer this, I've got to explain a little bit about what was happening and where I was when I sat down to write episode 10 of The Haunting of Hill House.

Hill House was not a fun shoot. The picture above is from very early in production, when I was still chubby and happy.

It was my first foray into television. I was absolutely terrified that I'd mess it up. So I'd opted to direct all of the episodes myself, figuring that - if nothing else - I'd have no one else to blame if it went south.

It was the most grueling professional experience of my career. The shoot was by no means a smooth one, every day was an uphill battle from a budgetary perspective, and between the three giant production entities involved with the production, I spent a lot of time fighting over the creative and logistical elements of the series.

I began losing weight. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

By the end of the shoot, I had dropped almost 40 lbs.

I was very depressed. Every day was a battle, and for the first time in my career, I wasn't excited to go to work in the morning. We were fighting for basic resources, fighting for the show we wanted, and even fighting amongst ourselves by the end. It was grueling.

We hadn't written all of the scripts when we started production. I believe we had finished through episode 7, but the rest of the scripts had to be finished while we were already shooting.

We'd mapped everything out in the writers room, and I had great support on the other episodes, but I was writing the finale solo. I'd thought I'd be able to juggle it with everything else. I quickly fell behind.

I finally got to the script about halfway through production. I'd work on it between takes at the monitor, and then get home to our tiny rental house in Atlanta, where Kate was waiting with our baby son. (One of the rare bright spots of this shoot came when Kate found out she was pregnant about halfway through production. We even named our daughter Theodora, in honor of her origins.)

I'd typically fall down from exhaustion when I got home, but I had to push through it and work on the script. My weekends were spent shotlisting and prepping for upcoming episodes. We didn't have enough time to stay ahead of prep, so every available day was used for that... I went three months without a single day off at one point.

I'd sit up late staring at the script. I was in a dark, dark place. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and feeling like I lived in an eternal present. Each day bled into the next and it didn't feel like there was an end in sight. That feeling of unreality was heightened because we kept returning to the same sets, same locations, and even the same scenes throughout the 100 shooting-day production. Stepping back into the exact room we had shot in days or weeks or even months ago made the whole thing feel absolutely surreal. Making movies is always an non-linear experience, but this one felt particularly so... it was like the days of our lives were happening to us all out of order.

I remember feeling something like despair creeping into my daily experience on the show. And I remember dwelling on that when I got into the scene work of episode 10.

As I worked through the draft, I recall that despair coloring a lot of what was on the page. My filter was breaking down. There's a monologue at the beginning of the episode where Steven's wife Leigh (played by my dear friend Samantha Sloyan) spews out a torrent of eviscerating insults about Steve's value as a writer. That is just me vomiting onto myself. She was voicing all of my deepest insecurities about myself at the time, and of what I was doing with this series.

She says "Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about, they're real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real - but not to you, is it. Not until you chew it up, digest it, and shit it out onto a piece of paper and even then, it's a pale imitation at best."

This was the mindset I was in for a lot of the shoot. The writing became a reflection of a lot of that turmoil, and I knew who I was referring to in that monologue - I was talking about my family. I was talking about how much of their lives I'd used as building material for this show. I was talking about the fact that I'd lost two loved ones to suicide, and seen what it had done to my mother in particular. And I knew I was using - possibly even exploiting - those people for this series.

There's a lot of despair in this episode. The Red Room, as we conceived it, was a place that would feed upon those emotions. Grief, sadness, loss... those were the real ghosts of our series, and where our characters find themselves at the start of the finale. They're being slowly digested - eaten alive - by those feelings.

So finally, it came time to write Nell's final scene with her siblings. I knew from the outline we'd constructed in the writers room what this was supposed to accomplish - she was supposed to be their salvation. She was supposed to take all of these feelings that we'd been wrestling with and finally provide catharsis... finally say something that would free everyone.

I remember sitting with a blinking cursor for a long time. The Crain siblings had just turned and seen Nellie standing by the door, and suddenly were able to hear her speak. But what should she say? What would I say? What would I want someone to say to me?

What she ultimately says lays bare a lot of what I was thinking about when it comes to grief. It exists outside of linear time, much as I felt I existed at the time. That sense of eternal present, that sense of a nonlinear eternity of moments and memories - it all came out in her speech to her brothers and sisters.

I remember feeling, looking at my insane present and looking back at my past, how strangely overwhelmed I was by memories. That I wasn't experiencing time in a straight line, and hadn't been for a while - for the better part of a year, I'd felt more like I was standing in a whirlwind of moments. "Our moments fall around us like..." Nell said, and I recall sitting back and trying to find the words.

"Rain," for certain, but there was something too uniform about that. The moments of life as I experienced them weren't that orderly, they weren't that small. They didn't fall the same way. Some sailed by, fast and unremarkable, while others lingered in front of me, twisting and stretching. So it was a good word, but not the right word. I left it on the page though.

"Snow" was my next attempt. Better, in that I imagined the snow blowing in the wind, swirling and dancing and feeling more organic. More chaotic. More like life. But for some reason, the word that stuck with me, the word I felt Nell Crain would connect with was...

"Confetti."

And that was because I was thinking not of Victoria Pedretti at this point, but of Violet McGraw.

Violet played Young Nell, and I wondered what she might have said if she experienced time this way. As an adult, Nell was despairing. Nell was overwhelmed. But as a child... there was an innocence to the word. There was a joy to the word.

I imagined moments falling around her, this little girl with the big smile and the wide eyes. Her moments would be colorful. They would be of different shapes and sizes, some falling fast and some falling slow, flipping and turning and dancing in the air, independent of the others. Sparkling, whirling, doing lazy summersaults as they sauntered down to Earth.

I thought of myself, and of the members of my family. I thought of those we'd lost. I realized what I hoped for them, and for us all, in the end... was to look upon that mosaic of experience, that avalanche of days and minutes and moments... and to smile with some of the joy we had as children.

And this, I thought, was something that gave me hope. This gave me a glimpse of some kind of salvation for them. This was also how I hoped my life might seem if I was a ghost - a cascade of color and light and shape and movement, something I could dance in.

So Nell smiled and said... "or confetti."

It stuck with me. The rest of her monologue gets heavy again, and gets to the real point of the show - the point of the whole series, if I'm honest - and that's forgiveness.

I figured the only thing that would let the Crain children out of the Red Room was to be forgiven. I thought of the losses in my own family, and I thought of what I wished for my mother and for my aunts and uncles and cousins and I tried to pour that into her final words.

"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she said, "that's all." And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn't matter. The rest is that rainstorm, or that blizzard, that fell around this one central truth, and maybe built itself in piles around it, to the point we lost sight of it along the way.

And I thought again of that little girl, and almost as an afterthought, wrote "The rest is confetti."

I liked the way it sounded, but I was insecure about the line. I almost took it out, in fact. I remember asking Kate to read the scene and talking about that last line with her. "Is it too cute?" I wondered. She was on the fence. "Depends on how it's acted," she said, and I figured she was right. We could always take it out if it didn't work. The scene could end with "I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all."

Why not shoot it and see what happened.

I turned in the script, we published it quickly so that we could start breaking it down and prepping it. And the next morning I was back on set. I'd deal with episode 10 when it came down the pipe again, sometime in the coming months. We had a lot of shooting to get through before I had to worry about it.

I recall Netflix asking me to cut a lot of that monologue, and I remember them also having questions about the "confetti" line. I pointed out that it didn't cost us any extra to shoot it all, it was only words, and fought to keep the script intact.

Ultimately, they insisted I make a series of cuts on the page. I begrudgingly agreed, but left Nell's speech alone. I made superficial cuts around it, throughout the draft, and even considered changing the font size to fool them into thinking it had gotten shorter (I ultimately was told I wouldn't fool anyone and not to risk starting a war). But Nellie's final goodbye stayed intact.

It must be said - Victoria Pedretti SLAUGHTERED this scene.

By the time we got around to filming it, things had never been worse for the production. There was almost nothing left for a lot of us. Tensions were sky-high, resources had been exhausted completely, and we were all ready to give up.

Filming in the mold-ridden Red Room was depressing, morose, and led to a lot of arguments and unpleasantness. The room itself just felt gross, always, and we were in there for days at a time. The last thing we had to shoot in there was Nellie's goodbye.

Victoria came to set having to push through pages of monologue, and she did so with captivating bravado. I recall being teary-eyed at the monitor watching her work. And when we finally made it to the last line, I watched her deliver it with... a smile. A sincere, innocent, longing, joyful smile. A smile informed by the sadness, grief, and loss of her own situation, of her own life... but a smile that finds forgiveness and grace after all. Pedretti knew how to say the line, and how that word would work.

And as she said it, I knew it would stay in the show.

Over the years, that sentence has become something of a tagline for The Haunting of Hill House. I'm always a bit mystified and touched when I see people approach me with the line on T-shirts, or even tattooed on their bodies.

I started signing it with autographs back in 2020 after enough fans asked me to. Now it's my go-to when I sign anything related to Hill House.

The line, for me, represents a lot of things.

It's about the insane, chaotic, non-linear experience of making that show. It's about trying to find and hold onto joy, even in the grips of despair.

It's about the way the moments of our lives aren't linear, not really, and how we may be unable to understand them as we exist in their flurry. It's about finding hope, innocence and forgiveness in the final reckoning.

And it's about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just... well, it's fleeting. It's colorful. It's overwhelming. It's blinding. It's dancing. And, if we look at it right, it's beautiful. But it's also light. It's tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it's as light as air.

The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

It's the love that stays.

[femmefatalevibe]

Femme Fatale Guide: Habits To Become Your Best Self In 2023

Some habits, routine ideas, and mindset shifts to help make 2023 your best year yet. Hope this helps and inspires you to reach your goals for the next 12 months. Remember to work hard and take care of yourself. Once you put your mind to it, the sky is the limit! xx

Make Your Meals Plant-Based & Produce-Focused: Center your meals around a variety of vegetables, fruits, plant proteins, potatoes, and unprocessed plant-based fats (avocado, nuts, seeds) and minimal whole grains.

