#but i get that the writers have to pump out new lessons almost every week so i get burning out and taking the easy path when writing

[ophelia-ophelian]

Kinda wish the Obey Me writers did more with Beel being that Avatar of Gluttony other than just eating all the time. I wish they showed that his hunger for keeping his family safe to the point where it can be obsessive is insatiable. His hunger for his other interests that are barely mentioned in the games are insatiable.

Like take Levi for example: his love for anime is insatiable, he is always seeking out more to indulge in to the point he shuts himself out from the world, isolating himself from everyone. Even his own family (and even you, if you romanced him).

Take Satan for example: his hunger for more and more knowledge is insatiable. It's not as intense as it would be if he was the Avatar of Gluttony rather than Wrath, but imagine him obsessively collecting relics of the past Imagine him collecting books to the point his room is the way it is now, and shutting himself out from the world to keep collecting more and more.

We can even take Mammon as an example as he is the literal Avatar of Greed. He always wants more than everyone else, to the point he steals from his family, his friends, where he works, he steals from anyone and anywhere. If he were changed to gluttony, I can imagine him hoarding his money rather than impulsively spending it. He would obsessively save his money and still steal, but would never give anything up.

Idk, not to put the writers of Obey Me to shame or anything, I just wish there were a couple major points in the game they would flesh out more. Like Nightbringer doesn't really show that much change in my opinion. Everyone looks and acts the same in the original game. Idk idk, this is why we have fanfic

[haroldtea]

i wrote something!!

soooo I’m a pathological “i have a fic idea and i’m never going to write it or I write a few pages and then fall off” writer buuuut I had this very cute idea and wrote 4k words of it! I wanted to post it here before ao3 because 1) not sure if I’m a fan of starting a multichapter WIP because I still may abandon it like my other stuff 2) i want feedback before i continue!!

here’s the gist: it’s princess prom except it’s a high school au and princess prom is actually homecoming. Adora is very happy and supportive of Glimmer and Bow running for king/queen. Glimmer is very, very passionate about winning. The problem is they’ve naturally got competition, in the form of Perfuma (who is equally as passionate about winning, for her own reasons) and her new girlfriend Scorpia. In a sitcom-style mishap, Adora sort of accidentally signs up to run as well...with Catra, Scorpia’s best friend who Adora doesn’t not have a crush on. The two decide to go through with it with the intention of getting eliminated from the race as soon as possible. Then, their friends come up with a different plan for them.

so, take a read below at 4k of stupidity and let me know what you think, and if you would be interested to read more :) (fyi there is a lot of swearing lol)

“I’M GONNA BE THE QUEEN!”

Adora shrieks, flailing her arms and almost knocking her lamp over in the process. She whirls around in her desk chair to face the intruder, arms raised in karate chop form (she does not know any martial arts), and finds Glimmer, who has flung her bedroom door open and has that crazed Glimmer look in her eyes that only means trouble.

“Fuck! Glimmer, you can’t just sneak up--wait, how did you get in my house?!”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?! Also, the door was unlocked,” Glimmer replies, kicking off her shoes and launching herself onto Adora’s bed, which she had just painstakingly made.

Adora presses her hand into her face, sighing. “I was kind of busy trying not to piss myself. Haven’t you heard of knocking? What if I was, you know...” she says, gesturing vaguely.

Glimmer rolls her eyes. “Please, Adora. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Anyway--the student council decided to bring back the homecoming pep rally!” she squeals, gleefully kicking her feet in the air.

Adora leans back in her chair, brows furrowed. “Bring back? Didn’t we have one last year?”

“Yes, but after the water balloon thing they weren’t gonna let us have it anymore, but it turns out that one senior who wasn’t gonna graduate did graduate so I guess they figured it would probably be fine, ‘cause like, who’s ever gonna try and top that?”

“Right,” Adora hums, thinking back to last year’s pep rally. Just before homecoming court was announced, a group of rogue seniors had risen from the bleachers, unleashing dozens of water balloons they had stashed in their backpacks. What ensued was a pandemonium Adora could only remember in flashes, resulting in almost the entire student body and the school’s hallways being completely soaked.

The catch was that the seniors had filled the balloons with blue paint. It had taken the janitorial staff weeks to get the gym bleachers, the lockers in the science wing, and the cafeteria ceiling (don’t ask) to look normal again. Classes were cancelled for almost an entire week because the paint had messed up something with the internal plumbing. It was single-handedly the coolest thing Adora had experienced in her living years.

It was all led by the legendary Mara Hart, notorious for sticking it to the man during her K-12 years. The prank had all but gotten her and her friends expelled, but given that she was otherwise an A+ student and no one could technically prove who was behind it (her friends were loyal to each other to the bitter end), she walked at Bright Moon High’s graduation to uproarious applause from her classmates.

Adora knew some of the more grisly details because Mara had been captain of the girls’ lacrosse team last year--effortlessly cool Mara, endlessly caring Mara, definitely part of Adora’s gay awakening Mara--but it had become something of an urban legend at BMHS over the past year.

“Wait, how do you know any of this?” Adora asks, because while she was personally connected to Mara in a small way, she hadn’t been aware that they were going to cancel the pep rally indefinitely.

Glimmer arches an eyebrow. “Um, hello? My mom’s the principal?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And Mermista totally let it slip when I asked her about it after the student council meeting,” Glimmer adds, then pauses. “Okay, it was more like I didn’t even wanna be there and I wish no one had ever voted for me and I’ll tell you whatever, but still. I’m...” she props her face in her hands and bats her eyelashes, “in the know.”

Adora smirks and rolls her eyes fondly, turning back to her desk to shut her textbook and put her notes away. She can never get anything done when Glimmer’s around. “Okay, so, pep rally’s back--that’s cool,” she says.

“It’s not just cool, Adora,” Glimmer scoffs. “Being homecoming queen is literally all I’ve wanted since I was a kid. I thought my dream had died with Mara’s academic career, but now there’s hope again--it’s meant to be, Adora. It’s destiny.”

Adora had literally never heard Glimmer talk about this, but, “Um, okay.”

Glimmer huffs and dramatically rolls onto her back, flinging her arms out and further messing up Adora’s sheets. Lesson learned, it isn’t worth the effort for Adora to make the bed anymore. “My mom was the homecoming queen like a hundred years ago, and my aunt was the homecoming queen before that. It’s, like, my birthright!”

Adora lifts a shoulder, twisting around in her chair to look at Glimmer. “Okay, then we’ll just get you to be the homecoming queen too. Can’t your mom just...make it happen?”

“Ugh, no,” Glimmer sighs. “I already asked. It’s a student vote.”

“Oh!” Adora brightens. “That’s easy, then. Everyone loves you.”

Glimmer pouts. “I know, but it’s not just a popularity contest--it’s, like, a whole thing. Me and Bow are gonna have to do a talent show, and there’s a relay race, and other stuff that if we don’t do well in we won’t even get to be in the final vote.”

“Wait, what?” Adora doesn’t remember any of that from last year. “What do you mean, Bow? Is...he's running for homecoming queen too?”

“Ha! No,” Glimmer laughs, then her expression darkens, eyes narrowing. “I would crush him.”

“Right...” Adora says. Actually, Bow would make a pretty good homecoming queen. But Adora values her life, so she decidedly does tell Glimmer this.

“No, every queen nominee has to also have someone to run with them as their ‘king,’” Glimmer explains, making air quotes with her fingers. “There’s no boy/girl bullshit, but you do have to be in a pair.”

“I don’t remember any...talent shows, or whatever,” Adora points out. “I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of one of those happening in real life.”

“Well, obviously you never went. It would’ve all been during your lacrosse thingies and you would've been too busy making googly eyes at Mara Hart,” Glimmer replies, wiggling her fingers at Adora.

Adora crosses her arms and blushes a deep red. “I would not. I would’ve been playing lacrosse. And stuff.” Okay, maybe she did make googly eyes at Mara, but only sometimes, as a treat, and Glimmer doesn’t need to know that.

Glimmer flips back over on her stomach and levels Adora with a pout. “Adora, this means a lot to me. We’re gonna need your help to win this.”

Adora has no idea how she could possibly be of any help with this, but hey-- “Of course, Glimmer. Whatever you need. I’m there.”

Glimmer grins, eyes sparkling. “Yaaaaay. Also, my mom’s making meatloaf tonight, you in?”

Adora pumps her fist in the air. “Sweet. Hell, yes.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“This is a joke, right? Like, you’re joking?” Catra says into the receiver as she shoves another handful of popcorn into her mouth.

“I am usually a pretty funny gal, it’s true--but, ah, no. This time I’m serious,” Scorpia replies on the other end.

Catra hoists her phone higher up on her shoulder while she adjusts her grip on her Xbox controller. “Okay, please explain,” she says between chews.

Scorpa sighs, and Catra visualizes her sitting cross-legged on her bedspread, hugging one of her many stuffed animals to her chest. “I know it’s kind of silly, but Perfuma sounded really excited about it, ‘cause I guess if you win, you get to pick what charity the proceeds from the dance ticket sales go to, and...I just couldn’t say no?”

Catra smirks, mashing a series of buttons on her controller as her TV screen lights up in front of her. She’s been trying to get past this level for weeks, but she’ll probably die right before the end again whether she’d answered Scorpia’s call or not. “You are so whipped,” she says.

Scorpia sighs again, but this time Catra can hear a smile in it. “I guess so, kitty cat. Still, it sounds kinda...fun? I mean, it’s more time spent with her, if anything else. She’s talking about writing an original song together for the talent show and incorporating her Tibetan singing bowls into it.”

Catra takes that in and barely suppresses a laugh. Her New Year’s resolution was to make fun of her friends less. Some days are harder than others. “Um, wow,” she says instead. “That’s, uh...that’ll be interesting. Do I have to call you Queen Scorpia if you win?”

“Oh, Perfuma doesn’t believe in gendered royalty,” Scorpia replies. “She wants us to be known as Homecoming Monarchs.”

“Of course she does,” Catra mutters. Perfuma is endlessly kind and patient and makes Scorpia smile, so by default Catra likes her, but otherwise they...don’t exactly share identical values, let’s say. Catra brings her own point home by pressing a button on her controller and chainsawing an alien in half on screen.

“Do you...think it’s a stupid idea? The whole...running for homecoming thing, I mean.”

Catra hears the telltale signs of Scorpia-doubting-herself in her reply, so she pauses the game. “Nah. If it’s something you guys wanna do, you should go for it. Fuck what anyone else thinks.”

“Okay, thanks,” Scorpia says, sounding lighter. “I think it means a lot to Perfuma. It would be cool to win it for her.”

“Well, hey,” Catra continues, un-pausing her game. “If you need any help, let me kn--oh, fuck!”

“Catra?” Panic sets in Scorpia’s tone. “Kitty cat, speak to me--do I need to call 911?!”

“No, no, Scorpia, please don’t do that,” Catra groans, tossing her controller aside. “I just got blown up in my stupid game again, that’s all. I’m never gonna beat this final boss.”

Scorpia sighed in relief. “Aw, don’t give up, kitty cat. One of these days, you’re gonna really give it to--what’s the dude’s name again?”

“Prime something-or-whatever,” Catra grumbled, reaching for her popcorn.

“Yeah, that guy. He’ll never know what hit him.”

Catra snickers into the receiver. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, Scorpia.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The lunch period at BMHS is, naturally, chaotic. Being a regional high school, every inch of the place is usually crawling with students, and the cafeteria is no different. The student population is small enough and the cafeteria big enough to condense into one lunch period, although Adora has oftentimes heard Perfuma lament about the ethics and health concerns of overcrowding.

Adora likes chaos. She likes that the overlapping sounds of chairs scraping and garbled chattering combine to form a comforting din that allows her to drown out whatever weird TikTok plans Bow’s making (ok, to be real, she will be asking about them later) and quietly observe the antics happening at tables around them.

She takes another bite of her pudding and her eyes land on the table to their right where Kyle, Lonnie, and Rogelio from her math class always sit together. Lonnie is mechanically chewing her gum as she stares into a compact mirror, examining her eyebrows with fierce concentration. Across from her, Kyle is holding up something on his phone to Rogelio with one hand and gesticulating wildly with the other as he holds a corn dog. Rogelio is nodding along but is staring down fondly at Kyle rather than at the screen Kyle’s pointing to, one arm hanging loose around Kyle’s shoulders. Lonnie slaps her compact shut and shouts something at them, pointing emphatically to her eyebrows. They all pause for a moment before bursting into laughter. Then Kyle drops his corn dog.

Adora pointedly does not observe the table across from theirs. She’ll gladly watch the Star siblings silently and intensely do their homework for the next period, or listen to Mermista fight off Seahawk’s PDA attempts, but nothing could compel her to look at the table straight ahead.

That table was where Catra Weaver and her friends sat.

Including: Perfuma’s new girlfriend, Scorpia Garnet; Entrapta Dryl, who was dating one of the Hordak twins (Adora was ever completely sure which one); the Hordak twins in question, one of which who usually broods silently and one of which who usually stares around smiling at nothing and everything; the stylish and blonde ruler of the theatre kids who has been nicknamed Double Trouble for as long as Adora can remember; and finally: Catra Weaver. Effortlessly cool, effortlessly gorgeous, effortlessly effortless Catra Weaver, leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed, coolly regarding the rest of the cafeteria as she holds court at her table of wonderful misfit toys.

Today’s effortless ensemble: cool jean jacket, a cool crop top, cool black jeans, cool combat boots, she got a haircut recently so--

“Um, Earth to Adora?”

“Huh?” Adora says, jerking her head up.

This is why she avoids looking at Catra Weaver’s table. Or Catra Weaver in general.

“We were talking about homecoming,” Glimmer says from her seat across from Adora, raising an eyebrow. “You were totally spaced out.”

Adora clears her throat, willing herself not to blush. “Sorry,” she replies, digging back into her pudding.

“Glimmer’s trying to convince me not to run for court,” Perfuma continues, crossing her arms.

“What? Why?”

“Because it’s totally lame and stupid and a waste of time,” Mermista answers from beside Perfuma, inspecting her nail polish. She glances up when she senses everyone at the table staring at her. “What?”

“Mermista, you’re on the homecoming committee,” Bow says.

Mermista shrugs. “So? I said what I said.”

“Look, Perfuma,” Glimmer starts, sliding her hand across the table toward Perfuma. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed if you lose. Homecoming’s a really big deal to me, and I really want to win.” She smiles saccharinely, tilting her head at Perfuma, eyes gone wide. Bow and Adora exchange a look.

Perfuma smiles back. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Glimmer! I’m sure our classmates will select the most deserving and talented couple to win,” she says, then goes back to stabbing a fork into her salad.

Glimmer’s eye starts twitching. Bow slowly and gently takes Glimmer’s hand and slides it back to her side of the table. “Glimmer, we’ll do great. The most important thing is to have fun,” he says, patting her hand.

“The most important thing is the charity,” Perfuma mutters.

“That too.”

“Is anybody else we know running?” Adora asks. Glimmer and Perfuma both shake their heads in response, until Mermista sighs dejectedly.

