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thexanwillshine · 4 years ago

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a;lskfjdk

Author: thexanwillshine (twitter, ao3) Pairings: Levi x Hange Cross-Postings: AO3 Notes: made for Day 2: Confessions of Levihan Week 2021

“But Levi,” Hange whines as she slumps her head on the back of her sofa and closes her eyes. “Kissing scenes are so tricky to write.”

Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s almost 5:30 in the morning. It could also be because he's tired from lack of sleep. Whatever the case, Levi Ackerman’s filter completely disappears when he asks, “Do you need a demonstration?”

Levi Ackerman can argue that every writer he’s met is always a little bit more eccentric than the average person, but no one proves his theory more than Hange Zoë.

Hange wakes him up in the middle of the night, voice screeching on the phone in her excitement. He responds groggily—as one does when their sleep is disturbed at an ungodly hour by an overly-excited author who acts as if they’ve just found out the answers to the universe—and tries to keep himself sober enough to understand what in the goddamn fuck Hange was talking about this time.

“Levaaiiii,” she says, drawling out his name in a manner that was both annoying and endearing, “I’ve figured it out!”

He can almost imagine the look on her face: starry-eyed in her joy, mouth stretched wide into a grin, fingers shaking as she bounces in glee, shifting her weight from the heels of her feet to the tips of her toes . . .

And Levi exhales in both relief and the tiniest hint of delight, because this is exactly how he wants Hange to be: happy .

Nevertheless, he replies “Figured what out?” snarkily.

Hange’s response comes out quickly, as if she needed to say everything that had to be said in the span of five seconds or less. “So you know how I’ve been trying to write a fiction novel because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone?”

Levi hums in acknowledgement as he fixes the covers over his legs before turning on his bedside lamp. He leans back on the bed frame and closes his eyes to listen to her ramble.

“So I was thinking, I wanted to write a romance novel, because you know how people fall in love and stuff?”

“No Hange, I’ve never heard of that concept in my entire life,” Levi says in a deadpan voice.

Hange laughs, because of course she would know that’s his pathetic attempt at lighthearted conversation. Levi is glad that she knows him better than most people, and it is this sense of familiarity that made him feel particularly comfortable when graced with her presence.

“Just because you’ve never fallen in love before doesn’t mean it’s not real, Levi!” Hange tells him in jest.

Wrong, Levi thinks.

“After all, you’ve probably never wanted to kiss someone your entire life!”

Wrong, Levi thinks.

“Sure, Hange.”

He rolls his eyes at her teasing, because yes, Levi has fallen in love—and maybe, just maybe, he’s still on the road to understanding what it meant to treasure someone far more than just a regular friend.

He shakes off such thoughts before maneuvering Hange back to the initial reason why she had called. “So, what did you want to tell me?”

“I finished,” she proclaims on the phone, her voice proud, “I finished writing the first ten chapters.”

Levi blinks in confusion before sitting straight up, the information processing in his mind that was still a bit drunk with sleep. “You what?” “I couldn’t stop writing,” Hange told him sheepishly, detecting the slightest hint of concern in her editor’s voice, “I’ve been writing for the past 24 or so hours. Maybe more.”

Levi grunts in annoyance, pulling the covers away from his body and jumping out of his unmade bed. He runs a hand through his dark locks, sighing. “Four-eyes, you need to get some sleep.”

“But Levi,” Hange says in protest, “I need you to read my draft. There are some parts I just don’t think are super natural.”

“And I was sleeping like a regular human being,” Levi retorted as he shrugged off his shorts. After that, he put on jeans that he had recently washed before patting down the shirt he was wearing in a pathetic attempt to get rid of the wrinkles that had accumulated while he tossed and turned in bed.

“Oh my gosh, Levi, I didn’t realize the time!” Hange replies, and he can almost feel her guilt starting to set in. “You should go back to sleep,” she immediately adds. “Take care of yourself!”

Levi slips on his rubber shoes and grabs his umbrella before answering. “Coming from you? Not that credible.”

Hange laughs light-heartedly, and his heart flutters just a tiny bit. Levi pushes the feeling away almost as quickly as it had come.

“Have you eaten?” he asks, almost dreading the reply.

There was none.

“Hange,” he calls, but there’s still no response. “Hange. Answer me,” he says firmly, prodding her on. “Have you eaten?”

The laughter that comes out from the other end is nervous. “Woops.”

Levi sighs. He opens his car door and slips inside smoothly, grabbing his keys from his pocket and starting the engine. “Hange, you’re supposed to eat.”

“Sorry,” she tells him honestly. “I really didn’t want to ruin my momentum. I can’t believe I forgot.” She mumbles her second sentence, sounding almost deep in thought. “I’ll go find food now! Want me to email you the working draft? You can look at it in the morning when you wake up.”

“No need,” Levi tells her, placing his phone on his dashboard and accelerating his car. “I’m on the way.”

“Levi!” Hange exclaimed excitedly as she heard her doorbell ring at around four in the morning.