Get Creative With Stress Eating Substitutions: Discover healthy swaps for your meals and snacks to ensure what you're eating without sacrificing your goals. Some simple substitutes include mixing in cauliflower rice into your whole grain rice to add nutrients/volume while slashing the calories, using half an avocado with lemon as a salad dressing over spoonfuls of olive oil, swapping meat for lentils in a chill, soups, or stir fry, choosing frozen grapes or whipped bananas with berries over candy or ice cream for a sweet treat, etc. Remember: Spices and seasoning are your best friends.

Be Mindful of Your Beverage Consumption: Consuming enough water is essential. However, if you get bored with water, add some herbal and black tea, black coffee, or fruit-filled water into the mix. Cinnamon, vanilla, and apple or peach teas are great options to satisfy cravings and prevent mindless snacking (not a substitute for food – eat if you're genuinely hungry). For the winter season, try using some pure cocoa powder with hot water, vanilla extract, and a tablespoon or two of plant-based milk for a healthy hot cocoa drink.

Prioritize Long Walks: Carve out 1-2 hours of your day to get 10-12K steps in at least 5 days a week. Go outside if possible or jump on a treadmill/walking pad to get in some movement while watching TV, talking on the phone, or catching up on some emails.

Find A Simple Resistance Workout You Love: Yoga, pilates, or an at-home weight-training or body-weight exercise you can do at home. Browse different YouTube videos for 10-30 minute workouts to try or sign up for a class in your local area to make it a more social experience (and force yourself to take accountability to show up in the first place).

Create Short & Long "Bookend" Routines: Create a simple routine for the beginning and end of the task-filled portion of your day. For most of us, these routines would be done in the morning and evening/at night before and after work, school, or doing chores/errands. Let go of the rigid idea that these routines need to be done at certain times of the day. Set yourself up to win and tailor them to your schedule. Consider these short routines (like drinking a cup of coffee/tea, reading, meditation, journaling, a walk, or a short dancing session) your warm-up and cool-down sessions of the day. Having these rituals to look forward to will give you the energy and motivation to do what you need to get done each day.

Practice This 10-10-10 Mindfulness Practice: Make time for at least 10 pages of reading, 10 minutes of meditation, and 10 minutes of journaling daily (This can include shadow work) either in the morning or nighttime to clear and reset your mindset for the day.

Take An Hour To Plan Out Your Week: It's most convenient to do this power hour on a weekend (I typically reserve an hour before dinner on Sunday for weekly planning). Write out all of your main work tasks, schedule any due date reminders (for work, bills, chores, and other life necessities), must-do errands, emails and calls or appointments to make, etc.). I like using the Productivity Planner from Intelligent Change and my Reminders app/Google calendar via iCloud to sync deadlines and times to schedule messages/tasks/bills, so everything will be in front of me at the correct time throughout the week.

Prioritize 1-3 Tasks Daily: You might need to choose one large project to work on in small chunks or select a "Big 3" for the day, depending on how complex, lengthy, and time-consuming your projects/errands or appointments are for the day. Using this method allows you to be efficient, streamline your life, and feel productive without overwhelming yourself on the regular (the fastest route to burnout).

Make A Life Admin Schedule (and Stick To It): Choose days (and times if possible) of the week to update certain spreadsheets, batch reply to less urgent messages, clean your house, do laundry, grocery shop, etc. Scheduling these tasks ahead of time eliminates half of the battle for following through on what you need to do. Eventually, you will make these tasks into habitual routines that your brain will allow you to execute effortlessly as though you're in autopilot mode.

Mind Your "Circle of Influence": Do an intake on the 5-10 people you speak to the most or value in your life. If you're an employee, it is probably best to not include your boss or coworkers in this consideration list, as you need to work amicably with them regardless of your personal feelings. Look how you feel during your interactions with your friends, family, intimate partner, or an adjacent love interest. Consider how they speak to you, about themselves, and the topics your conversations are focused around. See if they align with the person you want to be and your goals. Evaluate how close you want to be and what parts of your life you think would be the most beneficial for you and the relationship going into 2023.

Set Boundaries: Understand your expectations, non-negotiables, and limits in every area of your life. Communicate these principles to others clearly, so they know when they are overstepping. Don't tolerate disrespect, but also don't expect others to be mind-readers. If someone knows that they're crossing your boundaries, it is easy to draw the line in the sand and walk away without the guilt or shame that can arise when conflicts originate from a lack of healthy communication.

Incorporate One Creative Practice Into Your Week: Reinvigorate your mind by engaging in at least one hour of creative activity per week. Try drawing, creative writing, poetry, singing, dancing, painting, pottery, jewelry making, graphic design, photography, etc. Even taking a foreign language course or creating a Pinterest inspiration/mood board or organizing your home/closets in an aesthetically-pleasing way counts. Figure out what creative outlet(s) you find satisfying. Prioritize scheduling this practice into your schedule weekly.

Refine Your Signature Look: Edit your wardrobe, try out a new haircut, or change up your makeup routine, nail color, or signature scent. Consider how you can close any gaps between your authentic personal style and how you present yourself on a day-to-day basis. Create an inspiration board if needed to help yourself define your unique aesthetic and gradually work towards embodying your ideal look.

Keep A "Praise" Archive: Create a record of all of the messages you receive highlighting your achievements, milestones, recognitions, or compliments. Compile a folder that acts as your "praise" archive for every area of your life. Create a folder in your work email inbox to save all of your professional achievements, praise, and positive contributions. Do the same for your personal email. Create a folder in your photo album of screenshotted texts. Keep a running list on your "Notes" app of any compliments you receive on your conversational contributions, actions, attire, personality, smile, etc. Hyping yourself up to connect to your highest self.

Create A "Siren" Kit: Take note of all of the clothing, scents, songs, cosmetics, phrases, people, and other aspects of your environment that empower you to feel your sexiest. Keep all of these items/songs/texts together to make it simple to set the mood before engaging in some indulgent action or revisit when you need a boost of confidence throughout your week.

Do A Financial Audit: Create an income/expenses spreadsheet to understand your current spending behavior and budgeting plan going forward. Set up your 2023 financial goals and projections, including target amounts for income, savings, and investments.

Give Yourself A Weekly "Treat": Find a healthy indulgence that you can strategically incorporate into your week. This "treat" can be a massage or nail appointment, permission to watch a movie or a couple episodes of a TV show, a serving of your favorite dessert or a glass of wine, etc. Life is meant to be enjoyed. Consider regular indulgence as an act of self-care not as a sign of weakness or self-destruction. Embracing pleasure does not require guilt or external permission.

Happy New Year, loves! Cheers to an abundant 2023 xx

[thatwritergirlsblog]

10 worst ways to start a book

1. An irrelevant point of view

It's extremely frustrating as a reader to read the opening scene of a novel, get invested in the story and start rooting for the POV character, only to have that character never show up again or show up as an unimportant character.

Your readers will feel betrayed. Why did they get emotionally invested in this character? Why did they care?

One of the most important functions of your first scene or chapter is introducing your main character and getting the reader to root for them.

Don’t waste that crucial moment on an unimportant POV.

2. Too many characters

Starting to read a new book is usually a bit confusing. You have to get to know new characters, a new world, a new writing style etc.

Don’t add to that confusion by introducing two dozen characters in the opening scene. Readers won’t remember their names or care about them; they’ll just feel overwhelmed and confused.

Additionally, readers will also struggle to root for the main character, because there are too many other people crowding the scene.

3. Telling

My name is Lisa. I’m a short, feisty brunette who loves horse riding. I have two best friends called Anna and Daniel, and we carpool to college every day. I have a crush on Josh, one of my tutors, but he’s twenty-seven and isn’t interested in me.

Telling is boring. It has its place, but the start of your novel is not it. The above paragraph could have been an interesting scene in which you showed the reader all the information via action and dialogue.

Unless you’re using subversion to surprise the reader, e.g., My name is Lisa and I’m a class-three demon, don’t start with telling. 

Immerse the reader in the story through action, dialogue and the senses. Show us who the main character is, don’t just tell us.

4. Description

Please don’t start your book with a page-long description of the setting. In fact, I would recommend not starting with description at all. 

Yes, a few lines of description later in the opening scene is fine. But the reader needs to care first. 

No matter how beautiful your writing is, readers won’t be sucked in by a five-paragraph description of a field.

5. Worldbuilding info dump

Please don’t start your book with an explanation of your world’s climate, politics, history, magic system etc. 

Once again, the reader needs to care first. 

There needs to be action and conflict and a compelling plot. The world exists as a backdrop for the story and the characters – it’s not the protagonist and it shouldn’t take up the opening scene.

6. The dream sequence

The main reason that this is a bad way to start your book is that it’s been done way too many times.

But that’s not the only reason.

It also feels like a betrayal to the reader, because they got invested in the story and the character and the events, and then you tell them it was never real.

And oftentimes the storyline and world of the dream is much more interesting than the actual story, which makes the latter look very boring in comparison.

7. Looking in a mirror

Once again, it’s just been done too much: A character looking in a mirror and describing their physical appearance to the reader. 

Firstly, no one describes their appearance in detail when they look in the mirror.

Secondly, the reader doesn’t even know who this person is. We don’t know if we’re interested in the character yet. We don’t know why we should care. So, we don’t want a detailed description of the character’s appearance right off the bat.

Show us interesting aspects of your main character’s personality, hobbies and life. Weave in physical description as it becomes relevant. It’s not important enough for the very first paragraph.

8. Starting way too early

Yes, most books don’t start with the inciting incident (although I recommend that they do), but the start of your book shouldn’t be too far away from your inciting incident.

So, don’t start with a long scene describing the main character’s everyday life. The readers want the thing to happen.

Providing context and introducing the main character is fine, but don’t leave the reader hanging for too long before you get to the good stuff.

9. Trying too hard

“Your first line has to be amazing and hook the reader. It needs to be something no one has ever read before.”

I bet you’ve heard that piece of advice hundreds of times. It’s not bad advice, but taken to the extreme, it creates an opening that is disjointed, conflated and confusing.

Your first scene should introduce your character, story and voice. So, don’t write a single line of profound purple prose that has very little to do with your actual story as a first line.

Focus on writing a good story. Introduce the reader to the book and make the main character intriguing. You don’t need a mind-blowing first line.

10. The lesson

Most books have a theme or something the author wants to say. Oftentimes, that takes the form of a life lesson.

This is good, but the lesson needs to be subtly woven into the story.

It should not be forced down the reader’s throat in the very first scene.

Don’t tell me what I’m going to learn, show me the lesson through the story.