“Unfortunately,” she groans, raising her hand.

“Wait, what?! You just said it was stupid and lame!” Bow squawks.

“It is,” Mermista rolls her eyes. “But the rest of the student council said it would look really bad if I was on the planning committee and didn’t run. I was forced against my will.”

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” Glimmer asks, gripping her lunch tray so tight Adora wondered if she was going to launch it at Mermista’s head.

“I don’t know? I guess not? I’m planning on getting cut as soon as humanly possible though, so whatever,” Mermista replies, flicking her hair behind her shoulder.

“We won’t win with that attitude, my love!” Seahawk roars, throwing his arm around Mermista’s shoulder and raising a fist triumphantly. “You and I are going to be the greatest King and Queen this school has ever seen!”

“Oh my god, please stop,” Mermista groans, hiding her face in her hands.

“Picture it: you, me, newly crowned, gliding down the science wing--the students stop and stare! Could it really be our King and Queen in the flesh? The teachers stare too! I am going to give them both straight A’s!”

“Please just sit and eat your sandwich,” Mermista begs.

“Never,” Seahawk says, then kisses her on the cheek and acquiesces, taking a big bite of his sandwich. Adora tries to hide her smirk when she sees Mermista blush a deep red. She elbows Glimmer and nods in their direction so she can see.

“Aw, how cute. I’m going to destroy them,” Glimmer whispers in Adora’s ear.

“I know,” Adora whispers back. “But try to at least be nice about it.”

“No promises.”

“Ok, I have to pee,” Adora announces to the table, grabbing her lunch tray as she stands, grinning at Bow’s groan of TMI, Adora!

She makes her way over to the trash cans by the cafeteria exit, waving to her friends on the lacrosse team as she dumps her leftovers in the trash and sets the tray in the dish bin beside it. She should probably go over and check in with them about practice tonight, but she really has to pee, which reminds her that she forgot her water bottle all the way back to the table and needs to refill it before her next class.

“Damn it,” she mutters to herself, still smiling at her lacrosse friends as she whips around to head back--

And crashes right into someone, their heads knocking smack together.

“Ow!” Adora yelps, losing her footing for a moment. She rubs at her stinging forehead, glancing up as she apologizes, “Shit, sorry, sorry, that was totally my fault, I--”

And stares right up at Catra Weaver.

“I...I...I...”

She blinks a few times, but yes, that is Catra Weaver, rubbing at her own forehead and fixing a few strands of hair that had come loose from behind her ears. Catra Weaver, up close and personal, who she hasn’t talked to since...

“Your forehead is fucking hard. And big,” Catra says, holding her tray in one hand as she narrows her eyes up at Adora.

“Oh, um, you too...I mean! Thanks? I grew it myself,” Adora replies spectacularly, and then promptly wants to crawl into a hole and never come out.

Catra raises one eyebrow at her. “How hard did I hit you?”

Adora scrambles to answer. “Oh, not at all! I mean, not hard. It was my fault. Are you, um, are you okay?” This is going amazingly.

“I’m fine, Greyskull,” Catra replies, sending a tingle up Adora’s spine. She goes to deposit her tray. “Just watch where you’re going.”

Adora grins dopily. “Yes. I mean--I will. Sorry. Again.”

Catra glances Adora up and down, eyebrow still raised, and goes to say something else, when they’re interrupted by a foreboding, familiar voice.

“Ah, Adora! I’m so pleased to see you taking an interest in student affairs.”

Adora turns to see Glimmer’s mom looming over them, hands neatly clasped together. Maybe looming isn’t the right word as she’s smiling brightly down on her and Catra, but she’s tall, ok? “Oh, hi Ang--,” Adora starts before remembering they’re at school, “um, Mrs. Moon. What’s up?”

Angella gestures between her and Catra. “I was just observing how wonderful it will be that Glimmer will have a friend to share the homecoming experience with.”

Adora tenses again, remembering that Catra is still standing very close to her. “Oh, haha, yeah, super great. Wait, what?” Sharing?

Then she notices that her and Catra are standing in front of the wall where the Homecoming Court Signup Sheet is hanging. A sparkly pen tied to the clipboard is dangling within Adora’s reach.

“Oh, um, actually, Perfuma’s already--”

“I think this activity will make a fine addition to your college applications, Adora. And you know how Glimmer gets,” Angella leans in conspiratorially, not bothering to lower her voice. “I think it will calm her nerves to have a friend by her side. A bit of friendly competition, even!” she claps her hands together, delighted. “I remember having so much fun with my friends back in my day.”

“But, I’m already on the lacrosse team...” Adora mumbles, scratching the back of her neck. She glances down at the pen.

“Oh, but you know schools these days, always looking for that something that makes a student stand out,” Angella says, waving her hand dismissively. “And don’t worry, I’ll speak to Coach Huntara about any scheduling conflicts. You’ll get to have the best of both worlds!”

Wait, but lacrosse was Adora’s whole thing--does she not stand out enough? Will she seem boring to UEternia? “I...”

“Oh, Ms. Weaver!” Angella says, as if she’s just now noticing Catra. “I didn’t take you for the...school spirit type.”

“I’m not,” Catra replies, crossing her arms. She smiles saccharinely and adds, “ma’am,” for good measure. God, she’s cool.

“Ah,” Angella says, creating an awkward pause before brightening again. “Well, still, here you are. Are you Adora’s running mate?”

So, sometimes Adora panics.

Look, she’s in a high-stress situation. The girl she doesn’t not have an embarrassing crush on bumped into her, talked to her, and then her best friend’s mom swooped in basically saying that lacrosse is boring and dumb and running for homecoming court will get her into UEternia. At least, that’s what Adora got from all that. And then she insinuates that she’ll be doing that with Catra Weaver.

So, she panics. She panics, and she grabs the glittery pen, and she continues to panic.

“Yep! We’re running together!” she says, grinning.

“Say what?” Catra hisses.

“Oh, wonderful!” Angella squeals, clapping her hands together again. “I must say, I think this will turn out to be a very interesting competition. You’ll have to come dress shopping with us, Adora.”

“Haha, yeah...” Adora says, quickly scribbling Adora Greyskull & Catra Weaver on the signup sheet. Oh fuck, oh god.

“Hang on a fu--” Catra starts, then clamps her mouth shut, because the goddamn principal is still talking to them.

“Oh, I wonder what you’ll do for the talent show! I can’t wait...well, I’m off. It was great catching up, girls!” Angella says, and winks, and does weird-mom-finger-guns, and then she’s gliding away as quickly as she came.

Adora continues to grin and wave awkwardly until Angella is out of sight, then she deflates. That was so weird.

Then she turns and sees Catra reach for the pen that’s still in her hand. Adora has half a mind to snatch it away. Or half a brain cell, at least. “Hey!”

“Cross our names out. Right. Now,” Catra growls through gritted teeth, still trying to grab the pen. Adora tries to hold it up out of reach, but it’s still attached to the clipboard, so the best she can do is weave her hand in and out of Catra’s way.

“Um, no? I just told her we were running!”

“Well, we’re not. Give it to me!”

“No!” Adora grunts, yanking the pen away. “You heard her--she’s gonna talk to Coach Huntara. I can’t back out now.”

“Well, I can!” Catra says, grabbing at Adora’s arm, where she has the pen tucked under her armpit. “Find someone else to run with you!”

“I can’t! They’ll want to win!” Adora says, twisting her body away from Catra. She’s having a slight meltdown over Catra touching her so much, but she’s focusing on the pen for now. “No one’s gonna want to run with me anyway.”

Catra mutters something under her breath that Adora doesn’t catch, then she snakes her hand under Adora’s and takes hold of her wrist. Adora stifles a gasp. “Wait, you don’t want to win?” Catra asks, eyebrow quirked.

“Noooo,” Adora furiously shakes her head. “No, no, no. Glimmer would kill me. She wants to win. I just, um, panicked. I guess?” The heat from Catra’s hand is searing into her wrist.

Catra glances down at their hands and back up at Adora. “So, your friend will kill you if you run for homecoming. And you just signed up in front of her mom?”

“Um...” Adora thinks for a second. “Yes?”

Catra huffs out a laugh. “Wow, you’re even more of an idiot than I remember.”

Adora feels her face redden, shocked at Catra’s casual mention of the past, and glances away. “Look, let’s just get eliminated as quickly as possible and then we can forget it ever happened. Deal?”

“Ugh,” Catra lets out a groan, leaning her head back. She tugs at Adora’s wrist a few times, finding that she isn’t budging. “Fine! As quickly as possible.”

“As quickly as possible,” Adora nods, finding herself grinning as Catra loosens her grip and pulls away. “I’m gonna take this pen home, by the way,” she calls out as Catra begins to head back to her table.

“Fuck!”

After Adora finally pees and refills her water bottle, she gingerly sits back down beside Glimmer. Poor, sweet, deadly Glimmer, who’s chattering away excitedly with Seahawk about some new music video or something.

She says, in a very tiny voice, “So, um...I think I’m running for homecoming queen?”

Glimmer whips her head around, nose flaring. She stands up, slamming both hands down on the table with a smack.

“You WHAT?!”

And then the bell rings.

[demivampirew]

A night out in Buenos Aires.

Henry x OFC (María).

Triggers: mentions of sex (no smut) and the f word.

Tag list: @lunedelorient @henrythickcavill @wolvesandhoundshowltogether @mary-ann84 @desperate-and-broken @peakygroupie @summersong69 @ivvitm1109 @madbaddic7ed @iloveyouyen @the-soot-sprite @hell1129-blog

A/N: At the end you’ll find the explanation of the *

After almost a year of dating, Henry was finally meeting María's parent. She met him while working with Lauren as her assistant. She's a writer trying to make it in Hollywood, and when Lauren offered her a job as her assistant she could say no. Her boss was great and she could learn a lot from her and the money was a life-saviour. At first, Henry and she had barely any contact at all. She wasn't starstruck by him, mainly because she was not a huge Superman fan - she prefered Batman, to be honest- and she hadn't seen any of his other movies. She liked Henry, though, no in an emotional way or even a physical thing, she just found him to be nice and charming. He was attractive, there was no denial, but it wasn't something that takes her sleep away.

One day, Lauren asked María to deliver something to Henry. It was a few corrections they made in an episode's script that he had to learn. She stopped by the place he was currently staying and after completing her task and ready to go to the house she was staying, he invited her to have a beer, which she accepted since it was Saturday and she had Sunday free. Henry admitted to her that even if he had Kal, he loved to have some company when drinking a cold Guinness. He made clear how much he missed his friends in the centre of London. The situation was familiar to María. She told him most of her family and friends were in Argentina and that she hadn't seen them in over two years when she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream job as a writer. She had made some new friends, but she missed her sisters from the heart and her family too. They bonded over the feeling of loneliness and chatting up they found out that they had plenty of things in common. Henry was hurt when he found out she didn't like Superman, so he made his life mission to turn her into team Supes. He gifted comics and movies and would test her to see if she had seen them. She would make long arguments giving reasons of why he was the best superhero and would invite her every Saturday night for a cold beer and some movie. One day there were laughing and ranting about the legendary character and in another, they were making love. Neither of them knew the exact moment when they fell in love with each other, but at least that was something they were sure about: they were in love.

María got scared that Lauren would fire her for no approving her relationship, giving the fact that their jobs were related and might seemed unprofessional, but thankfully she was full on board with the pairing.

Now, a few months of dating, it was time for Henry to meet his girlfriend's parents. He happened to be on the road to promote the show which was set to premiere in a few weeks and since Lauren was on tour with him, she got the chance to go with them. One of the stops was the Argentinian Comic-Con, which was María's homeland, so they decided to visit her parents. The woman wasn't nervous about Henry getting to know her mother and father, but the language barrier was a little bit of an issue.

The couple went to the hotel first to left the luggage and then changed to go to María's parents home. The schedule was quite tight, so the plan was to stop by to have some tea and then Henry had arranged for someone to make reservations in a restaurant, so they could have a true Argentinian experience and explore the city while expending some time together.

She laid her head on his shoulder. He grabbed her hand a kissed her forehead. The car provided by the people in charge of Netflix Argentina for his transportation arrived at the destination. Susana, María's mother, ran to hug her daughter as soon as she opened the door and saw her. Henry greeter her, kissing her only in one cheek, as María had previously pointed out to him that's the way Argentinians greet each other; with his father, a handshake would be more appropriate. The house was small but lovely.

- Es un placer conocerlos (It's a pleasure to meet you).- Henry said to his girlfriend's parents, letting her speechless since she didn't know that he could speak Spanish. - Do you speak Spanish? - María asked him astonished as they walk to the sofa. - I've been taking lessons online while you were working. I wanted to surprise you.- He told her, grinning. She kissed him and sat down with him. Her father was not a man of many words, but her mother was quite chatty. Henry was beyond charming, something that didn't go unnoticed by the woman who gave life to his love. - Ella trabaja con Lauren, la... (She works with Lauren, the...)- he started to answer to Susana's question about how they met, and then he turned into his girlfriend for help to remember the word he forgot which described her job. - Creadora del show (show's creator) - she helped him. - Oh, that's right... Ella es la creadora del show en el que trabajo. (She's the creator of the show I work in)- he explained, proud of himself and his woman chuckled as she noticed that.- A ella no le gustaba el personaje que yo interpretaba, lo cual me sorprendió mucho, por lo que intenté convencerla de lo genial que es Superman y nos volvimos amigos. (She didn't like the character I played, which surprised me a lot, so I tried to convinced her how great Superman is and we became friends).- his rhythm was a bit off and had a little trouble with the r, but his Spanish was surprisingly good.

- He took "fuck the haters" quite literally.- María joked and her boyfriend blushed, looking at her with his eyes wide open and she just smiled. Her parents didn't speak English, so they'd not understand her joke and whenever she would speak in that language, they assumed she was talking to him.

They enjoyed some tea with bizcochuelo with dulce de leche (sponge cake with dulce de leche*) which Henry became obsessed with and asked his girlfriend to remind him to buy a few jars before leaving the country.

At nighttime, they went to the restaurant "El Mirasol" to try the famous Argentinian steak, which didn't delight María given the fact that she was a vegetarian, but fortunately, they found an option for her. After the dinner - and after Henry met the people in charge of cooking and took some photos, they went to a café called "Café de Los Angelitos" to take a coffee and watch some Tango dancers. Henry made her promised that they would go back to visit her parents when they had the time and to explore the city some more.

The next two days were quite busy for them. María stayed most of the time with Lauren and Henry spent time greeting fans and then he had a Netflix panel and the event at the Argentina Comic-Con. The woman's parents assisted the event and brought their daughter a few treats to enjoy on the plane and a few jars of dulce de leche, after seeing that Henry enjoyed too much.

As they were on the plane to Brasil, the Argentinian girl asked her man why didn't he speak in Spanish during the convention and he admitted that whenever he gets in places with big crows, his heart starts to pump and his adrenaline rises and he forgot how to speak the said language, which made the girl chuckled and kissed him; he was adorable.