She rushes to the door in delight, opening it to reveal Levi standing in front of her, a paper bag in his hand and a jacket half-heartedly slung over his shoulder.

“Hi,” he greets calmly, before walking inside and letting himself in.

Inwardly, Hange thanks whatever god is out there for her foresight. Her unit was relatively clean since she hadn’t really done anything since Levi’s last visit. The place seemed to pass Levi’s health protocols, since he sat on her couch and placed the paper bag on the table right across from him.

“Eat,” he tells her, crossing his arms over his chest.

Hange grins, before plopping down beside him and opening the paper bag. “What did you get me?”

“You’ll see.”

She raises an eyebrow at his ambiguity, before taking a glimpse inside the paper bag.

The smell of quesadillas immediately fills the room, and Hange lets out a soft squeal, taking out the food from the bag quickly.

“Oh my gosh,” Hange says as she nudges him on the shoulder. “You also got me onion rings! You know me too well, Levi.”

“Unfortunately,” Levi responds sarcastically, and Hange laughs almost automatically.

As Hange hums in glee, picking apart the paper wrapped around the food items, Levi maintains his silence. They stay like that as Hange eats. Every so often, she would comment about how the amount of cheese was perfect and how the onion rings just about melted in her mouth. Levi alternates between watching her eat and scrolls through his phone placidly.

Soon, he chooses to break the silence. “So where’s your draft?”

Hange is munching on her last piece of quesadilla when she glances in his direction. “Oh, it’s on my laptop! I can’t believe I forgot to tell you, this food was just so good.”

Levi stands up and heads on over to Hange’s room, gently pushing the door open and scanning the area for her laptop. On top of her unmade bed was a half open Macbook Pro, which he gently took before returning to his seat beside Hange.

Without hesitation, Levi opens the laptop and inputs the password. For some reason, Hange made it his birthday—1225—because she claimed that no one would guess such a random date. He is greeted with a blaring Google Docs document entitled “a;lskfjdk.”

“Nice title you got there,” he comments, and Hange chuckles.

“I didn’t want to think of a title yet, okay!” Hange pouts, and Levi nudges her foot gently in an attempt to comfort her from his own teasing.

He scans the document first before reading it. Hange is a good writer, but fiction is an entirely new genre for her. Immediately, he notices common habits from writing research papers leak into her new work: overexplaining, using words that are too formal for her target audience, sentences a little bit void from emotion.

He takes note of these comments on her notes app before going over her draft again, this time more meticulously than he had done previously. During this time, Hange finishes eating, wraps her trash and tosses them all inside the paper bag before standing up and dumping the entire thing inside her garbage bin.

“Levi,” she calls as she washes her hands through the sink faucet. Levi gives her the smallest hint that he’s listening by raising his eyebrow, but he doesn’t take his gaze away from her laptop. “I’m going to take a shower,” she announces, and he waves his hand dismissively.

Hange smiles to herself. Levi is always nagging her whenever she would accidentally hyperfixate on her writing, but he acts the same way when reading her works.

When Hange stepped inside the shower, Levi was already conducting a deep dive in her third chapter. The gears in his head slowly begin to turn as he begins to analyze her work.

The story revolved around the tales of the people who went to the clinic. The first chapter was a brief introduction on who the main characters were: There’s Janelle, a bright-eyed psychologist whose passion influenced the people around her. Together with El and Bea, her trusted assistants studying under her guidance, they would aid the people who went to the Hopiatria Clinic seeking care.

Meanwhile, the second chapter featured a child who felt as if she was being blamed for the death of her mother by her father. Her mother had died in a plane crash shortly after the young girl wished that her mom could go home on her sixth birthday. Janelle talks to the child gently while El and Bea provide emotional support, offering the child toys and biscuits whenever the need arises.

The third chapter was trickier, and it was there that Levi noticed a twist in Hange’s writing. The story revolved around a boy busy getting her doctorate, and a young girl who had been in love with him ever since they were in college. It’s the young girl who comes to Janelle’s office, and she relays the tale of her unrequited childhood romance to the psychologist.

The young girl is passionate, and wanted to take a step forward in order to guide her towards falling out of love with her best friend. Janelle presents two suggestions: (1) confession, while being fully-open to the possibility of rejection, and (2) accepting rejection without confession. The young girl decides to go with the first option, but to her surprise, the boy returns her feelings.

Everything seemed well-written up until the end of the chapter, where Hange had written,

And then they kissed.

Levi scrolled down the page, tilting his head to the side in slight confusion. That’s it? He thought, trying to find the rest.

Everything had been so well-described; from the girl’s internal turmoil—caused by her fear of destroying their friendship and the pain that came with unrequited love—to the boy confessing his own emotions for her.

The ending was anticlimactic, to say the least.

As he blinked at the google document in confusion, already typing out his comment on her notes app, Hange emerged from the bathroom. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, wet from her shower. Wrapped around her waist is his bathrobe, which she had borrowed from him long ago and never bothered to return it.

Levi scoffs as he glances in her direction. Here she was, parading with the cloth on and rubbing that specific fact in his face.