If you’d like to read a Fantasy Adventure novel that does not have any of these opening mistakes, check out my debut To Wear A Crown.

Reblog if you found this post useful. Comment with your own tips for writing a good opening scene. Follow for similar content.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Linkrot

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Here's an underrated cognitive virtue: "object permanence" – that is, remembering how you perceived something previously. As Riley Quinn often reminds us, the left is the ideology of object permanence – to be a leftist is to hate and mistrust the CIA even when they're tormenting Trump for a brief instant, or to remember that it was once possible for a working person to support their family with their wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong

The thing is, object permanence is hard. Life comes at you quickly. It's very hard to remember facts, and the order in which those facts arrived – it's even harder to remember how you felt about those facts in the moment.

This is where blogging comes in – for me, at least. Back in 1997, Scott Edelman – editor of Science Fiction Age – asked me to take over the back page of the magazine by writing up ten links of interest for the nascent web. I wrote that column until the spring of 2000, then, in early 2001, Mark Frauenfelder asked me to guest-edit Boing Boing, whereupon the tempo of my web-logging went daily. I kept that up on Boing Boing for more than 19 years, writing about 54,000 posts. In February, 2020, I started Pluralistic.net, my solo project, a kind of blog/newsletter, and in the four-plus years since, I've written about 1,200 editions containing between one and twelve posts each.

This gigantic corpus of everything I ever considered to be noteworthy is immensely valuable to me. The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come.

Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I've taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.

Then, the fact that all these fragments are also database entries – contained in the back-end of a WordPress installation that I can run complex queries on – comes into play, letting me swiftly and reliably confirm my memories of these long-gone phenomena. Inevitably, these queries turn up material that I've totally forgotten, and these make the result even richer, like adding homemade stock to a stew to bring out a rich and complicated flavor. Better still, many of these posts have been annotated by readers with supplemental materials or vigorous objections.

I call this all "The Memex Method" and it lets me write a lot (I wrote nine books during lockdown, as I used work to distract me from anxiety – something I stumbled into through a lifetime of chronic pain management):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Back in 2013, I started a new daily Boing Boing feature: "This Day In Blogging History," wherein I would look at the archive of posts for that day one, five and ten years previously:

https://boingboing.net/2013/06/24/this-day-in-blogging-history.html

With Pluralistic, I turned this into a daily newsletter feature, now stretching back to twenty, fifteen, ten, five and one year ago. Here's today's:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#retro

This is a tremendous adjunct to the Memex Method. It's a structured way to review everything I've ever thought about, in five-year increments, every single day. I liken this to working dough, where there's stuff at the edges getting dried out and crumbly, and so your fold it all back into the middle. All these old fragments naturally slip out of your thoughts and understanding, but you can revive their centrality by briefly paying attention to them for a few minutes every day.

This structured daily review is a wonderful way to maintain object permanence, reviewing your attitudes and beliefs over time. It's also a way to understand the long-forgotten origins of issues that are central to you today. Yesterday, I was reminded that I started thinking about automotive Right to Repair 15 years ago:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro

Given that we're still fighting over this, that's some important perspective, a reminder of the likely timescales involved in more recent issues where I feel like little progress is being made.

Remember when we all got pissed off because the mustache-twirling evil CEO of Warners, David Zaslav, was shredding highly anticipated TV shows and movies prior to their release to get a tax-credit? Turns out that we started getting angry about this stuff twenty years ago, when Michael Eisner did it to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911":

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/us/disney-is-blocking-distribution-of-film-that-criticizes-bush.html

It's not just object permanence: this daily spelunk through my old records is also a way to continuously and methodically sound the web for linkrot: when old links go bad. Over the past five years, I've noticed a very sharp increase in linkrot, and even worse, in the odious practice of spammers taking over my dead friends' former blogs and turning them into AI spam-farms:

https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-of-an-ai-clickbait-kingpin/

The good people at the Pew Research Center have just released a careful, quantitative study of linkrot that confirms – and exceeds – my worst suspicions about the decay of the web:

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it's 40%.

Thankfully, someone has plugged the web's memory-hole. Since 2001, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has allowed web users to see captures of web-pages, tracking their changes over time. I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.

The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder Brewster Kahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic – a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 – is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/19960501000000*/yahoo.com

Remember that the next time someone tells you that we must stamp out web-scraping for one reason or another. There are plenty of ugly ways to use scraping (looking at you, Clearview AI) that we should ban, but scraping itself is very good:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And so is the Internet Archive, which makes the legal threats it faces today all the more frightening. Lawsuits brought by the Big Five publishers and Big Three labels will, if successful, snuff out the Internet Archive altogether, and with it, the Wayback Machine – the only record we have of our ephemeral internet:

https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/internet-archive-stands-firm-on-library-digital-rights-in-final-brief-of-hachette-v-internet-archive-lawsuit/

Libraries burn. The Internet Archive may seem like a sturdy and eternal repository for our collective object permanence about the internet, but it is very fragile, and could disappear like that.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#pew-pew-pew

[theemissuniverse]

I’m not sure if you do nfsw but can you do nfsw headcanons for kitana if your comfortable!:)

KITANA NSFW HEADCANONS WITH FEM!READER

A/N : I want to also clarify I ONLY write with Fem!Reader as it is just easier for me to write. Please y’all don’t be mad at me. There’s plenty of mk pages that write gender neutral or Male!Reader. Also all my (Y/N)s are always unique, have personality and are interesting to the story or to the particular headcanon so please understand that

WARNINGS : MINORS DONT INTERACT. obvious smut but nothing major. Idk I don’t feel like typing all that

Kitana doesn’t mind being dominant but she is a brat and prefers to be submissive

She’ll never admit it but she prefers to make love to you than to be rough. Kitana just wants to feel close to you

Another thing Kitana will never say aloud is she does prefer receiving than giving. It’s not that she doesn’t like to/want to give. She genuinely believes she’s bad at it. It also helps that you’re good at what you’re doing

Kitana gets nervous but she likes eye contact whenever the two of you are having intimacy. She feels more connected when the two of you lock eyes

Kitana is in love with your breasts. She’ll usually get distracted when looking at them. You constantly have to gain her attention

7 times out of 10, you have to initiate intimacy. Kitana was nervous at first and still is some days. There’s just something about her asking for you in that way that seems desperate to her. But when Kitana is in a jealous mood or when she’s really needy, she’ll initiate

Kitana likes being the bottom. You dominate her well. She also just believes you’re better at it

Kitana also likes getting her ass slapped. She hates it when you do it in public though because she doesn’t want people to not take her seriously. She’ll always suppress a moan. You know this and do it on purpose

The princess doesn’t like anything too extreme. She’s not a fan of choking, being tied up, or any type of degradation at all. Kitana just wants to be loved when she’s that intimate with you

A thing that turns Kitana on is chivalry. You simply holding the door for her or grabbing a chair for her means a lot

[randombush3]

another snippet while I slave away lol

this one hurt a bit to write x

“My mums are lesbian!” he blurts out, excited enough to attract the attention of his teacher. When she appears, he grins at her sweetly; the kind of smile that has melted many hearts, though Nico is unaware of how many people know he exists. “More paper, please.” 

“Nico, you haven’t even tried with your first one.”

She isn’t harsh at all, but he has slowly learnt to stop asking follow-up questions. Six months of exasperated ‘I don’t know, Nicolau’s has taught him that. 

He shrugs. “Okay.”

He learnt what a shrug was the other day, when Mapi told him off for doing it to her. (“Don’t shrug your shoulders at me, Nicolau Putellas!” she had chided playfully. “All I asked was which of your mamas’ houses we need to go to.”)

“Nico, what’s ‘lesbian’?” 

“Mama says football is lesbian. Basketball might be lesbian! That’s why your sister is lesbian.” 

“My mum says that lesbians kiss girls.”

“Mama kisses girls! And Mami. And they used to kiss each other but now they don’t speak and me and my sister swap houses.” Nico begins drawing it out for Paula when she peers at him, befuddled. “Here is Mama’s.” A big square, a glamorous-looking woman inside of the blue shape; a stick with a circle on the end of it; the notes he sees in his piano music floating in the air. “And…” he says, tongue sticking out as he concentrates on the opposite half of the page, “here is Mami’s.” 

He draws a football. He picks up the red crayon too, and uses both the blau and the grana simultaneously. “Mami plays football for Barça.” He draws two lines on Alexia’s t-shirt. 11. “Mami made me get 11 at football.” Nico had originally worn the 10, but then the affair had come to light and Alexia was suddenly deep in conversation with his coach and apologising to the boy Nico then had to swap shirts with. 

Then, he drops the crayons in his hand and searches for the stack near Paula. He selects the purple one, gripping it tightly, his friend still listening to him with intrigue. 

“This is me and Lela.” Two stick figures are drawn in the middle of the page; the middle ground between each of the squares. 

Nico sometimes feels stuck between it all. 

When Mami got very sad, he and Elena went to stay with Mapi and Ingrid for a few nights. He held his little sister’s hand as much as he could. He always tries to remind her that he is right there with her. 

Mami once told him that it was his turn to protect Elena. Nico hasn’t forgotten that. 

“I keep Lela safe.” He has encouraged her, slightly selfishly, to call him ‘skipper’, which he has picked up from the Lionesses. Luckily, Alexia has not told him off for it because she doesn’t know what it means. “Lela is my little sister. She is a baby. She doesn’t remember what it was like when Mama and Mami loved each other, but I do.” 

The purple crayon scrapes on the page as he presses it into the white, colour rubbing out in the shape of a heart. “Lela and I are together. Mami tries to take me from her sometimes, but I don’t let her.” 

His story – and ability to make Paula pay attention for longer than ten seconds – has already garnered the quiet attention of his teacher, but she moves closer as Nico continues. The four-year-old leaves out how Alexia usually is inviting him to training with her. With Elena yet to show any interest in football, it remains her and Nico’s special thing, and, of course, she misses him when it is not her turn. 

You usually give your permission if you have no other plans. Alexia is upset that the only hindrance is the little boy who once worshipped her like a god. 

“Nico, why did you want two pages?” asks Paula curiously, assuming he is finished now that his whole family is displayed on the piece of paper. 

He frowns. “Because now I have to do this.” And with that, he tears the sheet in half. 