*Dulce de leche is an Argentinian confection of sweet milk cooked down until it's the colour and consistency of caramel sauce or butterscotch - something like Nutella but is sweeter.

[jlalafics]

Hello, you're an amazing writer! I truly enjoyed all of your stories! Recently I really liked the Two Kids universe. I don't know if you planned to write more of it but if you did i'd be really happy to read it :) Maybe after the birth of toastbabiy number 2 and the Hayhanna baby too ( i have a soft spot for this ship), when the kids are still babies or toddlers ( or even children)... Thank you for all the great stories you make! (sorry for my english, it's not my first langage ;)

First off, thank you so much for the compliment! I’m flattered and I’m so glad that you enjoyed Two Kids and the follow-up.

Since I’m kind of loving this universe at the moment, I thought I’d finish it off with a little follow-up.

I hope you enjoy! Happy Reading!

Summary: In which Katniss and Peeta become the mentors. A follow-up to “Two Kids” and this story.

“Diaper.”

Peeta reaches over to the basket holding the diapers before tossing one at me. I catch it easily before looking down at Abner or Abie—our four-month-old—and give him a bright smile. Abie wriggles on his changing table, but I easily slip the diaper under his used one, wipe him, then switch out the soiled diaper for a clean one.

Wrapping the dirty diaper, I toss it to Peeta who catches it with ease before throwing it into the wastebasket.

“Daddy!”

Jack, our three year old, is awake.

“His plate is already on the table. Remember—”

“Toast cut into squares, no crust, and jelly on every corner,” Peeta finishes for me.

He grabs the cloth wrap on the nursery’s dresser and helps me wrap it on my center as I finish dressing Abie. I crisscross the ends as I put Abie into position before placing him into the pocket of the wrap. Peeta tightens the wrap to create support under our son’s legs before tying the ends at my waist.

I give Peeta a grateful smile and lean to give him a kiss—

“Daddy!”

“I owe you,” he says before rushing out the door.

“As soon as we get downstairs, I’ll feed you,” I tell Abie. “Which boob do you want today? Left, or right?”

“Right is my particular favorite.” Peeta walks into the room with Jack in his arms. “Jack wanted to say good morning to Abie.”

Jack, sweet boy he is, presses a kiss to the top of his little brother’s head. “Abie…”

I take in this moment of calmness; this is what Peeta and I fought for and what others died for.

These small pockets of life where it is just perfect.

Then, a shrill cry from across the way breaks through the peace of our household.

Peeta and I look to one another.

Lulu is awake.

++++++

We step into the Abernathy home, walking over a pile of clothes at the front door as we follow the crying. There’s an overwhelming smell of powder in the air and, as we move forward, one of Haymitch’s geese dashes pass us.

I walk into the sitting room and find Johanna rocking Lulu in her arms, hair askew…and topless. Peeta covers Jack’s eyes before turning away.

I approach her carefully. “Johanna?”

She looks up at us, stare full of exhaustion. “Lulu’s not eating! I keep trying, but she just won’t latch.” Her mouth begins to tremble. “What if she hates the taste of my milk?”

I join her on the couch. “I’m sure that your milk is just fine. Where is Haymitch?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes remain on the wailing baby. “Probably snuck out in the middle of the night. I don’t blame him.”

Haymitch suddenly stumbles in and for a moment, I think he’s drunk.

He’s not. He’s just exhausted.

“Spilled baby powder last night, Lulu almost fell off the table…so many diapers…had to clean up the nursery…”

Sitting on the couch, Haymitch sits back, practically falling asleep against me.

Standing up, I go to Peeta. “They need help.”

Named after Johanna’s mother, Louisa—or Lulu as she is affectionately known—is just shy of two months old. She was born on a winter evening sporting Haymitch’s thick dark locks and Johanna’s penetrating eyes—a perfect combination.

Haymitch and Johanna insisted on not needing anyone to help them, both so use to taking care of themselves. However, they’ve both failed to realize that they are no longer solo, they are now a couple—at least, I think they are—and parents.

“But they said that they didn’t need our help,” Peeta responds.

“Yeah, that flew out the window when we both got a good look at Johanna’s breasts,” I tell him, and he colors. “Don’t act like you didn’t see them. I’m not mad—they’re hard not to look at.”

Peeta looks to me. “I do prefer your breasts.”

“I know you do, but we’re going off topic.” I turn to the two on the couch; Johanna is currently letting Lulu suck on her finger like a pacifier, looking dazed. Haymitch has slid down to the floor, his head on couch seat. “They have to learn to be a team.”

“When did you become Effie?” Peeta jokes.

“Someone has to be,” I reply resolutely. “You handle Haymitch. I’ll take Johanna.”

“Deal,” Peeta responds. He puts Jack down and smiles at our son. “Why don’t we help Haymitch and Johanna clean up? Then make them lunch?”

Jack pumps his fist excitedly. “Yeah!”

“First mission—let’s find a broom.”

Peeta takes Jack’s hand and they head to the back of the house in search of cleaning supplies.

After making sure Abie is okay, he is resting contentedly against my chest, I go to Johanna.

“Johanna…” She turns to me. “What happened to your shirt?”

“Milk soaked through and there are no clean clothes,” she explains. “Lulu hates my boobs; she keeps turning her head.” Her eyes fill and it twists my inside seeing her in despair. “I’m a bad mother.”

“You’re a new mother,” I tell her gently. “Why don’t we go upstairs and find you a shirt? Lulu seems to be calming down.”

“That’s a trick.” Johanna stands, wobbling slightly. “She pretends to be quiet, but as soon as my defenses are down and I’m about to sleep—she pounces!” Her eyes go to the girl staring up at her with Haymitch’s greys. “She really is my kid.”

++++++

The nursery is a wreck, despite Haymitch’s claim of cleaning up; Johanna explains that Lulu has gotten wriggly during diaper changes. In an attempt to diaper her without her falling off the table, Haymitch somehow spilled powder everywhere. Haymitch’s large footprints in the powder are tracked all over the floor.

“Peeta can teach him how to diaper her quickly,” I assure her.

Going to Johanna, who is sitting in the rocking chair, I take Lulu into my arms and cradle her next to Abie, who is snoozing contentedly in his sac. She seems to ease in my son’s calmness, settling in my arms.

I show Johanna how to slip a clean diaper under Lulu’s dirty one before cleaning her up and closing the diaper. I easily pull the dirty diaper out from under the baby then close it before throwing it in their wastebasket.

It takes less than a minute.

“I never get it done that fast,” Johanna says miserably. “I’m always afraid that it’s too tight or too loose. I don’t know why I can’t seem to get this right.”

“You’re going to make mistakes.” I place Lulu back in her arms. “But you learn from them. In the end, Lulu will only feel the love that you have for her.”

“I hope so, because I’m feel like I’m fucking up.” Her words come out in a tight whisper. “Sometimes, I think that this was all a big mistake.” She looks to me. “Is that wrong to say?”

“No.” I give her a smile. “We all have days like that.” Lulu begins to fuss, and I can see her lips pursing. “She’s hungry.” I grab a nearby pillow and place it on Johanna’s lap. “Use this to support Lulu so you can work on positioning her.”

Johanna nods, placing Lulu lengthwise on the cushion. She moves the semi-clean shirt off and adjusts Lulu’s head, close to her breast.

“Use your other hand and guide your nipple near her lips,” I instruct.

Johanna follows what I say, and I breathe a sigh of relief when Lulu quickly takes hold and begins to suckle.

“She’s eating,” Johanna exhales in happiness, relaxing into her seat. “Thank goodness.” She closes her eyes. “I was wrong. I do need help.”

“It took awhile to learn that I wasn’t alone,” I tell her. “In time, you’ll see that it becomes less scary to let people inside.”

Johanna opens her eyes, full of unshed tears. “Thank you.”

“I know you’re hormonal and will probably deny that you even said that later on.” I smile watching her caressing Lulu’s hair tenderly. “But I appreciate it.”

While Johanna continues feeding, I clean up what I can and then restock diapers and wipes in their appropriate places. Then, at my insistence, I tell Johanna to take a shower after I take Lulu.

“I’ll sit here,” I assure her. “Go while she’s in her food coma.”

When she is gone, I look at Lulu in her bassinet and smile seeing the best of both Haymitch and Johanna.

This one is going to be a warrior.

“You’re a lucky girl, Lulu.”

++++++

“So, you have the stew for tonight,” Peeta tells me. “Tomorrow, I can come by and show you how to make a roast and I’ll bring rolls. Also, I can make lactation cookies for Johanna. Just remember to keep her hydrated.”

I feel my head spinning at Peeta’s words. After showing me how to quickly diaper my child, the boy—man—wrote out a menu for the week and a list of groceries I am to get. Johanna and I cannot live on canned food alone, especially when he tells me how a good diet will help in Lulu’s feedings.

It is not easy for me when it comes to changes; I lived on schedules for awhile because they helped me from not thinking about the past. Before Katniss and Peeta, I lived on alcohol and drowning my pain in drunken slumbers.

However, that was when it was just me.

Now, there are three of us—and I can’t help but feel like I’m fucking it all up.

Johanna looks tired. Still beautiful, but tired, nonetheless. I feel helpless when I see her struggle with our Lulu, but I am also just as clueless.

However, for them, I will do what it takes—even if it means cooking lessons with the boy with the bread.

“I got it,” I assure him. Peeta nods, going back to checking on the stew. “I think I’m messing up.”

Peeta turns to me. “You’re not. You two are just finding your rhythm. We’re all survivalists. Maybe not me; I always seem to need Katniss in one way or another. I do know that it does take awhile to become a team—to stop being a you and becoming an us.”

Jack rushes back into the room, sitting on my lap and gives me a bright smile. “Goosey’s fed.”

“Thank you for helping, Jack,” I say and kiss the top of his head. “You’re going to have to help me out. I’m still learning to be a good dad.”

“You were always a good dad, Haymitch,” Peeta tells me. “After all, you practically raised me and Katniss.”

I manage to chuckle. “I’m not sure if it that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

I’ll never admit that they are a good thing. They happened when I needed them the most.

However, Johanna and Lulu—they are the best things in my life.

++++++

“I may not always love you

But long as there are stars above you

You never need to doubt it

I'll make you so sure about it

God only knows what I'd be without you…”

 Lulu stares up at me with those large doe eyes and something squeezes in my chest. Before Abie and Lulu, I always kind of scoffed seeing the way Katniss’ eyes lit up whenever she was around Jack.

But now, seeing Lulu looking at me, trying to smile as I sing causes something to stir inside.

It’s this hopeless devotion to her—and I gladly allow myself to love her. Love her enough for the family that was never able to meet her, both on my side and Haymitch’s.

“I didn’t know you were a singer.”

I find Haymitch leaning against the doorway, arms crossed and grinning at us.

“I’m not, but it seems to calm her down,” I tell him.

“Lunch is ready,” he informs me. “You need to eat.”

“I know, but I’m not ready to leave her just yet.”

Haymitch joins us, looking down at this little ham of a girl. “Wow. We made her.”

I chuckle. “Pretty cool of us.”

“We have to be better for her,” he says suddenly. “Better than we were for ourselves.”

“Yes. I agree.” Lulu’s eyes begin to flutter. “There are no Hunger Games and I’m not in the Capitol whoring my way through Snow’s elite. Sometimes I forget—or just become afraid that it will happen again.”

Haymitch puts an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close.

“We wouldn’t let that happen,” he assures me. “All of Victors, the ones that are alive, will never let anything like that happen. If it did, I would protect you and Lulu.”

“We will protect each other.”

Haymitch’s eyes warm at my words and in one breath, he kisses me gently.

“I almost forgot what that felt like,” I say as we pull apart.

He smirks. “You should be kissed more often.”

“That’s how Lulu happened.”

“True.” He rests back against the wall behind us. “We’re going to get through all this. One day, she’s going to be running circles around us and we’re going to miss her just like this.”

“Hopefully, I get my body back by then,” I snort. “I feel like I’m nothing but tits and milk.”

Haymitch eyes my chest. “Not like I don’t appreciate a full pair, but you just look uncomfortable.”

“Nobody informed me about the wonders of a breast pump. Katniss is having her mother send one here. Maybe then I won’t feel like my primary function is milk machine and I can actually get some rest.”

For a moment, we sit in content silence. Never in my life did I think I would be a mother. However, Lulu is here, real and a fresh as can be, smelling like hope and freedom. She is all things that are good about me, the parts of me that I never even thought I had.

And, she’s all mine.

My hand fits into Haymitch’s and he gives me a gentle smile.

He is mine.

“You know what the most annoying part about all of this?” Haymitch says suddenly and I raise a brow in question. “We’re getting advice from Katniss and Peeta.”

“Yeah, that’s really irritating,” I retort. “The worst part is that most of their advice is valid.”

Haymitch snorts. “Maybe for them. We’ll come up with our own ways.”

I yawn, resting back against him. “In time.”

Soon, we sleep.

++++++

Peeta turns to me, Abie is his arms.

“I don’t think we need to check on them.”

Jack rushes up to Haymitch’s door, knocking loudly. “Hay-me! Jo!”

“It’s too late now.” I join our son on the porch. “Jack has already created all kind of ruckus.”

However, I am surprised when no one comes to the door. Twisting the knob, the door opens easily; not surprising as we’ve never bothered to lock our doors.

“Hello?” I call out.

The sitting room is still in pristine condition from earlier. Peeta sets off into the kitchen to look in.

“No one is there,” he tells me.

Jack rushes up the stairs in search of Haymitch and Johanna and I scramble up behind him; he’s only started to master stairs. He toddles to the nursery, peeking in, before running the opposite way to Haymitch’s room.

“Mama, yook!” He points into the open doorway of Haymitch’s room.

“Please don’t be naked…” I whisper, crossing my fingers, before joining him and taking a breath before looking in.

Johanna and Haymitch are fast asleep, in-between them is a snoozing Lulu, arms up over her head.

I struggle to hide my laugh as Haymitch is sleeping the exact same way.

Picking Jack up, I put my index finger to my lips.

“It’s nap time for them so we have to be very quiet.”

Jack nods in agreement, wrapping his arms around my neck.

We go down the stairs, finding Peeta and Abie waiting for us.

I give them both a smile. “They’re asleep.”

Together, we head out the front door and head down the steps toward our home.

Peeta lets out a sigh of relief. “Maybe now we can get a decent night’s sleep.”

Then, Abie lets out a wail.

 FIN.

Lulu’s actual name, Louisa, means “renowned warrior” while Abner (Abie) means “father of light”. Their names feel appropriate for having Victor parents.

Song:

“God Only Knows”—The Beach Boys

[thisislizheather]

September Shenanigans 2021

So long, September! I can’t believe it’s finally here. And look, I try not to base my entire personality on the fact that I love this time of year so much but every year it’s getting harder and harder to deny it. There’s just something so electrifying about rainy nights and pumpkins on stoops, I’M SORRY. In any case, here’s what went down in September.

You can find my favourite tweets of the month over here and here.

I’ve been using the greatest eyebrow growth serum OF LIFE and wrote a bit about it over here (with photographic proof!).

