#challenge: how shitty can i sketch before class starts

[meruz]

once again i am answering asks in a big compilation post. included is... gotham, patrick stump, tips about drawing backgrounds, tips about drawing in general, links to my faq, and infinity train

like.... the tv series? No... I’ve drawn dc comics fanart before, though. But it’s been years since I’ve been really into it. I like jumped ship like 10 years ago when the New 52 happened LOL.

AFJHDSLKGH I’m sorry I (probably) won’t do it again??

Actually full disclosure I have a truly cringe amount of p stump drawings/photo studies in my sketchbook right now LOL. He’s just fun to draw... hats, glasses, guitar, a good shape... but I don’t think I’ll rly post those until I can hide them in another big sketchbook pdf.. probably Jan 2022. Stay tuned........ (ominous) 

(ominous preview)

These are all sort of related to backgrounds/painting so I grouped them together even though they’re pretty much entirely separate questions.... ANYWAYS

a) How is it working as a BG artist? Is it hard? What show are you drawing for?

I think you’re the first person to ever ask me about my job! Being a background artist is great. It’s definitely labor intensive but I think that could describe pretty much any art job (If something were rote or easy to automate, you wouldn’t hire an artist to do it) and I hesitate to say whether its harder or easier than any other role in the animation pipeline. Plus, so much of what truly makes a job difficult varies from one production to the next, schedule, working environment, co-workers etc. But I will say that I think while BGs are generally a lot of work on the upfront, I think they’re subject to less scrutiny/revisions than something like character/props/effects design and you don’t have to pitch them to a room like boards. So I guess it’s good if you don’t like to talk to people? LOL

A lot of my previous projects + the show I’ve worked on the longest aren’t public yet so I can’t talk about em (but I assure you if/when the news does break I won’t shut up about it). But I’m currently working on Archer Season 12 LOL. I’m like 90% sure I’m allowed to say that.

b) ~~~THANK YOU!! ~~~

c) What exactly do you like to draw most [in a background]?

@kaitomiury​ Lots of stuff! I really like to draw clutter! Because it’s a great opportunity for environmental storytelling and also you can be kind of messy with it because the sheer mass will supersede any details LOL. 

I like to draw clouds... I like to draw grass but not trees lol,,, I like to draw anything that sells perspective really easily like tiled floors and ceilings, shelves, lamp posts on a street etc.

d) Do you have any tips on how to paint (observational)?

god there’s so much to say. painting is really a whole ass discipline like someone can paint their whole life and still discover new things about it. I guess if you’re really just starting out my best advice is that habit is more important than product. especially with traditional plein air painting, I find that the procedure of going outside and setting up your paints is almost harder than the actual painting. There’s a lot of artists who say “I want to do plein air sometime!!” and then never actually get around to doing it. A lot of people just end up working from google streetview or photos on their computer.

But going outside to paint is a really good challenge because it forces you to make and commit to lighting and composition decisions really quickly. And to work through your mistakes instead of against them via undo button.

My last tip is to check out James Gurney’s youtube channel because hes probably the best and most consistent resource on observational painting out there rn. There’s lots other artists doing the same thing (off the top of my head I know a lot of the Warrior Painters group has people regularly posting plein air stuff and lightbox expo had a Jesse Schmidt lecture abt it last year) but Gurney’s probably the most prolific poster and one of the best at explaining the more technical stuff - his books are great too.

e) Do you have tips for drawing cleanly on heavypaint?

@marigoldfool​ UMM LOL I LIKE ONLY USE THE FILL TOOL so maybe use the fill tool? Fill and rectangle are good for edge control as opposed to the rest of the heavy paint tools which can get sort of muddles. And also I use a stylus so maybe if you’re using your finger, find a stylus that works with your device instead. That’s all I’ve got, frankly I don’t think my drawings are particularly clean lol.

f) Tips on improving backgrounds/scenes making them more dynamic practicing etc?

Ive given some tips about backgrounds/scenes before so I’m not gonna re-tread those but here’s another thing that might be helpful...

I think a good way to approach backgrounds is to think of the specific story or even mood you want to convey with the background first. Thinking “I just need to put something behind this character” is going to lead you to drawing like... a green screen tourist photo backdrop. But if you think “I need this bg to make the characters feel small” or “I need this bg to make the world feel colorful” then it gives you requirements and cues to work off of.

If I know a character needs to feel overwhelmed and small, then I know I need to create environment elements that will cage them in and corner them. If a character needs to feel triumphant/on top of the world then I know I need to let the environment open up around them. etc. If I know my focal point/ where I want to draw attention, I can build the background around that.

Also, backgrounds like figure compositions will have focal points of their own and you can draw attention to it/ the relationship the characters have with the bg element via scale or directionality or color, any number of cues. I think of it almost as a second/third character in a scene.

Not every composition is gonna have something so obvious like this but it helps me to think about these because then the characters feel connected and integrated with the environment.

Some more general art questions

a) Do you have any process/tips to start drawing character/bodies/heads?

I tried to kind of draw something to answer this but honestly this is difficult for me to answer because I don’t think I’m that great at drawing characters LOL. Ok, I think I have two tips.

1) flip your canvas often. A lot about what makes human bodies look correct and believable is symmetry and balance. Even if someone has asymmetrical features, the body will often pull and push in a way to counterbalance it. we often have inherent biases to one side or another like dominant hands dominant eyes etc. you know how right-handed artists will often favor drawing characters facing 45 degrees facing (the artist’s) left? that’s part of it. so viewing your drawing flipped even just to evaluate it helps compensate for that bias and makes you more aware of balance.

2) draw the whole figure often. I feel like a lot of beginner artists (myself included for a long time) defer to just drawing headshots or busts because it’s easier, you dont have to think about posing limbs etc. But drawing a full body allows you to better gauge proportion, perspective, body language, everything that makes a character look believable and grounded.

Like if you (me) have that issue where you draw the head too big and then have to resize it to fit the proportions of the rest of the body, it’s probably because you (I) drew the head first and are treating the body as an afterthought/attachment. Sketching out the whole figure first or even just quick drawing guides for it will help you think of it more holistically. I learned this figure drawing in charcoal at art school LOL.

oh. third mini tip - try to draw people from life often! its the best study. if you can get into a figure drawing/nude drawing class EVEN BETTER and if you have a local college/art space/museum that hosts those for free TREASURE IT AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT, that’s a huge boon that a lot of artists (me again) wish they had. though if youre not so lucky and youre sitting in a park trying to creeper draw people and they keep moving.. don’t let that stop you! that’s good practice because it’s forcing you to work fast to get the important stuff down LOL. its a challenge!

b) I’ve been pretty out of energy and have had no inspiration to draw but I have the desire to. Any advice?

Dude, take a walk or something.... Or a nap? Low energy is going to effect everything else so you gotta hit that problem at its source.

If you’re looking for inspiration though, I’d recommend stuff like watching a movie, reading a book, playing video games etc. Fill up your idea bank with content and then give yourself time/space to gestate it into new concepts. Sometimes looking at other art works but sometimes it can work against you because it’s too close. 

Also something that helps me is remembering that art doesn’t always have to be groundbreaking... like it’s okay to make something shitty and stupid that you don’t post online and only show to your friend. That’s all part of the process imo. If you want to hit a home run you gotta warm up first, right? Sports.

I should probably compile everytime i give tips on stuff like this but that’s getting dangerously close to being a social media artist who makes stupid boiled down art tutorials for clout which is the last thing i want to be... the thing I want to stress is that art is a whole visual language and there are widely agreed upon rules and customs but they exist in large part to be broken. Like there's an infinite number of ways to reach an infinite number of solutions and that’s actually what makes it really cool and personal for both the artist and the viewer. So when you make work you like or you find someone else’s work you like, take a step back and ask yourself what about it speaks for you, what about it works for you, what makes it effective, how to recreate that effect and how to break that effect completely, etc. And have a good time with it or else what’s the point.

for the first 2, I direct you to my FAQ

For the last one, I don’t actually believe I’ve ever addressed artwork as insp for stories/rp but I’ll say here and now yeah go ahead! As long as you’re not making profit or taking credit for my work then I’m normally ok with it. Especially anything thats private and purely recreational, that’s generally 100% green light go. I only ask that if you post it anywhere public that you please credit me.

(and I reserve the right to ask you to take it down if I see it and don’t approve of it’s use but I think that case is pretty rare.)

a) @lemuelzero101 Thank you!!! I haven’t played Life is Strange but actually  that series’ vis dev artist Edouard Caplain is one of my bigger art inspirations lately so that’s a really high compliment lol. And yeah I hope we get 5-8 too...!

b) Thank you for sticking around! I’ve been thinking about Digimon and Infinity Train in tandem lately, actually. They’re a little similar? Enter a dangerous alternate world and have wacky adventures with monsters/inanimate objects that have weird powers... there’s like weird engineers and mechanisms behind the scenes... also frontier literally starts with them getting on a train. Anyways if anyone else followed me for digimon... maybe you’d like Infinity Train? LOL

c) @king-wens-king I’M GLAD MY ART JUST HAS PINOY VIBES LOL I hope you are having a good day too :^)

a, b, c, d) yessss my Watch Infinity Train agenda is working....

e) aw thank you!! i think you should watch infinity train :)

[gemstoneconstellations]

He Fucked Up

Summary: Bakugo carelessly hurts his s/o’s feelings without realizing it.

Wordcount: 2583

“Hey ___! What are you doing here? You look cozy.” Kaminari and Kirishima sat down on either side of you. Well, tried to. You were currently in a nest of multiple warm fluffy blankets that didn’t leave much space for anyone to get close to you. “Where’s your Pomeranian boyfriend?” Kaminari joked as Kirishima let out a deep belly laugh.

You smirked at Bakugo’s friends; they were feeling a bit bold since King Explosion Murder wasn’t around. “He went to get some training in. When he is done, he promised to watch a movie with me before he starts on homework. I’m sure he’ll make fun of me since it’s a cartoon movie, but I like them and I want to sit with him. You know, couple-y kind of stuff, since we don’t get a lot of time to be alone together and enjoy each other’s company.” You could feel a small blush form on your cheeks. Missing your boyfriend has put you in a cuddly mood. So even if you only get two hours, you’ll take it.

 “I have a hard time picturing Bakugo snuggling and watching cartoons… wait, didn’t we see Bakugo in the gym like three hours ago? Have you been waiting this whole time?” Kirishima raised an eyebrow at you, concerned.

 You gave him a shrug. “I’ll wait as long as it takes if it means I can spend some time with him.” Kirishima nodded, understanding where you were coming from and stating that they would leave when Bakugo shows up.

 Kaminari leaned back with his hands hooked behind his head, letting out a grunty sigh. “Ah man, I’m super jealous now! I wish I had a cute girlfriend who would do that for me!”

 “Like anyone would want to date you, Dunce Face!” Bakugo came walking in the common room, drinking from his water bottle. He was wearing some sweats and a tank top. His hair seemed to be damp so he most likely took a shower before coming over. You were absolutely beaming with excitement at finally getting to see his face!

 “Hurtful!” Kaminari complained but Bakugo kept walking to the kitchen, not caring.

 You smiled at Bakugo. “Welcome back, Katsuki. You have fun at the gym?” He just grunted at you from the kitchen. You could hear him pulling out random items. “Are you ready for the movie?” You lower the blankets, preparing to let your boyfriend enter your nest and assume the cuddle position.

 Bakugo came back from the kitchen eating a protein bar, a scowl on his face. “I don’t feel like watching some shitty movie.” Your heart drops. His tone was harsh and didn’t leave much room to argue.

 “What? But you said you would a few hours ago… you promised…” You pulled your knees to your chest, not able to look him in the face suddenly.

 “Yeah, well now I feel fucking tired. I’m going to finish up my homework and then go to bed.”

 You scoffed at him as you stood up, eyes on your feet, trying not to cry. “So you don’t feel like watching a movie with me and just want to go to your room to sleep?��� Your voice came out more aggressive than you meant it to be, but there were too many emotions swirling inside you at the moment to control it.

 “That’s what I fucking said, I don’t want to watch some stupid kids’ movie. What’s your deal?” His words were like punches to your gut. You sucked in air through your teeth, trying to bite back words that you know will make the situation worse but you want to say them so badly.

 You began to fold your blankets and place them in your bag, packing away your things. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m fine.” You were completely and utterly done. Ironically, you were no longer in the mood to watch a movie either. Or see your stupid boyfriend’s face.

 “Bro… not cool.” Kirishima whispered to Bakugo, shaking his head.

 Before Bakugo could respond, you shoved the blankets that you took from Bakugo’s room into his arms. “Here, go sleep.”

 “Oi!” You ran out of the room with your things, not even caring that you were only in your pajamas. Bakugo shouted at you, but you didn’t look back and ran to your own dorm. Bakugo looked at the blankets in his hands and then at Kirishima and Kaminari. “What the fuck was that?”

 Kirishima just sighed, shaking his head and walking towards the elevators. Kaminari patted Bakugo on the shoulder as he walked by, following Kirishima. “And you guys call me the idiot. Even I’m not that stupid.”

 ~

 Bakugo was confused about what was going on with you. You had suddenly stopped texting him. Usually he would get at least three texts a day, whether he responded or not. You always said good morning, good night, and told him about the projects you were working on that day in your support classes. He didn’t think anything of it; sometimes you would disappear when you had some inspiration on a project. There have been times when you wouldn’t even leave the lab for days working on some support item.

 But there you were, sitting across the cafeteria, eating lunch with a group of extras he didn’t recognize. Not even a glance towards him. Normally by the time he got dragged into the cafeteria by Kirishima and the rest of the idiots, you would come up to him and pester him about eating together. Bakugo was starting to get an unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach; he didn’t like it and it was pissing him off. He stared you down from his place in line, willing you to look up and make eye contact with him. After a few minutes, someone noticed him staring at you and pointed him out to you. You shook your head at them and continued to eat.

 Fine, if you wanted to sulk over some fucking movie then he’ll just ignore you as well till you stop being a damn brat. Bakugo grunted as he turned back away from you to get his food. He made sure to not look at you as he made his way to sit with the idiots that insisted on hanging around him for some reason.

 “No ___ today either? I misssss herrrr!” Mina pouted as Bakugo sat down, laying her head on the table with her arms spread out. His eyebrow twitched at her whining voice.

 Sero smirked at Bakugo as he patted Mina on the back. “What did you do now?”

 “Shut up Soy Sauce! I didn’t fucking do anything!” Bakugo slammed his fists on the table, his rage aura pouring out of his pores now.

 “He fucked up.” Kaminari stated a matter-of-factly; Kirishima nodded in agreement.

 Bakugo glared at the redhead, daring him to say something as well. He turned his attention to Kaminari, who continued to eat his lunch, not caring that Bakugo was giving him a death glare. “I said shut the fuck up Dunce Face! You don’t know anything!”

 Kaminari scoffed at him, letting Bakugo’s outburst just roll off him before pointing his chopsticks at Bakugo accusingly. “I know more about ___ than you apparently.”

 “What do you mean by that?!”

 “Use that smart brain of yours and figure it out.”

 Bakugo was adamant that he hadn’t done anything wrong; he was sure that you would come back. Everything would go back to normal once you get over whatever the fuck it was. But a few days turned into a week, then two weeks, without a single word from you and he was starting to falter. He was becoming more irritable (if that was possible for him) and his classmates were beginning to keep their distance, not wanting an explosion in their face.

 “Bakubro, dude, you need to man up and go talk to her already.” Kirishima threw an arm on Bakugo’s shoulders, the only one brave enough to do it as of late. Bakugo growled at him in response. He knew the redhead was right, but he didn’t want to admit it. Kirishima sighed at him. Why must his best bro be so stubborn?

 “How about this? I need to make some modifications to my costume. Come with me. If she’s there, talk to her about some modifications you want and then about what’s going on. She can’t turn you down if it’s about your costume.”

 With a groan, Bakugo started walking down to the hall, not caring if Kirishima was walking with him are not. Bakugo stormed into the support lab only to freeze when he saw Pikachu-reject already talking to you. His eye twitched as Sparky casually draped his arm around your waist as you were sketching out a blueprint. “So ___, since you and King Explosion Murder are on a break, why don’t we go get some food? I’ll give you a shoulder to cry on… or anything else you want to do. My body is at your service.”

 And to Bakugo’s horror, you didn’t push his arm off and actually fucking giggled. “Thanks, but I’m okay with just free food.” The next moment, the ash blond stormed over, yanked Kaminari’s arm off of you and dangerously twisted it behind Kaminari’s back as he slammed him down into the workstation. You yelped at the swift action and loud sound, looking at him in shock. Before you could even blink, Bakugo was dragging you out of the room. His grip on you didn’t let up as he kept pulling you along.

 Kaminari slumped to the floor, clutching his shoulder that had been so close to being dislocated. Kirishima squatted down beside him to see how he was doing. “Remind me never to hit on Bakugo’s girlfriend again? Also, I will never be part of your plans again.”

 “It worked, didn’t it? He just needed a little push. Thanks for risking your life… do you need to see Recovery Girl?”

 ~

 “Hey! Let go already!” You stumble into Bakugo’s dorm building. He didn’t let go until the doors of the elevator shut. You made a point not to look at him as you rub your wrist. Bakugo began to mumble beside you. “What?”

 This time he reached out for your hand, weaving his fingers through yours gently. “We aren’t on a break. No way in hell will I let you go out with anyone that isn’t me, especially not Dunce Face.” His hand quickly squeezed yours. “Can you tell me what the fuck is going on already? Is this all because of a stupid movie?!”

 You huffed angrily, turning away from him. “Of course it isn’t about a goddamn movie.” The elevator door opened and you were being pulled again, more gently than before.

 Bakugo didn’t say anything till you were both in his room and the door shut behind him. He leaned back on the door and crossed his arms, his stance challenging you to try and get away. “Talk.”

 You mimicked him by crossing your arms, closing yourself off from him. For a few moments, the room was silent, the both of you staring each other down. The question that had been bouncing around your head for the last few days finally broke the silence. “Why are you even dating me?”

 Not being around him hadn’t felt much different than when you were on speaking terms, only the loneliness increased as you avoided every opportunity to spend time with him that you would have killed to have before.

 His jaw dropped and his eyes widened in shock. Bakugo’s defensive stance faltered as his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Haaah?!”

 Dragging your hands down your face, you let out a loud groan of frustration. “It’s like I have to twist your arm to spend time with you. What’s the point of being in a relationship if I only see you the few times you come to the support shop for mods for your hero gear?” You gestured to your support team jumper suit. Most of your conversations in the past have primarily during lunch and at the support shop.

 Bakugo rolled his shoulders as he let out a long sigh. “I’m aiming to be on the top, to be the number one hero. Of course I’m going to be fucking busy-”

 You interrupted him before he could continue a rant you have heard a million times. In the past you would admire his passion, just not right now. “Yeah! I get it! I know! I’m busy too, ya know! My to do list never seems to have less things on it despite how much I cross off. I still find time that’s just for you during my day. But you can’t even spare maybe an hour or two just to sit with me, maybe cuddle while watching a movie, and just enjoy each other’s company. All your focus on is being a hero, so what’s the point of dating me then?” It’s like you are the only one putting any effort into the relationship; all of his goes to becoming a hero, none left over for you.

 Bakugo scowled at you as he took a few steps toward you, his face becoming red. “Cause I fucking care about you, dipshit!”

 You blink at him, taken aback slightly before you crossed your arms. Turning away from him you mumbled. “Really? Could have fooled me.”

 It was silent in the room again; you kept your eyes busy by looking around his room. Not much has changed. “Do… you really think I don’t care?” Bakugo spoke so quietly, you barely heard him. Without glancing at him, you gave a small shrug.

 Next thing you know, you are being lifted in the air and then thrown on top of Bakugo’s bed. “Wha-What are you doing?!”

 “Shut up and fucking cuddle me!” Bakugo laid beside you, pulling you against his chest with his face pressed into the top of your head. His arms caged you in, wrapping around your shoulders and squeezed. After a minute, you slowly slid your arms around his waist, gripping at the back of his school uniform. His arms let up once he realized that you weren’t going anywhere. “Maybe… I could… do more. We could study together. Can’t really help with homework since we are in different courses, but…” He whispered into your hair, hesitant and unsure that you accept his attempt at an apology.

 You thought about it for a moment. This was him, in a way apologizing (though it would be nice to hear him say the actual words) and finding a compromise. And okay, you totally cutting him off without even saying what was wrong was probably not the best move either. You rub your face into his strong chest, taking in his burnt sugar scent. “Could we do this afterwards?” You look up at him with a small smile.

 The tension melted away from Bakugo’s face as he began to smirk. He pinched at your sides, making you giggle. “As long as you don’t pull another shitty stunt like what you’ve been doing for the last two fucking weeks.”

 You bury yourself into his chest again, hugging him tighter and closing your eyes as you enjoyed his warmth. “Deal.”

 “Also, don’t ever fucking let Drooly touch you again. I’m going to kill him later. You only need me to comfort you. I’m your fucking boyfriend, not him.”

 “I missed you too, Katsuki.”