“Hey,” Hange greeted, smiling as she ran a hand through her brown locks, “How’s the reading going?”

“It was okay until the third chapter,” Levi says honestly, pointing the laptop screen in her direction. “The ending’s anticlimactic.”

Hange hummed, pursing her lips together. “Yeah. I didn’t really know how to end it,” she tells him as she opens her cabinet and grabs a few pieces of clothing. “Give me a bit, I’m going to change.”

She disappears into her room and Levi focuses on her story, trying to think of a way to spur Hange on and perhaps actively improve the ending’s writing.

Hange emerges in a loose t-shirt (which was, once again, his) and shorts. She sits down right beside him, leaning over his shoulder to glance at her laptop and read the specific line that particularly irked Levi.

“It’s that one, right?” Hange asks, pointing at the last sentence. “And then they kissed.”

“Yeah,” Levi responds, shaking his head. “Everything was so well-written up ‘till that point. You were able to describe the emotions perfectly, and the narration’s not that bad . . save for a few paragraphs that maybe should’ve stayed in your research papers.”

Hange chuckles. “Old habits die hard,” she responds, before taking her Macbook from his lap and transferring it to hers. “So what should I write?”

Levi shrugs. “I’m just your editor. You’re the writer.”

Hange pouts. “Yeah, but I don’t know how to make this better.”

“Maybe describe the scene more,” Levi suggests. “Everything ended so abruptly. Every emotion you’ve created and built disappeared in that one line.”

She nods in agreement. “But Levi,” Hange whines as she slumps her head on the back of her sofa and closes her eyes. “Kissing scenes are so tricky to write.”

Hange’s eyes shoot open immediately, and Levi’s face turns red just as quickly.

“F-Forget it,” he says, interrupting her just when he saw Hange open her mouth to speak. Any semblance of calm in his body disappears immediately, and his heart starts pounding against his chest in a rhythm that reminds him too much of a beating drum.

Hange, however, looks elated.

“You want to kiss me?” she tells him in excitement, blinking at him. “I’d like that. It could help me write this scene, you know.”

Levi looks away. “It was just a spur of the moment question.”

“So, you’re not going to kiss me?”

He actively avoids her gaze because he can already see from his peripheral vision that she looks sad, disappointed even. He grunts in response, closing his eyes and focusing his attention on a random spot on the wall.

“Oh,” Hange replies, “Well, I thought it was a good idea.”

Contrary to popular belief, Levi does want to kiss Hange. More than anything.

There were many reasons why: Because she looks so handsome and beautiful at the same time, and her very smile could light up any room she’d walk into. Because she says his name in the most endearing way. Because she understands his flaws. Because she has one of the kindest hearts he’s ever seen. Because she welcomes him with open arms, not a single thread of hesitation in her mind.

Most of all, it was simply because she was Hange.

He steals a glance in her direction, and she’s slightly fiddling with the hem of his shirt, her head downcast. Her sad expression tugs at hi

Levi thinks he’s already in this too deep, so he decides to speak.

“Did you want me to kiss you?”

From his periphery, he sees her look up at him so quickly he thought her neck would break. “What would you do if I said yes?”

He doesn’t dare turn his head in her direction when he replies quietly, “What do you think?”

“Would you kiss me?” Hange asks inquisitively, tilting her head to the side.

Levi’s heart skips a beat.

“Maybe,” he says in a voice barely above a whisper. “If you’d let me.”

Hange is silent for a moment, and Levi thinks this is it, I’m going to be rejected, but he feels a gentle finger touch his chin and turn his head in Hange’s direction.

He is met with her brown orbs, shining just a bit in what seemed like hidden glee. He cocks an eyebrow at her then, confused.

“I’m letting you,” Hange says, laughing. “Kiss me, I mean.” Her face is already slowly nearing his, and he can almost see the way her thick lashes brushed against her skin.

Slowly, Levi raises his head just a tiny bit and responds against her lips, “Okay.”

Hange smiles and closes the distance between them, wrapping her arms around his neck as he does the same around her waist. She tastes like the peppermint of her toothpaste, smells like his shampoo (which he had kept in her apartment since he always found himself staying over), and felt warm as her skin made contact with his. Hange's lips are gentle, slow, and a little shy—so different from how she usually is. Levi knows it’s because she doesn’t want to scare him off, so he makes the first move and nips at her lower lip, taking it between his teeth and sucking it gently.

She lets out a moan, and Levi takes this as a sign to continue. He slides his hand over her back, and she shudders and deepens the kiss at the same time. Her tongue meets his, and they battle for dominance. Hange’s hand sweeps over his undercut and pushes him towards him, and it is then that he lets out a sound that vaguely resembles pleasure.

After a few minutes, Hange whispers “Levi,” as her lips make contact with his. He hums in response, pulling his lips away from her and connecting his forehead with hers.

“Hange,” he says, breathless.

“Is this you telling me you like me?” Hange asks, closing her eyes.

He doesn’t form a reply through words, but he nods and closes his eyes as well.