I recapped what I did from my summer list.

So obviously I had to create an autumn list because this is my life.

New podcast alert!

I made this chocolate zucchini banana cake with coffee frosting for Nathan’s birthday and we both fell in love with it. This will now be the only birthday cake I ever make for him, it’s incredible.

I went to the Italian restaurant Lilia in Brooklyn again because they always have the best focaccia (right now it’s cherry tomato with green garlic butter), so I got that as well as the corn-filled cappelletti with black pepper and pecorino and yes it was good but the pasta definitely lacked some sort of different textual element which would have sent it over the top in deliciousness. Am I being harsh? No. If you’re paying upwards of $20 for one plate of pasta, there has to be standards.

Above Photo: Cherry tomato focaccia with green garlic butter

Above Photo: Corn-filled cappelletti with black pepper & pecorino

I tried the pumpkin cream cold brew at Starbucks (with one pump of vanilla instead of two because they go nuts with their pumps) and it was only okay. Why do people love it so much? The salted caramel one looks good but I can’t bring myself to go back and try it. I have such a hate-hate relationship with Starbucks, so what the hell am I even doing going in there? The last time I brought my laptop in to work in a Starbucks was in 2019 and they played the whole Hamilton soundtrack on a loop TWICE and I almost lost my mind it’s such a terrible album. I feel like an alien for not being mesmerized by Lin-Manuel Miranda, but like… he sucks?

I ate at Forsythia again and it only confirmed its place in my mind as one of the best new restaurants of this past year. I finally tried and loved the short rib agnolotti as well as the pappa al pomodoro, which was like a beautiful tomato tartare, so summery and perfect.

I bought these pajamas from Banana Republic Factory because they’re soft as hell and I haven’t had matching pajamas since… never.

Links I’m Loving:

Okay, this is the cutest autumn sweater on the planet, COME ON.

Untold Horror is “a behind-the-scenes look into development hell to find the most frightening horror movies that never were, from unmade Re-Animator sequels to alternate takes on legendary franchises like Frankenstein and Dracula!” - this sounds like such a great read.

I Never Knew How Golden My Summers Were - a great piece on remembering the best summer of your life.

Creative Ways To Start Your Morning On A Good Note

Halloween Craft Idea For Kids: Pumpkin Stamps with Apples

Reason #214 Never To Get CoolSculpting

Tuesdays at Regal Cinemas are now offering $6.25 movie tickets! This definitely can’t last, so I’m going to make the most of it while it’s offered.

New seasonal candles are finally at Trader Joe’s.

Above Photo: Autumn candles at Trader Joe’s, September 2021

So it’s been established how much I love and support Milk Bar… but the new funnel cake soft serve is truly one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever ingested. Just shockingly gross. If you’re nearby, get a free sample and tell me how right I am.

I went for a late summer walk through Central Park and why don’t I do this once a week.

I can’t get over how beautiful this song is (thanks for introducing it to me, Jessie!), it’s toooo good.

There’s a sale on Aerie underwear right now IF you’re into that sort of thing.

I made a zucchini lasagna that was very good but in no way better than a meat lasagna.

Speaking of zucchini, if you own a deep fryer: please make this zucchini spaghetti or these cider battered chicken fingers and then ask me over.

I took this (free) (actually helpful) intro to SEO class online if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

I made these apple pie bars that are ridiculously easy, fast and incredible. I was feeling ambitious, so I made this quick caramel to pour on top.

I fell down a rabbit hole of researching all of the Broadway theatres in New York and I might get tickets to Girl From The North Country purely to sit inside the gorgeous Belasco Theatre.

Finally had the steak at L’Artusi and it was delicious. Best steak ever? God no, but good. They will, however, hold the title of best steak tartare in all of NYC though.

Above Photo: The steak at L’Artusi in the West Village

Above Photo: The best steak tartare in NYC at L’Artusi

New things I’ve watched and rewatched:

Searching For Italy: so, so great. I already wanted to travel around Italy and eat everything so watching this was a delight. It’s also just so enjoyable to watch people who love their jobs. The Tuscany episode was my favourite one, mostly because I love any and all panzanella talk.

I attempted to watch Basic Instinct but I was in a very specific mood and had to turn it off after the rape scene. Nah thanks.

Never Have I Ever (season two): Love that Common is in it, hoping he becomes a regular. I can’t stand the way the writers write the teen dialogue, it’s so cringeworthy, but if you can get past that it’s an absolutely okay show. That scene in episode nine with her & Paxton when he comes in from window? Shiiiiit.

Broken: it’s an episode about makeup and the lesson? Watch out for counterfeit cosmetics. Got it.

The X-Files (The Squeeze episode): Someone told me to watch this one because it’s supposed to be scary, but it wasn’t anything special. A waaay better episode is Pusher. Watch THAT one.

The Witches of Eastwick: How the hell have I never seen this before? So many parts are good. Would definitely rewatch. I’ll never get over how gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer is. Just maddening.

Scanners: boooooooooo. They shouldn’t make the cover look so good, it’s terrible.

Nightmare on Elm Street: Really holds up well. Always love it.

I’m rewatching Sabrina the Teenage Witch and kind of loving every minute of it. The episode where she becomes addicted to pancakes? A gem.

Was Dharma & Greg, like, a great show? I never cared about it at the time because I think I was too young to get into it but I just watched their Halloween episode and it was so good. Might look into this further.

Awkwafina is Nora From Queens (season two): With the exception of the blackout episode and the extremely hot cameo from original Reggie (Ross Butler), this season has really sucked. And this is insane to me because I loved the first season, what the hell?

Some things I’m looking forward to this month: I created an autumn highlight on my Instagram incase you care to see the fun things I’m planning on doing this month, excited to read Stanley Tucci’s new book, definitely going to make these pumpkin scones with a maple glaze, I will likely buy something from this year’s Halloween Lush collection, I’m gonna do a post about my recent trip to Salem (!), and I’m in the final stages of costume planning. God, I love this month.

If you have any interest in reading what went on in August, come on over here.

[gingerly-writing]

Questions Tag Games

explanation: I’m super late to these, I suspect not many people will want their dashes spammed with my random answers, and I’m not tagging people, so I’ve amalgamated all of these into one post. 

tagged by @concealeddarkness13! haven’t spoken to you in a while, hope you’re doing great

1. Would you rather write a more classical hero or an anti-hero as a protagonist? I’d rather write a hero for the protagonist, but an anti-hero as a general character

2. Who is your favorite character you have written and why? Ever? That’s cruel. Out of people that y’all would know, Urial does seem to generate the most emotional reactions

3. How many WIPs do you have? 3 proper ones, currently: Iron Flower, Space Royalty and Piracy Pays

4. Who is your least favorite character you have written and why? To write? Klarion from Young Jutsice fanfic. Motherfucker would not follow the assigned plot. Hate-wise? Possibly Coincidence or Accord, neother of whom you guys have met yet. Those two are a pair of nasty criminals/villains, and they are a little too good at punishing anyone who gets in their way

5. What is your favorite aspect of writing? Finishing!

6. If you had only one sentence (per WIP) to get someone to read your books, what would the sentences be? They wouldn’t because I suck at loglinesss...humourously though?

IF: an entire continent is saved from the ravages of war by the ancient art of sexting via treaty negotiations Space Royalty: ‘she stabbed me? god-fucking-dammit I am so in love with her’ Piracy Pay: you get to chug your drink every time I kill a character

7. If your protagonists fought to the death, which one would win? Protags? Depends if morals were removed, and whether it was on-on-one. Koronis, if not -he’s an emperor with black magic and an entire galaxy-wide army.  If it was on-on-one with minimised morals, Ace would stand a damn good chance. Boy is smarter than he gives himself credit for, and very adaptable. Galaxy is also pretty viable. Girl can swing a superpowered punch like she means it, and she hasn’t survived this long on luck alone.

8. Which protagonist(s) would survive the zombie apocalypse? Koronis would. Ace would die trying to save someone else. Solaris would...provided Monarch was dragging him around, and even then they might go down together in a dramatic last stand. Galaxy would be in charge of a small, benevolent queendom. Cleo would, those plant skills would make her handy to any new civilisation. Fact would go down staving off the hoardes so everyone else could run. Rosalie would think she was the weak link of her group, but they would probably keep her alive; L’aura would kick zombie ass.

9. Which is your favorite story you have written or are working on? Space Royalty is damn fun to write -the benefits of extravagant, overdramatic space operas I suppose. Piracy Pays has had a good reception, so I’m pretty proud of that. Hopefully I can keep the momentum going until the end! It is a huge pain o write though

10. Which of your characters is your favorite villain and why? Raph is my evil supervillin crimelord Big Bad and I adore him utterly

11. When do you find is the best time of day for writing? Evening! 8pm-1am

*******************************************************************************************

tagged by the lovely @a-sundeen​! this is so old I bet you don’t even remember tagging me, oopsie

1. When you’re describing a new character, what feature do you usually note first? Build, usually, as in their height/weight ratio, muscles/skinniness or lack of, how they carry themself etc. The reason for this is that I often start with the macro ‘impression’ of the character before zooming in on a few specifics. I try to use an interesting description or comparison here as well.

2. Do any of your characters play an instrument or really enjoy music in general? If so, what instrument (or what genre, if it’s the latter)? I am the least musical person on planet earth, so making my characters musical often doesn’t occur to me. Koronis can sing and play the space-piano (forced childhood lessons), and Jade can play the violin, but neither of them are passionate about it. Kolya/Cynosure (the popstar/supervillain) is very very musical, but I skip around a lot of the specifics because I’m a big cheater. He mostly makes anti-establishment and anti-hero music, but he’s one of those artists who strays all over different genres.

3. Which musical artist usually gets you the most pumped to write? Les Friction does good dramatic music and they’re not so well known, so I like to tell people about them when I can

4. Do you prefer writing fight scenes over other types? (This is a weirdly worded question I’m sorry, rip) It’s worded fine, sunshine! And no, I don’t like writing fight scenes because I don’t like the logistics of them. There are too many limbs to keep track of, and then I feel like I’m neglecting their surroundings and potentially useful items in favour of mentally tracking who’s where and what their arms and legs are doing. I cover up for my fight scene weaknesses with too much dialogue, and I’m fully aware of that fact.

5. Is there a city or country you’d really like to write in or about? Write in is probably just where I’d like to travel, so Russia, India and South America (I know that’s general but it’s the only continent except Antarctica that I haven’t been to) are my top choices. Write about…I’d like to sink myself deep into east coast USA to really nail the feeling of Galaxy’s city and her character, and then be able to confidently write about it. I do have a study year abroad coming up in 2020, so here’s hoping…

6. Do you prefer to be warm or cold while you write? Warm! I love blankets and my big fluffy dressing gown, and on top of that all my friends always complain about how hot my house is

7. Do any of your characters have hobbies you’d like to try out someday? Fiction wise, glo-ball from Space Royalty sounds like a very entertaining game, especially when I’m kept safe behind a pod. sodding netball injuries Jade paints and draws, and I’d love to get better at art. Likewise, Rosalie sews, making and decorating her own clothes, and I’d love to be able to do that. Idk, does being a supervillain count as a hobby? I’d love to rob a bank…not even necessarily for the money, just the #aesthetic

8. What is your favorite type of character to write? Villains! And morally grey people. And characters where the POV character has no idea what they’re really thinking, who they really are, what they actually want etc. And, on the flip side, balls of positive sunshine, because they make me feel better about the world

9. Halloween is here! Which character has a costume made for them by their mom? Ahahahahaha can you tell how late I am to this.

10. Halloween is here (again)! Which character thinks the holiday is childish but dresses up anyway? I AM SO LATE. Rosalie thinks the holiday is childish but dresses up in the most elaborate homemade princess outfit ever and entertains all the kids she can find. What, it is a children’s holiday, surely she should be making them happy on their special day…

******************************************************************************************* tagged by @blackfeatherantics who is now @mbovettwrites I think? I hope?

1.      How long have you been working on your WIP(s) for? Iron Flower is the oldest current one, and I started it on Christmas Day 2016

2.      What song would you assign as your protagonist’s theme tune? I’ll just pick one, and Koronis’ is Young and Menace by FOB. No real lyrical reason, it just reminds me of him

3.      Do you have any favourite spots (gardens, parks, cafes, etc.) where you like to write? The sofa in my living room next to my family

4.      Poetry or Prose? Prose!

5.      Where do you draw inspiration for your writing from? Everywhere! Other people’s writing and prompts and published novels and TV and movies and random stray thoughts and daydreaming and chatting to other writers and-

6.      Is there any popular book that you wish you had written and why? The Lies of Locke Lamora because I’d take out the first 100-ish page of solid worldbuilding and backstory that seemed almost completely irrelevant to the rest of the plot?And the domino-effect of all the plot elements knocking each other into action at the end was so clever, it annoyws me that the beginning means I don’t like reccing it to people

7.      What’s your planning process when you start working on a new WIP? I daydream about it for at least a few weeks to make sure the idea has staying power. Then I come up with character names, quirks, descriptions etc. finally, I lay out the plot chapter-by-chapter from the beginning to the end so I have a guiding rope throughout the whole process and I’m less likely to get stuck. Of course, that’s when I plan on letting a WIP bloom into being. Some, like Space Royalty and Piracy Pays, start off as short drabble ideas and then refuse to leave, which means I have no concrete plan for them...

8.      Do you work best in mornings, afternoons, or at night? Evening!

9.      Would you prefer to self-publish or work with an agent and publishing company and why? Agent and publishing company, because I value the help they can provide more than the ability to retain complete creative control over my book (since I’m crap at titles and designing book covers anyway)

10.  How do your emotions/moods affect your writing? Not a lot tbh. If I’m very very tired I can’t write anything good, but I’m not sure that counts as an emotion.

11.  What’s your favourite line of your WIP/one of your poems? I’ve written both of my current favourite lines for prompts, which were: ‘Time hollows all victories’ and ‘The hero doesn’t die in this one’. I’ve had other favourites in WIPs over time, but I can’t think of them right now

******************************************************************************************* tagged by the ever wonderful @time-to-write-and-suffer

1) How are you so awesome? Genetics.

2) What’s your favorite thing about your writing? The dialogue! Or the romances, which I mostly like because of the fun/cute dialogue.

3) Who’s your favorite character that you’ve written and why are they your fave? This is so mean. At the moment, Raph, because I can’t stop thinking about him and he’s so incredibly dangerous, yet on the low down (like the Mariana Trench level of low down) he has all these cute little quirks that only one or two people know about

4) One of your characters has been placed in the world/plot of a book you love. What happens? Rosalie becomes a Grisha in Leigh Bardugo’s world. She finds a sense of self-worth and gets to enjoy the little luxuries that come with the position.

5) One of your characters has been placed in the world/plot of a book you hate. What happens? X takes the place of Celeana Sardothien. He murders everyone in his path, tells the crown of Terrasen to get fucked because there’s no way he can run a whole government with any level of competance, probably murders Rowan with extreme prejudice, opens the Wyrd gates just to search the universe for Raph and bring him through so he can construct a decent government for Terrasen, would probably sleep with Dorian, would make it his new life goal to highfive Manon.