[astoldbygingersnaps]

Harper’s 2020 Fic Wrap-Up

my very good friend and incredibly talented felow writer @sagemoderocklee came up with the idea of doing an end of the year fic wrapup in an attempt to polish the turd known as 2020, and since i actually managed to get some writing done this year i figured, why not jump on the bandwagon? 

a lot of super duper fucking shitty things happened in 2020, but i will always be proud that in this incredibly chaotic, stressful, and challenging year i managed to produce almost 180k of content (and that’s not even counting the writing i started in 2020 but haven’t published yet). so, to celebrate what’s been a pretty big achievement for me, i wanted to go through the various projects i’ve spent the last twelve months working on and give a preview of my plans for 2021.

let’s jump in!

projects i worked on/completed in 2020:

first off, let’s start with the beast to end all beasts, my personal baby, and honestly probably the reason most people follow me -- star trek au:

something bigger than the sky (shiita; 44,163 words; completed): 

i’ve said this before, but the whole idea for star trek au was literally just a joke between me and my-then girlfriend, now-fiancee, and eternal shiita enabler alexa aka @durintrash (by the way, if you follow me for my fics and you DON’T follow alexa for her corresponding art WHAT, exactly, are you doing with your life????) where i sat in a space-themed diner and said ‘haha imagine itachi as a vulcan.’ but then i blinked and suddenly somehow i’d written the prologue and the first chapter of SBTTS in the span of a week. it’s like i was possessed by a fanfic demon.

it sounds super cheesy but i honestly can’t say enough how important this fic has been to me and how much it’s pushed me to be a more productive and more dedicated writer. previously i spent a lot of time Thinking about writing and occasionally i’d put a few words on the page and then i’d go... do... something... else. but star trek au was the first idea i loved enough that it actually pushed me to write and keep writing and not give up even when i was confronted with things like writer’s block and worry over the quality of my writing. so thank you, star trek au, for being the light in a very dark year for me. 

by the end of SBTTS, i felt like i accomplished everything i wanted to do with the story’s beginning installment: i introduced all the characters and set the groundwork for their development; i showed what life on the corvus was like and how starfleet, the federation, and the universe functioned; and, more than anything, i was able to sketch out both the main protagonists -- itachi and shisui -- with all their strengths and flaws, show their relationship to one another, and hint at how that relationship would progress. 

all the stars are closer (shiita; 75,195 words; completed)

considering how slow i used to be at writing, i thought it would be, like, twelve years before i managed to get to the second part in the series. BUT then covid happened and i half-lost, half-quit my job, and like a lot of people this year i ended up with a lot of free time on my hands. and so, like a fucking demon, i finished this part in two and a half months. 

when i originally planned this part out, i really thought it would be a lot shorter and a lot lighter atmosphere-wise than it turned out. instead, this second section of the story ended up being pretty meaty in terms of length and in subject.

that said, overall, i’m really happy with how ATSAC turned out. i loved the way the characters progressed, how the relationships deepened, and how we were able to see this universe grow bigger and more complicated. and i’m very satisifed with how it set the stage for part three, which takes us to...

lovers alone wear sunlight (shiita; 41,518 words; in progress)

there’s... a lot about this part that i just can’t talk about yet, a) because it isn’t finished and b) because it contains some of the biggest plot points in the entire series thus far. if you’ve been keeping up with the stardates thus far (which i encourage you to do!) you know what part three is leading up to: itachi leaving the corvus and the dissolution of shisui and itachi’s growing relationship. 

with that in mind, i’m... more than a little terrified about writing part three, which is why the third chapter has been languishing in my google drive for months now. (and also why i started not one, but TWO new fics to cope with my writer’s block. whoops.) chapter three is where all the parts come together and shit hits the fan, and i can only hope that everyone will be as excited to read it as i am to publish it. 

next up, the two other projects i began this year:

salvation comes only in our dreams (shiita; canon divergence; 16,835 words; in progress)

for a long time, i’ve wanted to write something that’s actually set in the naruto universe and works to correct a lot of the flaws that i see in the series. there are a lot of things that bother me about naruto, but i think one of the things that frustrates me the most is the really messy and in some ways offensive resolution to the uchiha coup plot thread, and i wanted to write a story that dealt with the complicated themes of the series--imperialism, oppression, genocide, child soldiers--but, like, didn’t suck and completely drop the ball. thus, the massacre au was born. 

my main goal was to tell a story that showed a lot of these characters in ways we’ve never seen them before, specifically itachi. i didn’t want to write itachi as just an idealist who suffers and Suffers AND SUFFERS for konoha yet still remains loyal to the village for some unfathomable reason like he is in the series. i wanted to write an itachi that was sharper, more jaded, and more suspicious of the world around him, but overall was still a good person with a kind heart. and for shisui, well... obviously there’s a lot going on there, too. 

this is easily the darkest story i’ve ever written, and as the plot thickens it will certainly get darker with relationship dynamics that are complicated and unhealthy At Best. i hope that as the story goes on it’s a ride people continue to enjoy, as i was super pleasantly surprised at how popular this fic became (compared to my usual stats, at least) 

oceans between us (shiita; alternate universe; 15,039 words; in progress)

it’s good to know that i continue to be the most ridiculously niche version of myself as yes, i wrote a fucking shiita atonement au. 

with each fic i write i try to have a very specific voice that suits the particular piece and distinguishes it from other stories that include the same characters. for example, star trek au chapters tend to be more fun and light-hearted (especially shisui POV chapters) and lean more into the action movie and sci-fi adventure feel of the star trek universe, while the massacre au is written in a way that’s much heavier and guided by itachi’s emotions and experiences. my main goal with this story was to give it the same romantic, operatic, almost hazy quality that the movie has, which reflects the period setting and also the nature of this grand tragic love story. 

i knew from the beginning that there were going to be a lot of things that i cut from the film in my retelling, like the lola subplot and obviously the setting of pre-wwii england. i also knew i wanted to explore some of the aspects of the film that were implied more than outright stated, like the themes of classism and upper-class privileges. and more than anything i wanted to structure this piece around this idea of tension building and building until it finally snaps and there’s just a world of mess and hurt and loss that affects these two characters in two very different ways. 

also, the sex scene. i haven’t written a sex scene for anything in, like, a decade, so that was a lot of pressure. but i’m happy with how it came out and i think it ended up being an aspect of the story that felt like both a natural progression and necessary to show the affection these two people have for one another.

originally i was just going to end the story with shisui going to jail, but when i told alexa this i genuinely thought she was going to kill me. so, that didn’t happen lmao. but the more i tried to imagine what a second chapter would look like, the more i realized she was right, and it would have been a terrible idea to end the fic there. as for whether or not the final chapter will keep That Ending... who can say?

goals i have for 2021:

finishing lovers alone wear sunlight and, if i’m very lucky, beginning the fourth and second to last part of star trek au (yes, as it currently stands this 160k+ word series is only halfway finished. sorry not sorry)

publishing the next chapter of salvation comes only in our dreams (i don’t know when it will drop. i don’t know anything about this fic. please do not @ me) 

completing oceans between us (the second and final chapter is currently sitting at about 4k words and will probably end up at about 15k in total)

completing and publishing a new fic i’ve started at the very end of 2020, which is the shiita jurassic world au nobody but me and alexa knew they wanted. it’s essentially a 90s romcom with dinosaurs and i cannot Wait to share it. (it’s at about 9k right now and will probably end up being around 20k to 23k in total... maybe...)

FINALLY starting my dream project: the shiita olympics au i’ve been planning for years, where itachi is a figure skater and shisui is a hockey player (i’d like to keep this under 150k but at this point trying to keep my stories at a managable word count is a losing battle)

anyway, that’s it! if you managed to get this far in this very self-indulgent and shameless bit of self promotion, congrats! also, a very big thank you to everyone who’s read my fics, left me kudos and comments, and spent their time on my work, because it really does mean the world to me. 

here’s hoping 2021 is a much healthier and happier year for us all! 

[topherfoxtrot]

Resilience

Here's the third part of my thunderbolts au. Emil Blonsky scaped his long imprisonment but he didn't went after the Hulk. Where did he go? The answer is bellow the cut. There's an original character here too. I'm not kin of OCs but I didn't find any character who would fit the role I wanted. Said oc will only be a part of this episode so consider it a special guest appearance. I've realized I've been writing more and more with each installment. Sorry about that, I'm getting more comfortable with the whole precess and I like to challenge myself. Continuing the trend, this chapter has a widely different vibe from the previous ones. As usual if you enjoyed please like, share or comment something.

Episode one

Episode two

Emil woke up from a nightmare. It was a fight. From as long as he could remember all Emil did was fight. Now even when he's not awake he's still fighting. He sat on the bed breathing heavily. Wait, where am I? He thought.

"You must be confused." A female voice was heard nearby.

Emil looked around looking for it. The cabin was small. The bedroom, the living room and the kitchen were all occupying the same space. There were two doors, one of them was probably for the bathroom. The woman was sitting at the kitchen table. She dressed a knitted sweater and rabbit slippers.

"My name is Charlie Reznik." She pointed at the soup, "Are you hungry?"

"Where am I?"

"Alaska. Three hours driving from Barrow."

Emil sat on the bed. He was naked. He covered himself with the blankets not for modesty but because they were warm.

"You weren't using any clothes when I found you and you don't seem like the kind of person who would wear my clothes. I hope the blankets kept you warm."

"Found me?"

"Yeah. You were screaming a lot. And throwing trees around." Charlie chuckled, "Eventually you got tired and just fell asleep right where you were. I was thinking about calling the police or something but when you started to shrink I decided to bring you here."

Suddenly Emil looked at himself realizing he did indeed shrink. He didn't look like that anymore. Still, the bones in his hands and abdomen were more prominent than they should be. He took his hands to his back to feel his spine was also prominent. That made him think of the super soldier serum, of the Hulk and of the prison he just scaped.

"I need to contact someone." Emil got up only to fall on the ground.

"Are you okay?" Charlie approached him with caution.

"I think I'll have the soap first actually." Emil muttered realizing how weak his body was.

***

The soup made with vegetables reminded Emil of his childhood in Russia. He had almost no recollection of those few years before he moved to England. He mostly remembered the cold and his mother's soap.

"I need to ask you but.. it's gonna sound weird." Emil was at the table tangled with the blankets, "What year is this?"

Charlie looked him in the eyes to decide if he was being serious or not. Emil didn't flinch so nor did Charlie, "It's 2023."

Emil pressed his lips and started to breath heavily. He was sleeping this whole time. They kept him asleep without ever giving him a chance to explain himself. No consent and no agency.

"No one has heard anything about you since 2008 Mr Blonsky and now you show up in the middle of the forest not knowing the year?" Charlie seemed genuinely curious.

"You know me?"

"I didn't recognize you at first. There isn't much footage from big you. But the sketch from witnesses matched pretty well. They call you the Abomination."

"Abomination?" Emil suddenly smashed the wooden table with enough strength to crack it. Charlie quickly moved her left hard to somewhere under the table. They locked eyes. For the first time Charlie didn't seem warm and inviting but rather fierce and absolutely ready to react. Emil closed his eyes a bit before recomposing himself.

"I'm sorry."

"I also think the name is impolite." Charlie brought her hand back, "But no one knew anything about you except you were military assigned to find Bruce Banner. I had to make some phone calls and turns out my guess was right! You are indeed in the accords database. Quite high level threat.

"What accords?"

"Alright." Charlie put her hair behind her ears, "I need you to be honest with me Mr Blonsky. What's the last thing you remember?"

So he said. He fought the hulk on Harlem, fell unconscious and woke up in Alaska. Charlie brought a computer from a big bag under the bed and put it on the table in a way that both of them could see it.

"The world changed a lot since 2008 Mr Blonsky. Put on your seatbelts."

Charlie then gave him a contemporary history class the best way she could while showing videos and pictures whenever she felt necessary. She talked about the avengers assembling in 2012 to stop an alien invasion caused by a norse god. She talked about the genocidal robot destroying a whole country in 2015. She talked about Wanda Maximoff killing those people back in 2016. She talked about the Sokovia accords and how that made the avengers disassemble. She talked about Wakanda opening up to the rest of the world. She talked about the avengers coming together again to fight yet another alien invasion. She talked about the snap and the chaotic years that followed. She talked about the blip and the even more chaotic year that followed it. Emil listened to everything in silence. It was a lot but he was smart.

"They put me to sleep for fifteen years." He whispered.

"I'm so sorry about that. It's unfair."

Emil had finished his soup but he stayed exactly where he was. Thinking about everything.

"I became strong. I became as strong as I could and still... they defeated me with bed time."

"You're being unfair."

"How come?"

"I don't think strength is really what you think it is."

"How would you know?"

Emil looked at Charlie's small stature with unconscious disdain. She picked on that and wore her fierce eyes again.

"With all due the respect Mr Blonsky..." It was possibly to hear the rage under her words, "You have no idea how strong I am. Thanos snapped my whole family! I wasn't even at home when it happened. Do you have any idea how much strength I needed to gather to simply get up every morning? I may not have big muscles like you -in fact no one does Mr Blonsky - but guess what? You could not have went through what I did. I'm sure of it!"

Emil got up aggressively and so did Charlie.

"You're really pulling the trauma card?"

"Wanna compete?"

"I think I do." He showed his teeth.

Charlie walked across the cabin stepping heavely. She sat on the bed. "Enlighten me."

The challenge got Emil off guard. He hesitated.

"I don't need to tell you anything."

"Of course you don't. If you tell me how traumatized you are, I'll tell you how traumatized I am. Then you will have to admit that none of it gives you permission to do the shitty things you did!"

The cabin merged in silence. Outside there was nothing but the cold wind running through the trees.

"I know your type." Charlie continued, a little calmer now, "Though childhood huh? No perspective of a future so you joined the military. Felt good to explode some heads didn't it? It felt powerful."

Emil remained in silence. He still looked mad, but remained in silence. Charlie went to the kitchen and grabbed a photograph from one of the drawers. She gave it to Emil.

"You're military." Emil studied the photo of Charlie and other soldiers smiling inside a tent.

"Used to be. Came back in 2019. The welcoming party wasn't exactly a party as you can imagine. My house was empty. As I said both my parents and my little brother got snapped. That's when I found this cabin."

"It's not yours?"

"Nah. I don't know who it belongs to actually. It was a cold night and I was just driving aimless. I don't know why exactly. Everything just seemed so meaningless back then. I felt weak."

Emil put the photograph on the table and they both locked eyes again. Not with anger this time though.

"It's cold but it's isolated enough. I could cry and scream as much as I wanted without anyone knowing. And did I need to scream! Scream at Thanos, scream at my parents, scream at myself. A part of me wish it could've been me, y'know? Trust me I would give my life for theirs in the blink of an eye! Yet, here I was."

Charlie sat at the table again. The temperature of the cabin went from 20°C to 40°C and then to 20°C again. Emil felt sorry about the table but most importantly he felt sorry for making Charlie mad.

"There's no much to say." He started, "Though childhood. No perspective. Joined the military. After everything I've seen, being strong is honestly the only option. It's survival."

"I get it. I really do. But strength is not on your muscles."

"Don't come with this heartfelt bullshit."

"It's not." Charlie chuckled, "Trust me I won't fall for that bullshit either. It's something else."

She got up and grabbed an old book from the shelf near the bed.

"All those things were already here when I got here for the first time. There was water, gas, energy, the bed, the blankets. It's like whoever lived here had just left. I've known this place for couple more than three years now. No one is ever here except me, yet the feeling never goes away."

The old book was covered with leather.

"Self help book?" Emil asked.

"In a way." Charlie tilted her head, "This book is about the universe. But not like a scientific encyclopedia. This book is about the whole universe, about the energy that comes from different parts of the multiverse and how to harvest and manipulate them. Essencially, magic!"

"Alright it's a self help book. Magic is not real."

"I was honestly hoping you would say that." Charlie smiled, "Check this out!"

Charlie put her hands in front of her and took a deep breath in order to focus. She moved her hands vertically and a orange string appeared from thin air. Charlie's hands drew a circle in the air and the string curved itself in a circumference. Charlie closed her hands as if grabbing something and with another gesture polygonal forms started to draw themselves in the magic circle. Charlie snapped her fingers with both hands and the whole thing started to spin like a magical ferris wheel.

"You discovered magic!" Emil whispered.

"Of course I didn't! People have been studying that for a long time. I just happened to find a weird book." The magical strings disappeared as Charlie stopped focusing so much on them, "You know when you are depressed so you set a simple goal just to give yourself a little achievement?"

"No, actually. But that's seems like solid advice."

"It is!" Charlie chuckled, "Anyways I read this whole book in like two days and I didn't understand shit. But I was super interested and started to dig the internet and beyond for anything related to all the weird concepts I found. I read the book more two of three times after that. Each time I learned something different and gained a new perspective over myself and the universe around me."

"So it is a self help book!" Emil laughed.

"As I said, it is but in a weird way. I mean look around. There's aliens and gods and the multiverse. When you think of all of it don't your problems seem way smaller?"

"I'm not sure."

"Here's how it's gonna be. I go to Barrow buy you some clothes and you think about everything I just said." She grabbed a jacket and wore boots, "But you have to pay me back alright? Otherwise I'm gonna hunt you and I'll find you. Remember: I know magic!"

"Okay, that's fair!"

Charlie grabbed a ring with slot for two fingers in a kitchen drawer. "That was one of the things I found here. Magic becomes weirdly intuitive once you learn some basics."

She made that focused face again and started to draw circles in the air with her right hand. The air in the middle of the cabin heated up and started to sparkle. An orange circle (much like the one she conjured with the hand gestures) appeared but in the middle of it was possible to see an alley.

"What is this?" Emil was shocked.

"Fast travel!" Charlie winked before passing through. The portal was gone as soon as she was gone and Emil found himself alone in the cabin.

***

There was a small mirror in the bathroom. Alone, he could check his own body for the first time. His face looked pretty much the same, he hadn't aged one day in the past fifteen years. Besides his hands and shoulders and spine, his elbows were also abnormally prominent. Was he the Abomination after all?

The power felt good, he remembered. Felt god-like. But the cost was too high. Emil became too dangerous and lost control over his own life for more than a decade. He wanted to blame Ross and Banner but would it be even fair? Emil was the one who accepted to take the serum in the first place. He actually pointed a gun at that scientist. He begged to become as strong as the Hulk is.

Emil left the house still covered in blankets. The cold snow made his feet burn but no enough to bother him. He was strong after all. Or maybe he enjoyed the pain in a sick way of reinforcing his own superiority belief. An orange portal opened nearby after a while.

"Aren't you feeling cold?" Charlie asked coming with a bag of clothes.

"A little."

"Come. See if any of those fit you. They're from the local thrift shop by the way."

"I've wore worse."

Charlie bought a simple jeans, two shirts, a flannel and boots. Really simple stuff just to protect Emil from the cold. It fit well.

"Thank you." He said.

"You're in debt, Mr Blonsky. Don't you forget that."

"You know magic." He chuckled, "I can't allow myself to have you as an enemy Ms Reznik."

They both laughed. Charlie sat at the table and started to type something on the computer.

"The feds are all over town." Charlie commented, "They're looking for you."

"Listen," he said, "I need to ask you a favor but first can I go for a walk?

***

Emil took a deep breath before jumping as high as he could. He could not see above the tall trees so he jumped again but grabbed one of the trees this time. Even with his bare hards, the wood bowed to his will. He kept climbing until he got to the highest part of the tree. From up there he could see the whole forest, including the trees he threw around the day before.

He jumped to the ground again. The snow splattered around him. His hands and knees started to bleed but he didn't care because he would break soon enough. He felt powerful and smiled without realizing it. Not a happy smile, bur rather a challenging one. Hey jumped a little before running in the direction of the destruction he caused. He started slow (more like jogging actually) but quickly escalated to marathon running and super human running. The cold wind cut his face like knifes but he didn't care. He just kept going faster.

When he finally reached the glade he jumped again. Even higher this time. When he landed his feet felt bigger. Breathing heavily he looked at his own hands and realized they were indeed getting bigger and muscled. Without wasting any breath he took off all his clothes and started running again. The cold started to bother him less and less as his body grew in size.

He started to scream so he could liberate his anger. He jumped high and landed with his fists causing the ground to crack bellow him. Emil grabbed a fallen tree and threw it to the air. He picked big boulders and threw them around at will. In the middle of the chaos he also started laughing. He was strong. He could destroy anything he wanted. He was as strong as he could be.

When Emil finally felt satisfied with his own display of power, he grabbed the trees and rearranged them back into the ground as best as he could. He picked the boulders and put them back where they were. So when the glade resembled the glade it once was, Emil sat on the ground next to his new clothes.

He started to think about everything Charlie said. Yes, he was big and could destroy everything is his way. But there were gods and aliens and robots and uncontable planets and entities across the universe. He was big and strong but he was also small and weak.

His strength though wasn't on his muscles but on his ability to survive. He survived his childhood, he survived the military and he survived the Hulk. Just like Charlie survived the snap and the aftermath. Like Charlie found new meaning in magic so could Emil find new paths to follow.

"I'm big and I'm small. I'm strong and I'm weak. I'm still here." Emil whispered to himself.

His body started to shrink calmly. Once he achieved regular size he wore his clothes and walked towards the cabin. Charlie smiled when he entered.

"Had fun?" She heard the screams obviously.

"Yeah actually. Thanks for everything."

"No problem. Remember, you're still in debt! So what favor do you need?"

"I need a portal but I also need an address. I believe you can find the person I'm looking for in the Sokovia accords database."

"Hm alright. What's the name?"

"Ava Starr."