Paula’s mouth drops open in surprise, as does his teacher’s. 

“What’s wrong?” comes a mature voice, a hand placed on his shoulder just like it is when the other children in his class cry. Nico doesn’t cry. He is strong and brave, like a little soldier. “Did you not like your drawing?” 

“No,” he replies neutrally, “half can live with Mama, and half can live with Mami.” 

“But now you are ripped down the middle.” 

He traces the jagged edges of the halves of his life. One leg is on your side, the other on Alexia’s. 

“I know, but it’s okay. I don’t cry.”

[squoxle]

Golden Rule - L.HS ff ✧˚ ༘ ⋆｡

🎧 pairing: inexperienced!heeseung x badgirl!reader

🎧 summary: your cute and nerdy classmate lets you have your way with him in exchange for help on an assignment

🎧 cw: corruption and exhibitionism kink, oral (m. receiving), religious themes, mentions of bullying, college au, hee’s a bit subby

🎧 wc: 1.4k

You had been feeling horny for the entire week and knew you had to get your hands on some good dick or else you’d literally combust.

Introducing your person of interest: Lee Heeseung.

He was the type of guy you could guess everything about without even speaking to him. From his glasses, the way he tucked his ironed dress shirts into his belted pants, the way you only saw him either sitting with his legs crossed at a church sermon or studying his heart out at the library.

Heeseung was the epitome of a Christian nerd, but it was his insanely good looks that drew your attention to him in the first place.

You two first met at the beginning of the school semester, but you weren’t sure if you could call it a friendship just yet, especially not with the way you’d fantasize about him with your fingers between your legs every night.

It currently 6:00pm: the same time he’d come to the library to study every week day.

“What’re you working on,” you asked, taking a seat beside him at the table.

“Nothing much. Mr. Sweeney gave me this stupid hand written essay that I have to turn in by tomorrow, so I’ll be pretty busy for the next few hours.”

“What for? I thought Mr. Sweeney taught Bible. There aren’t any writing assignments for that class.”

That’s honestly the only reason why you took Bible class this semester.

“He does, but this isn’t a part of the curriculum. It’s a punishment for the prank I pulled on Jake and his crew yesterday… let’s just say, I didn’t get away with it as easily as planned.”

“Oh, so you do have a naughty side?”

“Hardly,” he sharply defended, “All I did was swap their video game discs out with episodes of The Brady Bunch on dvds. But, Sunghoon snitched, so now I’m here.”

“Tough.”

“I know. It’s not like I don’t deserve it, anyways.”

“Nobody deserves to be bullied, Hee. Those guys were assholes and you stood up for yourself! They’re the ones who should be playing Shakespeare for the night,” you argued passionately.

His eyes widened at your use of a swear word, such language that was forbidden by your university code of conduct.

“I appreciate you taking sides with me, but please don’t call it bullying. Makes me feel all… soft, and… vulnerable,” he cringed at his own words.

“You look pretty soft and vulnerable to me,” you mumbled, hungry eyes falling to his pouty lips.

“Excuse me?”

You cleared your throat, “Uhm, what’s the paper on?”

“The Golden Rule.”

Your eyebrows furrowed in confusion, “The what?”

“Loving your neighbors as yourself? You should really pay more attention during Mr. Sweeney’s sermons.”

You chuckled at his comment, nudging him on the shoulder, “Hey, maybe I would if he wasn’t so damn boring… How many pages does it have to be?”

He sighed, “10 at least.”

Having to come of with 10 pages worth of “Golden Rule” greatness sounded much more challenging than you knew it actually was.

All he had to do was write in VERY BIG LETTERS.

You peered over his shoulder, examining the paper. He was just getting started on page two.

“Hmm. We have similar handwriting,” you added, making Heeseung look at you with his desperate doe eyes.

“Oh my God, ____! You have to help me!”

“Watch out, church boy. The pastor might make it 11 pages if he hear’s you calling the Lords name in vain.”

“Ughhhh,” his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he groaned, “Can you please just help me out?”

“Uh-huh, and why would I do that?”

“Look, I’ll do anything! You’re a way stronger writer than I am, and my brain is in the verge of kermitting suicide!!”

He was right. Writing was never a strong subject of his, so he really did need your help.

“Fine,” you gave in, looking around the library before whispering in his ear, “If you can be quiet while I suck you off until you finish page two, I’ll do the rest.”

His eyes widened in disbelief, “What?”

“You heard me,” you said cattily, sneaking under the table and between his legs.

“____, get from down there!! This is inappropriate!”

“Says who,” you giggled, unbuckling his leather belt.

“We’re not a married couple, ____. Hell, We’re not even dating!” He whisper-yelled from above the table, fidgeting with the pencil in his hand.

You could feel how tense he was just my touching his thighs, “You’ve never been approached like this before, have you?” You asked yet stated.

He took a deep swallow, already feeling himself throbbing in his pants, “Of course not… I’m trying to save myself here, y’know?”

“Aww, that’s cute,” you pouted, rubbing his bulge through his boxers.

“F-fuhh,” he mumbled, screwing his eyes shut at the feeling, “I don’t know if I can do this, ____.”

“With God, all things are possible, Hee! You should really pay more attention during Mr. Sweeney’s sermons,” you mocked, shimmying his boxers down to his ankles.

You adjusted yourself under the table before grabbing a hold of his impressively large dick, starting with gentle pumps.

“I’m not hearing the pencil penciling, Hee. Be a good boy and keep writing,” you slithered in a sing-song voice, licking a stripe up his shaft. The foreign texture of your tongue sent pleasurable shivers down his spine.

“____,” he cried with a surpressed moan, “how am I supposed to focus when you’re down there doing that?!” He worried, looking around as if waiting for someone to catch you two.

You released your lips from his heat with a pop, “Down here doing what, Hee? Sucking your virgin dick in the library? I always knew you had a naughty side.”

“Mmm,” he moaned again, rutting his hips up into your mouth, “please tell me you’re almost done, ____.”

You grinned at the sound of his begging, feeling yourself grow wetter with each second you spent between his legs, “Depends on if you either finish that last page or cum in my mouth first.”

Taking him past your lips again, you bobbed your head up and down, stroking the remaining inches you couldn’t fit comfortably in your mouth.

He tried his best to keep writing, but with that way you were sucking him off, his hands couldn’t help but drop the pencil before getting lost in your hair.

“Fuck,” he whined, finally letting the word come out.

He started to use your head like a toy as you sucked him in even harder, “just like that, baby. Please don’t stop.”

You were surprised by how his body slowly submitted to you the more you pleasured him.

Meanwhile, he was surprised that this was actually even happening. You moaned with the gag that tried to escape your throat, clinging to his thighs as your tried to hold in your sounds.

Your eyes started to poke with tears as he used your head more aggressively than before, finally shooting his warm load down your mouth, panting as if he’d just ran a marathon.

“Shh, you’re so noisy,” you teased, stroking him to a point of overstimulation.

“Okay, that’s enough,” he whimpered, taking your hands in his to stop your ministrations.

You licked the cum that dripped from your mouth before pulling his pants back up, getting from under the table.

You fixed your hair with your hands after literally just getting your face fucked by your sweet classmate, taking in his hot and bothered frame.

“How was it?” You asked casually, sitting next to him as if nothing happened.

You tried to ignore the sticky moisture that stuck to your thighs from your own arousal, figuring that you’d think about this moment while you pleased yourself later.

“Amazing,” he said with a shaky breath, still feeling his orgasm fresh in his veins.

“I’m taking about the page you just wrote, silly,” you teased, moving the sheet of paper closer to you before examining what he came up with, “Dude!”

“What, dude?” He asked back with flushed and sleepy features.

“This is garbage!” You exclaimed, ripping the piece of paper in half.

“Yeah, I don’t know why you would’ve expected anything different.”

“Gimme that,” you retorted, snatching the pencil from his hand, “I’m gonna need some coffee to write all these pages for ya…”

“Ugh,” he groaned, understanding that you were indirectly asking him to get you something to drink.

“Iced?”

“Always.”

He got up from the seat, searching through his backpack before pulling out his wallet, “Thanks by the way,” he smiled, trailing to the library exit.

“What can I say? It’s the Golden Rule,” you replied, jotting down the first of many sentences you’d write for Lee Heeseung, the guy you just blessed with the best blow job of his life.

❀ Thank you all so much for reading! Make sure to check out other works on my masterlist!

❀ 𝚃𝚊𝚐𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚝:

@chlorinecake @hoyeonheeseung @sussyjake @furious-eagle @cherrriesss @abbyizzy @weyukinluv @addictedtohobi @thatonenoona @wavykook @givemeyourtmihyun @jaeljn @hoonmywk @valennshit @19-yunalyn @hoonbby @frostedblankets @hoonsyo @no-mannerism @perfectxserendipity @chubbibish @ihrtlix @bunniesforsoobin @thereadersparadise @thatbooknerdfr @aiden2001 @belongstoheeseung @jakeybabe @donut-crazs @rizzhee @nikimeows @woonieees @uarmyxtae @rebecca-johnson-28 @they2luv1naia @isa-2007 @silcry @riverscafe @pearlwhitesoul @nikohiroshi @thatbooknerdfr @wonniewonwon

[thewayitalknj]

Friday, I'm In Love?

Eddie Munson x Female Reader.

When random corny love notes start appearing in your locker, you're wondering who the hell Is taking time out of their day to think of you.

Quick Notes - Happy Valentine's Day! I got this idea while playing our Valentine's Day Playlist at work and thought I would write something. Super short but to the point, lol. Hope you enjoy!

Word Count - 849 (Told you it was short) Warnings - None! Enjoy :)

Monday That's when the first note fell out of your locker. When the small piece of paper fell onto the floor you were confused. You had all your notes, what could this possibly be? You opened it up and read the message ; Let's commit the perfect crime. You steal my heart and I'll steal yours.

"The actual fuck?" You laugh.

"Whacha got there?" Eddie snatches the note from your hand and reads it in the most dramatic voice you have ever heard, clearly used for DM'ing only. You close your locker and lean against it. "You have a secret admirer? That's adorable." You take the note back and stuff it in your bag.

"Beats me. Probably someone playing a stupid prank."

"Or someone's in love with you."

"I highly doubt that."

Tuesday ; They say true love hides behind every corner. I must be walking in circles.