6) Your characters must fight each other to the death until only one stands victorious. Who wins? Raph. Koronis could conceivably stand a chance against him, but Raph would decimate pretty much anyone else. I think Raph would be able to stay above the fighting for longer, whereas Koronis would jump in just a touch earlier, which would be his downfall.

7) If you could steal a cover and a title from other books to use for your own WIP/s, which ones would you steal? Cover-wise I’d steal the minimalist Red Queen aesthetic, because that sleek shit is the bomb.  Title-wise? That’s harder. The Lies of Locke Lamora has some sick alliteration, but I think I’d rather steal the style of it rather than the exact title

8) If you switched places with one of your characters, what would happen to you and to them? I would die, pretty much everywhere. If Rosalie swapped with me, she would slowly come out of her shell and become a fashion designer -not an A-lister, she wouldn’t like how vicious and ruthlessly businesslike you have to be, but maybe making her own high-end clothes in a small shop in London

9) What makes your style unique compared to other writers? Thanks for the existential crisis, Eff.

10) Describe your antagonist’s song number if they were a Disney villain. No Good Deed from Wicked, for Darklight

******************************************************************************************* tagged by the lovely @itstheenglishkid

1. Have you ever realized how similar an oc is to you and felt the need to change them so they aren’t so similar? I mean, Jade from Iron Flower almost shares a name with me, and she’s ginger, which did concern me for a while, but hopefully she’s nothing like me personality wise (or else I’d have to do some serious self-reflection)

2. Do any of your ocs like candles? I bet Rosalie loves pretty candles, especially patterned or strongly scented ones! Anything luxurious that she can’t afford, really

3. Do you normally write settings that are (or are based on) places you know intimately (ie your home town)? Oh god no. I like sweeping Chinese-inspired castles or creaking pirate ships or far flung space universities and man-made planets. I’m really not a contemporary writer though, so I guess this isn’t much of a surprise?

4. What is a book that feels similar to your own wip? Ahahaha, which WIP? Piracy Pays has similar vibes to @boothewriter‘s pirates and probably also @noodlewrites’ pirates (I’m guessing? I haven’t read any excerpts from you I’m sorry). Space Royalty is just weird. Iron Flower is probably similar to a lot of generic fantasy YA, like Red Queen and whatnot.

5. Do you have a dream cast for your ocs? I don’t really faceclaim? Or know much about a wide array of actors, so no, not really.

6. Are you good at story titles? Do they come easily to you? I am abysmal at story titles, holy shit. I mean, you can see the evidence scattered around this post. Piracy Pays and Space Royalty are just placeholder names, but I’m not convinced I’ll come up with anything good to replace them. Iron Flower is alright in that its relevant to the story and fits into the series title (The Flowers of War) but…idk, its not setting the stars alight or anything.

7. Do you ever change oc names once you’ve started a wip? Not often, though I am considering changing Ace’s name because I don’t think ‘Seb’ suits him. Only question, what to??

8. Which people have you let read your work? I mean, all of y’all have the opportunity to read Piracy Pays. No one has read Iron Flower, and I’m stretching myself by letting @rrrawrf-writes @lux-deorum@haphazardlyparked read Space Royalty in its raw first draft stage.

9. What usually catches your attention about a book first? Style? Characters? Plot? I’m quite an easy reader to catch and hold tbh. What makes me love a book is a clever plot. For me, a very strong plot can carry weak-ish characters, but I can never read super deep characters with no plot.

10. Do you have a favourite author? Probs Rick Riordan, or Julia Golding.

******************************************************************************************* tagged by the wonderful @typeaadventures

1. How many works in progress do you have? Properly, three. Iron Flower, which is written (143k) but needs editing, Piracy Pays which y’all are reading, and Space Royalty which crossed 30k about a week ago

2. Do you/would you write fanfiction I used to! I stopped in Y12/13 because I didn’t have enough time to do fic and original writing, and I haven’t really had the time to pick it back up.

3. Do you prefer paper books or ebooks? Either, I’m not fussed. Though if it has a really pretty cover, I’ll be hankering after a paper copy

4. When did you start writing? 14-ish on Young justice fanfic

5. Do you have someone you trust that you share your work with? Not all of my work, but yeah, I have a lovely server and also some irl friends that get the junk landed on them

6. Where is your favourite place to write? At home chilling with my family while we all do stuff

7. Favourite book as a child? Dragonfly by Julia Golding

8. Writing for fun or publication? Hopefully publication, but I know I need to improve a lot first, honing my skills etc.

9. Have you taken writing classes? Not a lick

10. What inspired you to write? Gotta get those stories out of my head and onto the page, man. Gotta get that sweet sweet representation out there too.

thanks everyone!  xx

[thejustinmarshall]

Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog

One afternoon last August, a delivery truck rolled up outside my house in Denver. Two men got out, dollied a large box through the front door, unpacked a 6-foot long wooden workbench top and gave it a once-over to see if it had been damaged in shipping. I signed for the delivery, carried the wood and accompanying metal legs back to a 10-foot by 10-foot room at the back of our duplex, and put it all together.

A few minutes later, I dusted off my hands and stood in front of it: the first real desk of my outdoor writing career.

I’d been trying to be an adventure writer since 2004, been trying at it full-time since 2012—and I’d never had a place to set my laptop, pile up notebooks, stick post-it notes, or leave a printer plugged into a wall outlet. I’d typed in coffee shops, at friends’ kitchen tables, in the back of a van, at my own kitchen table, at airports, laundromats, anywhere I could when I had to. But now. A desk, in its own room. I must be a real writer now, right?

It’s funny how your definition of “real” changes.

—

In the spring of 2004, I had decided I was going to be an adventure writer. Not immediately, but someday. I had discovered Mark Jenkins’ columns in Outside, read Daniel Duane’s El Capitan book (despite never having climbed or seen El Cap), and tore through Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild. The model I understood from those writings—going on big adventures and writing stories about them—seemed like a dream job, although I had no idea if it was an actual job, or how a person could get that job. I did my master’s thesis at the University of Montana School of Journalism on peak bagging, and as a requirement for my magazine writing class, I had gotten published—an article in IDAHO Magazine about a road trip I’d taken the previous summer. The check for the article was for $40, or would have been, had I not asked the editor to please send me $40 worth of copies of the magazine instead, because I was so excited to have been published. It was a start, I thought. A slow one, but a start nonetheless. At $40 per article, I’d have had to write 233 articles each year just to crest the poverty line in 2004.

So I needed a real job, too. I applied at newspapers with no luck, so I got a job on the sales floor at the Phoenix REI to work while I sent out resumes and made calls to prospective journalism employers. I finally got a full-time editor/reporter/copy editor job at a small suburban weekly newspaper, and stayed on working part-time at REI.

In my spare time, I pitched every outdoor magazine I knew of, writing query letters that almost without fail resulted in rejection letters sent back to me weeks or months later. It was like walking up to a sport climbing crag, trying a route, falling after clipping the first bolt, failing to climb any higher, and moving on to the next route and repeating the process, with nothing to show for it. For months.

In my second year of pitching stories, I made $75 from one article. I moved to Denver to work at a small newspaper—but on the side, I kept pitching any outdoor publication I thought might pay. Almost all of them sent me rejections. In late 2006, John Fayhee at the Mountain Gazette liked a story I sent him enough to publish it and pay me $100. In mid-2007, I got a part-time job writing funny 100-word blogs for an outdoors website, at 15 cents a word, 2 to 3 blogs per week.

I kept working day jobs, first at the newspaper and then at a nonprofit that took urban teens on wilderness trips. After work, I obsessed over rock climbing routes, logistics of road trips I could take during my time off or over three-day weekends, read adventure books and magazines, and checked out guidebooks from the public library. I kept writing and trying to get published, chipping away at that idea of becoming a real writer.

I finally got a small assignment from a big magazine. I would interview a guy named Fitz Cahall, who had a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries.” I did the interview, wrote the 400-word story, sent it in, and … months later, I hadn’t heard from the editor. I checked back a couple times, and somehow the story had gotten lost in the editor’s spam folder. It never ran.

From the interview with Fitz Cahall, I held on to one part of his story: Fitz had wanted to become a magazine writer and had some success at it, but magazines weren’t interested in what he thought were his best story ideas. So he wrote them anyway, recorded them, and made them into a podcast—his own thing.

I ended up writing and recording an episode for The Dirtbag Diaries in mid-2008, starting a years-long relationship with Fitz and Becca Cahall. And, in late 2010, I followed Fitz’s thinking and took my rejected ideas (or ideas that were so ridiculous I’d never even pitched them) and started my own blog. In December 2010, I paid $12.17 for the URL Semi-Rad.com, and started writing short blog posts. I published the first four of them on February 2, 2011, and shared one of the posts with my few hundred Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The first month, I published four blog posts, one every Thursday. My friend Josh Barker had told me that a regular publishing schedule would keep readers interested, so I decided to write one blog every week until something happened or I got sick of it. The first month, my blog got 646 page views. Not exactly setting the internet on fire.

The next month, I got 1,810 page views. The next month, still posting every week, 2,085 views, and then 1,506 views the month after that. It went like that for a while. I wrote about pumping your fist out the window of your car at the start of a road trip, about the amount of beer you should pay your friends back with after they did a favor for you (like letting you borrow gear or digging you out of an avalanche). I wrote about not buying new gear just because you can. Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal reached out and asked if I would be interested in him re-posting some of my stories on his website and referring traffic back to me? Fuck yes I would. In October, I had more than 12,000 views. That December, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking consumers to not buy Patagonia jackets if they didn’t need them, so I made a few knock-offs of their design, around other environmental issues. It took off, and that month, I had almost 30,000 page views. More importantly, I had survived 11 months of writing one blog post every week. So I kept going.

—

After almost six years of trying, I started getting magazine assignments, starting in early 2011 with a story I’d been pitching and had written for Climbing Magazine. I started writing more stories for them, and eventually a monthly column—which was titled Semi-Rad, like my blog. Over the course of the next few years, I wrote short and long pieces for almost every magazine I’d wanted to—a gear review here, a short piece in the front of the book there, the occasional feature story. Sometimes I loved the result, sometimes the magazine and I had different goals, and once my name actually got spelled wrong in my byline (not in an outdoor mag, but a men’s magazine doing some outdoor stuff). In mid-2013, I was working on an assignment for an outdoor magazine, and the editor said that when I was writing the feature story we were discussing, I should “imagine if you were writing about it for your blog.”

By the time I’d gotten to write for a few of the outdoor publications I’d always wanted to, I started to realize things were changing, for me and for everyone. In 2004, I’d wanted to write magazine feature stories, Jon Krakauer- and Daniel Duane-style—but in 2014, lots of magazines were shifting resources to online content, and often (but not always) decreasing resources devoted to publishing long features. Gone were the days (that I never experienced) of travel budgets and high-four-figure/five-figure story payouts—the kinds of things that “real writers” had. But the internet, which made life hell for lots of newspapers and magazines, was fantastic for people like me, who could hand-draw a flowchart about pooping in the woods or write a half-serious blog post about how much I hate (but kind of love) running and potentially reach thousands of people—or sometimes, only a few dozen, which happened lots of Thursdays. At the beginning of 2013, I landed a sponsor, Outdoor Research, whose support cosigned my efforts and made sure I had what I needed to keep it going.

—

In June 2014, I was driving around Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs doing research for a rock climbing guidebook I was co-authoring. The year before, I had put large “Semi-Rad.com” decals on either side of my Astrovan, which I was living in, thinking I needed to do that in order to deduct mileage on my taxes.

A car started tailgating me around the scenic loop, flashing its headlights. I wondered, “did I just cut that guy off? Is the van on fire?” I pulled over at the next pullout. The car pulled over, a guy got out, and introduced himself. His name was Willie Bailey, and he was a firefighter and photographer from Tennessee. He had been reading my blog for a couple years, and he had just read the road trip book I had self-published and got inspired to take a road trip himself—which he was on. Right now. We chatted a little bit, took a quick photo, and I got back in my van to drive away, thinking that was a pretty heartwarming side effect of writing a blog post every week for three and a half years.

This would happen more times over the next few years, and it’s not something they teach you in journalism school or creative writing classes: if you put a little bit of yourself out there and people can relate to it, sometimes you get to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and hear a little bit of their story. And you don’t get that in every job.

—

There’s no monetary reward to having people you don’t know talk about some goofy thing you wrote, and it’s not a Pulitzer or National Magazine Award. But it was something I hadn’t considered when I started writing—that the weird shit I posted on my blog, which falls flat sometimes and makes it a little way around the internet some other times, could also become a piece of dialogue between friends. That not only do they laugh at the joke—which is all you hope for when you’re trying to be funny—but they laugh again later when they say it to a friend.

In late 2014, my friend Jim Harris wrote me an email from a bed and breakfast in Punta Arenas, Chile. He had been sitting on a couch around a wood stove with a group of people who were on their way to Torres del Paine when one of the group “started quoting your ‘Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome’ piece and the rest of the group filled in other memorable lines. I think they’ve memorized in a way I can only claim for a few Monty Python bits. Even 10,000 miles from home, the world’s a smallish place.”

—

Late last Monday night, I sat in my kitchen hand-writing thank-you postcards to the folks who support my creative efforts on Patreon, and realized my blog at Semi-Rad.com had turned 8 years old a few days before. I turned 40 last month, which means I’ve been writing Semi-Rad posts every week for a fifth of my life. If each blog was 500 words long, that’s well over 200,000 words written.

Since I started eight years ago, I’ve been able to successfully explore other ways to make a living besides writing a blog—public speaking, directing short films, writing books, drawing cartoons, and of course, writing for other publications. Some weeks I wondered if I should keep doing the blog, and some weeks it felt like no one read the blog at all.

But I had a place to write where no one told me what I could do and couldn’t do, for better (often) or for worse (hopefully not quite as often). I had a place to write an obituary for my friend Mick, who wasn’t a famous adventure athlete, but who I still quote to this day. I had a place to write about my mom, who climbs at a gym in Iowa, and my dad, who doesn’t climb at all, and about my friend Abi when she finally summited Mt. Shasta last summer. I wrote a story about my friend Nick’s rabid obsession with getting himself an old Trek 970 back in 2010, something he’d forgotten about until I reminded him last week. I don’t know if those stories would ever have gone anywhere if I hadn’t just done them myself, without caring whether 100 people or 100,000 people read them. (And let’s be honest—it was a little closer to 100).

Every once in a while someone asks what the word “Semi-Rad” means, and I explain that when I started the blog, I thought there was already plenty of outdoor media coverage of elite climbers, skiers, runners, and other record-breakers. I wanted to focus on the rest of us who love the outdoors—the things we have in common. I think those things are valuable too, and often ridiculous and worth laughing at.

If you ask any writer how to get started, I think you’ll get countless variations on one piece of common advice: Start writing. You just make yourself do it, even if you’re not sure if it’s any good at first. Writing is a lot like digging a hole in the ground: You only make progress after you actually start.