[batbootie]

My hands on your hearts -chap.2

Damian was bored. Out of his mind, left counting the holes on the ceiling, that bored students like him did with a ruler and an ink refill. Boredom was recurrent whenever he is at school, because no one can match his intelligence, even the teachers. The most of them can’t even resolve a three-degree equation without the help of a calculator.  He was raised since birth to rule, and he will be going to inherit the leadership of Wayne enterprises anyway, so there is no need for him to learn anymore. And to go to school for that matter. Really, what kind of school has no adaptation program for children who clearly are way superior then the average student?

But today, his boredom was reaching new heights. If boredom even has a level. Economy class was a, as Jason so colourfully puts it, pain in the left nut, because he already knew everything on the subject of the horizontal division of work from Adam Smith and its consequences on the society, but the teacher decided that, even though his grades showed that he clearly had the level of a university student, he should stay in class to try and socialise with the others.

Clearly, M. Judas had a chat with Father or Grayson. Traitor.  So, Damian was left glaring at the clock or at the teacher, urging for the class to end so that everybody, mainly him, could get on with their lives. He had started drawing a while ago, but even his imagination was bored. He couldn’t even get inspired by his surroundings, because school was boring even his imagination. He had drawn all his classmates, and his sketches were all about school, complete blueprints of the building’s structure and how many escapes routes existed. It was so uninteresting that despite the correctness of the sketch and the ideas for escape, Mother would be ashamed to see that his child was incapable to stay focused for more than 10 minutes or that he was not murdering them for boring him to death.

Sighing, Damian let his pencil roll out of his hand, wishing that he was anywhere but here, or that something interesting would happen in the course of the next three minutes. If nothing occurred in this time lapse, then he would come up with a shitty excuse, like a Father had a ski accident kind of lame excuse, even though that one was getting old, and go straight back to the Manor, to continue his work on the drug shipment case or search an idea for a gift, to offer at Jason’s birthday.

He already had everything planned for Grayson’s. For Drake, on the other hand, it clearly was a challenge. Because he knew next to nothing about Drake, except that he considered sleep like a distraction and that he’s a genius. But Damian was trying to make amend for some time now, and the only way to show Drake that he meant what he said back then. Back when he realised that he had grown to love his brother and that trying to murder his adopted brother was not how he would be accepted by Father or the entire family, even Cass disapproved his behaviour, or even a way to show love. But because Drake was a mastermind, he wouldn’t believe a word Damian said as an apology. So showing through actions, kind gestures was the plan. And what best opportunity is it then a birthday gift?

Even Grayson didn’t know about his change of heart. If he did, Damian wouldn’t have lived that down and Drake would’ve suspected something fishy. And he would lose all kind of credibility to make amend.

Hearing a forced cough, Damian came back to the sombre reality, realising that he was still in the classroom, and that the three minutes were up. Leaning to the side, he was ready to snatch his backpack and leave this smelly room full of goons in a matter of seconds when M. Judas decided to use this very moment to stand in front of the class and start speaking with a stern voice, eyeing carefully every student and quirking an eyebrow at Damian, clearly seeing that he had no intention whatsoever to stay.

“Okay everyone! I know some of you are impatient to leave for your Geometry class, but before the hour is up and I give you homework, I have some announcements to make. First of all, there was a change in the school policy, thanks to a reorganisation on the teacher’s level. As some of you may know, some teachers overlooked the actions of bullies, rich ones particularly, deciding to turn a blind eye and let things happen. But not anymore. You need to know that this is unacceptable, and will be punished, should you be a perpetrator or only a bystander. If anything of this nature occurs, I want to be informed, because if I don’t know anything, then I won’t be able to help you. Is that understood?”

The class hummed a half-hearted affirmation, some students clearly not believing that this new policy would change anything and deciding to continue their little games of pushing around the weaker students. Damian rolled his eyes, because really? This decision came from a good intention, but any students that would decide to take the teachers upon their offer will end up ostracised, being an even bigger target.

“Secondly, there’s a new student coming in today.”

The silence in the classroom was broken, the students starting to buzz with energy, eager to meet a new classmate -or a new victim, depending on the person-. Murmurs spread, questioning on the new student’s identity. Damian perked his head up in interest, letting his backpack fall to the floor and leaning in, something finally happening that would maybe enlighten his day. The teacher decided to open the door and stretched his neck in the corridor, calling and motioning for someone to come in.

The tension was palpable, like lions getting ready for the innocent lamb that would inevitably be thrown in. Finally, a hunched form made its way to the front, hiding behind the teacher’s back, the hoodie on its head and completely drenched in rainwater. M. Judas turned around as they came to a stop on their way to the teacher’s desk and whispered something to the new student, probably trying to encourage them and reassure them that nothing bad is going to happen. As if he can protect them from it, heh. He then stepped aside and let the class take the new student in.

Freckles. And scared. Those two elements jump in front of Damian’s mind as he takes the appearance of the new student, a girl, or a boy? They look androgynous. The next ten seconds are spent in silence, as the student shuffles with their hoodie, trying to hide their nervousness. A big breath, and they finally speak, catching everybody off guard by pushing off their hoodie. “Hello. My name is Isaac. I’m fourteen, like the most of you. I transferred here because my family had a job offer in Gotham and now I see why it was so well payed. I hope that we will understand each other and get along well. I am pleased to meet you.”

His voice. He is fourteen, but his voice has already cracked and is in a lower tune then the teacher’s. Damian is puzzled. His stance clearly shows that he is near a panic attack, ready to bolt out of the classroom should anything go wrong, but his voice is perfectly controlled. No wavering because of the nervousness, just a low tone hitting all the notes, in a perfect rhythm. The class is mesmerized, everybody’s jaws is on the floor –the teacher and Damian alike-  looking at what seems like the perfect embodiment of the absolute pitch, even being slightly awkward.  

With that, the boy, Isaac, his name’s Isaac, blushes furiously and quickly goes to his seat, to only stand awkwardly in the alley when he realises that he has none. “Hum… M. Judas? Where should I sit?”

The teacher shakes himself after being asked that question, but can only motion to an empty area near the window, next to Damian, with an incoherent gibberish. Clearly, if the teacher had all his brain cells functioning normally, he would’ve put Isaac at the extreme opposite, but no, Damian is stuck with Isaac for the rest of the year.

Damian shrugs himself out of the magic Isaac’s voice induced. Furious, verging to kill and hide the body kind of anger, without crossing that line in reality (really), he felt attacked by the teacher to consider him appropriate for the new student to sit beside him. Even if Isaac is a new kid, it doesn’t mean that he, Damian Al Ghul Wayne, has to give up the privilege of sitting alone and not have to be annoyed by unnecessary gossip other students love to share. Sitting down, Isaac looks Damian dead in the eye until Damian snaps, “What?” He just shrugs before looking down to his backpack, taking out a pen and a piece of paper before answering him, “Nothing, just don’t kill me.”

Don’t kill me? Why would I? Except getting on my nerves, I have no reason to legitimately kill you.

Damian quirked an eyebrow at Isaac, surprised by the last sentence, that had been said with gravity, absolutely no jokes in there. The tone was still controlled, like during his little speech in front of the class, but was tenser than before, if that was even possible. In fact, after Isaac had spoken, he avoided any eye contact with the Wayne sitting beside him, going to the extent to turn partially his back on him.

Perplexed, Damian shifted in his seat, to see Isaac flinch so slightly that without his training, he would’ve missed it. He taped his pencil on the side of the table and then on his sketchbook, observing Isaac for this experiment. For every sound, the boy moved, crocking his head to the side at the first tap before relaxing slightly after associating the sound with a pencil when he reproduced it on his own pencil case. Isaac was giving Damian his undivided attention, but without looking at him.

Damian’s eyebrow shot to his hairline when he realised that his new classmate was using a technique to get him to relax. With a behaviour that screamed ‘nothing to see, so not a threat here’ with his back turned on him, Isaac was exposing the back of his neck to Damian, in a sign of peace. He was trusting the Wayne not to kill him, like he asked. That kind of behaviour spoke to the animal that was walking alongside the rational part of the brain, sharing with each other the human skin. This gesture was like coming up to someone with the hands wide open, arms free, torso unprotected, but Damian wouldn’t have trusted such stance, because hands were as deadly as weapon. But how Isaac was sitting didn’t allow him to move quickly enough to make a move on Damian or to defend himself should Damian decide to attack. The power of decision was in the hand of the fifth Robin, even though Isaac was clearly following every of his movements, not being stupid enough to trust him on an intimate level.

Damian was intrigued. Clearly, Isaac thought that Damian was enough a threat that he should make clear on an instinctual basis that he wasn’t there to threaten him. So it meant that he was completely serious back then, when he asked not to kill him. He truly believed that Damian had already killed, and that he may consider him a threat and decide to eliminate him. But he wasn’t submitting to his strength, merely offering an olives branch. If he wanted acknowledge Damian’s ‘dominance’ and show that he was situating himself below him, then he would’ve exposed his throat and heart, making Damian’s life easier if he wanted to rip his throat out.  

They stayed like this for three minutes or more, in complete silence, Isaac still turning his back on Damian but assessing the threat he represented and Damian weighting the pros and cons. Finally, he sighed, “-Tt- I don’t kill, so there is no need to bare your neck and pray for the best. I’m not going to begin with such a low-life like you. You don’t even have a last name, Isaac.” Isaac’s back relaxed completely, his shoulders slopping down. He turned to Damian, still not looking at him in the eye, a heavy sigh leaving his lips. “Hey, I mean, you were going all Silence of the lambs on me, so you can’t blame a boy for trying his best to avoid a bloodshed, especially if he’s the one who’s going to end bolognesed. Man, red was all over the place. And it was buzzing like crazy, with the war tambours out.” He shuddered visibly, and scratched his ear, as if trying to get rid of an annoying sound. “Why were you angry?”

Damian scoffed, annoyed that he pinpointed that out, even through his mask of the annoyed but perfect student, and escaped the question “Red?”. He did not grasp completely why his new tablemate used the term red to describe the situation.

Isaac just shrugged, oblivious of the boy’s glare, “Yeah, red, like all over your hands and hair when you first looked at me.” Before Damian asked even further questions, he suddenly turned around to face the Wayne heir, as he calls himself. Isaac’s body was facing him, but he still didn’t look at him in the eye, instead tilting his head to the side to signify that he was listening to Damian’s move. He continued when he understood that Damian was staying dead silent on purpose, just to throw him off and make him forget about his initial question, “Right now, red is draped around your eyes and your mouth, and you’re just fucking with me.”

Before Damian could ask him the how and why Isaac could see something like colours around people, the new one just flat turned back on his chair and focused on the teacher, whispering a quick “Anyway, nice chat. I have to concentrate on the course because I don’t want to fall any further behind in Economics. Cool to meet you, Damian, even if I don’t know your last name.” And forgetting in a matter of seconds Damian’s existence.

The Wayne was left fuming, the deepest scowl on his face anybody in the school had ever seen, trying to untangle all the information Isaac let slip and trying also to cover his bruised ego at the other boy’s capacity to ignore him successfully, even when he was glaring holes in the back of his skull.  

First, rude. And second, how in the world can you NOT know me, you baboon? Did you live in a jar for the last 40 years to not know the Waynes?! We are worldly famous for Father’s shenanigans as Brucie (and the ones from his family, but let’s not dwell upon that). Isaac did not lie when he said that he did not know them, they were no signs of it. No muscles contraction, no dilated pupils, nothing. He was truly ignorant.

Even more perplexed, Damian resumed his doodling from before and began to chew on the mystery Isaac was beginning to become. The guy came from nowhere, was seeing colours in places that didn’t exist in this reality realm, had the behaviour of an animal in order to prevent any unfortunate dismemberment and finally was rude. That smelled trouble, in capital letters. Damian observed Isaac closely, and by the way he was crouched on his chair and listening to the teacher, he seemed like he couldn’t hurt a fly. But appearance could be really deceiving, so Damian decided to keep an eye on the new walking mystery for the sake of his sanity and to push away his boredom. He didn’t trust Isaac to not bring some crazy ass monsters straight from Allah knows where. Maybe it was his paranoia speaking, but anything new meant more than he liked something bad coming, and he wasn’t about to take any chances.

Economy class went without any incidents, but Isaac sent Damian a few glances in Philosophy class every time the teacher -this teacher got on Damian’s nerves more than others because of this attitude of considering that his words equalled God’s word and therefore should not be questioned- spewed some bullshit about artists being prostitutes, selling themselves through their artwork and desperately trying to lure people and get their attention, or started yelling at some students because they didn’t highlight in the right colour. And to be honest, his mood only worsened when he discovered that Isaac had decided to sit next to him for every class they had together, much to their classmates’ surprise (they expected –and for some of them, hoped- for a public execution at the second the economy class was over)

During lunch, he observed from afar, and could analyse the interactions Isaac had with some other students. He was clearly guarded around them, talking gladly with them, offering a smile, but anytime someone new approached or one made a grand gesture, he was immediately wary and tensed. He stared at every person when they were talking, clearly assessing their threat level, but avoided eye contact at any cost. He refused to look at them when talking to them, preferring to turn an ear to them or the discussion- much like he did with Damian at their first meeting-.

Surprisingly, even with bullies that only made contact to get a taste of a potential victim, he relaxed after a few seconds of interaction and didn’t pull the same stunt he did with Damian. Unsurprisingly enough, the behaviour of his classmates changed when the discussion came to colours he was seeing around people. Some of them were clearly uncomfortable, thinking that this poor dude had not all mugs on the shelf, as he showed them where the colour should be. But none of them asked what the position of the colour meant, and Isaac never offered an explanation.

School life and rules obliged, because Isaac was a bit out of the box as normal, and because of his apparition during the middle of the year, all added with his behaviour, he was quickly labelled freak, like Damian – though not with the mention dangerous, can dislocate a shoulder without blinking- and was left mostly alone. People came to talk to him about work he had to catch up with or just small talk, but beyond exchanging names or homework, everybody stayed away from him. Something set them off about Isaac. Meanwhile Damian ignored him in class, even when Isaac tried to talk to him about uninteresting matters, but watched him from afar during lunch, PE, basically every time he could, and took notes of anything weird on a villainous level.

But quickly, it became not enough. Damian’ paranoia was leaving him awake at night, wondering if this new boy was the calm before the storm, ready to shred them to pieces. He had to pierce this mystery, or he would end up with grey hair before his puberty.

The best strategy became clear: he would put Isaac under constant surveillance, at school and at home. He hacked the school servers to retrieve an address, learning Isaac’s last name: Menourem. There was no mention of any parents of any kind in Isaac’s file, just a sister, Elilian. He broke in during school hours, knowing that nobody would be there, Isaac’s sister working from 7am to 8pm every day and Isaac himself being at school. He bugged the whole apartment, placing cameras in every room – not forgetting the bathroom, even if he didn’t want to have the image of Isaac taking a shit on his camera feed-  and designed his patrol route so that he would pass on the rooftop in front of Isaac’s bedroom. He would then watch Isaac and his sister have a complete normal life.

His brothers picked up on his change of route and Father confronted him about it, but he quickly dismissed his worries, saying that he had saved someone during patrol and they had asked to keep an eye on them, scared that whatever monster attacked them would come back if Robin wasn’t there. And him being the white knight on the mighty horse that he was immediately agreed. He got teased for it, but it was better than having his brothers snoop around and have at the end to explain himself to them when they would see that he was stalking the perfect little civil Isaac was.

Himself thought that way too, but just to be sure, he stalked him even harder, going to the extent of mapping his whole movements, following him to his dance courses and taekwondo training for the whole week. The only one in the loop was Alfred, who merely arched an eyebrow when he got a call from Damian asking to be picked up near the sports club, in the pouring rain, to only respond that he was already on his way.

Pennyworth knew all along. Is he sentient? I know Father tested him for any mutant genes, but his deductive abilities are humanly impossible. He nearly resembles Sherlock Holmes, without the annoying doctor at his side.  

Disappointed that nothing crispy was going on, but reassured that it meant nothing dangerous would be dumped on them, he continued his nightly surveillance for about a week just to be sure, and ignored him at school.

But Isaac didn’t hear it that way. School went on his nerves, aggravated by the change of scenery and all of the new people, making fun him while his back was turned. So when he saw Damian not even casting a glance in his direction when he greeted him at the beginning of Philosophy class on Monday, he snapped. Slumping in his chair, he took out his notebook, angry, trying to reign his temper before he would explode. Damian, being the fine detective that he was, frowned at his tensed shoulders and the anger radiating from his persona, even with his breath controlled. Normally, everything should be fine, Isaac didn’t see his sister in the morning, because she normally left for work early as always but they shared a civil meal the evening before, Damian knew, because he was watching over them. Maybe in the bus, he was run over by an old lady and her rollator. The fifth Robin was perplex, but he didn’t really care if Isaac was angry, if it only meant that he would leave him alone.

The class began, the teacher spewing nonsense as always. Isaac waited for the teacher to start a rant about the Oedipus complex, and how much we are fucked up in our heads because we were part of a love triangle early in our lives, before turning partially to Damian and whisper-scream “Are you bloody bipolar?!”

Damian blinked, not really understanding why Isaac’s anger was directed at him and enjoying the slip in the most British accent he ever heard, aside from Pennyworth’s. Surely he left the new one alone, so why should he be angry? Avoiding as always eye contact, Isaac got the confirmation that Damian was not going to talk when the Wayne tapped his pen on his paper, and continued, getting even angrier, “I told you that I wasn’t a threat and that I wasn’t here to do you harm, so, here comes my question… WHY?!”

“-Tt- What are you talking about? I left you alo-”

“No, you didn’t! Watching me from afar in school, noting every strange behaviour – which, by the way, must be hard, because my face is next the definition of strange in the dictionary- is not leaving me alone. But school I understand, you want to have every bits of information about your new classmate. Won’t blame you for paranoia, in this city. What I don’t really understand is stalking me. Like, really?!! Following me home? Lurking on a rooftop, watching me in my bedroom like a bloody weirdo?!?!”

“Again, what are you talking about? Is that a new technique to try and get my attention? If it is, then take a ticket and wait in the line. I have other things to do then paying attention to an extra.”

“Really, Wayne? We’re going down this road? Okay, then how do you explain the boy I saw Wednesday evening, just in front of my window, with the same height, same body mass – I saw you jump in sports class and the sound of the landing was the same, so proof- and same shoe size than you? Hell, I can just do a DNA test on the hair I found when I went to check I wasn’t hallucinating. What will the results be? A 100% match maybe?!”

From annoyed, Damian went to deadly in matter of seconds. In a blink, his knife was drawn – which slipped Grayson’s thorough search and patting this morning, thank you very much- and the sharp end went to Isaac’s thumb and sliced. Blood pearled and Isaac withdrew his hand, hissing, more surprised by the location – he thought that Damian would’ve gone for the throat and ask question later- than in pain. Standing up, the Wayne boy took him by the arm and forcefully hauled him up, managing to get everybody’s attention. Turning to the teacher without letting go of his arm, he declared in a flat tone, “He cut himself on the edge of the table. I’ll show him the infirmary, because I don’t think anyone already has.”, and looking at Isaac, “Now come, you fool, I don’t want to have your DNA on my papers.”

Isaac snorted and murmured, “Like you don’t have some on your knife to test it...”

They exited the classroom together, with everybody’s eyebrow shooting up to their hairlines. They walked a few meters and left the main hallway, turning left to the administrator section, which was less frequented.

As soon as they disappeared in the hallway, Damian slammed Isaac against the wall, putting the knife against his throat. “What. Are. You. Talking. About.”, he hissed, blocking Isaac’s airways for a brief moment, to make him understand the precarious situation he was currently in. Isaac merely relaxed and sarcastically quirked an eyebrow, looking away from Damian’s face as soon as the fifth Robin came too close for comfort, “What am I talking about? Oh, I don’t know, how about you sweeping through my flat, putting bugs and cameras in every corner, invading my privacy and my sister’s?! See, when I spotted you, I wasn’t so sure, but honestly, Robin doesn’t just do surveillance from a window. He bugs you, inspect all your accounts, learns everything about your life. I’m also talking about you wearing a bloody neon costume, lurking at my window, watching ME! I would’ve been flattered if I wasn’t so pissed that I had to abstain from jerking off for two whole weeks!”

Damian must’ve made a face, because Isaac sighed and whispered, “TMI?”

The knife was pressing even harder, threatening once again Isaac’s blood vessels, and restricting his movements so, that if he tried to move, he would end up with the imprint of the blade in his flesh, making a smile like scar on his Adam’s apple. “How.”, was the only word he was able to get out of his gritted teeth, already hearing the shame and anger in Father’s voice when he would announce that he got busted by a classmate he stalked. Mother was screaming in his head to kill him and let the body be a feast for the fishes of Gotham City. Isaac’s stance relaxed even further, going as far as wrap his hands around Damian’s wrist to show them and leaning more comfortably against the wall. “Dude, you said you don’t kill. But I know for a fact that you did before- Robin is infamous like that-, so why not pull out the knife before anybody sees us. I am way too angry at you to hug you in order to hide this wonderfully made slicing object.”

“I am seriously reconsidering my no killing rule, so do not test my patience with witty banter. Answer. How?”

Isaac only smiled, a confident smile, “I can see your battle with your blood lust. Not killing is harder than you thought, but right now, red is not around your eyes, so you’re not losing your shit. Yeay, win. So you won’t kill me – or anyone for that matter- today. Applause.”