"So, who do you think it's from?" Jonathan asks as you walk the track field for gym.

"No idea. I just find it odd. Why now? For fucking Valentine's Day?"

"Maybe they think it's the right time since it's a holiday about love."

"I still think it's a silly prank."

"Or someone is in love with you." He smiles.

"Well, I highly doubt it."

Wednesday ; Romance is the icing, but love is the cake.

"I like this one, it has to do with food." Robin snarks, holding all 3 notes in her hand.

"That's such a you comment to say."

"What are you guys talking about?" Nancy takes a seat next to you at the lunch table.

"Someone has been leaving me stupid notes with pick up lines in my locker everyday this week."

"And you don't know who it is yet?"

"Nope."

"You haven't recognized the hand writing?"

"See, this is why you're the smart one." Robin states.

"I never even thought of that, let me take a look." You examine the writing on the notes. "Yeah I got nothing. Who knows, it could be very obvious and I don't even see it."

"Or, someone is in love with you."

"Again, I highly doubt it."

Thursday You fling your locker open and there fell a note. ; If I were a cat, I would spend all nine of my lives with you.

"Okay, that's it. I'm done with these. Thank god tomorrow is Friday."

"You haven't figured it out yet?" Eddie asks.

"Nope, I haven't. Do you think I'm stupid?"

"No, of course not. But speaking of stupid," He pulls out his math binder. "Here are the math notes you needed."

"Thanks, I'll get them back to you tomorrow. I can't believe you actually paid attention."

"Well if I want to graduate I gotta do some work, ya know?"

Later that night you're doing homework in your bedroom and started organizing your math notes. Using Eddie's notes from earlier you flip over the page to continue note taking when you notice some scribbles at the bottom, definitely not pertaining to math. Let's commit the perfect crime. You steal my heart and I'll steal yours. ; They say true love hides behind every corner. I must be walking in circles. ; If you were a fruit you would be a fine apple ; Romance is the icing, but love is the cake. you're a 9 out of 10 and i'm the 1 you need ; well i'm here so what are your other two wishes? if you were a cat, I would spend all nine of my lives with you ; if you let me borrow a kiss I promise I'll give it right back to you.

A lightbulb goes off and you immediately reach for the love notes in the front pouch of your backpack.

"Holy shit." You whisper.

Friday The morning bell rings as you slip a note into Eddie's locker. ; Roses are red, Violets are blue. I found out who you are, and you must admit it to me too. Meet me at the picnic table after school.

The afternoon bell rings as you take off towards the woods to meet Eddie.

You sat on the table impatiently waiting, bouncing your leg up and down until a familiar face appears before you.

"What's this?" He asks waving the note in his hand.

"It's you."

"What do you mean it's me?"

You wave the four notes in front of him this time. "Didn't get one this morning. I beat you too it."

"That's not me."

"Stop lying Eddie."

"But it's not. Can you prove it?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"Your math notes." He looks at you confused, taking out his backpack and finding his notes. As you watch him flick through his eyes get wide.

"Holy shit." He whispers.

"Yeah I said the same thing."

"Look I'm sorry-"

"Why are you sorry? And why didn't you just say anything in the first place?"

"Because it wasn't suppose to end like this, and I didn't know how you would react. So I thought this would be a good way to ask you out. Maybe. Possibly."

You nod your head and look down to the ground.

"So?" He ponders.

"So what?" You look back up.

"Can I take you out on a date?"

You smile.

[charmedreincarnation]

Hey Maya, I got into the void using the method @gorgeouslypink and you talked about so thank you so much.

I had a gaming chair in my room with a reclining chair so I just used that for my method. I went to bed and like the method instructed I woke up 3.5 hours after falling asleep! I woke up and went to my chair which I angled to 130 degrees. Well idk how exact I was, but I tried my best lol. I went to bed after 15 minutes and i had so many weird experiences ranging from hypnagogic state awareness, three false awakenings, sleep paralysis, and lucid dreaming. All within around one hour it was very confusing but I took it as a good sign because I have never experienced any of those things. I just kept going back to bed expecting to wake up in the void and I did!!!!!!!! After one year or over consuming and victimizing myself, I’m leaving my dream life.

I manifested

✨master of the void state and I can get in by just saying I am void 3x. Plus shifting for the future. Harry Potter here I come

✨revising my age from 24-> 18 to relive the childhood I missed from toxic family, abuse, depression

✨revising my family in every aspect. We went from poor, toxic, classless, uneducated, fat ugly looking, conservative… to a respected, wealthy, gorgeous, socialite loving and educated family that is loved and known by the people in my state.

✨for myself I manifested being super gorgeous. (Void came clutch i look like a fucking model) being skinny and never gaining weight, having my desires hourglass body with big boobs and a perky butt, being extremely intelligent and innovative,being an influencer, beginning my acting career, making one million dollars a year, perfect college life at USC, having a wattpadd life, so many different hobbies like singing, playing multiple instruments, pottery, drawing, writing, and so much more. My list was 10 pages long.

✨dream sp, that’s like all my favorite actors, wattpadd men, and has all my dream traits. I am beyond bless. I’m every aspect of my relationship though no one loved it even talked to me two days ago. I was always the ugly duckling, the girl people made fun of, the fatty taking up to much space. Now I have everything because of the law. It feels normal, and I’ll finally start living my life.

I’m super proud of you. Have fun living your dream life, you deserve it, and thank you for sharing your experience 💕

[melrodrigo]

Tardy, part 8

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11

Tara Carpenter x Fem!Reader

Summary: An unexpected family member reveal sends you spiraling, will anyone trust you now?

Warnings: Angst that turns into fluff, mention of violence, mention of sex

Word Count 2.6k

A/N: I was dying writing this chapter (both physically and mentally) but I think the writers block is gone! Thank you for 600 followers!! As always, love u guys, and tell me what you think <33

“Mom, who’s my dad?” You asked absentmindedly, legs swinging from your living room couch.

“All the other kids at school know who their dad is, who’s mine?” You continued, blissfully unaware of the tension you had just created.

Your mom turned sharply, cigarette between her lips as she spoke.

“Oh, sweetie. Your dad’s gone. It’s just you and me now.” She said as she brought the lighter up and ignited the cigarette.

“What do you mean he’s gone?” You’d asked, eyebrows furrowed.

Your mom lets out a frustrated huff before she answers again.

“I don’t know, he’s just gone. Okay? He left town. Would you leave this topic alone now?” She sounded annoyed, and you don’t want to upset her any further, so you nodded quickly and turned your attention back to the TV screen.

“Okay, Ma.”

-

You flash back into another memory, this time you’re older; freshly graduated from high school, ready to move across the country to start university.

You’ve bid your farewells to friends and relatives, promising you’ll come visit every year.

Your mom’s pulling you aside looking at you weirdly. She’s getting old, you can tell by the increasing wrinkles on her face every day.

She smiles softly, and you think she looks like the sweetest grandma ever.

“Honey, I want you to know something. About your dad.”

You raise an eyebrow, mouth dropping slightly.

Your dad has always been a touchy subject for your mom, she’s never really allowed herself to tell you the full story.

Sure, as you’ve gotten older, you’ve learned bits and pieces. He was a dirtbag, leaving your mom right after she gave birth. You’d also learned that you were born in a small town called Woodsboro but had been whisked away almost immediately.

Your mom sighs now, and everything suddenly feels very heavy.

“I just tried so hard to be both parents for you, I know it wasn’t fair to keep this from you for so long. But if you’re ready to learn who your dad is, I’m ready to tell.” She says, voice cracking only the tiniest bit. You can see how strong she’s trying to be.

You suddenly see your whole childhood flash before your eyes. Your mom sending you off and picking you up every day after school. Making meals for the two of you every night, working overtime to support the family.

“No Ma. It’s okay. I already have a dad, and his name is you.” You say, pointing to her heart.

She opens her mouth but you cut in before she can say anything.

“No, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t need a dad when I have you.” You say, and you mean it wholeheartedly.

Your mother swells with happiness and takes you in a big hug. Wraps her arms around your shoulders.

“Be safe, honey.” She whispers into your ear.

-

You splutter, staring at the page in front of you with a jumble of letters that don’t look like coherent words anymore.

No…it couldn’t be?

There’s no way your dad was Stu Fucking Macher.

It doesn’t feel like you expected it would, finding out who your real father is. Years and years of endless crying; wondering why and why and why.

Every moment has led up to this.

This light, breakable paper in your palms. It’s telling you all you’ve ever wanted to hear, and yet somehow it’s also the thing you need to hear the least.

There’s quick flashes of déjà vu as you stare at the name.

Blood; lots of it. Splattered on the ceiling, all over your body. Screams, loud and clear as day, piercing through your eardrums and starting a ringing sound.

You snap back into reality as Sam steps up to you.

You brace yourself for the worse, you wouldn’t be mad if Sam kicked you out bare into the street right then and there, hell, she could hurt you and you wouldn’t even be mad.

She raises her hand but the impact never comes. Instead, she kneels down to you and holds your shoulders tight.

“It’s okay. I know it’s hard.” She says, soft. Her lips are pulled into a frown but her eyes are sorrowful.

“It’s- it’s okay?” Tara splutters, staring between you and her sister. Flabbergasted would be a minuet way to describe her expression.

“Yes. It’s okay. Can everyone leave the room for a minute? I want to talk to YN.” Sam says, and everyone heeds her orders; shuffling down through the living room hallway.

You stare at Sam, eyebrows knit tight together. She’s hated you since you the day you met, and now she’s the one protecting you?

“Why?” You ask, curiosity seeping through your voice.

“Everyone here has been through something.” She says, biting her lip. “And believe me, if anyone knows about being framed as the bad guy, it’s me.”

She hesitates a little before she opens her mouth again.

“Let’s not pretend that everyone here doesn’t have immensely traumatic things happen to them. Me and Tara…well we know about that. But Mindy and Anika and Chad? You wouldn’t believe the stories I’ve heard from them.” She says, twiddling with her thumbs.

“What if I’m actually the killer?” You press, gauging Sam’s reaction.

She tuts and answers sharply.

“I don’t believe for a second that you are.”

It takes you aback, her being so sure about it. You stay quiet, try to think of anything to say.

You can’t, it’s all too much information to get.

“How can you know that?” You say finally, tilting your head up to make eye contact with Sam.