The one thing I’ve learned from making myself write something every week is this: You can’t hit a home run every week. Maybe you can’t hit a home run every month. But if you keep writing, sometimes you bunt, sometimes you strike out, and sometimes you get a walk. But if you get to first base, there’s someone out there who might need whatever it is you wrote, on that day. Even if the rest of the internet doesn’t seem to notice.

In mid-2017, Jonah Ogles, then an editor at Outside, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in having my Semi-Rad blog posts published as a weekly column on OutsideOnline.com. It was an unexpected, but welcome, honor for a blog born out of the fatigue of trying to get my stuff printed on someone else’s platform.

It was a totally different path than my adventure writing heroes, like Mark Jenkins, took, but making a living as a writer has never been straightforward, maybe less straightforward now than ever. If you had told me in 2008 that it was possible to get a book deal by writing really good Instagram captions, I would have said, “What the hell is Instagram?” in the same way if you’d told Mark Jenkins in 1998 that you could get a book deal by writing a blog, he probably would have said, “What the hell is a blog?” We’re all trying to figure it out as we go, whether you’re a publication like Outside or a hopeful somebody who just wants a few people to read your stories, in whatever format.

I don’t pretend to speak for all writers, but I think if you’re a writer and you’re honest with yourself, the thing you want most for your writing isn’t money or some sort of fame, but readers. You want a genuine connection with a few people. I don’t know if I’d say everything has turned out like I thought it would, but I’m grateful I found a small community of people who read some of my stories about all the things we love to do outside. I may not be filing dispatches from a base camp in the Karakoram or anything like the legendary writers I read, but I’ve had a great time trying to make sense of all the weird stuff we do out there—getting cold, exhausted, scared, stormed on, wondering why we do it until we get back home and immediately want to do it all again.

Eight years after starting a blog, and picking up that metaphorical shovel every week to keep digging that metaphorical hole, I still can’t say I know what a “real writer” is.

I do have a desk now, though. So I might as well stick with this writing thing.

—Brendan

The post Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog appeared first on semi-rad.com.

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[olivereliott]

Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog

One afternoon last August, a delivery truck rolled up outside my house in Denver. Two men got out, dollied a large box through the front door, unpacked a 6-foot long wooden workbench top and gave it a once-over to see if it had been damaged in shipping. I signed for the delivery, carried the wood and accompanying metal legs back to a 10-foot by 10-foot room at the back of our duplex, and put it all together.

A few minutes later, I dusted off my hands and stood in front of it: the first real desk of my outdoor writing career.

I’d been trying to be an adventure writer since 2004, been trying at it full-time since 2012—and I’d never had a place to set my laptop, pile up notebooks, stick post-it notes, or leave a printer plugged into a wall outlet. I’d typed in coffee shops, at friends’ kitchen tables, in the back of a van, at my own kitchen table, at airports, laundromats, anywhere I could when I had to. But now. A desk, in its own room. I must be a real writer now, right?

It’s funny how your definition of “real” changes.

—

In the spring of 2004, I had decided I was going to be an adventure writer. Not immediately, but someday. I had discovered Mark Jenkins�� columns in Outside, read Daniel Duane’s El Capitan book (despite never having climbed or seen El Cap), and tore through Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild. The model I understood from those writings—going on big adventures and writing stories about them—seemed like a dream job, although I had no idea if it was an actual job, or how a person could get that job. I did my master’s thesis at the University of Montana School of Journalism on peak bagging, and as a requirement for my magazine writing class, I had gotten published—an article in IDAHO Magazine about a road trip I’d taken the previous summer. The check for the article was for $40, or would have been, had I not asked the editor to please send me $40 worth of copies of the magazine instead, because I was so excited to have been published. It was a start, I thought. A slow one, but a start nonetheless. At $40 per article, I’d have had to write 233 articles each year just to crest the poverty line in 2004.

So I needed a real job, too. I applied at newspapers with no luck, so I got a job on the sales floor at the Phoenix REI to work while I sent out resumes and made calls to prospective journalism employers. I finally got a full-time editor/reporter/copy editor job at a small suburban weekly newspaper, and stayed on working part-time at REI.

In my spare time, I pitched every outdoor magazine I knew of, writing query letters that almost without fail resulted in rejection letters sent back to me weeks or months later. It was like walking up to a sport climbing crag, trying a route, falling after clipping the first bolt, failing to climb any higher, and moving on to the next route and repeating the process, with nothing to show for it. For months.

In my second year of pitching stories, I made $75 from one article. I moved to Denver to work at a small newspaper—but on the side, I kept pitching any outdoor publication I thought might pay. Almost all of them sent me rejections. In late 2006, John Fayhee at the Mountain Gazette liked a story I sent him enough to publish it and pay me $100. In mid-2007, I got a part-time job writing funny 100-word blogs for an outdoors website, at 15 cents a word, 2 to 3 blogs per week.

I kept working day jobs, first at the newspaper and then at a nonprofit that took urban teens on wilderness trips. After work, I obsessed over rock climbing routes, logistics of road trips I could take during my time off or over three-day weekends, read adventure books and magazines, and checked out guidebooks from the public library. I kept writing and trying to get published, chipping away at that idea of becoming a real writer.

I finally got a small assignment from a big magazine. I would interview a guy named Fitz Cahall, who had a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries.” I did the interview, wrote the 400-word story, sent it in, and … months later, I hadn’t heard from the editor. I checked back a couple times, and somehow the story had gotten lost in the editor’s spam folder. It never ran.

From the interview with Fitz Cahall, I held on to one part of his story: Fitz had wanted to become a magazine writer and had some success at it, but magazines weren’t interested in what he thought were his best story ideas. So he wrote them anyway, recorded them, and made them into a podcast—his own thing.

I ended up writing and recording an episode for The Dirtbag Diaries in mid-2008, starting a years-long relationship with Fitz and Becca Cahall. And, in late 2010, I followed Fitz’s thinking and took my rejected ideas (or ideas that were so ridiculous I’d never even pitched them) and started my own blog. In December 2010, I paid $12.17 for the URL Semi-Rad.com, and started writing short blog posts. I published the first four of them on February 2, 2011, and shared one of the posts with my few hundred Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The first month, I published four blog posts, one every Thursday. My friend Josh Barker had told me that a regular publishing schedule would keep readers interested, so I decided to write one blog every week until something happened or I got sick of it. The first month, my blog got 646 page views. Not exactly setting the internet on fire.

The next month, I got 1,810 page views. The next month, still posting every week, 2,085 views, and then 1,506 views the month after that. It went like that for a while. I wrote about pumping your fist out the window of your car at the start of a road trip, about the amount of beer you should pay your friends back with after they did a favor for you (like letting you borrow gear or digging you out of an avalanche). I wrote about not buying new gear just because you can. Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal reached out and asked if I would be interested in him re-posting some of my stories on his website and referring traffic back to me? Fuck yes I would. In October, I had more than 12,000 views. That December, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking consumers to not buy Patagonia jackets if they didn’t need them, so I made a few knock-offs of their design, around other environmental issues. It took off, and that month, I had almost 30,000 page views. More importantly, I had survived 11 months of writing one blog post every week. So I kept going.

—

After almost six years of trying, I started getting magazine assignments, starting in early 2011 with a story I’d been pitching and had written for Climbing Magazine. I started writing more stories for them, and eventually a monthly column—which was titled Semi-Rad, like my blog. Over the course of the next few years, I wrote short and long pieces for almost every magazine I’d wanted to—a gear review here, a short piece in the front of the book there, the occasional feature story. Sometimes I loved the result, sometimes the magazine and I had different goals, and once my name actually got spelled wrong in my byline (not in an outdoor mag, but a men’s magazine doing some outdoor stuff). In mid-2013, I was working on an assignment for an outdoor magazine, and the editor said that when I was writing the feature story we were discussing, I should “imagine if you were writing about it for your blog.”

By the time I’d gotten to write for a few of the outdoor publications I’d always wanted to, I started to realize things were changing, for me and for everyone. In 2004, I’d wanted to write magazine feature stories, Jon Krakauer- and Daniel Duane-style—but in 2014, lots of magazines were shifting resources to online content, and often (but not always) decreasing resources devoted to publishing long features. Gone were the days (that I never experienced) of travel budgets and high-four-figure/five-figure story payouts—the kinds of things that “real writers” had. But the internet, which made life hell for lots of newspapers and magazines, was fantastic for people like me, who could hand-draw a flowchart about pooping in the woods or write a half-serious blog post about how much I hate (but kind of love) running and potentially reach thousands of people—or sometimes, only a few dozen, which happened lots of Thursdays. At the beginning of 2013, I landed a sponsor, Outdoor Research, whose support cosigned my efforts and made sure I had what I needed to keep it going.

—

In June 2014, I was driving around Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs doing research for a rock climbing guidebook I was co-authoring. The year before, I had put large “Semi-Rad.com” decals on either side of my Astrovan, which I was living in, thinking I needed to do that in order to deduct mileage on my taxes.

A car started tailgating me around the scenic loop, flashing its headlights. I wondered, “did I just cut that guy off? Is the van on fire?” I pulled over at the next pullout. The car pulled over, a guy got out, and introduced himself. His name was Willie Bailey, and he was a firefighter and photographer from Tennessee. He had been reading my blog for a couple years, and he had just read the road trip book I had self-published and got inspired to take a road trip himself—which he was on. Right now. We chatted a little bit, took a quick photo, and I got back in my van to drive away, thinking that was a pretty heartwarming side effect of writing a blog post every week for three and a half years.

This would happen more times over the next few years, and it’s not something they teach you in journalism school or creative writing classes: if you put a little bit of yourself out there and people can relate to it, sometimes you get to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and hear a little bit of their story. And you don’t get that in every job.

—

There’s no monetary reward to having people you don’t know talk about some goofy thing you wrote, and it’s not a Pulitzer or National Magazine Award. But it was something I hadn’t considered when I started writing—that the weird shit I posted on my blog, which falls flat sometimes and makes it a little way around the internet some other times, could also become a piece of dialogue between friends. That not only do they laugh at the joke—which is all you hope for when you’re trying to be funny—but they laugh again later when they say it to a friend.

In late 2014, my friend Jim Harris wrote me an email from a bed and breakfast in Punta Arenas, Chile. He had been sitting on a couch around a wood stove with a group of people who were on their way to Torres del Paine when one of the group “started quoting your ‘Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome’ piece and the rest of the group filled in other memorable lines. I think they’ve memorized in a way I can only claim for a few Monty Python bits. Even 10,000 miles from home, the world’s a smallish place.”

—

Late last Monday night, I sat in my kitchen hand-writing thank-you postcards to the folks who support my creative efforts on Patreon, and realized my blog at Semi-Rad.com had turned 8 years old a few days before. I turned 40 last month, which means I’ve been writing Semi-Rad posts every week for a fifth of my life. If each blog was 500 words long, that’s well over 200,000 words written.

Since I started eight years ago, I’ve been able to successfully explore other ways to make a living besides writing a blog—public speaking, directing short films, writing books, drawing cartoons, and of course, writing for other publications. Some weeks I wondered if I should keep doing the blog, and some weeks it felt like no one read the blog at all.

But I had a place to write where no one told me what I could do and couldn’t do, for better (often) or for worse (hopefully not quite as often). I had a place to write an obituary for my friend Mick, who wasn’t a famous adventure athlete, but who I still quote to this day. I had a place to write about my mom, who climbs at a gym in Iowa, and my dad, who doesn’t climb at all, and about my friend Abi when she finally summited Mt. Shasta last summer. I wrote a story about my friend Nick’s rabid obsession with getting himself an old Trek 970 back in 2010, something he’d forgotten about until I reminded him last week. I don’t know if those stories would ever have gone anywhere if I hadn’t just done them myself, without caring whether 100 people or 100,000 people read them. (And let’s be honest—it was a little closer to 100).

Every once in a while someone asks what the word “Semi-Rad” means, and I explain that when I started the blog, I thought there was already plenty of outdoor media coverage of elite climbers, skiers, runners, and other record-breakers. I wanted to focus on the rest of us who love the outdoors—the things we have in common. I think those things are valuable too, and often ridiculous and worth laughing at.

If you ask any writer how to get started, I think you’ll get countless variations on one piece of common advice: Start writing. You just make yourself do it, even if you’re not sure if it’s any good at first. Writing is a lot like digging a hole in the ground: You only make progress after you actually start.

The one thing I’ve learned from making myself write something every week is this: You can’t hit a home run every week. Maybe you can’t hit a home run every month. But if you keep writing, sometimes you bunt, sometimes you strike out, and sometimes you get a walk. But if you get to first base, there’s someone out there who might need whatever it is you wrote, on that day. Even if the rest of the internet doesn’t seem to notice.

In mid-2017, Jonah Ogles, then an editor at Outside, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in having my Semi-Rad blog posts published as a weekly column on OutsideOnline.com. It was an unexpected, but welcome, honor for a blog born out of the fatigue of trying to get my stuff printed on someone else’s platform.

It was a totally different path than my adventure writing heroes, like Mark Jenkins, took, but making a living as a writer has never been straightforward, maybe less straightforward now than ever. If you had told me in 2008 that it was possible to get a book deal by writing really good Instagram captions, I would have said, “What the hell is Instagram?” in the same way if you’d told Mark Jenkins in 1998 that you could get a book deal by writing a blog, he probably would have said, “What the hell is a blog?” We’re all trying to figure it out as we go, whether you’re a publication like Outside or a hopeful somebody who just wants a few people to read your stories, in whatever format.

I don’t pretend to speak for all writers, but I think if you’re a writer and you’re honest with yourself, the thing you want most for your writing isn’t money or some sort of fame, but readers. You want a genuine connection with a few people. I don’t know if I’d say everything has turned out like I thought it would, but I’m grateful I found a small community of people who read some of my stories about all the things we love to do outside. I may not be filing dispatches from a base camp in the Karakoram or anything like the legendary writers I read, but I’ve had a great time trying to make sense of all the weird stuff we do out there—getting cold, exhausted, scared, stormed on, wondering why we do it until we get back home and immediately want to do it all again.

Eight years after starting a blog, and picking up that metaphorical shovel every week to keep digging that metaphorical hole, I still can’t say I know what a “real writer” is.

I do have a desk now, though. So I might as well stick with this writing thing.

—Brendan

The post Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog appeared first on semi-rad.com.

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The Nintendo King and the Midlife Crisis

It was December in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, black hair wet from the shower and curling above his eyes. He was in front of a wall of nearly 1,000 games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever released; the wall, floor to ceiling, was amazing to behold, Contri as small as Ahab in front of his whale. He read from the spines of gray plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades collecting: Spy Hunter, with its Peter Gunn theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987; Jaws, which he picked up at a flea market with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a year or two later; Zelda II, a game he had his parents order from the Sears catalog in 1988, a game he cried over because it took forever to arrive.