Again with the Red, Damian was lost. Isaac had seen perfectly what had happened in his mind and pinpointed that out with the use of a colour. The fifth Robin was getting suspicious that the colours had something to do with his revealed identity, even though it seemed clearly unbelievable. During his search in the Merounem’s apartment, he didn’t find any sign of magic or suspicious furniture, - Isaac’s sister only having weird taste in decoration-  which lead him to think that Isaac was indeed crazy. Clearly, he was wrong.

Seeing that Damian had no intention of moving any time soon, Isaac shrugged and tightened his grip on Damian’s wrist and pushed the knife a tiny bit away from his throat and tilted his head, eyeing the floor thoughtfully. He then looked at the ceiling, “I know. Follow me and I’ll explain how I knew it was you beneath the hoodie. And then you can take out all the bugs and cameras you put in our flat, before we go completely Ghostbusters and fry them.”

Damian was not trusting him, but after everything Isaac had said and done to signify that he wasn’t a threat, nor willing to be taken as one in the future, he decided that he was smart and trained enough to handle any unexpected situation. Pocketing his knife, he motioned for the new boy to lead the way, glaring at him for good measure. Much to his surprise, they exited the school by signing themselves out, using the skiing excuse for Damian and a cold for Isaac, and hit the streets. The walk went on without any sound from each other, Damian growing more and more curious and wary at Isaac, who was seemingly perfectly fine with leaving him in the dark. As they walked nearby a bakery, Damian finally recognised the neighbourhood – he took this route when following Isaac home, the first time he got out. - Knowing now where they were heading, Damian was only left wondering why. But when Isaac opened the door to his apartment, the truth slapped him in the face like Barbara did when he accidently tripped a wire and sent the nest on lockdown.

Colours. They were colours everywhere. The first time he came in, he didn’t pay attention to all the nuances on the walls and around the furniture, to busy searching for information. But now that he was invited, he could look up and take in all the undertones of beiges and whites of the living room and the ceiling, how the black of the piano on the corner and all smoky colours of the other instruments lying in different corners of the room brought out the sofa and the table near the kitchen area. It was like a wool sweater with a collared neck and décolleté that succeeded to underline elegantly the breasts of the wearer and her figure, giving it a respectable atmosphere and kind of homey. There were plants everywhere, with flowers popping out, in different colours and shapes. Damian, as an artist, was slapping himself for not seeing it the first time he came here. But it was understandable, because he came here as Robin in the skin of Damian, and not as the artist that popped in whenever he was safe and alone in his room, free to draw whatever he wanted.

Isaac laughed and Damian realised that he had been staring. Adverting his eyes as soon as the Wayne boy set his own on him, Isaac motioned with his hand to follow him further into the place. Picking up his jaw left on the floor, Damian followed him into his room, to be awestruck for a second time – bitch slapping himself for the second time today -. Like the living room, Isaac’s bedroom was all about nuances and glimpses of warm and cold colours in unexpected places. Brown and green were dominant, with the bed and the wooden table in warm brown, and the sheets and the three stripes on the wall to be a pine green, with blue pooping up on the walls with photos and some purple picking out from his underwear drawer. The room was lit up by the dull sun from Gotham, blocked by all of the pollution, and gave a peaceful atmosphere when Isaac stood in the middle. He looked surreal, and Damian only wanted to sit down and draw him, to capture this moment out of time, purely human and truly beautiful.

The moment was broken as Isaac reached out for his chair. Damian had it preciously stashed in his memory to try to recreate it later. But the moment turned from beauty to pure confusion as he watched Isaac frantically beginning to search through his desk drawers, pulling out papers and papers filled with crap – doodles of the philosophy professor, one of what he did not want to believe was a caricature of him with snots running down his nose- before coming to a sketchbook that wasn’t there when Damian searched the room. Pulling it out, Isaac sat down on the floor and looked up to Damian, only to advert his eyes when he met his. “I think you’re beginning to understand, but I’ll give you the final proof that will maybe the last nail to my coffin if you decide that I’m a threat and make me disappear form the face of Mother Earth. Without killing me, sure.” He then reached out his hand holding his sketchbook and gave it to Damian, who opened it, perplex of why Isaac was giving him his clearly most precious belonging, giving himself bare to the scrutiny of Damian’s mind.

Curious and more excited than he would admit, Damian opened it and refrained his desires to let his jaw fall to the floor –for the third time today, seriously honey, could it stop?!-  and to bolt at Isaac to kill him. In the sketchbook were drawings of him. Not just him as Damian, but also him as Robin. On the first page were two drawing, looking almost like pictures: His face as Damian, looking bored, probably drawn from a memory of History class, and his face as Robin, hood down and domino mask on. The shades and contours lines were put in the same places and the two drawing, minus the domino, looked identical. But the interesting part was the colour on it. His faces were done with a pencil, and the shades too. But droplets of colour were on it. As a civil, red was around his mouth and eyes, while as a vigilante, red was around his hair and ears. Red.

“You said you saw red the first time we met.”  

“Yeah, and it was around your hair and ears, like something bad was whispering to you, or just anger was showing through.”

“This is how you found out?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Thing is, those places are general for all people. If someone’s angry, then it’ll show like it showed on you, same places. But what gave it away was the colour. Everybody has a unique colour and that’s how I recognised you, Damian Wayne, as Robin. You were going all weirdo under my window, and if it wasn’t for the colour, I wouldn’t have spotted you. It’s pretty weird to recognise your table neighbour as one of the famous thigh clad vigilante, lurking in the dark like the roof top is your playground. Every colour has its nuances, and for you I used #eb1523, but around your stomach there’s another nuance, duller and sombre, almost like #70060d.” Damian took a short breath at the mention of his stomach, but Isaac continued, undaunted, “The colour of blood. That’s weird, ‘cause I’ve never seen something like this before.”

So it meant that Isaac was a mutant. No doubt. An a dangerous one for that matter.

“You’re a meta.” His voice was cold, weighing if yes or no he should tell Father about new metas roaming Gotham. One that could bust out his identity by one look.

Isaac tilted his head on the right side and smiled, “Naaa, not it this sense. When you recognise someone on the streets, I recognise a colour. Same difference, our brains are just not made the same. I’m no mutant with a radar, I just associate things differently than you do. But I don’t know why I see two colours on you. Maybe someone who left an impact on you… I dunno. ”

Isaac seemed content with his explication, and did not look curious as why another colour was lingering on his body. His stomach. The pain flared as he remembered his death by the hand of his mother, obscuring his vision. It had been the worst moment of his life (pun intended).

What had really pushed him metaphorically on his knees was the realisation that he wouldn’t be able to help Father anymore. That he wouldn’t be there to ensure that Father would not kill, him and Todd taking that decision for him, taking out some villains permanently in order to keep their father’s sanity. If Father lost his moral compass, then they were all doomed, because once you tasted blood, there was no coming back, not really. Todd understood now why Batman couldn’t kill, but it didn’t mean that they couldn’t kill for him. Grayson turned a blind eye and sometimes Tim provided the targets.

But knowing that they would have to continue without him, that he wouldn’t be there anymore, it had struck him. That he wouldn’t be there to enjoy the company of Alfred, with some Earl Grey and Pennyworth on his lap, purring. That he wouldn’t be able to put his fist in the face of the goons they fought every night. That he wouldn’t see Father smile at Superman and Wonder Woman like they were the most precious thing he ever had the chance to hold. Like Jason looked at Dick whenever he thought that no one was looking. Selfishly, he thought that he was too young to die, had too many things he had now the right to explore to be run through by a katana.

Coming back to reality when a hand waved in front of him, he snapped his eyes back at Isaac, who was wearing a concerned face. “What?” he spat, clearly not over the fact that a civilian had discovered his identity and was now concerned.

“You okay? I have the feeling you went in a bad place of your memories, ‘cause the red on your stomach started to spread.”

Oh right. Colours. Seriously, it was starting to get kind of annoying. Those colours were like an emotional state detector and it was unnerving to know that a stranger could read all his emotions by just looking at the colour on his body. Scowling, he sighed, “I am well, no need to dump your worries on me.”

Isaac just snorted, disbelieving. An awkward silence settled, the two boys not knowing what to say anymore. Everything had blown off, they had nothing more to discuss. Damian wanted to go back home to figure his next move about Isaac – maybe locking him away to make sure that he wasn’t about to hand him to the cops, or someone worse for that matter- and take a nap before patrol. Standing up, Isaac handed him his hand to help him up and turned at his face him for the first time of the day, eyes glued on a point over Damian’s head. “You know what? I think you’ll want to keep an eye on me, secret identity yada yada, so why not be friends? That way you can drop the creepy act and I’ll have a conversation partner in school. Win-win situation.”

Damian wanted to laugh at his face. Him, a friend? Had Isaac really gone insane for him to ask that? And also, he hadn’t ignored him for a while to now become friends with him. That would absolutely be counterproductive. But seeing Isaac stare nervously in the space them, he doubted his judgement for the first time today.

That was way too simple. Or maybe not, Kent had done the same and they were now on ‘friendly’ terms. But the situations were different. Kent was an alien with superpowers that fought alongside him, while Isaac was a stranger that busted his identity in no time with some weird brain powers. It smelled trouble, and Damian wasn’t sure this would be a good idea. But he had come a long way from the antisocial brat he once was, being rude, seeing friends as a liability more than a strength and he had to admit, Isaac was getting more and more interesting. So if this contract allowed Damian to keep his surveillance without getting caught, then he would maybe give it a shot.  “-Tt- Alright, your idea merits considering. But keep your bragging to a minimum or it won’t be viable anymore.”, he said, standing up on his own, refusing Isaac’s hand, who let it drop at his side with a slight frown.

“You are so weird, Damian.”, muttered Isaac so quietly that Damian didn’t pick it up. He then went in front of him to lead him out of his room, shouting at him before exiting for the bathroom, drowning him in a flow of question before locking the door. “You like hyperrealism? Oh and there’s coffee under the counter. Put it in the coffee maker and start it, I think I need a cup to celebrate our newly sealed friendship. Surely you want one as well, don’t you Wayne? Do you even know how to make coffe?”

Damian almost smiled at the absurdity of it all. Almost.

Boom, there ya go. Second chapter. find me on Ao3 under Neverask, or with the name of this story. 

Do not reupload to another site without my consent. If you do, I will find you and I will send Wade after your ass. He’s very fond of the spider I’m bringing to the team.

[fredseibertdotcom]

“When in doubt, count!” 

My mentor Dale Pon didn’t get much public recognition for his smart, strategic and successful creative work in media promotion. I’m posting about a few projects I was lucky to work on with him.

Scott Webb sent along this advertising campaign Dale Pon created on the cusp of the 1979/80 era of WNBC Radio in New York City. Bob Pittman, Scott, and I recount our view of it below, and I’ll update as more come in from other colleagues. 

There have been countless lessons I learned from Dale Pon about promotion and marketing, but the one that has stuck with me most is...

“When in doubt, count!”

Sounds pretty boring and I thought Dale was a creative guy. Count, like “4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crest”? Really, that’s a good solution?

But Dale’s point of view was the numbers can always point you to a creative solution that can work if you use them as a jumping off point. Basically, as you’re trying to figure out a pitch, a unique selling proposition for a campaign, if you get stuck, look at the numbers. It’s an idea that so pervasive that our mutual co-worker Bob Pittman has even started a podcast on the principal called “Math & Magic.”

To me, this maxim was often how to do a lot with a little, but it didn’t become super clear to me how “counting” could lead to anything useful until I saw it in amazing action back at the beginning of our relationship in the late 1970s.

Fred Seibert:  In 1977, Dale Pon had hired me at WHN in New York City, moved me to Los Angeles and back again. He’d successfully and ____ promoted WHN into the 2nd most listened to country music station in American –remember this station was in New York, home to Frank Sinatra, not Johnny Cash– and I was his lackey,

In early 1979  Dale abandoned me. He went to a New York radio competitor, telling me that not only could I run the WHN promotion department –a job for which I had virtually no experience other than my short stint with him. (“Hey, you produced a jazz record that got a Grammy nomination, you can be good at this too.” Really?) He’d been whisked away by WNBC, a relative ratings laggard, home to Imus in the Morning, run by veteran Bob Sherman and upstart program director Bob Pittman. Sherman’s public goal? “Beat WABC!, which had been New York's #1 station for decades.”

“Oh, I need you to help me produce the TV campaign. If WHN finds out and fires you, I’ll bring you over.” 

Oh great.

Next thing I know Dale’s whipped out the latest New York Arbitron radio ratings books and hands one to me. “Go to every demographic page and circle WNBC. Let’s see what’s what.”

A half hour later I said, “You’re fucked. At best they’re #14 in the prime demos.”

“Here!” he points, “They’re #2!!” It was something like Adult men 35-49. 

I was confused. The group that advertisers wanted was Adults 18-49, maybe on a stretch Adults 25-49. What the hell?!

“We’ll note the demo in the mouse type at the bottom. No one will notice!”

No one will notice?!

Within an hour Dale had sketched out the pitch. A take off on a successful Avis Car Rental campaign.

“We’re #2, we want to be #1! WNBC Radio 66!” 

Before I knew it, Dale had WNBC putting out a call to it’s listeners to send in  Polaroids of any twins who listened for a potential casting in commercials.

Huh, twins? “We’re #2.” Twins. OK, he’s got a creative idea. 

Soon enough, he had me coming to an audio studio after work to moonlight the soundtracks for the campaigns. (WHN never caught on, and I stayed until I want to MTV Networks.)

“Twice as many winnas!*** Twice as many prizes!! Twice as many chances to win!!!” 

And you know? The damned thing worked like crazy. When in doubt, count. Indeed. 

***Remember, we were in New Yawk City. You know, that accent.

Bob Pittman: “...being bold; getting attention; and dominating the airwaves…” 

In addition to my time working with Dale Pon when he created ‘I Want My MTV’ for us in the very early days of MTV and when he helped me relaunch Six Flags Theme Parks, Dale was a lifelong friend and was my partner in building WNBC Radio in the late 70s.

We had completely rebuilt the programming and brought Don Imus back to WNBC from Cleveland, and Dale used the Imus return to help build the huge cume for the radio station and lead WNBC to its eventual position as number one.  WNBC went from an old, staid, second-rate New York radio station to the number one radio station through building the right  programming; Don Imus was the anchor and nighttime disc jockey Alan Beebe’s introduction of ‘WNNNNNBC’ gave the station its unique hooks. Dale took those  – and the rest is history.

Dale taught us all about having a clear and valued claim; being bold; getting attention; and dominating the airwaves with frequency.  Although he may not have won awards for his creativity, it worked time and time again and those of us who adopted his philosophies had that same kind of success in other businesses at other times.  But make no mistake about it – it was Dale’s influence that got us there.

Scott Webb: “...creativity was about problem solving and winning...” 

I got an internship working for Dale Pon two days a week at WNBC Radio during last 3 months of my senior year at Sarah Lawrence College. There were 3 other interns and mostly we made sure that content winners got their prizes and that all the promotions were administered properly. 

There were A LOT of contests and giveaways. 

I had never worked at a radio station before and I just assumed this level of promotion fervor was standard operating procedure. The station was based on the 2nd floor of 30 Rock and at the time it seemed glamorous. I was in line with David Letterman at the cafeteria and Saturday Night Life was rehearsing on the 8th floor and Tom Snyder was in the office down the hall. 

Dale’s office was the dead center of the office when you walked in the door. He ran the team like it was a barroom in the middle of a battlefield. He was loud and always barking out orders. It was stressful and fun. On the last day of our internship we were given T-Shirts that read “I survived Dale Pon”. I, for one, was afraid to put it on - for fear of what his reaction might be - but also because I didn’t want it to end. 

A few weeks later, after he abruptly fired one of his managers he hired me on the spot to join his battalion, er I mean, team. We went to work on the TV advertising campaign that would take WNBC from #2 to #1 in the NYC market. 

We put a call out for twins and cast dozens of twins to kiss Imus. Shooting that campaign was the first production I had ever been part of and it was fast and furious and Dale took me to almost every meeting and along the way from storyboarding with the cinematographer to instructing the animator to directing sound and even buying the air time. 

I didn’t know it but I was getting a master class in creative strategy that was all about winning. It was not just fun – it was a mission to transform what had been a shitty, demoralized loser of radio station to being totally made over into an unstoppable #1 radio station. 

When the dust settled WABC, formerly #1 gave up completely and changed their format from music to News and Talk. An outcome that blew me away at the time. I thought Dale would be happy at the utter defeat he delivered to his competitor but he hated that they never took the bait to respond to his challenge. He wanted a worthy adversary but he never got it. They ran. 

It was the most stressful and wonderful time of my life and it was impossible to not be fascinated by everything Dale did. He was a great teacher and often just told me to sit close to him and just watch everything he did. He taught me how to see and how to think and to understand that creativity was about problem solving and winning. Thank you Dale.

[heartsofstrangers]

What has been one of the most challenging things you’ve experienced or are currently experiencing?

“Probably drug addiction.”

Tell me about that.

“Since I was fourteen years old, the first time I ever tried it, I’ve been intermittently addicted to crystal meth. The past four years, it’s been pretty consecutive other than the four months that I spent in jail two years ago. I guess that’s the gist of it.”

When did you start using it?

“I was about fourteen years old. I used to do it every other weekend with a group of shitty friends that I had made.”

What was going on in your life at that time?

“I had just lost my best friend, who was like my brother; we grew up together. He died from complications due to diabetes. I saw that they were using it and I had taken Adderall before. I thought it was like Adderall, except you could snort it or smoke it, and I thought that’s always fun. I recognized that they were carefree on it, and I wanted to be like that, so I did it.”

What was it like the first time you got high?

“It was sketchy and I was on edge. I don’t know if you’ve done any sort of upper, but it’s intense. It actually made me feel disgusting for a while. I felt really gross the entire time and then coming down was awful, but something inside me wanted to do it again, so I did. It disconnected me from the world. All that really mattered was scribbling on a piece of paper for hours on end. I guess it was really getting lost in reality.”

How did your life unfold—were you in school at that time?

“It kind of caused me to ‘fail out’ of high school; I didn’t drop out, but failed out pretty bad. I had to retake my sophomore year on the computer and graduated at the bottom of my class because of it, or the choices I made while on it. I don’t really know if I was in control or not then.”

You talked about jail—how did you end up there?

“I got arrested leaving a drug deal in June 2015 and then, after my parents bailed me out, I stopped going to court for the probation sentence and a year and a half later, they picked me up at my older brother’s apartment at 11:00 p.m. Six bounty hunters apprehended me and  then I spent the next four months in Montgomery County. I was there for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s, and almost my birthday, all behind bars.”

What was that like?

“Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. It was pretty shitty and I was very confined. I was in a sixteen-man room for the most part. It was me and fifteen other people, all in a big-ass room full of bunk beds, having to stare at each other all day.”

Where did that lead you to mentally? Did you process anything in your mind about where you had been, where you wanted to go, where you were?

“I just wanted out. It kind of made me feel like an animal. In Texas, I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else, but you become state property when you’re incarcerated; you lose all your rights. Basically, you’re a body with a name. You’re not a human in there. It’s weird.”

How long ago was that?

“It was January 2017.”

Where did you end up when you were released?

“Back to my older brother’s, and he does dope too. I went right back to where I started, or stopped at midway.”

So, you were sober and clean in jail?

“Yes, while I was there.”

Did you go through withdrawal?

“I slept for the first four days. I didn’t eat or use the restroom; I just slept.”

So, you get out, move back in with your brother, and get right back into it?

“The night that I got out, I used.”

What’s your relationship like with your family, aside from your brother?

“I don’t talk to them, only whenever they speak to me and, even then, it’s usually just my mom, and it’s like once every two weeks, sometimes twice.”

What are those conversations like?

“I love you, I miss you. I love you too, I miss you too.”

Do they live locally?

“They live about two hours away.”

Do they kind of push you away due to your addiction?

“I alienated myself because I knew I’m not anyone a parent could be proud of—that’s how I feel. Because of my problem, and I don’t want them to see me like this and I won’t let them. So, I pushed myself away from them.”

Have you done that with close friends as well?

“I’ve done it with everyone.”

So, who are you associating with, dealers and other users?

“Yeah. I dated this dude for almost a year and he basically isolated himself away from me recently because of it. That really fucked me up a little bit because I feel like I put so much into it, but really it was just me high as hell, overthinking everything, all the time, slowly dissipating into nothing.”

It’s got to be a pretty lonely feeling to be that isolated.

“Yeah, but you’re never really alone when you’re a drug addict.”

Because you’re connecting with your substance.

“I’m perfectly fine with being alone, but I’m not okay with how lonely I am most times.”

Are you scared at all to continue down this path?

“Yeah, because I don’t know where my life’s going. So, I just get high and it’s like ‘where are you going now?’ to go get high.”

How can you afford to get high?

“My best friend sells it. My only friend just happens to be a drug dealer.”

Are you performing any sort of acts or anything in exchange?

“No, no, no; we’re just really good friends and misery loves company. He’s basically in the same spot I’m in.”

What are some of the things you’ve lost along the way through these years of addiction?

“Honestly, I lost my sanity, a lot of good friends, and a close tie with my family. I lost my car. I lost my license. Somehow I lost my social security card, but I don’t think that had anything to do with drugs. I lost my apartment, but that was at the beginning so that’s not a big deal.”