“Great,” Hange tells him, pecking his lips with her own. “Because I like you too. Ever since I met you, I’ve liked you. Even though you were so rude to me on the first day of college.”

He chuckles silently in relief, pulling her closer to him before placing his chin on her shoulder. “Think you’ll be able to write the ending now that you know what a kiss feels like?”

Hange laughs, and it vibrates against his shoulder as she hugs him tighter. “It’s exhilarating. I probably wouldn’t be able to put into words how good I feel that you like me back.”

“Try,” Levi teases.

“Well . . . you know that alternative title I wrote for the fictional novel?”

Levi’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “The keyboard smash?”

Hange nods. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I feel like right now.”

a;lskfjdk.

#levihan #levi x hange #levihanweek 2021 #LHW 2021 #LHWeek Day 2

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synthient · 5 years ago

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Found an unfinished fic in the drafts--prob about 2 years old, cuts off abruptly, no idea where I was going with it, but feat. deeply bitter 10-year-old Seto POV:

A month after they're dumped like trash on its doorstep, the orphanage holds a toy drive.

They're all cheap, trashy clearance aisle toys. Not the kind parents would buy for their own precious children, but good enough for someone else's brats. Gifts that they can hand sanctimoniously down to the unfortunates without stretching their wallets.

Seto waits in the back, holding Mokuba's hand as his brother strains on tiptoes to see over the heads of the crowd huddled around the scuffed plastic donation bin. The other kids pick through the toys, searching for the least shitty options. One grabs a foam football. Another claims an off-brand Beanie Baby knockoff with a lopsided face. It's only once the jostle of elbows dies down and the crowd thins that Seto finally lets Mokuba tug him forward to dig through other people's dregs.

Mokuba hops right over to the bin without hesitation or shame, sticking his arms and head inside and leaning so far over the edge that his feet kick in midair. He emerges with a small plastic airplane (sloppily painted, cast from a mishapen mold) and plops down on the floor with it, waving it in circles over his head and making "vroom" noises.

Seto shuffles slowly after him. Hands jammed in the pockets of his threadbare hand-me-down jacket, he inclines his head just enough to peer over the edge.

Like he expected, there's not much.

No. Wait.

There--at the bottom of the bin. A flash of silver.

Suddenly, Seto's heart is pounding.

No one wanted it. No one wanted the booster pack some cheapsake picked up from the dollar store and dumped in the bin, the foil-wrapped handful of cards from an obscure new American game that most people had never heard of.

But Seto does. Seto wants it.

He reaches out with trembling fingers.

***

He gets his hands on a card catalog (aka: sneaks off from the rest of the group during a field trip, goes to a game shop, pretends he has the pocket money to actually buy anything, lets the owner spread a catalog out on the countertop and show him all the possibilities that might be in any given booster pack, waits for the owner to get distracted by another customer, slips the catalog under his arm and walks out with it).

All the cards in the game are listed there. Pictures, descriptions, stats, printed in neat glossy rows.

That's how he finds out the cards he has are garbage.

It's what he should have expected, really, from the contents of a single booster pack. Weak, low-level monsters. Situational-to-the-point-of-uselessness spells. The cards aren't coordinated together for any specific strategy, even if he did have enough of them to build a full deck. Which he doesn't. Much less two.

Mokuba gamely plays chess with him, even though Mokie's only barely old enough to actually comprehend the rules and not just sit there messing around like he used to, babbling to himself and making up play-pretend stories with the little kings and queens and horsies. Or stick the pieces in his mouth like he would when when he was really little, chewing contentedly on the head of a bishop while Seto tried to tug it out of his tiny fist and Mom laughed and--

And. Anyway. He can't play Duel Monsters with Mokuba.

But that doesn’t stop him from pouring over the catalog at night, dreaming of the decks he would build, if he could. The strategies he’d use. He runs his fingers across the rows of artwork and imagines epic battles: sorcerers and knights; dragons and monsters; swords clashing; fireballs flying; incantations chanted; a roar that shakes the earth and a stream of lightning that splits the sky.

Mokuba curls up next to him, peering over his shoulder, and Seto reads the card text out loud like a bedtime story: “This legendary dragon is a powerful engine of destruction. Virtually invincible, very few have faced this awesome creature and lived to tell the tale.”

#going thru old drafts

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aion-rsa · 5 years ago

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Best Thanksgiving Movies to Watch This Holiday Season

https://ift.tt/392gRNP

This year marks a unique Thanksgiving, to be sure. With the pandemic carrying on, families and loved ones across the United States are testing out new ways to celebrate a national holiday that might be best described as food, football, and then, of course, more food. For some that means outdoor gatherings are the order of the day; for others it will mean the first time you might be cutting turkey while wearing a mask.

However you might wish to celebrate the holiday though, gathering with loved ones around a movie never goes out of style. For that reason, we’ve gathered the best Thanksgiving movies to choose from. Some of these films are truly beloved holiday classics, and others might be less obviously about Thanksgiving, even as they wear their affection for the holiday on their sleeves. And yet others still will offer the rare respite: a streak of cynicism for those who think Thanksgiving is for the birds. So pass the potatoes and enjoy a helping of good cinematic cheer below.