She pats your back lightly. “You’re a good person YN. We can all tell.”

“We’re a family. One fucked up family, but family all the same. Including you.” She says, voice sure.

You hold eye contact for a while, a silent conversation being spoken. Setting aside all your differences, Sam was actually a really cool person. And you can tell she feels the same way.

Before you know it she’s out down the same hallway the group left in.

You’re sat on the couch, mouth open and eyes glazed.

Huh.

“YN? Mind if I come in?” Tara’s voice sounds from in front of you. You can’t decipher what the tone is.

“Yeah…yeah of course.” You answer, watching as Tara enters and stands before you.

You can’t handle her intense stare, and you drop your head immediately. Anxiety floods you, heart picking up speed.

You don’t notice her until she’s right in front of you, taking your cheeks in her hands. Stroking, softly.

10 minutes ago she was mad, and now she’s comforting you? This girl and her mixed signals.

“I believe you.” She murmurs, leaning down to press her lips on your cheek. She’s so short that even when you’re sitting down you’re almost the same height.

You don’t want to think about any of this now, you don’t want to think about it ever. You want to tell Tara this, but you can’t bring yourself to speak.

Your throat feels dry, eyes slightly teary.

“So what do we do now?” You whisper.

She continues stroking your face fondly, cradles you in her arms.

“We continue with the plan.” She says, and there’s a sense of finality in it that makes you shiver.

-

They’ve pushed back the date on their plan to capture Ghostface a little bit. Tara won’t admit it, but you know she’s the one who suggested it. She must think you need time to process the sudden father reveal, no doubt.

It’s sweet, but she’s wrong. In fact, right now all you need is a distraction. Something to take your mind off all the racing thoughts through your head, the sense of betrayal you feel.

Maybe I should call my mom.

“Hey. Whatcha thinking bout?” A voice sounds from behind you. It’s Anika, and you send her a soft smile; feeling weirdly glad to be in her company.

“Oh nothing much. Just about how my dad was one of the original Ghostfaces and that we’re literally running straight into danger in a few days.” You say, trying to make your voice sound light and teasing.

Anika seems to pick up on the underlying message, and you hear her sigh a little before speaking.

She rounds the couch to come sit down beside you, a pack of medical supplies in her arms. She splays it across the table and turns back to face you.

“If it makes you feel any better, I know what it’s like to have a rough family. My parents were…dipshits to say the least.” She says, casually.

Oh.

You try and think of something appropriate to say in response, but your brain seizes up and it goes blank.

“But you don’t have to feel bad for me. I have a new family now.” She continues, smiling at you; genuine crinkles at the tips of her eyes. She pats your back lightly.

“Just so you know, I don’t think you’re the killer. Who cares if your dad is Ghostface? It’s not like this is the first time it’s happened in our friend group. I trust you, really.”

It’s enough to make you teary-eyed again. You look away, hoping she can’t see them.

“Thank you.” You mumble. “That means a lot to me.”

She chuckles warmly before taking you in a hug. You guys don’t say anything the rest of the time she fixes up your wound.

-

“Are you blushing?” Tara asks immediately when Anika leaves the room, footsteps light.

“What? No, I’m not.” You say, running a hand through your hair.

“Did she make you blush?” She’s asking, a teasing smile on her lips.

You frown.

“She just said some very nice things to me, okay?” You huff, cross your arms like a child.

“Aw, baby. You look adorable.” She murmurs, giving you a peck on the lips.

“Are you not jealous?” You ask, cocking an eyebrow at her.

She brings a finger to her lips and feigns thoughtfulness. Then she smiles wide and takes your lips in a searing kiss.

“No.” She mumbles against them. “Because I know you’re mine. And I can definitely make you do a lot more than blush.”

It’s enough to make you flush completely red. You let out a little whine at her words.

“See?” She’s asking as she leans back, a smirk on her lips. You try and wipe it off by wrapping your arms around her neck and pulling her in for another kiss.

She’s not wrong. But you’re not going to admit that. It’s a fatal flaw, really. How easily you relent when it comes to Tara. You’d die for her, you’d kill for her, and she knows it.

“Come on,” She’s whispering. “Let’s go to my room.”

You pull back, amused.

“I don’t think I can even stand and you’re asking me to do what?” You ask pointedly.

She tugs on your shirt, obviously not in the mood to play one of your games right now.

“Then maybe I’ll just take you right here.” She whispers into your ear, laughing as you shiver beneath her.

You gulp, stare at her with big eyes. She crawls forward, leaning her elbows into your sides on instinct.

You can’t help but wince.

It seems to break Tara out of her lustful haze, because now she’s looking at you with worried eyes.

She’s getting up kind of panicky, fiddling with her hands.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. I should let you sleep.” She says, sort of fast, words tumbling out of her.

You smile at her, grip her hands tight.

“It’s okay, Tara. Although, I do want to hit the hay for a while. Care to join me?” You invite, tugging her closer slightly to make sure she doesn’t leave.

She grins shyly and nods.

“Okay.” She says, biting the inside of her cheek. She’s the cutest with the excitement that radiates off her.

-

When you wake, Tara’s not in your arms anymore. You stir, rubbing your eyes aggressively.

“Tara?” You groan, trying to look around the weirdly dim room for any sign of your girlfriend.

You notice the candles immediately, more than a dozen of them lining the table and making a little pathway to the fireplace.

Your girlfriend appears in front of you now, wearing a little white sundress; one you’d specifically bought for her weeks ago.

She looks so good, you almost start drooling. Like an angel, the way she’s standing and staring at you, playful, excited gaze.

“I was wondering when you were going to wake up.” She grins, bending down to press a kiss to your cheek.

“What is all this?” You question, looking around the room in further inspection.

There are two plates set up quite nicely on the dining table, along with a bottle of champagne and a single flower in the middle.

It’s all so, romantic.

Tara twirls, and gives you a little show of her dress. Then she takes your hand and gently helps you up, leading you to the dining room with her.

“I never got to take you on a date. I think it’s time I return the favor.” She says, nodding along to her sentence; like a reassurance.

“You’re adorable.“ You say, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and pulling her close. She blushes a little.

“Thank you.” She mumbles.

The smell as you enter the dining room is mouth-watering. You recognize it immediately. It’s your favorite pasta, ravioli with white wine and tomatoes.

Tara’s an amazing cook, you know this already. But the flavors that explode in your mouth when you take a bite out of it are otherworldly.

“This is the best thing you’ve ever cooked.” You speak through stuffed cheeks, eyes wide and happy.

Tara picks up a piece of her own and eats it.

“I didn’t know what to make you, so I called your mom. She said this was your favorite, so I went on youtube and tried to replicate the recipe.” She says, somewhat shyly.

You beam.

“You called my mom?” You ask, teasingly. Boop her on the nose. You celebrate internally when you see her flush red.

“Yeah, it was no biggie. Just a phone call.” She disregards, biting her bottom lip to try and stop the color that’s overtaking her whole face.

She reaches forward to grab another piece of ravioli before she stops short and gasps.

“Oh! I almost forgot to give you these.” Tara says, reaching behind her chair for something. She pulls out a huge bouquet of flowers, filled with your favorites.

You don’t try and hide the surprise in your face, mouth open and gaping.

She slaps your arm lightly at your reaction.

“Hey! I can be romantic too you know.”

You nod sarcastically.

“Oh yeah no doubt no doubt.” You say, taking the bouquet from her hands in favor of bending over the table and kissing her.

“Thank you, baby.” You say against her lips. She smiles wide, scrunching her nose as she pulls back.

“You taste like pasta!” She’s giggling, pushing you back into your chair.

You finish the dinner in record time, and that’s due entirely to how good the meal was. You and Tara sit and talk for a little while before moving to the floor to watch a movie.

Tara’s annoyingly secretive about it, not letting you see whatever she’s setting up. You huff and go grab snacks from the fridge instead.

When you get back it’s to the TV covered, and there’s a small projector at the side shining light on a random bed sheet she’s hung vertically.

“Impressive speed.” You praise.

Tara’s sitting smugly, arms open and inviting you to come sit.

It’s playing 10 Things I Hate About You, one of your all-time favorite movies. You settle down into the spot next to her and sneak a glance over, but she’s already staring at you; hard.

You let out a breath of happiness and pull her closer by the waist. Kiss her on the forehead, murmur against her skin.

“Thank you for this. I needed it.”

She nods into you and pulls you impossibly closer.

“Of course.” She says.

You decide Ghostface can wait, your dad can wait. All that matters right now is Tara. Her and this movie and you.

The only three things that exist in the world.

[maleyanderecafe]

not sure if anyone has recomended monster x mediator yet but its such a fun game despite being quite short. the game is supposed to have mutiple routes eventually (which I'm not sure are supposed to be yanderes) but the one it has rn is complete and definitly fits the yandere vibes. If u like things that mix horror with humor and have a funnily pathetic but still terrifing yandere this one is a trip. Also the fact that the guy is a monster that looks like a madness combat character adds to the charm of it in my opinion lol

I'll be honest, I was a little skeptical about this game, but I saw how pathetic he is and now I'm very much on board. This game is supposed to have four different routes, but currently only has one for now. The comedy and horror is well balanced in the game itself. If you want to try out the demo, you can play it here.

The story starts out with the MC taking on a job for a large sum of money. They are currently in debt and need money quick. After receiving the first half of the money, they are directed to go to some abandoned building to get the other half. After receiving it, they are then told their task to go inside of the building. If the MC tries to run away, they will be shot on the spot. If they accept, they will be faced with a couple of doors. Their boss will then tell them that there are monsters that behind each door, and that the MC's job is to get all of them out of the room without dying.

Going into the red door, the MC is pretty much immediately knocked out before waking up and finding a large monster hovering over them and thousands of things pasted up in the walls. You can successfully get him out of the room in three different ways but can also be killed a couple of other ways as well. The first thing he does is declare himself as the MC's biggest fan, getting so excited that he grips his axe menacingly. If the MC gets him too excited, they will end up killing the MC. The monster (later revealed as 404), talks about how much he loves the MC's fanfiction blog and how he was really sad and depressed when the MC blocked him and even sadder when they stopped writing all together. 404 also reveals that he is such a big fan that he also knows all of the MC's passwords and even their bank account, with all of the fanfiction that they written pasted on the wall. 404 then asks if they want to see where he kills everyone and if they can write a fanfic for him.