Where are you living now?

“I live with my friend, Pat, who is also a drug addict, but he’s a more functioning one, I should say. He’s held a job for four years and his addiction is kind of new and, ironically enough, I’m the first one he ever tried it with, which is kind of funny or fucked up.”

Have you ever been in any situations where you felt like your life was being threatened?

“No, not really. Not that I can think of, but I don’t know . . . no.”

How’s your judgment when you’re high?

“You can rationalize just about anything. For the most part, I would say it’s pretty good. There are dumb people who get addicted to drugs and there are people who are addicted to drugs who already have a good grip on reality and are able to make the right decisions or rational ones at least, but I’ve done some pretty stupid stuff.”

What are some of the stupid things that you’ve done?

“Not put the filter on a vacuum cleaner and small things like that. I’ve never done anything really stupid like rob anyone. I did, however, one time throw a brick through a window. I was super pissed off at the person who lived at the apartment and, in a fit of rage due to addiction or substance use, I picked up what was closest to me, which happed to be a chipped piece of concrete by the curb and chucked it threw the window. I don’t know how’s that going to fix it, but it made me feel better. It was really stupid.”

Prior to losing your friend, had you experienced any sort of obstacles early on in your life that taught you some coping skills to deal with grief, pain, or challenging experiences?

“To isolate; that’s all I’ve ever really known. Get over it and, if you can’t, shut up about it. That’s what I was basically taught.”

Do you want to stop?

“Yes and no. Crystal meth is the only thing that’s kept a roof over my head while, at the same time, it’s kept me on the edge of losing that. It’s the only thing that sort of keeps me connected with the real world because I have friends and acquaintances who use and who keep me from going insane living alone. At the same time, those people come and go. Those people aren’t necessarily friends you want to keep around; they’re people who are just going to bring you down because they’re going to keep you high. I’m aware of that but, at the same time, I can’t stop. So, yes and no. I was sober for about a month and moved to New Mexico with my ex. That didn’t turn out well, obviously. He flew me back here on a last-minute, overnight flight and I started using again.”

How old are you now?

“Twenty-four.”

So, you’ve been using for ten years?

“Just about.”

Any issues with your health?

“No, not that I know of. I probably have shaky hands, but so does everybody.”

Do you sleep?

“Yeah, every night, which is kind of an achievement really if you’re a crackhead like me. I’ve kind of plateaued. I’ve reached a level of tolerance that makes me have a normal sleeping schedule, which is something you really don’t want to be but, at the same time, I’m glad I’m there because now I’m normal-ish. I don’t look cracked out.”

What’s your biggest fear?

“Dying—not from drug use, though I guess that would suck too, but just dying in general, because I don’t know what’s going to happen after that. Maybe my biggest fear is actually not knowing and being unaware.”

In contrast, do you feel like you’re living?

“I feel like I’ve been dead since I was about twelve, but I don’t think that had anything to do with drugs, but the realization of how fucked up the world really is. I think I’m living in a way—I get to do shit that not everybody gets to do, like not have to work, I’m able to explore the city, and that’s what I do every day. I go to different parts of the city and sketch around, but I’m probably not really living, not in a way that’s (I guess) savory.”

Did you grow up here?

“No. I grew up two hours northeast, in a little town, Cold Springs, with about 900 people, and that’s consolidated because it’s a bunch of small towns put together.”

What brought you to Houston?

“Drugs. I bounced from circle of users to circle of users to circle of users until I ended up in Kingwood. Kingwood is right on the outskirts of Houston. I just migrated over here, made friends wherever I could, and now I’m here.”

When you agreed to do the interview, did you have any idea that you’d be talking about this?

“No, not at all. I honestly had no idea what it would be about. I was just like ‘an interview, okay, that’s fine.’ I thought maybe it was going to be ‘how do you feel about Houston’ or some sort of typical bullshit interview, but I didn’t think it would make me open my eyes to shit I’ve been closing them to or haven’t said out loud in a while. I’ve said this stuff before, ‘I don’t want to do this.’”

How does it feel to hear yourself expressing these things?

“It kind of pisses me off.”

In what way?  You’re pissed at yourself?

“Yeah, because I know I’m just going to go get high afterwards.”

Are you high now?

“No. I used, but I’m not high. I guess that’s high; I don’t really know. The last time I used was about six hours ago. I get high and then there’s other days where I just get by and, today, is a just a get by day because I didn’t do too much of it.”

What happens if you don’t use?

“I sleep and I’m dead to the world basically, which is probably what I am now, but in a different way because I’m asleep. I’ve slept for thirty-six hours straight before and my friends have asked if I had a bladder infection, and I said that I was good, just tired. When I woke up, I had muscular atrophy, where I couldn’t really feel much, and then I’d just waddle around until I found food, and then I was good.”

Would you say you’re depressed?

“Probably clinically. I used to take Pristiq, but it didn’t mix well with my meth use, so I cold turkey stopped taking it after about six months. It’s a serotonin replacement or something, but I thought it was kind of bullshit. I’ve been told before by friends that I’ve been manic; they would say ‘wow, you’re pretty manic’ and I’d say ‘yeah, I know.’”

Do you think you were like that before the drugs or has that manifested since?

“Half and half. I’ve always been kind of bipolar-ish, but this has really intensified it or brought it to a meniscus versus overflowing. If it was overflowed, I’d probably be in prison, but it’s definitely got to that point.”

What keeps you in that elevated state?

“Being aware that I’d probably go to prison, so to stay at a constant ‘that’s okay.’ It’s not necessarily the way anybody would want to live.”

What were you like as a child?

“I didn’t take ‘no’ as an answer. I wasn’t a spoiled brat or handed everything I wanted, but I didn’t have to ask for much. I never really had to go without anything. My parents weren’t wealthy, but they were comfortable, and have been that way as long as I can remember. For the most part, I’d say I was a pretty happy kid.”

How did you meet your friend who died?

“We were neighbors. He was like my brother. I don’t have close ties or close relationships with anybody like I did with him. He was the first person I could ever really say was my best friend. When you’re a kid, grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents’ and grandparents’ friends die, and  you say ‘oh, that’s sad.’ But, when your fourteen-year-old best friend dies, basically out of the blue, he just wakes up one morning and then he’s dead . . . That shit really happens, people die, people who you know die, people you’re close with die, and it’s hard. It sucks pretty bad, especially when you’re that young and you don’t really know how to take it in. You know how you’re supposed to take it in, you know how people do it, and you see it in movies, but there’s something inside of you that dies too, and you can’t wake it up. Josh was my best friend and was like a brother to me. We did just about everything together.”

What would you say to him if he was here now?

“That I’m sorry. I would tell him that I’m sorry because, at this point, I would have probably alienated myself from him too. I guess given if he had left and came back. Yeah, I would tell him that I was sorry because I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted to see me like this.”

What do you think he would say to you?

“I don’t know. He’d probably call me an idiot, but I’m not sure.”

If you could go back to your twelve- or fourteen-year-old self in that time in your life, as the adult you are now, what would you say to that child?

“Don’t do it. You’re going to fuck up. Don’t do it, but that twelve- or fourteen-year-old probably wouldn’t listen anyway. He’d probably think that I was stupid because ‘no’ is not an answer and ‘don’t’ is not a reason.”

What were you passionate about at that age?

“I really liked art and liked to draw. I haven’t actually picked up a pen or pencil and drawn anything since I was about seventeen. My senior year of high school was a pretty heavy usage year. I was focused on doing that versus something that made me happy.”

How does it feel when you’re drawing or creating something?

“It’s instant gratification, kind of like vacuuming is to me now. I did it, it’s there, that’s something I did, it’s something I completed on my own, other people get to see it, I get to see it, know that it’s done, know that I did it, and I like it. It’s a successful feeling, but I haven’t felt that in a minute.”

Did you have any other outlets that you felt a connection to?

“I listened to music a lot. Even now, I listen to music all the time. I never played any instruments and I’m not really talented in any other way, but I like music.”

Do you write at all?

“No, not at all. I don’t even remember the last time I wrote something down. My handwriting probably looks like someone trying to write with their left hand. I’m not used to a pencil or pen; it’s unfamiliar.”

What’s the first thing you do in the morning when you wake up?

“I drink coffee sometimes; that or Coke, which is terrible for you. I eat, smoke a cigarette, and then smoke dope (I guess use).”

Have you ever felt hopeless and suicidal?

“Yes, at least twice a week. I feel like I’ve reached a point where there’s no way of turning around. I’m twenty-four years old and I already hold a drug possession felony. No one’s going to want to hire me, so I haven’t tried to look anymore. I have basically no friends, especially if I were to stop. My family and I aren’t really close and they don’t want to help me anyway. I feel like there’s not a good enough reason to want to keep living but, at the same time, I’m kind of too much of a pussy to kill myself.”

So, you’re just kind of slowly and passively doing it through using drugs every day and not taking care of yourself.

“Pretty much.”

Is this what you thought you’d be doing tonight?

“No. I knew I was going to be doing an interview, but didn’t think it would be such a reflective one.”

If there was someone else out there listening to this or reading this who could relate to where you are in your life and where you’ve been, and possibly feeling hopeless or numb, or even just alone, what message would you want them to hear and know?

“That they’re not alone. There are other people just as fucked up as you are. I have a really bad mouth, it’s probably just another side effect of drug use. They’re not the only ones who feel nothing or like they are that.”

Is there any part of you that sees a different future for yourself other than your situation right now?

“Yeah, but it’s all sort of hazy. If I were to try to picture it, I couldn’t put the pieces together. It’s more like an audio clip. I can hear myself ‘all right, you’re sober, you’re good, life’s okay,’ but I can’t actually see it. It’s like there’s someone with my voice telling me that, but I don’t see it with my own eyes or inside my own head. I can’t picture it and to me that just tells me it’s not a thing. If you can see it, you can achieve it, and I can’t see it.”

Is it possible that that’s faith? Do you have faith?

“I have something; I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if I’m pessimistic or I’m realistic, but I don’t think I have faith in myself; that’s what it is.”

Why?

“Why should I? Maybe I just doubt myself more than I have faith in myself.”

All the various skills you’ve developed to sustain what you’re doing today could be used in the opposite direction to sustain you in a way that you might thrive.

“I’ve managed to be able to live without any sort of resources other than the kindness of strangers for the past three years, so that’s good; that makes me something.”

That’s strength.

“I’m probably evil. I don’t think I’m a bad person for it—surviving strictly on the kindness of others. It sounds terrible when you say it like that. I’m just getting by how I can.”

What would give you hope?

“Probably better resources. If I knew there would be something to catch me whenever I fell off this horrible plane ride of whatever it is I’m going through now. If there was a safety net that would give me hope. Now knowing that I would hit rock bottom and fall to my death if I were to stop, I won’t stop because of that. If there was something to catch me, and if I knew it would be okay and there was a better support system other than the people who are constantly throwing dope in my pipe, then I probably would stop.”

It’s hard to see that in any situation. I can only speak for myself, but for me, I could never see what was going to catch me either, whether I continued to perpetuate self-destruction and didn’t want to not feel pain anymore, but didn’t know how to end it without inflicting more pain on myself, or to follow my heart and intuition and move in the other direction. My life started to change when I listened to my heart and moved in the other direction, but it was just as scary because I couldn’t see how I was going to have the resources I needed and somehow (and I’m not a believer in your traditional God or any type of religion) miraculously I had what I needed when I needed it. It didn’t ever come in the way I expected it to, and yet it was there, some sort of ground beneath my feet, and that gave me faith and restored my faith that if I had enough courage to continue to be vulnerable, enough to step out of my old behaviors, to step out of the routine, and step out of the comfort, even if it is perpetuating discomfort—somehow it’s familiar so it’s comfortable—if I had the vulnerability and courage to do that, something would catch me. I remember early on looking for people who were going to save me or thinking that all these various opportunities that presented themselves were going to be the quick fix that would save me. What I continued to learn, and to repeat over and over again through making that mistake of thinking someone else was going to save me, is that I had the power to save myself all the while. All the resources I needed were within me. I had to think them into reality: thought, action, reality. Yet somehow, we train ourselves to think it’s going to come the opposite way, that it comes from the outside in, but that wasn’t my experience. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.

“It does.”

I can relate to that feeling of being stuck. You know you want to get off that ride, but you don’t know if there will be anything to catch you if you’re to get off. So, you stay stuck.

“I made up this fun little terminology of being plateaued. You’ve reached a level where there’s nothing much around other than the great distance between you and the ground and it’s not high enough to put you up in the clouds where you need to be. So, you’re there, drifting above the surface of rock bottom and normalcy.”

It’s like being in limbo.

“Yeah, or purgatory. I live in purgatory. Actually, it might be hell. I live in gray, very gray, not a whole lot of color there.”

Are there moments where you see or feel color in your life?

“There’s a lot of blue and, when it’s not blue, it’s red but, for the most part, it’s gray. I don’t really feel much but, whenever I do, it’s usually just sadness. I get so sad and I feel like I can’t do much about it, so again, I get angry, then I get so mad that I cry and that makes me even more sad, and then I’m mad that I’m crying, so it’s purple or gray. It’s not really a colorful journey—this life. It’s like an old-school comic book, it’s all grayscale with a little blue and a little red.”

What do you know about the process of grieving?

“I don’t. I know that it sucks. I don’t know how to get over it. You can either sweep it under the rug or you can actually deal with it, and I’ve just been sweeping it under the rug. Anything that I’ve ever lost, I’ve been ‘all right, shut that down, shut that down’ and only ever pick up where I left off, which is having it suck basically, whenever someone lifts that rug up for me ‘thanks.’ So, I guess I don’t know much about the process of grieving.”

I’m not particularly sure about the order, but there are five stages of grief. I think you’ve mentioned a few of them, like the deep sadness, the anger, and there’s a stage of blame, transferring that uncomfortable feeling onto someone else, making them responsible for your suffering. There’s also acceptance, which I think is a hard one to come to; we avoid a lot by repressing. As long as we can keep it stuffed down, we don’t have to look at it or accept that it happened. Until we do that, we’re not truly moving on, whether it’s grief or trauma. I had a woman tell me in an interview, and it’s very profound, she said when she started to heal the trauma, the addictions started to go away, and that really stuck with me. I believe that we continue to connect with whatever our substance is, whether it’s our phones, drugs, alcohol, money, or sex, to avoid looking at the wound, but the only way to heal a wound is to treat it with compassion and kindness.

“Not a big band aid?”

No. I know in our culture and in our families, we’re taught to discharge pain, to move away from it, and stuff it down.

“The sun gives you a sunburn, stay away from it kind of thing.”

Yes, but growth, transformation, awareness, wisdom, empathy, joy, and love are all qualities that are developed through leaning into pain and discomfort, not from running away from it. Everything that we long for—that sense of real meaningful connection, fulfillment, sustenance in our life, and purpose—is on the other side of that pain, and there’s no way to skip over it or go around it.

“You got to go through it and deal with it.”

Yeah. It’s shitty. I don’t know what’s worse, spending your lifetime running away from it or feeling shitty for a period of time, then having some relief, and maybe recognizing that you’re resilient, you do have potential, and there is more to life than this grayscale and constant fear of when is the bottom going to drop out.

“I feel like I’ve hit rock bottom a couple of times, like literally scraping my teeth on its surface is where I’ll probably want to stop but, at the same time, I’ve probably hit that part too. It seems like chilling at the mantle.”

Do you have a favorite song lyric, mantra, or something that someone has said to you, maybe even your friend or your parents, that has stuck with you that you’d like to share?

“There are lyrics to a song that says ‘if you talk me out of my needs and stitch me up at the seams then I can live in my dreams’.”

What’s that mean to you?

“It’s kind of sad, if you think about it. If I didn’t have to do the things I have to do, then I’d be happy. If I didn’t have to wake up and get high, I’d probably be okay or if I didn’t require x amount of blah, blah, blah then I’d be cool, things would be okay, and life would be a dream. But, that’s not how it is and I’m living a nightmare. Yeah, talk me out of my needs and stitch me up at the seams, I can live in my dreams.”

Do you think it’s possible to heal?

“Yeah. You just got to rip off that band aid I was telling you about. I don’t know. I feel like, metaphorically, my band aid is waterproof and I don’t want to pull it off because it really hurts, and I don’t want to deal with it, so I slowly pick at it, but eventually I just stick it back on. Yeah, it’s possible to heal; tons of people do it, right?”

Yes. It’s a matter of surrendering. It’s like showing up and saying ‘I don’t know how this is going to turn out.’

“But doing it anyway.”

Yeah. That’s courage, right?

“Yeah. I don’t think I have much of that. Like I said earlier, the fear of the unknown, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it, so I don’t try it.”

What’s worse? It seems like you have more to lose by continuing and knowing that the rest of your life may look like it does right now or there’s a risk that you may feel some discomfort for a while, but there’s a chance that things could get better.

“I don’t know. I should probably stop using, because it’s not helping me. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s hurting me either, but that’s probably the drugs talking.”

Who would be the first person you would call, if you were to make that choice?

“I’d probably call my mom. Yeah, that’s probably who I’d call. I’d probably tell her to come get me. I’ve done it before. I’ve told her ‘I need you to come get me. I need you to fuckin’ stop what you’re doing and come get me’ and she has; she would do it in a heartbeat. The last time I called her and said that was about three years ago. I’m not too sure how or if she would be okay with it or how she would go about it, but I’d call her. I need to call her actually.

“Not only for that, but I miss my family a little bit, a lot. I haven’t seen them. I spent that one Christmas in jail, but the two after that—I didn’t go, the one before that—I didn’t go. I haven’t been home in so long. I haven’t actually seen my mom in a year—that sucks. For a long time, she was my best friend. She was always a shoulder and an ear. It’s been a while, a long time.”

I hope you do make that phone call.

“We Snapchat sometimes, which is kind of weird. We’re actually Snapchat friends, but I haven’t snapchatted her in about six months. I sent her a text about two weeks ago, and that’s about it. I haven’t heard her voice in a long time. I can still remember what she sounds like, which is kind of surprising. Usually whenever I cut things off like that, I completely disconnect from it. I don’t know what they look like. I don’t know what they feel like. I remember her and her voice; it’s weird.”

Do you think she would answer the phone now if you called?

“She’s probably asleep right now, but yeah she might answer. If not, she would text me ‘what?’, but I think she would answer.”

I hope you make that call after this interview. How has it felt to talk about these thoughts, feelings, and experiences with me tonight?

“Surprisingly, not bad. Like I said, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. At the beginning, I thought it was probably going to be annoying, but I didn’t find it that annoying because there was a level of comfort versus judgment. I didn’t feel very judged at all.”

It’s a beautiful thing, you being vulnerable.

“Is that what this is?”

Yeah, and you being met with empathy. It kind of kills shame, which I think feeds addiction.

“Probably, yeah, needing to hide something.”

It’s a heavy weight.

“It will suffocate you. That’s always good.”

It’s lethal; it really is.  Do you think it’s possible by sharing your thoughts, feelings, and experiences so courageously tonight, as you are, that someone on the receiving end gains some hope, inspiration, or at least a sense that they’re not alone?

“I would hope so, because this wasn’t that easy to do. Yeah, I think they probably could if they aren’t stubborn assholes like me, and listen all the way through. Because if I were handed this to listen to, read, or watch, I’d probably stop paying attention halfway through; depending on my state of mind I might say ‘I don’t want to hear that.’ If I actually listened to it or if someone like me listened to it from A to B, they’d probably like it; they’d probably get it.”

Yeah.  Thank you.

“Thank you. You’re welcome.”

I’m really proud of you. This was a really courageous thing to do and you skipped right into it.

“I ripped the band aid off that time.”

You did. I hope you’ll continue to do that.

“There’s a bunch of open blisters and sores here—this sounds so weird.”

Thanks.

[sergeant-angels-trashcan]

ღ about CaptiKate and Stuckate

ngl this is how i know you love meeeeee

send me a thing

Captikate:

Who’s the first to wake up in the morning: absolutely no question Steve. Kate may be UP at 5 AM but that just means she didn’t go to bed

Who’s the one to make breakfast: look, I don’t think either one of them cook very well, so it’s usually a matter of “who is going out to get breakfast” and that’s Steve. Kate is in charge of coffee. He cannot make it. He is not allowed near the coffee. He doesn’t understand how to make it. Also, Kate can make really good scrambled eggs and Steve can manage the toaster, so there’s that.

Who’s the one to serve the other breakfast in bed: the bed isn’t for EATING, that’s what the couch is for

Who would suggest a quickie in the morning before work: asdfgdksljd both of them. If you were to ask them Steve would say Kate and Kate would say Kate but it’s actually pretty evenly distributed. Kate is more likely to initiate sex that is satisfactory to all parties and Steve is more likely to just go down on Kate before work and he always looks really smug about it

Who suggests they both ditch work to lay around all day: you know what, it’s Steve. Kate takes her job Seriously and Steve is all “I’m a hundred years old, Kate, oh my back” or whatever. Steve has been known to ditch his Avenger stuff and hang out while Kate is PI-ing or doing stuff with her team. He never interferes or anything, he’s just sort of…there

Who chooses the movies: Usually Kate–they have a whole list of Movies Steve Needs to See they’re working through, and a huge list of TV shows to binge, but every now and then, Steve will hear of something or someone will tell him about a movie and they’ll watch that. 