Addams Family Values (1991)

Addams Family Values might seem an unusual choice, but then everything about this one is unusual, right down to it being the rare comedy sequel that is superior to its predecessor. That success is in no small part due to the filmmakers realizing Christina Ricci, who made her big break playing the morbid Wednesday Addams, was devastating in her deadpan delivery.

Movies

How 1991’s The Addams Family Nearly Got Derailed

By Simon Brew

Movies

The Addams Family and Their Spooky New Jersey Origins

By Aaron Sagers

Thus Wednesday gets half the film to herself in this one, and we’re thankful for it. With Addams Family Values, she’s forced to endure the dreariness of summer camp and its middle class morality, right down to them holding a Thanksgiving pageant in July. Surrounded by smiling rich white kids who cast Wednesday as Pocahontas (who, it should be said, was not in New England or at the first Thanksgiving), Wednesday takes the opportunity to keep it real about Thanksgiving.

“My people will have pain and degradation,” Wednesday hisses in her last minute rewrite. “Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They say do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller. And for all these reasons I’ve decided to scalp you.”

The chaos that ensues is delightful. Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

Alice’s Restaurant

Alice’s Restaurant is an inadvertent Thanksgiving comedy directed by Arthur Penn, who re-envisioned Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as counterculture antiheroes in his 1967 gangster classic, Bonnie and Clyde. Penn did the same with Arlo Guthrie, the son of folk hero Woody Guthrie, the committed anti-fascist who wrote “This Land is Our Land.” The film is based on Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 folk song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” which was about Alice and a restaurant. The restaurant wasn’t called “Alice’s Restaurant.”

That’s just the name of the song, which is very talky, like the movie, which is also pretty violent and fairly drug-fueled. The film doesn’t start on Thanksgiving, but at an army recruitment center, where Arlo, playing himself, is trying to avoid the draft. Turns out he’s got no good reason to stay out of the war.

The Thanksgiving setting, however, gives the film its purpose, and main reason to be thankful. The main plot involves getting rid of some trash after a holiday dinner. Arlo and his friends load a couple months’ worth of garbage into their red VW microbus, along with “shovels, and rakes, and other implements of destruction,” and head to the city dump, which is closed for Thanksgiving. They’d never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, so with tears their eyes, they drive off to find another place to put the garbage.

It takes Arlo 18 minutes and 21 seconds to tell the plot in the song, in intermittent three-part harmony, but the gist is: he gets arrested for littering, and his criminal record keeps him out of the draft. With it, Penn turns Guthrie into one of the most mild-mannered antiheroes in counterculture cinema. He’s not moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses, and villages because he’s a litterbug.

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

Perhaps not quite as iconic as the legendary A Charlie Brown Christmas or It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the third Peanuts holiday special (and 10th Peanuts animated special overall) is still just as charming, wholesome, and satisfying as its predecessors. Once again written by Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz and directed by Bill Melendez, the show has been a November staple on TV for decades since first airing in 1973.

This time out, Charlie Brown (voiced by Todd Barbee) and his sister Sally (Hilary Momberger) are getting ready to go to their grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving when one by one, all their friends invite themselves over to his house—despite the fact that Charlie Brown can only make “cold cereal and maybe toast.” It all gets sorted out in the end, and it’s all the little jokes, the delightful voices, and the unforgettable music by Vince Guaraldi that makes this a perennial favorite.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

There isn’t so much as a mention of Thanksgiving in Wes Anderson’s stop motion masterpiece. Yet, somehow, it’s impossible to watch The Fantastic Mr. Fox and not have late autumn brought to mind. Is it the carefully chosen fall color palette that’s all sunsets and foliage? Is it the warm familial vibe of the Foxes and their neighbors that makes you miss big get-togethers? Is it the impeccably dressed cast of animal characters, all resplendent in corduroy, flannel, and tweed, quietly shaming you with their perfect sartorial choices? Or perhaps it’s simply their ravenous eating habits that puts you in the right frame of mind.

With little resemblance to the Roald Dahl book it’s based on, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is instead one of the most perfect encapsulations of Anderson’s eye for (some might say obsession with) the little details. And it’s those little details, even more than its fuzzy animal characters, that make this perhaps the coziest of the director’s efforts. Alternately exuberant and melancholy (just like the holiday itself), and with numerous scenes of beautifully plated gluttonous excess, it’s remarkable that this movie hasn’t already been adopted as an unofficial icon of the season. Let’s start that campaign right here, shall we?

Hannah and Her Sisters

The movie that won Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest Oscars, Hannah and Her Sisters is a story about family framed between two Thanksgivings and the year that connects them. With a meticulous insight about the highs and anxieties of upper-middle class life among Manhattan intellectuals, the film is really the travails of Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her sisters Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey). There’s also the lust of Hannah’s husband Elliot (Caine), who pursues an affair with Lee, but the film is mostly told from the vantage of three women of varying ages struggling with how they see themselves and their lives in a year of New York living.