If the MC is curious about where all the dead bodies are, 404 will bring them into another room to show them. We learn a lot about 404: he doesn't know what kind of monster he is, doesn't really need to eat, loves to kill with his axe and seems to have regenerative abilities considering he was shot in the head and was completely fine the next day. The MC can have two ways to get him out of the room, both of which are hilarious. The first way is to literally beg 404 to leave by pleading desperately (do you know that let me rizz you up meme? That's what you do) until 404 gets tired and does it for his super star. The other way is to seduce (?) 404 by telling him that it would be sexy of him to leave the room, which works well. We also learn about the facility itself, that 404 has been living there since as far as he remembers, that he loves killing the various people that come in, doesn't like the MC's boss (finds them annoying through the walkie talkie) and pretty much only kills and reading the MC's blog.

If the MC decides to oblige 404 with his obsession, they will start to write on a typewriter as 404 stands behind them excitedly. He keeps on asking the MC to add more and more things, making it 100 pages instead of 10, making the story a romance, making it a romance between him and the MC (noting that "the name Nick is the same as his username", which is a huge stretch).

If the MC refuses to write 100 pages, 404 will end up getting extremely angry and hold the MC by the throat, calling them and humans "bitches". He will start to kill the MC, crying and feeling despair as he kills the MC by choking them to death.

If the MC does oblige, they will write the most god awful fanfiction (their words) and end up pretty much just holding the a key until it fills all 100 pages. 404 ends up crying out of happiness at such a beautiful gift and leaves the room, just as the MC wanted.

First of all, I think that the game does a good job of balancing the horror elements with the comedy. I did not expect to like 404 this much and definitely did not expect his personality to be like this. I did feel it was interesting that 404 believes that the MC's writing would "fix him" and even laments that even though he knows it wouldn't, he still wanted to try when he was killing the MC in a choke hold. He basically is a very feral online fan who meets their super idol (which gives me a bit of incel vibes), but not enough to be extremely obvious, much more than other yanderes, with him saying like he's a gentleman, or that he isn't angry at all despite the fact that he got blocked. I also love the various ways that you can get him out of the room, and just how obsessed he is with the MC. He seems to mostly be an obsessive yandere, with him pasting the fanfic of the MC's work all over his walls, delusionally believing that he is the same character that the MC writes, confessing his feelings to the MC while they're writing, not killing the MC (since apparently he's killed every other person that came in) and wanting the MC's writings to fix him. He is also a pretty pathetic type of yandere, hoping desperately that the MC (and their writings) would fix them, crying when he does kill the MC and generally seeing himself in their writing, but also rather dangerous just due to his violent nature. It's fun to see dangerous but pathetic yanderes since I feel like that's something that I haven't seen to much.

I am curious about how the other monsters will be like. It seems that as of writing this, the Knight Monster is currently delayed, so I guess we'll see if he ends up being a yandere too. I would recommend this game just on it's humor and interesting kind of intrigue about why these monsters are in the buildings themselves. He does look like a madness combat characters, you're right.

[the-girl-wh0-cries-w0lf]

Don't Touch Her - James Wilson x peds!reader

description: y/n will challenge whatever threat there is to her children, at any consequence to herself. James will always be there to pick up the pieces.

word count: 2.1k

warnings: sexual assault, child sexual assault, mentions of rape, yelling, angst

authors note: I've realised I'm great at writing angst!

Masterlist

REQUESTS OPEN - request here

House’s pov

I stared at the test in front of me.

Everybody lies.

I held the DNA test in my hand, and I could feel it burn through my skin as I limped my way down to the office of my ‘sister-in-law’.

Knock knock.

“Is that Mrs Wilson in there? I can hear you caring.” I shouted through the wood in hopes of gaining access. The door was flung open. I was met by sunshine itself.

“Mrs Wilson? I thought that was you?” She jabbed. “What can I do for you, House?”

Her face was the picture of innocence, and the smile never left her face despite the witty comment. I worried about her reaction. Usually, I relished in the extent of human outbursts, wondering how far I could push them so long as the consequences never fell on me. But this didn’t feel right. This wasn’t going to be fun. I only prayed I could get to Wilson fast enough before these consequences ricocheted back on to her.

She widened her eyes in a silent question of why I was here. Her eyes flitted down to the piece of paper in my hand.

“Well come on, what medical supervillain are you going to brag about curing to me now?”

“Actually, this isn’t my patient. It’s yours.”

She scoffed at my ambiguity and proceeded to take the paper from my hands.

“What is that supposed to mean?” She giggled at the joke she assumed I was trying to make. But my face revealed the truth. When she received no further taunt or clever wordplay her smile dropped. Without much further thought she practically tore the paper trying to unfold it. Her eyes danced across the words on the page and each word took a little bit more life from her face each time.

In a flash she had exited her doorframe and had unceremoniously crashed into my shoulder. I couldn’t even bring myself to mock her for ‘injuring a cripple’ because as I watched her frame run further down the hospital hallway I had more important things on my mind. Primarily, protecting her from herself. And there was only one person I needed for that.

I limped down a few more doors and finally barged into the one office I needed. Wilson turned away from the new photo he was hanging on his wall. It was him and y/n at the beach.

“Please, come in. Have a seat. Thank you for knocking.” He mocked but I remained unmoved. “You’re not taunting back?” His brows furrowed at the abnormality. “Why are you here?”

I looked to my feet, suddenly afraid of my friend’s reaction.

“Your girlfriend is about to do something incredibly brave and incredibly stupid.”

Wilson carefully removed the nail and placed the picture neatly back on his desk. His eyes never met mine until he said.

“Where is she?”

Your pov

Flames burned my soul, and my heart was filled with anguish. I flew down the hallway. People jumped out of the way when they saw my sunny disposition replaced by hard stone. Normally, I didn’t like feeling like an imposition in the hospital. I would run towards a patients room when they’re seizing whilst simultaneously apologising to anyone who moved out of the way for me. Yet here I was, a torpedo through a sea of colleagues.

I made it. Room 309. The doors creaked at the weight of my push. A mother and father sit at their daughters bedside. 10 years old, in for a heart attack. The two parents turned towards me as their daughter remained peaceful and sedated. I was thankful, as the words that were about to spew out of my mouth were not for young ears. I held up the paper and presented it in front of them like a detective who just cracked the case.

“Three days ago, your daughter was brought in for a heart attack. Because of her extremely young age I decided to keep her in for observation so I could come up with a diagnosis for a myocardial infarction in a 10-year-old girl. I was coming up blank and eventually I was going to have to release her back into your care, but I was terrified. Terrified that if I let you go, I’d be dooming your daughter to a disease I missed. That was until today when I found out that your daughters heart attack was brought on by a short but severe onslaught of emotional distress.” At this point the two parents had closed in on me, eager to hear my findings. At this the mother became confused and sought answers amongst her tears. The father remained quiet.

“Emotional distress-I don’t—I don’t understand? Nothing happened before. We would---I would’ve known?”

I opened my mouth to speak but it just wouldn’t come out as my eyes fell on the little girls sleeping form. My eyes drew in and I decided to merely hand the mother the results which I had been given moments ago. She took them from me with shaky hands. I turned to face the man to the side of me.

“The police are on their way.” A loud shriek exploded from Mrs Hart as the words on the page resonated in her already fragile mind. I stared him down. “I don’t suggest running.”

I made my way to exit the room, preparing to actually call the police but also because, as selfish as it was, I couldn’t be subjected to that level of despair any longer. The screams of a mother learning about her child’s pain were enough. However, I was harshly ripped away from the door.

“What the fuck do you mean by that.” Mr Hart had my arm in an iron grip.

“I think you know. And now, so does your wife.” I tried to pry myself free, but he was too strong, and I was thrown up against the wall.

“What are you insinuating!”

“She had vaginal tearing, and her 10-year-old uterus was filled with semen. Semen that was just confirmed as having your DNA from a test which your wife is now holding the results of. Along with a comprehensive list of the injuries you subjected your daughter’s body to.”

I gained new strength and shoved the significantly taller male away from my body.

“My professional opinion is that when you crept into your daughters room that night and started subjecting her to your own examinations, the extreme emotional distress caused her body to shut down and brought on a heart attack. At least we now have the cure, no more playtime with daddy.”

“YOU BITCH!”

He lunged for my throat but not before I fled the room. I should have ran; found James or House or anyone. That would have been the smart thing to do. But I just couldn’t. This man disgusted me, and he needed to feel it. I needed to say it. The police would deal with him later, but I needed to get a few shots in first. I turned back to face him.

“That little girl in there, she depends on you because she has no one else. She trusts you to take care of her and you treat her like that. Every day I take in children, and I work to save them and I work to protect them. Every day I do my job as best as I can only for there to be people like you who take the innocence of a child and control it for their own perverted needs.”

Now he was fuming, and he stalked towards me. A lion to its prey. My resolve began to crumble, my bravery slowly lacking. He towered over my body, and I suddenly felt the fear that his little girl felt every night when daddy came in to her room. His face was confident, but his body held an anger.

“You’re lying.” His face was now inches away from mine. His hot breath washed over my face, and I began to shrink into my body.

“I have the proof. I have medical proof.” I whispered, my eyes struggling to hold his firm gaze

“Papers can go missing. It happens.” As he spoke his tainted fingers found a new resting point in my hair as they slowly began to stroke through my locks. I shuddered at the action that I ordinarily found so much comfort in. I remembered the nights where I would lie on James’ chest as he ran his fingers through my hair. The memory couldn’t save me from the situation I currently found myself in. As I went to speak I could feel the words crawling back in my throat. ‘Don’t antagonise. Play along. Wait for someone. He’s stronger. He’s bigger.’ But these inner thoughts were overshadowed and my mind replayed the first moment that little girl walked into my care.

“Enjoy your last moments of freedom.”

“I’m not going to prison.” He smirked at this, concocting a plan of escape. I had to say it.

“Really? I hear it’s so much fun for kiddy touchers.” In my peripheral I saw his hands fly up to grip my neck. I gasped. But before I could even feel his icy touch around my throat, he was ripped away from me and his back hit the floor in a matter of seconds.

“Don’t ever touch her.” James stood over his body. Just looking at him I felt my racing heart slow. He wasn’t wearing his lab coat, only his shirt and tie with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He panted from the long run from his office. Once he composed himself his professional nature returned.