Who initiates kissing during the moving, thus distracting the other from the movie all together: look, i hate to say it but also Steve? For the most part. Because Kate would Never Distract him from Cinematic Excellence provided it is truly excellent but if they’re watching a shitty movie or a boring TV show Kate will just crawl on his lap and Steve is really easily distracted. Kate takes the initiative; Steve will do the whole arm-stretch thing

Who orders lunch: Kate, when she remembers. Usually it’s one of their friends or teammates who is like “please go eat some fucking lunch.”

Who steals food from the other’s plate without asking: oh absolutely Kate. Steve needs a shitton of calories because of the supersoldier stuff but he would NEVER steal Kate’s food. Kate’s justification is that Steve always has so much food???? They COULD just order another side of fries but food is always so much better when it’s been taken from someone else’s plate. Sometimes Steve catches her which means the food stays Steve’s but quite often he doesn’t realize she’s stolen his food until she’s eating it. It’s very impressive.

Who curls up next to the other and falls asleep due to a full tummy: Oh, both. Steve pretends he’s not tired and he’ll sketch or something but eventually he winds up conked out with a sketchpad on one knee, his head tipped back on the back of the couch, and Kate curled up next to him, using his thigh as a pillow. 

Who distracts the other from trying to work at home: Steve, oh my god he’s such a baby. To be fair, he usually ends up helping Kate with PI stuff but first he gives her these big puppydog eyes and suggests taking walks and visiting food trucks or walking shelter dogs or anything 

Who asks to go get ice cream like a five year old: Kate

Who takes pictures of their partner eating ice cream: Kate. She’s got, like, a whole instagram to use that Billy goes apeshit over and Steve only likes social media when it’s twitter

Who makes a sexual joke about the dripping ice cream on their partner’s face: Kate, only Steve usually takes it as a challenge which is how they almost got arrested that one time

Who cooks dinner: neither of them cooks

Who cleans up the kitchen afterwards: Kate? Steve just puts dishes in the sink. Kate will fill the dishwasher and Steve will empty it.

Who stays up until 2 reading: Steve. Kate stays up doing other things but Steve probably has reading glasses and a stack of nonfiction that’s super dry and a stack of YA books that Kate’s team keeps adding to

Who stares at their partner while their sleeping: Steve. Kate isn’t a peaceful sleeper by any means and she takes up so much room considering that she’s, like, two feet shorter than he is, but watching her sleep is calming, and it reminds Steve of where and when he is

Who kisses their partner while they sleep: Kate. Usually it’s like kissing the shoulder or the back of Steve’s neck (how is there not a question about big/little spoon here, Kate is the big spoon SO MUCH). It’s also pretty rare that Steve is asleep while Kate is not, so usually this happens after Steve had a mission or got hurt or is having a rough time and Kate just needs reassurance that he’s there.

So for Stuckate I’m doing post-Thanos Riptide Stuckate where they’re retired and going back to college because Reasons. Also tumblr was a little bitch and ate this the first time, so let’s try again.

Who’s the first to wake up in the morning: Steve. Steve always. Bucky likes sleeping in, and when Steve gets up, Bucky curls around Kate

Who’s the one to make breakfast: Bucky. Because Bucky is the only one who took time to learn how to fucking cook, oh my god Kate how did you set the toast on fire

Who’s the one to serve the other breakfast in bed: Bucky WOULD but breakfast in bed usually ends in disaster

Who would suggest a quickie in the morning before work: oh, probably Kate, only they’re never actually quick, you know? Bucky likes to take his time so it falls to Steve to be responsible and tell them they don’t have time. Which. Never happens, so they just wind up late

Who suggests they both ditch work to lay around all day: none of them, they all like going to class, but if it’s Actual Work then suddenly none of their phones work and Nick Fury has to personally come and drag their asses out. Also, laying around all day usually involves a Spa Day and/or Bucky and Kate doing Nothing while Steve sketches

Who chooses the movies: Bucky! Bucky gets to choose whatever the fuck he wants. When he doesn’t feel like picking it’s Kate. If none of them have the mental capacity to pick they text David and Sam

Who initiates kissing during the moving, thus distracting the other from the movie all together: Kate and Bucky in equal measures. Usually they both sandwich Steve between them and pass him back and forth

Who orders lunch: If we’re talking about wrangling people to make sure they eat, it’s Steve, who generally remembers that they need to eat. If it’s a matter of bringing food to people who are busy, that’s Kate. Sometimes Steve loses track of time in the studio. Kate is also the one shoving ungodly amounts of granola bars and high protein snacks in the boys’ bags. Bucky is the one who finds all of the nice diners and the cool cafes and stuff.

Who steals food from the other’s plate without asking: All of them do. Bucky’s just the only one who never gets caught in the act.

Who curls up next to the other and falls asleep due to a full tummy: it’s a secret, don’t tell anyone, but it’s Bucky. Someone starts petting his hair and he’s out, man.

Who distracts the other from trying to work at home: it’s not like they have steady jobs but Steve gets really into art again, so he usually paints and sketches a lot at home. Sometimes Kate and Bucky try to distract him, usually by stripping or making out with one another and it only works about half the time because Steve will absolutely draw Kate and Bucky in intimate positions. YEAH I SAID IT

Who asks to go get ice cream like a five year old: Steve always wants a Snack Break, and Bucky knows where all the small mom-and-pop ice cream places are

Who takes pictures of their partner eating ice cream: Kate and Steve. Bucky doesn’t get instagram, and Steve needs photo references

Who makes a sexual joke about the dripping ice cream on their partner’s face: Kate, because she’s Super Mature (she’s also the one licking the dripping ice cream off of Steve or Bucky’s face THIS IS WHY THEY AREN’T ALLOWED OUT IN PUBLIC)

Who cooks dinner: Bucky loves cooking. Taking charge of what he’s putting in his body is a healing/coping thing from being the Winter Soldier. He also loves doing something that’s creative rather than destructive, that also is a way for him to take care of people he loves

Who cleans up the kitchen afterwards: Steve and Kate “clean” the kitchen which often means getting into water fights and arguing about the best way to load a dishwasher

Who stays up until 2 reading: Bucky or Steve

Who stares at their partner while their sleeping: Bucky watches Steve and Kate a lot. Watching them sleep is really calming to him

Who kisses their partner while they sleep: Steve just can’t believe how lucky he is and sometimes he just has to kiss them to remind himself that this is real

[krustywhore]

ten thousand words ch. 9

hhh surprise update;)

no sprace in this chapter, but plenty of faves

(I’m at a football game on mobile rn so I’ll fix the formatting later but I just got impatient lmao)

also here it is on ao3 with correct formatting!!

Jack lived for the thumping bass vibrating through the floorboards. He would give anything for the rush of a few too many drinks in his system and pretty girls dancing nonstop. His second year of college and he was living the high life. Drinking cheap beer out of plastic cups in the basement of a semi-abandoned house. The high life.

“Hey!” He called, catching the attention of his roommate, Davey. “You’re not leavin’, are ya’?”

Davey sighed, turning and sitting down in a plastic chair next to Jack.

“What’s it to you?” He grumbled, downing a sip of his drink. “You don’t have to leave with me.”

Jack looked around the room, trying to find any familiar faces in the sea of drunk barely-adults.

“You really hate this?” Davey shrugged.

“It’s a Thursday, Jack. I have three classes tomorrow,” he sighed. “I can’t just relax and go out whenever I want.”

Jack ran a hand through his hair, reaching over to the coffee table to grab a shitty pen and a cocktail napkin. He propped the napkin on his knee and started sketching.

“Davey,” He spoke in a tone that mimicked that of a slightly-condescending teacher. Davey did not seem fond of this, but he rolled his eyes fondly. “I’m gonna’ tell you something that’s gonna’ save you from being a grumpy old man my the time you graduate.

Davey snorted and pulled out a wad of headphones from his pocket.

“You need to have fun. Look, your sister is the epitome of fun,” he started, pointing at Sarah who was challenging one of the sorority girls to chugging an entire bottle of wine. “Whether it’s your family or your double major, or whatever, you don’t want these last three years to be the worst of your life, Dave. Trust me, letting loose every once in a while seriously helps when you need to double down and focus in a day or two. Like, if I know I have a party to go to at the end of the week, I know I have less than five days to get my shit done so I can have fun.

Davey stopped trying to untangle the pile of white wires.

“If it’s not your thing, it’s not your thing. You can go home, I’ll give you my keys and you can go, but maybe think about it?” And Davey nodded. He shoved his headphone jack into his phone and, as Jack took that as his decision to mope around for the rest of the night, he hung his head over his bottle, holding it and swishing the beer around inside.

“Here,” Davey spoke up, Jack looking to the side to see him holding out a single earbud, the other in the former’s ear already.

Jack chuckled, setting his drink down on the coffee table.

“No, no, no,” he smirked. “You stay right there. We’re gonna’ do this right.” He dashed off, dodging through the crowd to get to Albert at the bar. He returned a few seconds later with two red cups of sloshing liquid, one of which he handed to Davey. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you what’s in this, so drink fast and try not to think about it.”

Jack plopped himself down on the sofa and graciously accepted Davey’s opposite earbud, chuckling softly at the high-tempo classical music.

“If you’re gonna’ hang out with me, Jackie, you have to deal with my version of hype music,” Davey mumbled, just loud enough for Jack to hear from beside him.

“That I can handle,” Jack smiled, tossing back another sip of his drink and sinking back into the sofa, letting the music drown out the rest of the party.

----------

“So you’re a freshman?” Sarah asked, trying to claim the attention of the redhead girl looking very confused by all of the drinks.

“Huh?” Her hair bounced as she whipped her head around. “Oh! Yeah, I am.”

“Cool, cool,” Sarah continued, climbing on top of the makeshift bar counter, sitting across the table from the girl. “I’m a sophomore, but it’s my brother and I’s first year here. We transferred in from out of state. University of Chicago, specifically.”

The girl smiled, her hands in her pockets.

“Do you, um, maybe have any recommendations? Sorry, I’ve just only really ever had the stuff my father used to buy, so I’m not really used to all this, um, cheap beer and stuff,” She rambled, immediately covering her mouth with her hand, a horrified look in her eyes. “Oh my god, that’s horrible, I totally don’t mean it like that! I just meant, you know, my father was really picky about alcohol and stuff! I just, kinda, took whatever he had in the house, and I-”

“It’s cool,” Sarah interrupted, flashing the girl a smile and a laugh. “Trust me, we all know we’re cheap. What’s your name, princess?”

“Oh, god,” she groaned, a laugh in her voice as she buried her face in her hands. “That’s gonna’ stick around for a while isn’t it?”

“At least until I get your real name, that is,” Sarah chirped, reaching under the bar to grab two bottles of their cheapest wine. “Until then, I propose a toast.” She popped the corks one by one.

“And what exactly are we toasting?” The redhead asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“I don’t know,” Sarah started, her drunk brain clearly trying to come up with something. “How ‘bout we toast to your rich dad and his fancy liquor that I really hope gave you a high tolerance.”

The girl laughed, but shrugged, grabbing a bottle.

“Keep up then, princey,” she teased, immediately tipping back the bottle and chugging as much as she could. She kept both eyes open, never making a face as she stared down her opponent.

Sarah immediately pulled out her phone and took pictures, laughing as she watched the girl drain the last few drops of the bottle and immediately toss it behind the bar. Surprisingly or not, it didn’t break and merely bounced behind some empty boxes.

“Eh, it’s drugstore wine. The bottle’s probably plastic,” Sarah joked, earning a laugh from her new friend.

“Oh come on, stop stalling,” she teased, egging Sarah on.

“Fine,” the latter smirked, sweeping her ponytail off her shoulder. “Watch this.”

She, much like Katherine, tipped the bottle into her mouth, but instead held it between her teeth and chugged the whole thing with no hands. The moment she finished, she puffed the bottle out of her mouth and onto the floor, both girls laughing hilariously.

“Katherine,” the redhead spoke up once she composed herself slightly, jutting out her hand for Sarah to shake.

The latter stared at it for a second before grabbing it gently and bowing slightly to bring it to her lips and kiss across the girl’s knuckles. “Sarah,” she spoke, sending chills up the other’s arm.

Sarah Jacobs would be the first to admit she’d had more than platonic feelings for girls before, but Katherine? Yeah, this was very new and she couldn’t deny she kind-of liked it.

----------

“Who was that guy you were with earlier?” Albert whipped his head around to see one of his frat brothers, Austin, nudging him with his elbow. Albert dug through his memories of the night so far, only coming up with one person his friend wouldn’t know.

“Race? Kinda lanky, blond, not exactly talkative?” He suggested.

“Yeah, where’d he come from?” Austin asked, pulling off his cap for a second and repositioning his shaggy brown hair.

Albert tossed his friend another beer bottle while they talked, the other catching it with ease. They were both there with baseball scholarships, after all.

“You know Spot, right?” Austin nodded, popping the cap of the bottle. “Yeah, they’re friends I guess. I don’t really know why he came. Why, do you know ‘im?”

Austin took a second before he sighed, stepping back behind the bar next to Albert and away from the crowd around him.

“You think he’s gay?” Austin asked, his voice barely audible.

Albert was a bit taken aback, but he shrugged anyway. “I mean, just from tonight, I’d guess he’s all over Conlon for a reason, but I guess I don’t really know. Why, is that a problem or somethin’?” He couldn’t help getting a bit defensive.

“Nah, definitely not,” Austin started vaguely. “Think he’d say yes if I asked ‘im out?”

Now that was not what Albert was expecting.

“Y-you want to...oh, I mean, I don’t really know him, but like, yeah? Go for it, I guess,” Albert rambled awkwardly.

Austin chuckled, clapping Albert on the shoulder.

“We’re cool, right dude?” He asked, only a slight nervous quiver in his voice.

“Yeah, ‘course,” Albert smiled, clinking their bottles together. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Austin smiled, a slight blush on his cheeks before he ducked out, looking for a particular blond in the sea of people.

[atmilliways]

More tattoo AU

I didn’t expect to write more of this so soon, but I woke up this morning and my brain was already composing specific sentences so I went with it. May or may not have accidentally the last line from something Obama said to someone in a dream, but I can’t actually remember. 

SEVERAL YEARS AGO

Skwisgaar only met Charles Offdensen because a professor paired them up for a class project. He sized him up and came to the conclusion that Charles, several years older and bespectacled and very serious, was the type to shoulder any slack in an effort to still get an A on the assignment. That was good, because Skwisgaar was getting a D in the class so far and could use the boost, but he didn’t actually have enough ambition to get it by, you know, actually studying or anything.

He did not expect Charles to actually show up at his house the next day, expecting to actually get work done. For one thing, he hadn’t even given the guy his phone number or email, let alone his physical address.

“Are you fuckings serious? You can’ts just fuckings shows up at places,” Skwisgaar hissed as he hustled Charles back out to his car before Servetta saw him... Sometimes he suspected his mother had only insisted he enroll in business school so she could hit on his more successful peers — which managed to take first place in his embarrassment hall of fame, just ahead of how shitty their craphole apartment was.

“I’m very serious,” Charles replied stubbornly. “You have to put some effort into this, at least for the, ah, oral report.”

Skwisgaar winced. He hadn’t really been paying attention when the professor explained the assignment, and public speaking wasn’t amongst his strengths. Had Charles ever shared a class with him where he had to do one of those, or...?

“And I’ve seen you try to present reports to a class. I’m not prepared to, ah, risk my GPA on this.”

Apparently yes. Skwisgaar groaned and gave his classmate a push towards his car. “Fines, fines! Let me gets my stuff, we can studies at your place.”

The car ride was awkwardly silent. Charles was just the kind of guy who didn’t automatically reach for the radio, which Skwisgaar found incomprehensible. If he could afford to have a car of his own instead of riding the damn bus to school every day, all silence would be eradicated by heavy metal blasted through all available speakers.

Studying with Charles turned out to be just as boring as a car ride with him. The longer they tried, the more frustrated and monosyllabic Skwisgaar became, until Charles finally snapped the textbook closed. There was a frown on his face, but it wasn’t the expression of someone about to give up and shoulder the workload himself — which was what Skwisgaar had been aiming for. No, here in his own very practical and neatly kept apartment full of second-hand but perfectly serviceable furniture, Charles seemed to be in his element, more in control than before. The almost-stutter of pauses and ah’s had lessened, and he looked, in fact, like a man prepared to tackle a difficult yet interesting challenge.

“What would help you concentrate on this?” he asked. “What do you usually do while the professor is lecturing?”

Skwisgaar shrugged, nonplussed. “I don’ts knows.”

“Can I see your notebook?”

Reluctantly, Skwisgaar handed it over. He always had it with him in class, always had it open while the professor droned on about risk management and investing or whatever, and he did take some notes... Mostly, though, he doodled. On each page a sparse collection of words was encroached on by a thicket of sketches, winding and twining and overgrowing the margins to take over most of the available space.

Charles flipped through that for a moment, then put the notebook down and looked at Skwisgaar over the top of his glasses like a damn librarian. “So... I’m, ah, guessing that most of the material goes in one ear and out the other?”

Skwisgaar could feel his face heating slightly as he shrugged noncommittally. It wasn’t his fault, he wanted to protest. He had never wanted to go to business school, but his mother had scraped and saved and enrolled him anyway, and never let him forget that he was why they couldn’t afford a better place to live. In Servetta’s opinion, she had made her investment in him and by the gods it was going to pay off in her old age.

“Okay,” Charles said. He gave Skwisgaar a thoughtful look. “What do you want to do with your life, really? Because it’s not business.”

It was as if the guy had read his mind. Skwisgaar, somewhere between startled and weirdly grateful, blurted out, “I wants to be the world’s greatest tattoo artists!”

“Hm.” Charles opened the notebook again and seemed to examine the sketches more closely. “Have you ever practiced? Drawing on a person, I mean.”

An hour later, Skwisgaar was sitting cross-legged on the couch facing Charles’ back, using a permanent marker to fill the reaching branches of a massive tree with dark, thick foliage. His classmate had handed him the marker and gave him some very simple instructions: don’t draw anywhere that would be visible with a shirt on, and pay attention.

And it was working.

“That was good,” Charles told him after Skwisgaar’s most recent attempt at reciting his part of the report. “You’re starting to sound more natural.”

“That ams because I thinks I kinda gets it nows,” Skwisgaar replied, a hint of amazement in his tone. “You would makes a good teachers, anyones ever tells you that?”

Charles shrugged, and the drawing of the tree rippled slightly as if caught by a breeze. “Yes. I could’ve paid my way through undergrad just by charging for tutoring. But that’s not what I want to do with my life.”

“What does you wants to do?” Skwisgaar asked.

He found, to his surprise, that he was actually curious. That never happened. Typically, he floated through life in a haze of apathy, and the only thing that made the clouds thin was being free to draw or paint — a solitary exercise that didn’t encourage a lot of connecting with other people. When he connected with other people, it was usually by having sex with them. Bodies, he’d always thought, were much more interesting than the random collection of thoughts and feelings that lived chaotically inside them.

Charles glanced over his shoulder at him. The massive World Tree that Skwisgaar had drawn on his back stretched the full length of his spine, branches and roots stretching in either direction to take up as much “canvas” as he’d been allowed. And Charles had good skin for it, smooth and unfreckled and firm with underlying muscle.

“I want to be a lawyer,” Charles told him.

Skwisgaar’s mouth twitched into a smirk. “The world’s greatest lawyer?”

“Ah, sure.”

The next week, they got an A- on their presentation. A few months after that, Skwisgaar dropped out of business school to start an apprenticeship at a tattoo parlor owned by some crazy, pot-smoking redhead he’d met at a bar.

~

SEVERAL YEARS LATER

If he was being honest with himself, letting Nathan move in with him had not been high on Skwisgaar’s list of priorities. He hadn’t had a roommate since he’d moved out of his mom’s place, and very much relished his privacy. But Nathan wasn’t very good at keeping jobs and the burger place down the road had finally fired him for general incompetence and he couldn’t afford his own apartment... and Skwisgaar had found himself offering his spare room to the kid. After all, if Nathan had to give up on independence and move back to Florida to live with his parents, Skwisgaar would lose access to his dark and twisted imagination that churned out such powerful imagery. He paid a commission whenever he used one of Nathan’s ideas for a tattoo of course, slightly bargained down for now in lieu of rent.

The thing was, on more serious projects where they really had to talk over how to best translate a particular sketch onto a human body, Skwisgaar had started to find he actually enjoyed the collaboration. It was like when Pickles had first started teaching him how to tattoo. There was a certain wavelength that Skwisgaar functioned best at, and both Nathan and Pickles were capable of tuning in and matching it. They were, for want of a better phrase, his best friends.

Nathan had just texted to let him know he had a decent shot at getting a job in some coffee shop nearby, which meant actual rent money in the near future, when the bell over the door jingled. Skwisgaar glanced up, totally not intending to actually greet the person or anything — they had hired some gap-toothed idiot to do that these days, because nothing scared the riffraff off like being sworn at and sprayed with spittle at the same time — but he caught sight of vaguely familiar glasses and paused for a closer look.

“Hey Charles, ams that’s you?” he called.

Charles gave an awkward little wave. The man looked basically the same. Hairline a little receded, maybe, and a few more lines on his face, but other than that...

Willy, up at the front counter, spun around and glared suspiciously at Skwisgaar. “You know thisch guy? Scheriouschly? He’sch wearing a schuit.”