Writer-director Woody Allen is here too as a hanger-on in this family, who’s struggling with his own fears of death, but his and Elliot’s roles are ultimately as outside observers who arrive every Thanksgiving to watch the sisters and their parents renew their family ties… and close ranks.

Home for the Holidays

One that feels particularly timely as 2020 adults hole up in their childhood homes for Thanksgiving and beyond, director Jodie Foster’s underrated family gathering comedy wallows in the downsides of going home. The film stars Holly Hunter as a woman who’s lost her job and is growing apart from her teenage daughter (Claire Danes). But all of that pales in comparison to spending Thanksgiving with her parents (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning), plus younger brother Robert Downey Jr.

The Best Thanksgiving TV Episodes

By Alec Bojalad

Movies

The Long History of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Thanksgiving

By Gavin Jasper

It’s a familiar setup, but Thanksgiving is a time of being with those you’re familiar with, whether you like it or not. Plus, as a comedy it also has the still vital message of counting your blessings.

The Ice Storm

Based on Rick Moody’s acclaimed 1994 novel, director Ang Lee’s (Brokeback Mountain) masterful adaptation is a scathing portrait of upper middle class suburban life in the early 1970s, when all the experimentation in the world with drugs, alcohol, and sex couldn’t quite stop anyone from feeling like their lives and society were unmoored.

Like other dramas that take place around Thanksgiving, there’s very little to actually be thankful for: the characters (played with flair by Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire, and others) are all trapped in emotional black holes of their own making.

Similarly, all the decadence and crazy fashions/trends of that surreal decade can’t replace the feeling that something has gone dreadfully wrong. Lee–before he became obsessed with the latest camera technology–charts this all with patience, empathy, and precision.

Knives Out

Okay, so Rian Johnson’s brilliant little whodunit isn’t actually set on Thanksgiving, but it sure feels like it is and was released around the holiday on Nov. 27, 2019 (God, that feels like a century ago). So… close enough. And while the family gathering at the center of the story is for a patriarch’s birthday, it certainly resembles the kind of large family assembly many hold at Thanksgiving, right down to feeling like it could end in murder.

Movies

Knives Out and the Villainy of Privilege

By Kayti Burt

Movies

Knives Out: When Murder Makes You a Better Person

By Natalie Zutter

The murder in question, of course, is that of mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), and it’s up to gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to figure out which of his many bickering, backbiting, scheming descendants might have had a hand in it. Perhaps Harlan’s nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) can help since the clan insists “she’s like part of the family.”

All that’s really missing is the turkey. The knives are out, in abundance.

The Last Waltz

Perhaps no title card in cinematic history deserves to be heeded more than the one which opens The Last Waltz: “This film should be played loud.”

Not just the greatest concert film ever made. Not only the greatest rock documentary of all time. The Last Waltz may lay claim to being the only movie of any stature literally filmed on Thanksgiving. Martin Scorsese shot The Band’s farewell concert on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, where the audience of 5,000 was served a literal Thanksgiving dinner in addition to an unforgettable night of music by some of the most legendary performers of the 20th century.

Culture

The Last Waltz: Martin Scorsese’s Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Movie

By Tony Sokol

Culture

New Deep Purple Album Whoosh! Coming in June

By Tony Sokol

But this is no mere concert film. Being treated to a document of such legendary musicians at the height of their powers would make this important enough, but when it’s shot, lit, and edited by Scorsese, and with The Band joined by towering guest stars like Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and many more, The Last Waltz becomes one of the most powerful musical statements ever committed to film. Scorsese breaks up the performances with members of The Band reflecting on their career, and even in these quieter moments, The Last Waltz radiates the power and danger of a life lived on the road, in seedy dives, and storied ballrooms.

When you’ve had your fill of football and family for the night, pour yourself a glass of something good and do exactly as that opening title card says.

Miracle on 34th Street

Yes, yes, technically speaking Miracle on 34th Street is a Christmas movie. But it is definitely worth noting that the film actually spends more screen time on the actual Thanksgiving holiday than Christmas Day. Indeed, the picture opens with the now legendary Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In the ultimate stroke of product placement, Macy’s New York City shindig got nationwide attention on the big screen, even as the movie focuses on the department store hiring the wrong Santa Claus for its festivities.

Arriving drunk and disgraceful to Macy’s preparations, an inebriated mall Santa creates an opportunity for a man who calls himself Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) to step in. Kris is passing through, presumably doing some holiday shopping ahead of his own big day in December. But upon seeing his personage so besmirched, he demands to take Santa’s reins and in the process saves Thanksgiving. We also see how this affects the turkey time of the film’s central mother and daughter team, played by Maureen O’Hara and Natalie Wood.