“Officers, please escort Mr Hart off the premises. I believe Dr Y/l/n and Dr House have the medical proof of the sexual assault of a minor along with the DNA evidence to prove Mr Harts involvement.” The two police officers, who had obviously been called, but not by me, held Mr Hart by his arms as they hoisted him up off the floor. They secured the handcuffs around his wrist whilst reading him his Miranda Rights. “Whilst you’re there you can also add the physical assault of Dr y/l/n to his list of accusations.”

As he spoke, James approached me. At this point, I realised I hadn’t moved since the confrontation. James noticed my thousand-yard stare and approached me like how one would handle a skittish horse. He carefully rolled up the sleeves of my lab coat and he saw the beginnings of a bruise where his hands had gripped me.

I uttered a less than believable, “I’m fine.” Despite the lump in my throat.

His arms eventually wrapped around me, and I sunk into his embrace. He placed a gentle kiss onto my hair. I allowed myself to sink into him more. My head rested on his heart and the gentle thud offered me a consistent beat to focus on.

“How did you know?” My once strong voice came out as a whimper. He only needed to utter the word.

“House.” I felt a warmth spread through my heart at that. He knew. Somehow, he’d known. And James had known. And he knew how to take care of me.

“I don’t need you to defend me.” I spoke, uncertainly, into his chest.

“I know.” James softly said as he stroked my hair and brushed his thumb against the exposed skin of my waist.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He punctuated his sentence with the lightest kiss to my lips. As he retreated, I leaned in to seek him out again and he answered with another, deeper kiss.

We stayed there for a while. Neither of us speaking but our breaths saying everything for us. In that moment, despite what my words said, I had needed him and now, more than ever, I needed him to save me from myself. From the spiralling thoughts that flooded my head ready to push me down further and further. Eventually we separated but our intertwined hands meant I could still make sure he was there, and he wasn’t going to leave. He led me down the corridor, in the direction of his office rather than mine.

“What did you tell the police, when you called them? I was so blinded; I couldn’t even think about following procedure.”

“I didn’t call them. House did. Seconds after he got the results.”

We made it to his office where I remained for the rest of the day. James explained what happened to Cuddy and she allowed me the rest of the day off. James offered to drive me home but, honestly, there was nowhere I wanted to be, nowhere I felt safer than in his arms. So, he sighed and pushed out his chair in a silent allowance. I curled up on his lap as he sat and filled out forms. His left hand wrote as his right gently ran up and down my thighs. We didn’t need to speak; we were just there.

---

[stealthetrees]

Okay I’ve snapped.

If you say Percy Jackson is stupid I will find you and make sure you regret it.

I have inattentive type ADHD. I was diagnosed in 4th grade and got put on medication. I did not think there was a difference but I got an award from the school for how much I improved. They didn’t know it was because of meds.

Before I was diagnosed I remember being on the verge of tears often at school because I got so frustrated that I couldn’t do work. I sat at my desk with the pencil in my hand staring at a worksheet physically unable to write the awnser I knew. I would stare at the question and like an optical illusion the rest of the page blurs together and I can’t even make out word anymore.

I thought I was dyslexic for the longest time because some fonts are so difficult for me to read. I could look at a recit, know it says lettuce, and it will not process in my brain. Unless I am a few hours away from a deadline it is nearly impossible to start assignments. Essays are hell.

You know those songs that have an American accent but are completely nonsense? That’s what it sounds like a lot when I listen to people talk. Usally I can grasp the general meaning but I can not tell you what word you just said.

Time is not real. I sit down, scroll through tumblr for maybe 15 minutes and my roommate asks why I’m sitting doing nothing for 4 hours straight. Full days disappear and I can’t remember anything that happened. I have no idea how long it takes me to do something I do almost every day.

I went two weeks at the beginning of the semester with meds that where 10 milligrams lower than my usual dosage. My grades still haven’t recovered.

THAT SAID. In cannon, Percy Jackson passed 13 years of school with high enough grades to be accepted to a university. Not medicated. Without accommodations.

So either the education system in New York is taylored specifically for people with ADHD, or Percy Jackson is a fucking geinios. I can’t spell.

So ignoring the fact that nearly every fight he won by outsmarting his opponent, let me tell you why.

In the books, he’s an introvert, sits in the back, tries to keep his head down but usually fails, gets detention often, and has been expelled multiple times. That’s not the kind of kid teachers go out of their way to help. He’s also unlikely to ask for help. So, despite his struggles in the classroom, he has never been held back or had to redo a grade as far as we know. And it’s pretty likely considering his age.

Add in the fact that he would be constantly sleep deprived from staying up very late (like from 10-3, based off my experience) and his dyslexia, Percy would need to be really good at retaining information after hearing or seeing it only once. That’s actually supported by his ability to memorize prophecies word for word after only hearing them once. We know Percy is bad at taking tests, so he would have to be really good at recalling information.

He also did it all unmedicated. I want to cry just thinking about it.

tldr, the fact that Percy’s grades where high enough to get into college means hes fucking brilliant

[capricorn-season]

10 JUNE 2020

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues

This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.

If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.

But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).

So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018,  American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’

The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people.  The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much.  It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity.  I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

[cuubism]

@magnusbae challenged me to write smut using professional email language, and i'm nothing if not a slut for abusing corporate jargon!

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>> Saturday, March 26, 8:32pm – Morpheus <morpheus @ dreaming.com> to Office (All):

Subject: TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

I do not appreciate tardiness. Cease your dallying at once come Monday morning. Or there shall be consequences.

>> Saturday, March 26, 8:41pm – Hob <robert @ dreaming.com> to Morpheus:

RE: TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Morpheus, mate, all due respect, what with your being the sole god, ruler, and iron-fisted authoritarian of the place, but do you have nothing at all better to do than send work emails on a Saturday night?

And before you say, "but Hob, you yourself are replying to emails this Saturday," you are so right! I’m currently drinking alone :)

>> 8:42pm – Morpheus to Hob

I should fire you for such insolence.

>> 8:47pm – Hob to Morpheus

Do it then :)

Alternative proposal: we commit several HR violations like we did in the office on Thursday.

>> 8:50pm – Morpheus to Hob

All proposals must be submitted to me in writing.

>> 8:52pm – Hob to Morpheus

You really want a paper trail?

>> 8:56pm – Morpheus to Hob

It has an email trail already, does it not?

>> 9:05pm – Hob to Morpheus

Please find attached my detailed proposal.

attachment: :)_version_1.docx

>> 9:07pm – Morpheus to Hob

This is twelve pages that only say, “I want to suck your dick.”

>> 9:09pm – Hob to Morpheus

What, have you got edits or something?

Do you need more time to review? Wanna circle back on it later? Block some time on my calendar to go over it? ;)

>> 9:15pm – Morpheus to Hob

My redline is attached.

attachment: :)_version_2.docx

>> 9:17pm – Hob to Morpheus

I’m amenable to those changes.

But on second pass I think we can accomplish more in this partnership. I think I’d like to take you apart slowly, have you begging. You’re always demanding, I think it might be good for you to beg for once. It’s not good business to agree without a little negotiation. I wanna see you beg for my cock.

What are your thoughts on this addition?

>> 9:40pm – Hob to Morpheus

Hi Morpheus, I hope this finds you well. Just following up on this question :)

>> 9:50pm – Morpheus to Hob

Perhaps I am considering.

You may wish to consider that I am your boss.

>> 9:53pm – Hob to Morpheus

I think there’s been a miscommunication. You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that I give a fuck about that.

>> 9:54pm – Morpheus to Hob

I truly should fire you.

>> 9:55pm – Hob to Morpheus

Don’t you think you deserve to cum first?

>> 9:56pm – Morpheus to Hob

After I beg for it, you mean?

>> 9:57pm – Hob to Morpheus

Now you’re getting it.

If I correctly guess that you’re in your bed, that you’ve BEEN in your bed while you’re “considering,” do I get a gold star? Employee of the month?

>> 10:00pm – Morpheus to Hob

There is no possible universe where you win such an award.

However, your supposition may be correct.

>> 10:02pm – Hob to Morpheus

Excellent, so we’re on the same page, then :)

Are you touching yourself? Are you imagining it’s me touching you instead? Because I’m imagining I have you under me and I’m fucking into your tight hole instead of my hand. (And typing emails w/ one hand is not so easy btw).

>> 10:03pm – Morpheus to Hob

I have two fingers inside me. But it is not enough. I would have your cock.

>> 10:04pm – Hob to Morpheus

I think you know what I wanna hear.

>> 10:05pm – Morpheus to Hob

…Please.

>> 10:06pm – Hob to Morpheus

There’s a good boy.

Don’t worry, love, I’ll give you everything you want. You’re taking me so good, I just know it. Going to feel it for days.

>> 10:07pm – Morpheus to Hob

I am.

Yes

I would have you come in me. If you’re amenable.

>> 10:08pm – Hob to Morpheus  

Fuck you make me so hot. Yeah I’m amenable. Will you cum for me first? Can you cum just from the feeling of me inside you?

10:09pm – phone call from <unknown>

“I thought… you would want to hear it.”

“God your voice… did you get this number from the HR directory?”

“What if I did?”

“Kinda stalkery but kinda hot. Are you close?”

“Very. I… I want you. Badly. Please, Hob.”

“I have you, darling. Ah, you beg so pretty. You can come. I want to hear you. Can you do it without touching yourself? Be good.”

“I can’t—”

“I know you can. Go on. Imagine me with you. Holding your hands to the bed so you can’t touch yourself. I can imagine how beautiful you look. I’d kiss you if I was there, wreck your mouth, too.”

“Hob—”

“Go on. For me?”

“Ah—”

“There you go, sweet thing. I wish I could see you.”

“Will you… come for me now? So I can feel you inside me?”

“Fuck—”

“Good. You feel… so good. Worthy of employee of the month, perhaps.”

“Oh, fuck you, Morpheus. You don’t even have awards at this place.”

“Of course I don’t. That would be inane.”

“Are you satisfied with my efforts, at least?”

“I am pleased to say that I am.”

“Still, I think we should probably debrief that meeting. You wanna touch base about it in person? Say… eleven pm? My calendar’s clear.”

“…Yes.”