“Ja ja, says it don’t sprays it,” Skwisgaar shot back, striding up from his work station at the back of the room. “I haven’ts seen you in years,” he said to his old classmate, the first person to ever encourage him to go for the career he actually wanted. “What brings you to’s a place like this...” He raised an eyebrow, because Willy did have a point about the suit. There was even a tie. “...Dressed like that?”

“I, ah, just came from work. I’m a lawyer now.” He held up a sleek briefcase, then to the surprise of both men watching he put it on the counter and opened it with a click. From it, he produced a manila folder full of papers, which he held out to Skwisgaar.

Immediately, Pickles was at the counter too. “Hey mister lawyer dood, I’m the owner here. If you’re serving the place with a lawsuit or something, you gotta give that to me.”

“Ah... no, it’s not a lawsuit.” Charles looked flustered. “I, ah, just brought in some, ah, references that I wanted to talk to Skwisgaar about. For a... potential tattoo idea.”

Willy snorted loudly. “You want a tattoo? Gimme a break...”

Discretely, Skwisgaar kicked him in the shin. Or it would’ve been discreet if not for the idiot hopping around clutching his leg in exaggerated pain and cursing a blue streak at him. Skwisgaar and Pickles just ignored it in favor of the folder’s contents.

“This is all your work, innit?” Pickles asked Skwisgaar.

“Ja,” Skwisgaar replied absently, flipping through the prints of various pictures. There were sleeves and chest pieces, big tattoos and smaller ones, some that fanned out and some that knotted in on themselves. For anyone else it might have been hard to spot the connection between any of them, let alone all, but he knew at a glance that these were all projects he’d collaborated on with Nathan. He glanced up at Charles. “There ams a lot of stuffs here… Do you know whats you wants, or you just like the styles?”

“The second one,” Charles confirmed. “I saw them and… Well, I asked around. Someone gave me your card, so, ah, here I am.”

It was still flattering, of course. Sure Nathan came up with the concepts, but Skwisgaar was the one who made them a reality, embellished a little here or there, and made sure each tattoo came out absolutely perfect. He decided to take his former classmate’s sudden appearance as the compliment it was.

“All rights, I have some times before my next appointkints,” he said, waving at Charles to put the folder away and come around the counter. “Come sits back heres with me and looks at what I haves.”

“Dood, you think he’s going to be a custom job? And maybe really big?” Pickles murmured excitedly. He didn’t wait for Skwisgaar to answer, just drifted off with dollar signs in his eyes back to the customer he’d been working on before the interruption. They needed up upgrade some of the older equiptment, and Charles definitely looked like he could afford to sponsor that.

What Skwisgaar had was, essentially, pages from Nathan’s sketchbooks in a three ring binder of plastic sleeve protectors. He tugged an extra stool over for Charles and handed him the binder, then settled down to start mixing the colors in preparation for his next appointment. As he did so he commented, “You seems to has done pretty wells for yourselve."

“I was going to say the same thing,” Charles replied with a reserved smile.

“And… I seems to remembers you saids way back thens that you didn’t thinks you wants a tattoo. Somethings about it was ams too pourminents?”

“I did say something like that, didn’t I?” He turned a page, studying the drawings intently. “I don’t know, I could never, ah, picture anything I’d actually want. Your drawings were always very well done, of course, but they weren’t quite my style. But when I saw these… and especially when I found out you were the one who did them, it just, ah, seemed like a sign.”

Skwisgaar mixed an extra dab of blue into a very pale shade of indigo. “So this ams to be your first tattoos, huh mister bigs lawyer mans?”

“Yes, why?”

“Just wonderings if you ams still not the types to shows it offs, since I couldn’ts sees any,” he replied with exaggerated innocence. Then, after a moment, he added, “Virgins, heh.”

Charles glanced up at him over the top of his glasses and replied, dryly and with a very, very faint smirk, “Bold of you to assume.”

[thatishogwash]

Bad Pick Up Lines

KuroDai Week 2018 May 9, Day Four: Admiration / Bad Habits AO3

Kuroo was nervous.  He didn’t really blame himself as he adjusted his jar of brushes for the fourteenth time or moved his canvas before ultimately moving it to the original spot he had it in.  He brought out extra lights even though he had purposefully chosen this space for its natural lighting.  He thought of putting music on but then thought that might be weird.  Would it make it seem like he was trying to set a mood?  He was trying to set a mood but not that kind of mood.

Kuroo Tetsurou knew how fortunate and lucky he was to have the career he did.  It’s not to say he didn’t fight and bleed and lose countless hours of sleep over it.  He worked in shitty jobs for years, stayed in tiny apartments with far too many roommates, did everything he could to save up for just a couple mid-line paints and brushes.  He worked himself to the bone and then continued to work just for the small hope that someday, someday he could do what he loved.

Now Kuroo could comfortably live as a full time artist.  He had permanent art installations at actual museums and not just in Japan either, his art was being shown in twelve different countries around the world.  He had an assistant that kept tabs on his schedule and filtered through all the commissions he got.  Kuroo still worked his ass off but now it was doing something he loved, something he had worked so hard to achieve.

It didn’t mean that everything was perfect.  There was something whispered amongst artists of all different mediums, something that felled even the best.  The dreaded artist block.

Kuroo had faced a couple in his couple decades of life.  He had always managed to power through it, to find inspiration or a muse from something.  But Kuroo had basically run through every single modeling agency he usually contacted when he needed real life models.  He had taken to venturing out to random places to see if anyone fit what he needed.

The commissioned pieces for his next art installation were half done.  The first half had been done in record timing, almost laughably easy.  His model had been tall, nearly amazonian with lean muscles and a grace of a professional dancer.  Those pieces leaned against the wall, laughing at him.

Kuroo had become desperate.  Hope came in the form of his taciturn assistant who sometimes Kuroo could have sworn wanted to watch Kuroo burn out.  Tsukishima Kei was equal parts the best and worst assistant Kuroo had ever had.  Definitely the worst had been the walking disaster known as Haiba Lev, who had thankfully been taken off of Kuroo’s hands by a modelling agency who liked the look of the half-Russian and wasn’t too concerned with his puppy dog like attitude.  The best had Akaashi Keiji, who might have referred to Kuroo as pain-in-the-ass-Kuroo but was still the best damn assistant anyone could ever ask for.  Of course he just had to graduate school and get a fantastic job in his field and fall in love with Kuroo’s traitor of a best friend Bokuto Koutarou.

But that was neither here nor there.  The point was just when Kuroo was on a verge of a nervous breakdown and was thinking about burning his own studio down, disappearing into the night, and changing his name Tsukishima stepped in.  Kuroo thought it was mostly self preservation on Tsukishima’s part.  As much as the younger man complained about the workload, Kuroo knew he paid better than any job a broke full-time student could make.

So Tsukishima had suggested a different sort of company to book a model through.  The type of company that might help lonely people out, someone might pay them for a date or other things.

It was an escort company and Kuroo had hired an escort.

Truthfully Kuroo had hired seventeen escorts and none of them had been the right fit.  Kuroo didn’t even want to question how Tsukishima knew about the company since he couldn’t find a single trace of it online.  Kuroo didn’t worry about his reputation much.  Hiring an escort would probably be on the tame side for the rumors floating around about him.

Kuroo had gotten desperate and the man he always talked to when booking the escorts had sounded rough and annoyed.  Kuroo had assured him repeatedly that he just needed a model for some sketches and maybe a painting or two.  Yes they would have to remove their clothes but a pair of biking shorts could be worn.

The man had sighed and told Kuroo he was sending a guy his way.

Kuroo was nervous.  The impending failure of an unfinished commissioned piece made Kuroo want to hole up in his apartment and never come out.  So much was riding on this and he was being sent an escort he didn’t even choose.

A knock at the door had Kuroo flinching so bad he knocked over the jar of brushes he had been anxiously touching and he managed to kick over his easel.

“Uh- come on, the doors unlocked!”  Kuroo yelled as he attempted to pull himself together while putting everything back into its place.  “Hi!  Hello.  Hey.”  Kuroo wanted to cover his face as his soul attempted to leave his body out of sheer embarrassment.  Three greetings?  Really?

“Hi, hello, hey.”  The man by the door surprised Kuroo, not just from his cheeky greeting but by his looks.

Kuroo had been surprised with each escort he had met.  Every single one vastly different from the last and none of them really screamed escort to Kuroo, which he guessed was kind of the point.  Also he felt a little judgemental about his preconceived notions of escorts too.

The man in front of Kuroo took all those notions about what Kuroo thought escorts looked or acted like, pushed it into the garbage disposal and turned it on until there was nothing left.  He looked like the type who would feel perfectly comfortable with a toddler on his hip as he enjoyed a backyard barbeque with his neighbors.  He looked like he played some type of sport on the weekends and worked in an office where he was always bringing in treats for the rest of his floor.

The man looked plain and boring, as if he could blend seamlessly into a crowd of businessmen.

“Is that Toothless?”  The man, the escort asked, seemingly surprising even himself.  Kuroo didn’t blame him, not many people came into his studio but even Tsukishima showed the slightest shock when he walked in to see a life-size version of Toothless taking up the back portion of the studio.

“Yeah,” Kuroo answered with a grin, finally feeling a bit like himself.  “My friend Oikawa, his son is having a How to Train Your Dragon themed party and I just really enjoy being liked by his kid so much more than him.”  The admission surprised a laugh out of the man but with surprise of his own, Kuroo realized that he had purposefully distracted Kuroo.

He was a lot more cunning than his looks let on and Kuroo found himself enjoying that.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, I’m Sawamura.”  Sawamura took a couple steps over to Kuroo and held out his hand.  It was a firm handshake, Sawamura’s hands were calloused and warm.

“Kuroo.”  Kuroo stretched out his fingers by his side, still feeling the warm tingly after effects from the handshake.

“So I’m going to be truthful, this is all kind of new to me.”  Sawamura gave a self deprecating grin and oh, he was so good.  Kuroo would have to pay close attention because with one little sentence he had managed to put Kuroo at ease and in charge without either having to really talk about it.  “I took an Art History class once and it was way beyond me.”

“Well why don’t you take your jacket off and get comfortable?  I’m just going to start with some warm up sketches.”  Kuroo stepped behind his easel, glancing over at Sawamura as he pulled his jacket off, causing the plain dark gray shirt underneath to pull tight against his torso.  Without the jacket Kuroo could see that Sawamura was built better than the dad-bod Kuroo had been expecting.  His shoulders were broad and they tampered off into a trim waist with rather impressive arms.

Kuroo started to draw those shoulders, trying to work out the muscles and bone beneath and how they moved and shifted.  Sawamura wandered around the studio, taking a closer look at Toothless, which would be rideable when Kuroo was finished with it.  He was excited to leave Tsukishima with the task of actually getting it to Oikawa’s house back in Miyagi in one piece.

Then Sawamura moved to the long table pushed against the far left side of the studio.  Kuroo opened his mouth but quickly closed it as he got a good look at Sawamura’s back.  He normally didn’t allow people to see his work in progress or his failed works, all of which were spread across that table, but Sawamura was proving a good study.  There was something unique in the plainess, something intriguing past the neat hair and clean cut look.

“These are all for the project your working on?”  Kuroo didn’t correct Sawamura about the term project, it clearly wasn’t meant to be demeaning or offensive.

“Sort of?  They are all the models I’ve tried but something didn’t click.”  Kuroo answered honestly, feeling more at ease with every passing moment.  He had no idea how someone could be such a calming personality and make Kuroo feel as if he was challenging him at every turn.  “None of them fit my first model.  Could you take off your shirt?”

“Like mixing fluorine to hydrogen.”  Sawamura mumbled as he did as asked.  Kuroo was almost too distracted by the stretch of newly revealed muscles to miss the joke, almost being the keyword.

“Did you just make a chemical reaction joke?”  Kuroo asked, earning a grin from Sawamura.  “Hey Sawamura?  You must be chlorine because you are polarizing my bond.”  Sawamura stared at him in muted horror before tossing his head back and laughing.

“That was so bad!”  Sawamura moved closer to Kuroo.  “How many of those have you got?”

“Please Sawamura, I am a professional.”  Kuroo continued to sketch, glancing up at an expecting looking Sawamura.  “My favorite attractive force is van der Waal’s force.  Can you feel it?  I’ll move closer if you can’t.”  Sawamura laughed again, that deep belly type laugh that made Kuroo intake a little too much air.

The rest of the time passed in sharing bad pick up lines and Kuroo was surprised when his phone beeped, signalling the end of their time.  He had moved on from quick sketches to more detailed ones, the floor around him was covered with pieces of Sawamura.  Kuroo had discovered a faint scar on his cheek, the middle and pointer knuckles on his left hand were swollen, his lips pulled up a little higher on the left side then right when he smiled, and several other minute things he could have easily overlooked when he brushed Sawamura off as plain.

“Thank you.”  Kuroo said with real feeling because he finally felt as if he was seeing a light at the end of his dark, artist block tunnel.

“I didn’t really do much.”  Sawamura shrugged though Kuroo couldn’t be but disagree.  He gave the studio one last glance around as he pulled on his jacket.  “All of this, everything you’ve managed to create even your petty life sized dragon-” A flashing, cunning grin at this.  “It’s all amazing.  It’s really admirable, what you do.  Pulling nothing out of your mind with just some paper and pencils, sticking with it even after three dozen different models.”  Kuroo could feel a creeping blush at this.  He hadn’t realized he really needed to hear that until someone said it.

“I think what you do is really admirable too!”  Kuroo rushed out.  “I know your job can’t be easy but you came in here with confidence, not knowing what was in store for you and you made this easy and enjoyable.  Thank you, really.”  Sawamura wasn’t smiling though as Tsukishima came in through the door.

“What do you think my job is exactly?”  Sawamura asked, eyes narrowed.  Tsukishima paused before turning on his heel to walk out.  “Don’t even think about it Tsukishima.”  Kuroo had never seen Tsukishima listen to anyone as well as he listened to Sawamura in that moment.

“I’m sorry?  Is it not okay to talk about it?”  Kuroo asked worriedly, wondering if he had somehow insulted Sawamura.  Tsukishima’s back was to them but his head ducked down.

“Talk about what?”  Sawamura said.  “Say it.”

“You’re an escort?”  Kuroo meant to say it as a statement but it came out as more of a question.  Tsukishima’s bean pole body seemed to slump forward at Kuroo’s words.

“I’m a what now?”  Sawamura practically yelled.  “Tsukishima Kei, what the hell did you tell him?”

It was then that Kuroo realized there was no escort business that Tsukishima knew about.  He had his old volleyball coach pretend to be some sort of pimp while sending various friends and acquaintances of Tsukishima’s to Kuroo.  Turned out that Sawamura really did work in an office during the week and played with a neighborhood association team during the weekends.

“So then, is it okay if I ask you out?”  Kuroo asked to Tsukishima’s obvious horror.

“Please no Sawamura, you could do so much better.”  Tsukishima said quickly.

“I’m telling Kageyama that you sent Hinata and Yamaguchi out as pretend escorts to your boss.”  Sawamura deadpanned.  Kuroo had yet to meet Tsukishima’s longterm boyfriend Kageyama but from what he had heard he was a pretty intense young man and the only one able to wring any sort of remorse from the emotionless Tsukishima.  “And yes it is, but I’m paying.”

Kuroo couldn’t help but grin at that.

[italicwatches]

My Hero Academia, season 2 - Episode 21

Alright, let’s get this thing going. It’s My Hero Academia, episode 21! Here we GO!

-Opening!

-With the stage finally dry and clean, it’s time for the next match! In THIS corner, it’s the plant girl from Class B, Shiozaki Ibara! And in THAT corner, Kaminari Denki! Will their match last any longer than the others we’ve seen? Only one way to find out!

-Episode 21: Battle on, Challengers!

-Also Ibara doesn’t like the commentary calling her an ‘assassin’ because she’s here for honest and earnest heroism. And Denki is losing his focus because she’s cute. You stupid idiot. He literally asks her out before the match starts, while also assuming he’s gonna win. You stupid idiot, are you sure your brain’s fully kicked back on?

-So he goes full burn on his voltage…But Ibara kicks up a wall of vines to shield herself, before a tendril spears up from the ground and ensnares the stupid idiot! The match is decided in like two seconds.

-So the various heroes are starting to talk it out. He lost major ground in their eyes, while Ibara’s got a real notice with the sheer versatility she showed there, to say nothing of her grace…Also Deku is making notes. Thorough, thorough notes. And he hasn’t replaced the notebook that Katsuki burned, so it looks extra creepy. Especially when he reveals to Ochaco that he’s also been taking notes on them, including her. And I think we have our screen cap. That face.

-Okay, stage repaired, next match! It’s Tenya versus Mei!!! Yes I am incredibly excited for this earnest enthusiasm. …Wait why is Tenya strapping on a pack? Mei offered it to him, it turns out. She wants a cool match and so he’s given an exception to use equipment…As Deku watches and realizes she’s in no way the type to just want a good honest match.

-Yeah, she’s not. She slips on a headset as the match starts, and seems to have hacked the stadium’s PA system, because her voice cuts out our commentators entirely. She’s not interested in a good honest fight…She’s doing an infomercial. How do you like those actuators around your legs? THEY’RE WHISPER QUIET!

-And we also learn Mei’s actual Quirk! Those cool scope eyes of hers actually work, she can Zoom her eyes like scopes and see as much as five kilometers away. That’s legitimately a really cool Quirk. But, yes. Tenya keeps trying to get on her, but Mei just keeps dodging with her hydraulic extensions and keeping the hard sale going. Did I mention how much I like Mei and want a spinoff about her?

-And it just keeps going, as she even sends Tenya tripping right up to the edge of the stage…To show how her auto-balancer’s edge sensors can keep you from falling to your doom even when otherwise incapacitated! He’s starting to get mad, actually…As she takes to the sky with her hyper-enhanced hover boots that use potent electromagnets to allow temporary flight and instant evasion! And now, a classic, the net gun! She wove the nets so they could fit into an easily pocketable cartridge, and the gun can hold five in its magazine! They also self-ensnare, locking around themselves once they hook a villain to become a fully contained capture method! Just shoot and call in the retrieval!

-And who made all of these wonderful items, you might ask? Who showed not only the capacity to make a non-combat Hero battle-ready, but to make a combat-capable Hero better than they ever could on their own? Who do you want for your tech company’s R&D division?! That’s right, her, Hatsume Mei! Your choice is clear!

-It’s not even over. Ten minutes later, she walks off the stage feeling like a million bucks, casually giving the actual win to Tenya since she did everything she had to do. You got all that out of one chest of gear?

-So Tenya’s really not happy about this and if it wasn’t for Ochaco’s amazing face I’d have to use that reaction shot. In fact I’m saving it just in case I change my mind. And Deku realizes how terrifying Mei truly is. She’s ruthless!

-While Ochaco just goes total blank as she steps out….

-Next match! Laser boy, Aoyama Yuga! Versus pink girl, Ashido Mina! That could actually be an interesting match, just because their powers don’t counter each other at all. The match begins…And Yuga immediately shoots a laser, but Mina gets to using her slime to whip her way around, skating on it at high speed! And she knows his limits, that his stomach aches if he shoots too many lasers, and she’s gonna make him keep doing it…

-Indeed, soon his stomach gets all wrecked, and when that makes him hesitate, she slams a thick glob of slime right home that ruins the lens on his belt! It also ruins its ability to keep his pants up, and she delivers a single vicious uppercut that puts him right on the ground! The match is decided, and she is very hype.

-And Deku keeps making notes. Mina’s Quirk is potent and multi-faceted, but the thing that really shifted the game was her sheer physical skill and fitness…

-Next match! Fumikage versus Momo! People are starting to ask Deku what his take on the match is…And he thinks this one’s all down to time. Then it’s into Momo’s head, as she starts putting together a battle plan…And it has to be put into play almost immediately, as Fumikage puts her on the backstep in a flash with Dark Shadow’s strikes!

-But then, the attacks come to a stop…? She has a chan—

-Her foot got pushed over the line. She lost, simple as that, before she had a chance to engage her plans. The weight of it hits her like a freight train. It’s a depression and frustration that many of them know all too well…

-Okay, it’s Kirishima Eijiro the rock boy versus Tetsu*4 the iron boy. Will stone or iron rein supreme?!

-We’re not gonna find out yet. Tenya gets into the waiting room after his…let’s call it a match, and finds Ochaco is…How to put this…Well she’s very intense and freaking out a little. Her nerves have gotten to her.

-Which is when Deku finds them! As soon as he realized she wasn’t there, he came looking…And of course, her match is coming up fast…And he knows one thing all too well. Katsuki’s not going to hold back. He’s not going to slow down. He’s not going to go easy on you. But Deku wants to help. He’s got his notes. Everything he learned from watching Katsuki for over a decade, and the rough sketch of a plan to overcome the guy…

-But, no. Ochaco needs to do this herself. She’s let herself be too reliant on Deku, on her friends…For her own dreams, there’s only one way to do this. To claim her victory with her own two hands…So, thank you for everything. And may they meet in the finals!