Mistress America

Sometimes Thanksgiving can be quiet and intimate… and desperately needed. That’s the case of the end to Noah Baumbach’s effervescent Mistress America. A mostly successful attempt at emulating 1930s screwball comedy for literary millennials, Mistress America is a clever throwback set during autumn in New York City and, tellingly, a trip to the suburbs of Connecticut. But by movie’s end, protagonists Tracy (Lola Kirke) and Brooke (Greta Gerwig) find themselves alone and isolated in the big city on Thanksgiving. They also thus discover an excuse to reconcile after grievances drove them apart, breaking bread at a restaurant down the street. It’s downbeat, but emotionally cathartic for both the characters and film.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

As the late John Hughes’ masterpiece, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the quintessential “get home in time for the holiday” tale. Steve Martin is Neal, a stressed-out marketing exec who picks up an accidental travel companion in Del (John Candy), a well-meaning but oafish shower curtain ring salesman. As the two struggle to get back to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving amidst a string of misadventures and transportation issues, an eventual friendship forms, leading to a moving conclusion.

Planes was a step forward for Hughes as he began to move away from teen comedies, and the movie’s balance of humor and heart was perfectly complemented by the dynamic comedic chemistry of Martin and Candy. The latter probably had his best role ever in Del Griffith, and it’s a tribute to both actors and Hughes that each lead character can be annoying yet is never unlikable.

Movies

Christmas Movies on Disney+ Streaming Guide

By David Crow

Movies

Christmas Movies: A Complete Holiday Streaming Guide

By Alec Bojalad

Hilarious and poignant, this mix of buddy picture and road movie is a near-perfect treat for the season—or any time.

Prisoners

We wouldn’t exactly call Prisoners ideal holiday viewing. It’s set at Thanksgiving and immediately afterwards, although there isn’t much cheer during most of the film’s harrowing 153 minutes. The movie opens with a Thanksgiving dinner involving two Pennsylvania families, a pleasant ritual that soon turns nightmarish when two little girls—one from each clan—go missing. From that point onward, the story becomes a downward psychological spiral in which the search for the girls takes a terrible toll on all caught in its wake.

The first Hollywood studio film directed by French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (who has since gifted us with films like Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and next year’s Dune), Prisoners is a brutal, emotionally complex thriller that maintains a high level of suspense and dread over its formidable running time.

Featuring excellent performances from Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, and others, it may not be the kind of cheery escapism we often seek out at the holidays. But it will leave you deeply thankful for the good things in your own life.

Rocky and Rocky II

“To you it’s Thanksgiving, to me it’s Thursday,” Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) tells Adrian Pennino (Talia Shire) as they hit the streets for their first date in Rocky. That date wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the tougher than tough love of Adrian’s brother Paulie (Burt Young). He gave them no alternative but to go out when he tossed the Thanksgiving turkey his sister slaved over all day out the side door. What followed was one of the best first date scenes in film.

It doesn’t seem like Rocky and Adrian have a lot to be thankful for. She says her daddy told her to develop her brains because she’d never get by on her looks. Rocky says he’s so dumb he couldn’t hope to be anything else but a fighter, which is halfway to being a bum.

While the scenes surrounding the ice skating rink date aren’t only some of the most romantic sequences captured on celluloid, they culminate in one of hottest. This is all before Rocky is even approached to fight the heavyweight champ of the world. The battered underdog Rocky stays on his feet until the final bell, and an almost equally bashed Apollo Creed, who barely held onto his title belt, swears he never wants a rematch.

Culture

Could Rocky Balboa Really Have Gone the Distance?

By Tony Sokol

Movies

The Top 10 Carl Weathers Movie and TV roles

By Wil Jones

Apollo takes that rematch when he defends his title in Rocky II. The fight is set for Thanksgiving Day, and Rocky knocks the stuffing out of that turkey, and laps up the gravy. Many of the Rocky movies, including Creed, opened on Thanksgiving weekends, and are perfect “date movies.” The main bouts may focus on two fighters, but the love stories, starting with the one between Rocky and Adrian, are tenderer than the bird Paulie tossed in the alley.

Spider-Man

The original Spider-Man really is a superhero movie for all seasons. With its romantic and old-fashioned photography of New York City in the spring and autumn, the picture runs the calendar’s gamut in its storytelling of the webslinger’s first year on the job. But it also pivots on a rather eventful Thanksgiving dinner.

Movies

Why Spider-Man 2’s Train Fight is Superhero Cinema’s Greatest Action Scene

By Mark Harrison

Movies

Sam Raimi Spider-Man Trilogy Writer David Koepp Reveals Original Plans

By Joseph Baxter

Fresh off Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) refusing to team up with the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), and after a blow up at a not-Macy’s Day Parade in Times Square, the pair’s alter-egos unwittingly meet up for Thanksgiving in Peter Parker’s apartment. It’s a swanky bachelor pad he shares with Harry Osborn (James Franco). But even with Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) there to give it some holiday warmth, things get frosty when Dafoe’s patriarchal Norman realizes the kid passing him the cranberries is his mortal enemy. Awkward.

And yes, nearly 20 years later this strangely does feel like a holiday movie, doesn’t it?