The wall was both a shrine to his life’s hobby and the backdrop for his work. For a decade, Contri has played a character called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000 viewers on YouTube. Fans recognize him at the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets, and he has become not just an expert on Nintendo but a public face for anyone who grew up with the NES, anyone who’s worn a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the Super Mario Bros. theme song thumping in their heart.

The Punk is goofier than the real-life Contri—a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his id. Games are the Punk’s life, and thoughts of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake him in sweat. Almost all of his videos, which run around 10 minutes, focus on the Punk’s experience with a single NES game. Each is a combination history lesson and review, delivered with a narrative voice that lets Contri (as writer, director, and star) show off his sense of humor, his knowledge of Nintendo, and occasionally even the depths of his introspection—about being boxed into an endless childhood by video­games, about the inherent sadness of trying to fill a hole in his life with them.

See more from the Life Issue. April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Nik Mirus

One of Contri’s best videos, a 12-minute piece from 2013 dedicated to the rare and expensive NES game The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, begins with the Punk rustling awake from a fever dream, choking out “I need help.” And, looking at his games: “What am I doing? They’re just video­games. I’m holding like a thousand bucks’ worth right in my hands. That could be going to something useful, something memorable. Like a vacation! I could go anywhere I want. Scotland. Italy. Tahiti …” And there he pauses. “I wonder if there’s NES games in Tahiti.”

It was a bit, mostly, but as Nintendo celebrates the 33rd birthday of its historic console—and as Contri approaches 38—it was also a sign of the conflict within him. Like a lot of people who were born in the years just before and after the launch of the NES, he is no longer young and not nearly old, neither new nor vintage, and it seems like he has started to feel a bit lost in the in-between. “I don’t know if I want to be 65 years old talking about retro video­games,” he told me. “I don’t want that to be the only thing I talk about forever. I think sometimes, ‘Is this where my talent begins and ends?’ ” He says he doesn’t play NES video­games anymore—except when he’s in character—and that it’s different now: It’s work. He admits this in resignation, like it’s sacrilege, the man for whom Nintendo became a career.

“There’s something a little self-deprecating about the Punk character, and about my character too,” says James Rolfe, a 37-year-old godfather of YouTube gamers who plays a character named the Angry Video Game Nerd and is a collaborator of Contri’s. “All these YouTube characters have some kind of element of sadness to them. Thinking back to childhood, were we wasting our time with games? Were we really entertaining ourselves? Were we really happy?”

Contri’s home library consists of nearly 1,000 NES games.

SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

Contri is a 37-year-old man who has been playing video­games his entire life. His cousin’s Atari 2600, when he was 4. His family’s PC-IBM XT. Then he was 7 when his parents bought him an NES console, and pre­adolescent Pat started spending hours in his family’s rec room in front of a small Magnavox monitor. Later, in high school, he played Super Nintendo and then PC games, and rediscovered the NES while he was in college. After he graduated, in 2002, he eventually settled into a job in market research, working 50-plus hours a week in Princeton, New Jersey, and living in nearby North Brunswick. He hated it.

One day in 2006, he came across the Angry Video Game Nerd’s irascible game reviews, and the sight of a character drinking beer and railing about the game Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest rang out to him. “I saw the AVGN doing well, but I saw a lot of bad videos out there too,” Contri says. “I’d watch them and think, ‘Not only does this person not know how to play the game, he didn’t include any history of it.’ At the very least, I thought I could do better.”

Contri made his first video, six and a half minutes of him as the Punk playing a couple of NES baseball games before landing on the best, Baseball Stars. He chose the nickname because he thought it had a ring to it, had an attitude, and, well, women he’d dated told him he acted like a punk. It also captured the overpowering feeling he got when he played the games; the NES made him happy, and the character was a weird, happy extension of who Contri really was. He made his second video a month later, about The Three Stooges, and then another one after that. He started pumping out videos, each loaded with enough humor, personality, and insider knowledge to set it apart from everything else online. In 2012, a few years after leaving New Jersey for San Diego, he quit his market research job and started making videos full time.

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Today Contri gets flown across the country up to a dozen times a year to attend video­game conventions, where he often arrives sleep-deprived and stressed, carving a smile in front of his fans. He schleps suitcases full of NES Punk wristbands and DVDs across banquet hallways and sits at a booth wearing a T-shirt and sandals, a guy with that perpetual five-o’clock shadow and the foppish hair, selling his merchandise and signing his name a hundred times on NES consoles and controllers and game cartridges. He earns six figures a year, his revenue coming from merchandise and book royalties; from YouTube ads and the sponsors of his two podcasts, Not So Common, which he hosts by himself, and the Completely Unnecessary Podcast, a show he cohosts with a friend named Ian Ferguson; from the Patreon supporters whose monthly donations help pay for his content.

As of earlier this year, the NES Punk videos were the least lucrative and most time-­consuming of all Contri’s ventures. One of his most recent videos, about a game called Stadium Events, took him more than 50 hours to create—much of that time spent researching the mysterious rarity of the game—and it attracted just over 70,000 views at last count, earning him a little less than $400. A low return, by any measure, and he’s started to think more and more about retiring the character and maybe doing something else with his time.

“For the last year and a half, I’ve never really known what he does for fun,” says Ferguson, who met Contri in 2008. “I can’t think of one specific hobby aside from exercise that he does that’s completely disconnected from work. His work was once his hobby, and now he’s married to that work.” Contri insists that he does, in fact, have other interests: “I like movies. I love the zoo. I like watching sports on TV. I hate the Patriots, but who doesn’t?” He’s never been married, has no kids, and lives alone, unless you count the Punk. “The Punk is just a character,” he says. “Sometimes people think it’s really me. But at some point this will end.”

In the game room where he films the videos, Contri lingered over the wall of NES cartridge games he no longer plays for fun. “I don’t know if they give me a feeling anymore,” he said. “And I don’t know if I’m still looking for that feeling. Most of us are well-adjusted adults now.” Maybe he meant the generation of adults who’d loved the NES as kids, or the obsessed people like him who’d collected the whole North American library (he keeps three games in a bank vault), or the really insane people who would want an ancient, mint-condition NES holographic cereal box, which he proudly showed me.

Pat Contri holding a jumbo-sized vintage Donkey Kong plush from 1982 at his home outside of San Diego.

SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

Contri doesn’t know what to do—walk the Punk into the sunset, or kill the character off. Nintendo is as popular as ever, which isn’t making the decision any easier. The Switch—a Nintendo console designed for middle-­aged people as much as it is for anyone—has sold more than 14 million units since it was released last year. Stores spent a year selling out of the NES and SNES Classic. And in the summer of 2016, Contri released a 437-page, $60 hardback coffee-table-sized bible called Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985–1995, which took him nearly three years to finish 1. It includes reviews of every mainstream NES game released in the US along with information and factoids and NES curio history. He wrote 450 of the 800-plus reviews, then compiled it all before publishing it himself.

It suffocated him but turned into a surprise hit—with two print runs totaling 10,000 copies—thanks in part to his meticulous research and the surge in interest in retro NES games. It was a big reason why he was able to buy his house in San Diego, where Nintendo is on the walls and in the bedroom, on the floor and on the shelves, in the beady plastic eyes of the stuffed animals and on his personalized wristbands and the five-o’clock shadow that his YouTube character can never seem to get rid of. Nintendo forged him and allowed him the strange bounty of internet fame, not to mention a ton of crazy stuff he has collected for no other reason than that it probably made him feel like a kid.

He has already planned a sequel to the book, a guide for the Super Nintendo library that he hopes to publish next year. “I am happy, I think—I’ll definitely be happy, once I finish the next book,” he says. Contri’s hair is going a little gray, and he mentions that maybe the Punk might survive to have totally white hair—that maybe he could still be talking about games 30 years from now, like old men talking about toy train sets in the corners of convention ballrooms. He has enough games to make it all last forever. The Punk, an old guy, hunched over, still collecting, still playing the ancient games, still living in a house full of Nintendo.

Read More

Real Wedding, Virtual Space • The Pursuit of Youth • The Digital Vision Problem • The True Screen Addicts • Rebooting Reproduction • Silicon Valley's Brotox Boom • The Next Steve Jobs • Solving Health Issues at All Stages

Justin Heckert (@JustinHeckert) is a writer living in Charleston, South Carolina. This is his first feature for WIRED.

1 Correction appended, 3/27/18, 8:28 PM EDT: Contri published his book, Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985–1995, in 2016, not 2017.

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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LA / Bodies of a Different Mass

BODIES OF THE SAME MASS ADRIAN GLICK KUDLER

Everybody who really lived in L.A. was linked into the trance. Everybody knew certain boulders were fake and they knew why.-Eve Babitz, L.A. Woman

Willimina Armstrong: white Indiaphile, writer, failed cultist. She incarnated the spirits of “ancients” into her expensive collection of dolls, according to a complaint filed in 1913 by Beatrice Fuller, a former disciple. She believed old spirits animated many kinds of new bodies, including the dog Bonnie, pet of Bessie Prosser, who Willimina lived with for many years in a sandalwood-scented bungalow near Ivanhoe Canyon, flooded in the period of their residence to create the Silver Lake Reservoir.

Willimina lured visitors—many socially prominent in Los Angeles—with stories from her days as a physician to the harem of an Indian prince, before gradually revealing that they had the whole time been in the presence of the Kalki Avatara, “the living embodiment of the personality or godhead of the infinite,” arrived to shepherd in a golden age on Earth. Then she would begin asking for money. Sometimes she hypnotized them.

According to her press coverage, Willimina attended the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia as a teenager in the 1880s and lived for seven years after in India, where, according to her, she “revealed an intellect broad in its grasp and a spirit that perceived the truth until she was adopted into the most ancient order of teachers known to mankind and declared a ‘Sage of India.’”

She spoke through the ether to Goethe and Apollo, and was the physician of the minor gods in their post-death bodies. She said the railroad magnate E.H. Harriman had discovered her divinity in the afterlife and that his ghost had literally begged to make her rich by making her followers rich so that they could pass their riches on to her.

Willimina died in 1947. She had changed her name to Zamin Ki Dost. In the 1940 census, it was recorded that she was living with a school teacher named Mattaline G. Crabtree, who was also her disciple and biographer.

She waved off the charges of her earlier disciple. “I do not know any Mrs. Fuller,” she told an LA Timesreporter in 1913, who noted that “when ... she stretched herself on the couch, and brushed her hair, which is soft and silky, back from her forehead, she appeared years younger.” “But,” she continued, “I do know to some extent a Miss Fuller. I would rather not say anything about her, because she is the daughter of a very fine man, and also on her own account.”

Willimina refused also to speak about the dolls, except to say that “A number of my friends have helped me dress these dolls ... and no one has done more beautiful work or which I appreciate more than the work done by Miss Fuller. She crocheted little silk socks and tiny woollen petticoats for a whole lot of the littlest ones.”

*

Doris Duke: the Richest Girl in the World. Died—possibly murdered—in 1993, at 80, surrounded by four huge guard dogs, her maid, her lawyer, and her butler, in the master bedroom at Falcon Lair, the mansion that Rudolph Valentino built in Benedict Canyon in the last years of his life. Doris bought Falcon Lair in the 1950s and after that she split her long, idle year among Los Angeles, Hawaii, Duke Farms in New Jersey, and Rough Point in Newport. At Rough Point, staff cleaned up the shit of two camels that shared the house with Doris, gifts from a Saudi billionaire.

She was close with the actress Sharon Tate, who became her neighbor in Benedict Canyon for a very short time at the very end of the 1960s; she believed Tate was the reincarnation of her child with the surfer Duke Kahanamoku. Arden: who had been born prematurely and died immediately.

Doris’s father, James Buchanan Duke, inherited a tobacco company from his father, and he acquired others until he was selling cigarettes to 90 percent of American smokers. When he died in 1925, when Doris was 12, he left her $100 million. Doris sued her mother at 15, briefly married first a Philadelphia socialite and then a polo player, had her own 737, paid Martha Graham to give her in-home movement lessons, supposedly bedded General George S. Patton, put up $5 million to bail out Imelda Marcos when she was indicted for looting the Philippines, accidentally crushed her interior designer to death under her car, and supposedly liked to say “You can’t buy a person, but you sure can rent one for a while.”

In 1988, she adopted Chandi Heffner, a 35-year-old blonde woman and follower of Hare Krishna who she had met in a dance class. Some people say they were lovers, or that Doris thought Chandi was another reincarnation of Arden. Chandi introduced Doris to Bernard Lafferty, Peggy Lee’s personal assistant, who “began to fill Miss Duke's head with all sorts of conspiracy theories” about Chandi, Doris’s chef swore years later in an affidavit. One day in Hawaii, Doris told Chandi she was going to the dentist, then flew to Los Angeles while her staff evicted her daughter.

Lafferty was born in Ireland and moved to Philadelphia at 17, after his parents died, to live with his aunt. He became Doris’s butler in the mid-1980s and, depending on who you listen to, perhaps her dear companion. He reportedly grew his ponytail at her request; he made her feel young.

Two LA Timesreporters later made an accounting of Doris’s appearance in these years: “Her hair was too blonde for her years. And while the skin of her long, narrow face was taut as a 30-year-old's, heavy lipstick accented an almost ghoulish droop of her mouth.”

Doris had a facelift at Cedars-Sinai in the spring of 1992. Over the next year and a half, she was repeatedly admitted to Cedars under the name “Norma Jane” (a mishearing of “Norma Jean”): for a broken hip, anemia, knee replacements, two strokes, and another knee replacement—with the hope she’d be able to dance again. At some point, from her hospital bed, she signed a new will that named Lafferty executor and left him $5 million in fees and $500,000 a year for life.

Doris went home to Falcon Lair for good in late September 1993, and lived her last days in bed, pumped full of morphine “through a tube that Duke had nicknamed Tallulah,” according to People. She died in the early morning on October 28 and was cremated by the next day. No autopsy was performed.

Her ashes were brought in turn to each of her four houses, which were kept staffed to await her reincarnation. Lafferty expanded the master bedroom at Falcon Lair and shopped at Armani, Cartier, and Louis Vuitton. He bought two miniature horses as companions for the last camel left living at Rough Point.

Several parties challenged the will. Their star witness was Tammy Payette, a veteran of the Gulf War and one of Doris’s six private nurses in her last days at Falcon Lair, who alleged that Lafferty and Doris’s doctor had murdered her with morphine and Demerol.

Chandi eventually won $65.8 million, in exchange for her eternal silence about Doris Duke. Today she has a nonprofit with the mission to provide medical care and other services to humans and animals in India. In May 1996, Lafferty took $4.5 million and $500,000 a year for life, in exchange for giving up his executor role. He died that November, alone, in his mansion in Benedict Canyon, decorated with photos of Doris.

Off a tip from private detectives working for the Duke estate, Tammy Payette was arrested outside a pawn shop on Rodeo Drive in 1995, at 28. She was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing diamond cufflinks, sterling silver corn holders, and more from seven of her rich patients. Prosecutors said she sold much of it and used the money to buy a car and furniture, and to take vacations. She pleaded guilty to everything, except the accusation that she had stolen diamond and pearl necklaces, jade eagles, and other jewelry from Doris. She said those had been given to her by Lafferty in exchange for her silence about Doris’s death.