-Back at the stage, it turns out to be a draw after a raw, bare-knuckle brawl. In such a case, they’ll be left to recover and have their match decided with a simple direct contest of capability. Of course, even being redundant, a lot of the more straightforward heroes are liking both of these guys. Fierce, strong, passionate, you can always use guys like that in the field…

-And now it’s time to get hype, because it’s Katsuki versus Ochaco! This is gonna be serious…And vicious. And rough. Especially with Katsuki having had one hell of a shitty day…And a target in front of him to take out all that frustration on. Eighth match, START!

-Credits!

So obviously this is gonna be a big one. Hell, I heard about this match while the season was going. I know it’s gonna be a Big Deal.

But so far, a lot of these matches have been really interesting. It’s always cool to see different people figure out creative and clever ways to use their Quirks. And of course, Mei’s entire display was, just, amazing. So amazing. Anyways come back to see Ochaco’s big match next time, in episode TWENTY TWO of My Hero Academia! Wait for it!

[nullset2]

How to set up an Apache Spark cluster with a Hadoop Cluster on AWS (Part 1)

One of the big points of interest in the latest years comes from the posibilities that Big Data entails. Organizations, from the smallest startup to the biggest, oldschool enterprise, are coming to the realization that there's tons of data to easily come around in these days of Massive, Always-on Networked Computing in the Hands of Everyone(tm), be it through Data Mining or out of their old, classic datasets, and it turns out there's tons of value in being able to do something for a change with that data. Maybe you can use your data to understand your users better to market better to them, or you can understand market trends better and ramp up your production at the right time to maximize profits... there's tons of ways to get smarter and better at business from Data.

But what's the problem? Data is finnicky. Data can be a diamond in the rough: are you getting the right data? Does it need cleaning up or normalizing (protip: it usually does) or formatting to be usable? How do you transform it somehow to make it useful? Do you need to serve it to someone, and how, to maximize efficiency?

A lot of times, the scale of that data is a challenge too. So, this is what we call a Data Lake. We call it data lake because there's a preemptive assumption: that data ingresses and egresses from your Organization in many shapes and forms, but it has many different shapes and sizes. But, how can we make sense of your data lake? How do you pull this off? O, what is the shape of water, thou aske? Well, that's the crux of the matter.

Enter Big Data, which is kind of an umbrella term for what we're trying to accomplish. The very prospect of Big Data is that we have the tech and the beef (distributed computing, the cloud, and good networking) to make sense of all of your data, no matter even if it's in the order of magnitude of petabytes.

So, there's lots of different propositions in the tech market today to attack this ~even though the more you look it seems that every company is coming up with their own propietary ways to solve this and sell you some smoke and mirrors rather than actual results~. But lately the dust has settled on a few main players. Specifically: Apache Spark to run compute, and Hadoop in the persistence layer.

Why Spark and Hadoop? Spark is a framework to run compute in parallel across many machines, that plays fantastically well with JVM languages. We are coming off almost 30 years of fantastic legacy in the Java ecosystem, which is like a programming lingua franca at this point. Particularly, it's exciting to program on Spark on languages such as Scala or Clojure, that not only have [strong concurrency models])(https://the-null-log.org/post/177889728984/concurrency-parallellism-and-strong-concurrency), but also have normalized conceptions of map and reduce operations to munge and crunch data baked right into the language (it will be seen, in a bit, that Map/Reduce is a fundamentally useful construct to process Big Data).

On the other part, Hadoop can make many disk volumes be seen as just one, while handling all the nitty gritty shitty details behind scenes. Let's face it: when you operate in the order of petabytes, your data is not gonna fit in a single machine, so that's why you need a good distributed file system.

And yes, before you say so, yes: I know there's managed services. I know Amazon has EMR and Redshift, I know I don't need to do this manually if Amazon Will Run It For Me Instead(tm). But SHUT UP.

I'm gonna set up a cluster so you don't have to!

And besides, we can use very exciting cloud technologies, that leverage really modern programming paradigms and that enable us to exploit the web better and faster, particularly with the event model of cloud computing. More on that later, because it's something that I really love about cloud services, but we can't go in depth on Events right now.

So this exercise will proceed in three phases:

1) Defining the compute architecture and bringing up infrastructure 2) Defining the data lake and your ingress/egress 3) Crunching data!

Defining the compute architecture and bringing up infrastructure

Spark

Spark works clustered, in a master-slave configuration, with many worker nodes reacting to instructions sent by a master node, which thus works as the Data plane. With something sophisticated as a container orchestrator you could run these workloads with containerization and scale up/down as needed. Cool, right?

So this is a rough estimate of how our architecture is going to look like:

The number of worker nodes is up to you and your requirements ;). But this is the main idea. Rough sketch.

We'll run all the machines on EC2. Eventually, we could run all our compute containerized like I said, but for now, we'll do servers.

For each machine I plan to run small, replicable, machines. One of the tenets of cloud computing is that your compute resources should be stateless and immutable and for the sake of practicity you should consider them ephemeral and transparently replaceable.

For the machines I'll Use AML (Amazon Linux). A nice, recent version! I love CentOS-likes and AML is well suited for EC2.

Now, we will provision the machines using cloud-init. Cloud-init is a fantastic resource if you subscribe to sane cloud computing principles, particularly the premise of infrastructure as code. Cloud-init is a tool that you can find in most modern linux distros that you can run first thing after creating a machine, with what's basically yaml-serialized rules as to how the machine should be configured in terms of unix users, groups and permissions, access controls (such as ssh keys), firewall rules, installation of utilities into the machine and any and all other housekeeping needed.

Why is it that important to write your bootstrapping logic in cloud-init directives? In cloud computing, given that the resources that you have access to are theoretically endlessly elastic and scalable, then you should focus more rather on the substance behind the compute resources that you use for your operations rather than the resource itself, since the resources can be deprovisioned or scaled in replication at any time. Thus, if you specify the configuration, tools, utilities, and rules that should dictate how your resource works in a text file, not only your resource becomes easily available and easily replicable, but you also get to version it as if it was any other piece of logic in your application. Since this configuration should not change arbitrarily, that means that any and all resources trhat you provision will, each and every time, be configured exactly the same and work exactly the same as any other resources that you have provisioned.

Besides, tangentially: cloud-init gives you a comfy layer of abstraction that puts you one step closer to the deliciousness of the lift and shift ideal. If you notice, cloud-init has constructs to handle user creation and installing utilities and such, without having to code directly to the environment. You don't have to worry if you're using a Slackware-like or Debian-like, and which assumptions are made under the hood or not :)

(Bear in mind that I have only tested this on Ubuntu on AWS. If you're running another distro or are on another cloud, you are GOING TO HAVE TO adjust the cloud-init directives to match your environment! Debugging is key! You can look on the cloud-init log after your compute launches, usually by default in: /var/log/cloud-init-output.log)

Marvelous!

Infrastructure as code is the bees fuckin knees, y'all!

So, this is my cloud-init script, which is supported natively in AWS EC2:

#cloud-config repo_update: true repo_upgrade: all # users: # - name: nullset # groups: users, admin # shell: /bin/bash # sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL # ssh_authorized_keys: ssh-rsa ... nullset2@Palutena packages: - git - ufw - openjdk-8-jre runcmd: - [ bash, /opt/cloud-init-scripts/setup_spark_master.sh ] write_files: - path: /opt/cloud-init-scripts/setup_spark_master.sh content: | #!/bin/bash SPARK_VERSION="2.4.0" HADOOP_VERSION="2.7" APACHE_MIRROR="apache.uib.no" LOCALNET="0.0.0.0/0" # Firewall setup ufw allow from $LOCALNET ufw allow 80/tcp ufw allow 443/tcp ufw allow 4040:4050/tcp ufw allow 7077/tcp ufw allow 8080/tcp # Download and unpack Spark curl -o /tmp/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION.tgz http://$APACHE_MIRROR/spark/spark-$SPARK_VERSION/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION.tgz tar xvz -C /opt -f /tmp/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION.tgz ln -sf /opt/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION/ /opt/spark chown -R root.root /opt/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION/* # Configure Spark master cp /opt/spark/conf/spark-env.sh.template /opt/spark/conf/spark-env.sh sed -i 's/# - SPARK_MASTER_OPTS.*/SPARK_MASTER_OPTS="-Dspark.deploy.defaultCores=4 -Dspark.executor.memory=2G"/' /opt/spark/conf/spark-env.sh # Make sure our hostname is resolvable by adding it to /etc/hosts echo $(ip -o addr show dev eth0 | fgrep "inet " | egrep -o '[0-9.]+/[0-9]+' | cut -f1 -d/) $HOSTNAME | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts # Start Spark Master with IP address of enp0s3 as the address to use /opt/spark/sbin/start-master.sh -h $(ip -o addr show dev eth0 | fgrep "inet " | egrep -o '[0-9.]+/[0-9]+' | cut -f1 -d/) - path: /etc/profile.d/ec2-api-tools.sh content: | #/bin/bash export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0 export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Of particular attention: Notice how I setup a user for myself on the machine by adding my public SSH key. You should add your personal public key here or you can use a private key generated by ec2 to connect to the machine and delete the users block if you prefer to use a private key generated by ec2.

We will use this as our "canon" image for our spark master. So, let's create the machine and pass this cloud-init script as the User Data when configuring our compute instance:

If you run this and everything goes fine, you should end up with a complete spark installation under /opt/spark, with a bunch of helper scripts located in /opt/spark/sbin. You should be able to confirm or debug any issues by taking a look at your cloud-init log which should be by default on /var/log/cloud-init.log.

If you see something like this you made it:

starting org.apache.spark.deploy.master.Master, logging to /opt/spark/logs/spark-[user]-org.apache.spark.deploy.master.Master-1-[hostname].out

Now, we'll do something very similar for the worker nodes and launch them with cloud-init directives. Remember to replace the value for the IP of the master server that we created in the step before you run this!!!!!

#cloud-config repo_update: true repo_upgrade: all # users: # - name: nullset # groups: users, admin # shell: /bin/bash # sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL # ssh_authorized_keys: ssh-rsa ... nullset2@Palutena packages: - git - ufw - openjdk-8-jre runcmd: - [ bash, /opt/cloud-init-scripts/init_spark_worker.sh ] write_files: - path: /opt/cloud-init-scripts/init_spark_worker.sh content: | #!/bin/bash SPARK_VERSION="2.4.0" HADOOP_VERSION="2.7" APACHE_MIRROR="apache.uib.no" LOCALNET="0.0.0.0/0" SPARK_MASTER_IP="<ip of master spun up before>" # Firewall setup ufw allow from $LOCALNET ufw allow 8081/tcp # Download and unpack Spark curl -o /tmp/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION.tgz http://$APACHE_MIRROR/spark/spark-$SPARK_VERSION/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION.tgz tar xvz -C /opt -f /tmp/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION.tgz ln -sf /opt/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION/ /opt/spark chown -R root.root /opt/spark-$SPARK_VERSION-bin-hadoop$HADOOP_VERSION/* # Make sure our hostname is resolvable by adding it to /etc/hosts echo $(ip -o addr show dev eth0 | fgrep "inet " | egrep -o '[0-9.]+/[0-9]+' | cut -f1 -d/) $HOSTNAME | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts # Start Spark worker with address of Spark master to join cluster /opt/spark/sbin/start-slave.sh spark://$SPARK_MASTER_IP:7077 - path: /etc/profile.d/ec2-api-tools.sh content: | #/bin/bash export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0 export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Notice: in both scripts we have a variable that has the value for a certain IP subnet. I am currently setting it to 0.0.0.0/0 which means that the subnet that the machine will be on will allow any connections from the world. This is fine enough for development but if you're going to deploy this cluster for production you must change this value. It helps if you're familiar with setting firewall rules on ufw or iptables and/or handling security groups on AWS (which is a completely different subject, which we'll pick up on later).

Another Notice: PLEASE ensure that your TCP rules on your master/slave security groups look like this before you move onward! This goes without saying but you should ensure that both machines can talk to each other through TCP port 7077 which is the spark default for communication and 8080 for the master's Web UI and 8081 for the slave Web UI. It should look something like this

The cool thing at this point is that you could save this as an EC2 Golden Image and use it to replicate workers fast. However, I would not recommend to do that at this point because you would end up with identical configuration across nodes and that could lead to issues. Repeat as many times as needed to provision all of your workers. You could probably instead use an auto-scaling group and make it so things such as the IP of the master and whatnot are read dynamically instead of hardcoded. But this is a start :).

And finally it should be possible to confirm that the cluster is running and has associated workers connected to it if you take a look at the Spark Master UI, which should be pretty simple if you look at the content being served on the master on port 8080. So open up the ip address of your master node on port 8080 on a web browser and you should see the web UI.

So that's it for the time being! Next time we'll set up a Hadoop cluster and grab us a bunch of humongous datasets to crunch for fun. Sounds exciting?

[omgsaranstuff]

Fusion 360 & 3D

I could only attend at the morning lecture sense I started to feel very ill and it felt like it was a virus going around in the class because we were a lot of students who were sick, even Johannes if I recall it well was ill.. We walk-through programs such as Fusion 360 step by step and why we use it and for what. I have been waiting sense I started the program to get involved with this kind of programs tho I thought I would manage to create something cooler than I ended up doing. I guess it looked easier at the tutorials then doing it by yourself. I did find some difficulties because the program was not able to get starting at the time as I hoped it would so for aprox. An hour I just watched my classmates fooling around with the program and doing every step by step that was shown on the mark while I tried to uninstall and download again the program.

Even though the start was a bit ruff I managed to keep up with the class and made a sort of a rectangular box with mirror color and a shelf where I imagined to put my air pods in? Unfortunately, I did not save it cause I was a bit to harsh on myself with the ending result of it so I can not show you how it looked.

I find these program challenging, you kind of have to have something in mind before starting otherwise it could end up being something really shitty and you can block the entire program cause you start punching on every single thing to see if it gets better. Trust me, I know from experience.

I do see a lot of potential on the program when coming to using the 3d printer and creating a sketch to something physical. But this is only the beginning so I guess I have to wait and see if it really is how I expect it to work.

[brittanyinterviews]

Eben Benson, Managing Editor of Juxtapoz Magazine

Eben Benson, Managing Editor of Juxtapoz Magazine

---

This interview was conducted via email in November 2018.

---

Brittany: Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

Eben: Hi! My name is Eben Benson, I’m 25 years old, and I’m managing editor of Juxtapoz magazine. I’m from Gorham, Maine, but live in SF now. I generally take things one day at a time.

Brittany: How did you get into writing and editing? Have you always been interested in writing?

Eben: I’ve actually never been much of a writer. I’d try writing stuff for myself in high school, but then I’d burn it because I’m dramatic and also have had a hard time creating certain types of things since I was young. I did okay in English class, and have always been a pretty strong reader, but I would get really distracted and bored in school so I never dedicated much time to it. I became a substantially better writer when I became more engaged with history and politics, which I ended up majoring in at UMass, where I went to college. So, expository writing has been more my thing.

Brittany: How did you come into your role as the Managing Editor of Juxtapoz? Did you have prior experience in publishing?

Eben: I didn’t! I was managing the web store for Thrasher magazine, which isn’t an editorial role but is in the same office as Juxtapoz. One day, my boss came downstairs and asked if I wanted to work at Juxtapoz, and I was like, “Wait, what? Seriously? I don’t know how to edit. I feel like I barely know how to read? I don’t know anything about art?” and everyone was like, “Eh, you’ll figure it out.”

Brittany: Can you describe your day-to-day in this role?

Eben: Basically I get into the office at 8 and leave at 4:30, between those hours it’s a toss-up. I spend a lot of time posting stuff on our site and social media platforms. Other than that, I edit the print mag, plan events, interview artists, check out new books, respond to Instagram DMs, and read through, like, 200 emails a day.

Brittany: You've interviewed quite a few artists about their work. In your opinion, what makes a great interview?

Eben: It’s tough, because I’m sure I drop the ball on good questions sometimes, but I think when someone writes back something funny and unexpected, they make the interview so much better. The work of course has to look nice. I hate when people send me shitty photos of their amazing art. I wanna be like, “Where are you located? I’m going to go buy a camera right now and get some higher res images because I know your art looks better than this.”

Brittany: In an interview with the graffiti artist known as SLUTO, you mentioned that you crowd-sourced questions on Instagram and scrolled through 150 of his post recent posts. Can you elaborate further on how you prepare for an interview and what research it might entail?

Eben: Yeah, I usually go deep on the IG. I’ll be back in like, 2013, looking at heavily-filtered photos of artists and their high school friends, or their emo phase, or something like that. I spend a lot of time looking at their work and their progression. I love seeing how an artist’s work has changed over the years. I’ll usually check and see if they’ve done other interviews, to make sure I don’t ask redundant questions. Thankfully, the internet has short-term memory loss, so even if I ask some of the same questions, it’ll be new to the reader.

Brittany: Have you always been a big fan of art? Can you describe your first "art memory"?

Eben: Honestly, no. I grew up on music and skateboarding, and felt like critically successful or “fine art” was some exclusive club that I was actively excluded from. I had some people just really turn me off from art, kind of shaming me for not getting it, and then I’d try to “get” it, but since there’s nothing to “get,” of course I never got close.

I think my earliest art memory was looking at a Picasso at the Portland Museum of Art (in Maine) and thinking, “Oh, this is apparently the good stuff.” I had to have been like 6, and I think I hated it. Growing up on a farm, a lot of “high culture” is really distant and kind of unattainable. I associated art with yuppie intellectuals, which isn’t entirely false, but they aren’t entirely bad. Haha.

I went to a drawing class in college because my friend was modeling for it, and this girl I was dating at the time laughed at all the sketches I made. She ended up talking hella shit on me after I started working at Juxtapoz because she went to art school and I didn’t. I think it was people like her who made me think art was bullshit, and there are plenty of people like that. I just don’t hang out with them anymore.

Brittany: Who are artists we should know about, particularly any local ones in the Bay Area?

Eben: Wheeew. Well, I am going to ramble here. In no particular order: Jeffrey Cheung, Oliver Hawk Holden, Calvin Wong, Muzae Sesay, Casey Grey, Yetunde Olagbaju, Kristin Farr, Lena Gustafson, Nychos, Joe Roberts (LSD World Peace), George Rocha, Paige Gausman, Alán González, Ellie Andrews, Max Stern, Olivia Krause, Elizabeth Yoshiko Schmidt, Cannon Dill, Brett Flanigan, Anson Cyr, Austin Leong, Maryam Yousif, Marcela Pardo Ariza, Meryl Pataky, Kellen Chasuk, Anika Chasuk, Laura Rokas, Robbie Api, Michelle Fleck, Terry Hoff, Bryon Christman, Yarrow Slaps, Joonbug, Odysseus Wolken, Ryan Whelan, Liz Hernández, Sofie Ramos, Tim Diet, and damn, a few more. The Bay Area is the shit, there is so much good stuff happening here right now.

That’s more the younger up-and-coming crowd. Then you have the legends obviously: Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Rigo23, Jeremy Fish, John DeFazio. There are more I’m forgetting…

Brittany: I think you use social media, specifically Twitter and Instagram, in a fascinating way. Although both are public accounts, you discuss very real, potentially sensitive, and very personal issues around topics like mental health that are still often seen as off-limits. Is using social media in this very public way a conscious effort? Can you speak more about how you approach using social media?

Eben: I think it’s odd that my generation has been on social media for more than half our lives. Starting out on Myspace, AIM, and forums like 4chan, etc, the internet definitely became a very normal part of my life at an early age. Then, moving on to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Slap magazine, etc. became organic too. I hit my self-conscious adolescence at the same time the internet was in its adolescent phase, so I was very fragmented in the way I used it. I would post the most random shit, trying to keep it “safe” and not, like, overshare. I used to be freaked out a lot, thinking of every person who might see anything I do.

Around 2013, I started opening up a little more, I think that was when I got Instagram. I definitely used it in a lot more boring way, just not as self-conscious as before. In 2015, I got super depressed and started just pouring it out online. I was spiraling hard, but it was nice to have some company and to feel a little bit seen, even if I was being annoying in my head. Then at one point, I kinda synthesized the self-conscious and manic-sharing, where I recognize that seeking validation will only solve half the problem, but also that no one has to follow me, so I have the “right” to be as personal as I want, and if someone really hates it, they can unfollow me, and that’s fine. I think my progression in how I use social media reflects my own mental health progression. Coming to terms with who I am has made me more comfortable sharing what I’m going through, or what I think, and at the same time, the internet is now growing up in a way, too, where we collectively know that whatever you post will be quickly forgotten anyway, at no fault of our own, so why not just live it up online? Four years ago I would have been bummed out that nearly everyone reading this interview has clicked out by now, but me at 25 is entirely fine with that and I’m having fun talking about myself. Haha.

Brittany: What can readers expect to see from you in the future?

Eben: Hopefully I’ll introduce people to new, challenging, and talented artists that make work they like. Hopefully they can get a few laughs or feel some comradery in the feelings or thoughts that we share, and hopefully at some point I can make a big enough mark on the world that I will leave it slightly nicer than it would have been if I never materialized.

In the meantime, like I said at the beginning, I’ll be taking it day by day. Thanks, Brittany <3

---

Photo provided by Eben Benson.

---

Special thanks to Eben for discussing his work at Juxtapoz with us. You can follow Eben on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

[lemonomelette]

For @lord_squiggletits amazing Pharma fic. I want to eat this fic grrrrr your Pharma is so headstrong and cute pls let me smooch his chevron and pack his school lunch he's out there making the world a better place <3<3<3