Of the rest of her patients, she said, “They were so wealthy. I thought they weren't going to miss it.”

*

At the end of July 1899, a man’s body arrived at C.D. Howry’s morgue in Downtown Los Angeles, about a mile from here. On July 21, the man had been registered at the Woodland lodging house on Main Street under the name Mr. Reither, but a journal found with his few possessions was inscribed “L. Reuther.” “I went up to Mt. Lowe, and the trip was worth the price,” he wrote a few days before every crevice in his room was plugged up and the gas turned on. “$2—one day’s life—for I have set the limit of my life to coincide with the exhaustion of my funds, and I have but very little.”

The register of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco showed that Reuther had checked in on July 14, giving Chicago as his place of residence, and left on July 19 on a steamer boat to San Diego. He showed up in Los Angeles two days later.

For a week after his death his body lay unclaimed in the morgue. But then, somehow, word began to get around that there was a body at Howry’s that looked very much like a St. Louis man named Aaron Wolfsohn, who had been through town the previous March on business for a Philadelphia ribbon firm. An anonymous woman acquaintance of Wolfsohn’s visited the morgue and strenuously confirmed the dead body was his. S.A.D. Jones, an agent of the New York Life Insurance Company, went to look at the body out of what he would later say was “sheer curiosity,” but was “struck with the resemblance” to Wolfsohn, who he said had bought a $10,000 life insurance policy from him that spring while staying as a guest at the Nadeau Hotel at First and Spring.

Wolfsohn told Jones that he intended to marry soon, and to start a business, and to get the capital for the business from his new wife. He was examined twice, possibly, by a Dr. Carl Kurtz. The first time in March, when he was alive, at his hotel room, in the company of a woman named Margaret O’Neil. The second time in August, as a corpse. Kurtz was nearly, but not entirely, convinced that the body was Wolfsohn’s. No autopsy was performed.

Wolfsohn never paid for his policy. He gave Jones an IOU, signed twice—once by Aaron Wolfsohn and once by Arthur Wolfson, “which he said he had adopted as being more convenient and not so suggestive of his Hebraic ancestry,” theLA Timesreported. Later a lawyer for the New York Life Insurance Company would insist that the company had failed to collect from Wolfsohn in Philadelphia and that Wolfsohn, annoyed, ripped up the policy and assumed he had nullified it. But he hadn’t.

Wolfsohn’s St. Louis relatives, on notification of his death, had refused to pay for his funeral, and his father, who he’d had a falling out with a few years before, told Howry to hand the body over to the Jewish Benevolent Association. The anonymous woman at this time stepped in and paid for a burial at Evergreen Cemetery. Los Angeles Public Administrator C.G. Kellogg took over administration of the estate and in November took payment from the New York Life Insurance Company of $10,000.

A week later, the New York Life Insurance Company said Aaron Wolfsohn was alive. “There is nothing whatever to conceal about the matter,” Jones the Los Angeles agent told the LA Times.

At this point, May O’Neil, San Francisco widow of comfortable but not extravagant means, came forward as the mystery woman who had paid for the funeral of the man she was “thoroughly convinced was none other than Aaron Wolfsohn ... Although more than a week had passed since death, and the face was somewhat discolored and distorted, the features were unmistakably those of my lifelong friend.”

She said they had been schoolmates in the Midwest, but hadn’t seen each other in years, until they crossed paths in Los Angeles in March. She said she had seen him off on the train to Philadelphia. “I did nothing that I need be ashamed of, nor anything I would boast of,” she said.

Howry then revealed that O’Neil intended to put in a claim against Wolfsohn’s estate for $1,000 of the insurance money; she later told the newspaper that she asked for so much because “she knew the Wolfsohns were of a race that likes to bargain and she expected to be ‘jewed down.’”

For a month, all the parties involved argued among themselves about the mortal state of Aaron Wolfsohn. On December 30, the man arrived in Los Angeles.

He “posed and strutted,” according to the newspaper, and said that before November 18 he had been in Europe for six months, as a representative of “a big London commercial house.” When a reporter asked him what he did for a living, “after floundering about for a moment, [he] swelled up and said he was a ‘promoter’ and traveled for himself.”

“My acquaintance with her was limited to three days, and I am only sorry it was not briefer,” he said of May. On the first day, he met her on a streetcar. The next day, they met at a hotel (evidently the Nadeau). On the third day, “they boarded a train together and traveled to Kansas City.”

A reporter tipped off May that Wolfsohn was staying at the Van Nuys hotel and she was waiting to meet him when he returned with Edward O’Bryan, attorney for the New York Life Insurance Company. When O’Bryan saw her, he told Wolfsohn to run. Wolfsohn ran.

He skipped town, but returned soon after, and the public administrator finally agreed that Aaron Wolfsohn was himself, and alive. The matter was clinched in part by an affidavit from Rosa Blumenthal, Wolfsohn’s cousin and fiancee, who stated that she “was informed on or about August 1, 1899, that Aaron had committed suicide in Los Angeles, and that she believed him dead and mourned him as such until November 19 of the same year.” Public Administrator Kellogg gave the $10,000 back to the New York Life Insurance Company, less attorney fees and expenses.

No more was reported about May O’Neil. Wolfsohn had a happy reunion with his family, including his father. “No trace of the old animosity remained.” S.A.D. Jones died of dysentery in Hawaii in 1904. His obituary said he’d lost his job and moved to San Francisco after the Wolfsohn affair. “The company is satisfied to recover its money,” said Edward O’Bryan. “The identity of the dead man or why he was palmed off as Wolfsohn does not interest us now.”

“The deceased ... like Aaron Wolfsohn,” wrote a lawyer for the public administrator during the long confusion, “was a circumcised Jew, being about the same age, having the same color of hair and eyes, the same complexion, the same height...” Someone had cut off the ends of his long mustache and combed his hair like Wolfsohn’s, but his landlord, Mrs. Collins, described him “as a quiet, studious, reserved and melancholy man, and not a fresh dude like Wolfsohn.”

A few days before he died, the dead man wrote in his journal: “I shortened my life another day by buying ‘The Market Place,’ by Harold Frederic. I think the book is overrated. After reading it I exchanged it for ‘Tekla,’ by Barr. It is a good story. In both these books the women are rather neglected. I read books every day. They act on me as a narcotic. I dope myself with them. They make me forget for a moment, for there is a continual struggle going on—to be or not to be.”

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The Nintendo King and the Midlife Crisis

It was December in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, black hair wet from the shower and curling above his eyes. He was in front of a wall of nearly 1,000 games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever released; the wall, floor to ceiling, was amazing to behold, Contri as small as Ahab in front of his whale. He read from the spines of gray plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades collecting: Spy Hunter, with its Peter Gunn theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987; Jaws, which he picked up at a flea market with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a year or two later; Zelda II, a game he had his parents order from the Sears catalog in 1988, a game he cried over because it took forever to arrive.

The wall was both a shrine to his life’s hobby and the backdrop for his work. For a decade, Contri has played a character called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000 viewers on YouTube. Fans recognize him at the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets, and he has become not just an expert on Nintendo but a public face for anyone who grew up with the NES, anyone who’s worn a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the Super Mario Bros. theme song thumping in their heart.

The Punk is goofier than the real-life Contri—a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his id. Games are the Punk’s life, and thoughts of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake him in sweat. Almost all of his videos, which run around 10 minutes, focus on the Punk’s experience with a single NES game. Each is a combination history lesson and review, delivered with a narrative voice that lets Contri (as writer, director, and star) show off his sense of humor, his knowledge of Nintendo, and occasionally even the depths of his introspection—about being boxed into an endless childhood by video­games, about the inherent sadness of trying to fill a hole in his life with them.

See more from the Life Issue. April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Nik Mirus

One of Contri’s best videos, a 12-minute piece from 2013 dedicated to the rare and expensive NES game The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, begins with the Punk rustling awake from a fever dream, choking out “I need help.” And, looking at his games: “What am I doing? They’re just video­games. I’m holding like a thousand bucks’ worth right in my hands. That could be going to something useful, something memorable. Like a vacation! I could go anywhere I want. Scotland. Italy. Tahiti …” And there he pauses. “I wonder if there’s NES games in Tahiti.”

It was a bit, mostly, but as Nintendo celebrates the 33rd birthday of its historic console—and as Contri approaches 38—it was also a sign of the conflict within him. Like a lot of people who were born in the years just before and after the launch of the NES, he is no longer young and not nearly old, neither new nor vintage, and it seems like he has started to feel a bit lost in the in-between. “I don’t know if I want to be 65 years old talking about retro video­games,” he told me. “I don’t want that to be the only thing I talk about forever. I think sometimes, ‘Is this where my talent begins and ends?’ ” He says he doesn’t play NES video­games anymore—except when he’s in character—and that it’s different now: It’s work. He admits this in resignation, like it’s sacrilege, the man for whom Nintendo became a career.

“There’s something a little self-deprecating about the Punk character, and about my character too,” says James Rolfe, a 37-year-old godfather of YouTube gamers who plays a character named the Angry Video Game Nerd and is a collaborator of Contri’s. “All these YouTube characters have some kind of element of sadness to them. Thinking back to childhood, were we wasting our time with games? Were we really entertaining ourselves? Were we really happy?”

Contri’s home library consists of nearly 1,000 NES games.

SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

Contri is a 37-year-old man who has been playing video­games his entire life. His cousin’s Atari 2600, when he was 4. His family’s PC-IBM XT. Then he was 7 when his parents bought him an NES console, and pre­adolescent Pat started spending hours in his family’s rec room in front of a small Magnavox monitor. Later, in high school, he played Super Nintendo and then PC games, and rediscovered the NES while he was in college. After he graduated, in 2002, he eventually settled into a job in market research, working 50-plus hours a week in Princeton, New Jersey, and living in nearby North Brunswick. He hated it.

One day in 2006, he came across the Angry Video Game Nerd’s irascible game reviews, and the sight of a character drinking beer and railing about the game Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest rang out to him. “I saw the AVGN doing well, but I saw a lot of bad videos out there too,” Contri says. “I’d watch them and think, ‘Not only does this person not know how to play the game, he didn’t include any history of it.’ At the very least, I thought I could do better.”

Contri made his first video, six and a half minutes of him as the Punk playing a couple of NES baseball games before landing on the best, Baseball Stars. He chose the nickname because he thought it had a ring to it, had an attitude, and, well, women he’d dated told him he acted like a punk. It also captured the overpowering feeling he got when he played the games; the NES made him happy, and the character was a weird, happy extension of who Contri really was. He made his second video a month later, about The Three Stooges, and then another one after that. He started pumping out videos, each loaded with enough humor, personality, and insider knowledge to set it apart from everything else online. In 2012, a few years after leaving New Jersey for San Diego, he quit his market research job and started making videos full time.

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Today Contri gets flown across the country up to a dozen times a year to attend video­game conventions, where he often arrives sleep-deprived and stressed, carving a smile in front of his fans. He schleps suitcases full of NES Punk wristbands and DVDs across banquet hallways and sits at a booth wearing a T-shirt and sandals, a guy with that perpetual five-o’clock shadow and the foppish hair, selling his merchandise and signing his name a hundred times on NES consoles and controllers and game cartridges. He earns six figures a year, his revenue coming from merchandise and book royalties; from YouTube ads and the sponsors of his two podcasts, Not So Common, which he hosts by himself, and the Completely Unnecessary Podcast, a show he cohosts with a friend named Ian Ferguson; from the Patreon supporters whose monthly donations help pay for his content.

As of earlier this year, the NES Punk videos were the least lucrative and most time-­consuming of all Contri’s ventures. One of his most recent videos, about a game called Stadium Events, took him more than 50 hours to create—much of that time spent researching the mysterious rarity of the game—and it attracted just over 70,000 views at last count, earning him a little less than $400. A low return, by any measure, and he’s started to think more and more about retiring the character and maybe doing something else with his time.

“For the last year and a half, I’ve never really known what he does for fun,” says Ferguson, who met Contri in 2008. “I can’t think of one specific hobby aside from exercise that he does that’s completely disconnected from work. His work was once his hobby, and now he’s married to that work.” Contri insists that he does, in fact, have other interests: “I like movies. I love the zoo. I like watching sports on TV. I hate the Patriots, but who doesn’t?” He’s never been married, has no kids, and lives alone, unless you count the Punk. “The Punk is just a character,” he says. “Sometimes people think it’s really me. But at some point this will end.”

In the game room where he films the videos, Contri lingered over the wall of NES cartridge games he no longer plays for fun. “I don’t know if they give me a feeling anymore,” he said. “And I don’t know if I’m still looking for that feeling. Most of us are well-adjusted adults now.” Maybe he meant the generation of adults who’d loved the NES as kids, or the obsessed people like him who’d collected the whole North American library (he keeps three games in a bank vault), or the really insane people who would want an ancient, mint-condition NES holographic cereal box, which he proudly showed me.

Pat Contri holding a jumbo-sized vintage Donkey Kong plush from 1982 at his home outside of San Diego.

SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

Contri doesn’t know what to do—walk the Punk into the sunset, or kill the character off. Nintendo is as popular as ever, which isn’t making the decision any easier. The Switch—a Nintendo console designed for middle-­aged people as much as it is for anyone—has sold more than 14 million units since it was released last year. Stores spent a year selling out of the NES and SNES Classic. And in the summer of 2016, Contri released a 437-page, $60 hardback coffee-table-sized bible called Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985–1995, which took him nearly three years to finish 1. It includes reviews of every mainstream NES game released in the US along with information and factoids and NES curio history. He wrote 450 of the 800-plus reviews, then compiled it all before publishing it himself.

It suffocated him but turned into a surprise hit—with two print runs totaling 10,000 copies—thanks in part to his meticulous research and the surge in interest in retro NES games. It was a big reason why he was able to buy his house in San Diego, where Nintendo is on the walls and in the bedroom, on the floor and on the shelves, in the beady plastic eyes of the stuffed animals and on his personalized wristbands and the five-o’clock shadow that his YouTube character can never seem to get rid of. Nintendo forged him and allowed him the strange bounty of internet fame, not to mention a ton of crazy stuff he has collected for no other reason than that it probably made him feel like a kid.

He has already planned a sequel to the book, a guide for the Super Nintendo library that he hopes to publish next year. “I am happy, I think—I’ll definitely be happy, once I finish the next book,” he says. Contri’s hair is going a little gray, and he mentions that maybe the Punk might survive to have totally white hair—that maybe he could still be talking about games 30 years from now, like old men talking about toy train sets in the corners of convention ballrooms. He has enough games to make it all last forever. The Punk, an old guy, hunched over, still collecting, still playing the ancient games, still living in a house full of Nintendo.

Read More

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Justin Heckert (@JustinHeckert) is a writer living in Charleston, South Carolina. This is his first feature for WIRED.

1 Correction appended, 3/27/18, 8:28 PM EDT: Contri published his book, Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985–1995, in 2016, not 2017.

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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