ThanksKilling

This film is terrible. An exploitative C-cheapie horror where a turkey possessed by a demon with a smart mouth hunts and murders coeds. But if that’s your jam… well, it exists.

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precipi-nation-blog · 6 years ago

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Scenario: The cup clattered to the floor... (Nordics)

Warning: Swear words

Denmark:

... As you rushed to the sink to wash your mouth out.

“What the hell was that?” You spat between heaves of the awful concoction that Matthias had offered to you.

“An Irish car bomb?” Your reaction had turned his otherwise exclamatory phrase into a question, whilst he moved to rub your back. You finally coughed the last of it up, and used the spray nozzle of the sink to wash the remaining taste out of your mouth. Once the offensive taste had retreated, you raised your head from the basin of the sink to glare at Matthias.

“That was not an Irish car bomb! What’d you put in it?” You demanded, and the once-bold Nordic fiddled with his collar in response.

“Well, I didn’t have any of that Irish beer, so I substituted some of mine. And I couldn’t find any cream stuff either, so I put in coffee creamer.” He explained, looking at you through his eyelashes in hopes that you’d go easy on him.

You weren’t entirely sure that you wanted to know what his other stand-in was, but your mouth moved before you could get ahold of it.

“What ‘some of yours’ did you use, then?”

At this, Matthias smiled proudly.

“Only the best there is: Pilsner!”

Matthias’ smile was quick to flee the premises when he saw your face drop into one of disbelief.

“You used Pilsner? You used a Danish pale lager, instead of an Irish black stout, such as, I don’t know, Guiness, the only beer you’re supposed to use to make an Irish car bomb! And don’t get me started on the fact that you used coffee creamer instead of Baileys! Do you not realize that Baileys is just another alcohol? Just because it’s a cream alcohol doesn’t mean you can just dump some sugary garbage into a shot glass and make an Irish car bomb out of it!”

While he only paid about half an ear to your rant, Matthias lent both eyes to the passionate luster in your own and was quickly enveloped in the fire they possessed, warming him down to his bones with affection for you. Quick to stop you before you could rant for another half an hour, he reached a hand out and cupped one of yours.

“Want to go out so I can treat you to a real Irish car bomb?”

“... Sure.”

Finland:

... As opposed to the garbage can, where it was supposed to go.

You sighed in disappointment and got up to put it in its place, unwilling to litter in such a beautiful area. Padding back over to where Tino waited with an amused smile, you grumbled a half-hearted demand for him to hush before continuing on the path with him.

The silence, pierced only by the noise your boots made as they beat down the snow underfoot, went unbroken by purposeful sound. It was a little ironic, Tino thought to himself- The whole point of getting out of the house was that you two wouldn’t make noise and rouse the others from their slumbers, seeing as you both had happened to get up early. But now that you were outside, the two of you were as quiet as was nearly impossible in the house.

It was anything but unwelcome to either of you, though. And without sharing a single word, the two of you came to agree on that fact, and allowed the hushed air to continue its rounds undisturbed with your own waves of sound.

Perhaps it was because of this respectful pact with nature that it granted you sight of things typically hidden from those outside of its residence. Your walk was punctuated with appearances of all walks of life, from gray owls preening themselves high in the evergreens, to a family of deer picking out the sparse greenery hidden in the folds of white. The most that either Tino or yourself did, though, was motion to it with a smile. There was something pure, some kind of sanctuary here, and neither of you were willing to invade it.

Along the way, your head ended up propped against his shoulder. Wordlessly, Tino capped it with his own, and on you went to experience the magic of the forest together.

Iceland:

... And shattered against the tile.

“Shit!” You shouted under your breath, frozen where you stood. Emil rolled his eyes at your behavior and grabbed a broom from a closet, quickly returning and handing it off to you.

“It’s not a big deal, just clean it up. I doubt you woke anyone up anyway, they all sleep like logs.” More annoyed by the noise you produced than anything, Emil leaned back against the counter, staring out the gap between the curtains in the kitchen window.

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to do a midnight raid for hot chocolate,” you offered, trying to escape the blame while sweeping up pieces of what was decidedly your mess.

“You’re the one who suggested it in the first place!” Your companion shot back, crossing his arms.

Unable to find any kind of comeback for the blatant truth, you sighed out the last of your indignation and threw the shards of the mug into the trash can.

“Sorry for breaking your mug.” You looked guiltily back at Emil, tapping the dustpan against the bin to get the last bits of ceramic out of it.

Emil’s eyes flicked over to you, frosted back over with his usual composure.

“It wasn’t even my mug.”

“Oh.” You returned. Lacking anything to say, and having finished your task, you set your tools down and joined Emil in slouching against the counter.

After about fifteen seconds of staring at the white curtains, you ejected a “Hold on,” moving forward to push them out of the way of the chilled glass.

Emil watched silently as you did this, as you opened up a portal to a vast, unending nebula of stars, accompanied by a peeking sliver of the just-past-new moon.

And just as silently, when you settled back at his side to join his vigil, he slipped his hand in yours.

Norway:

... Along with the rest of your careful stack of dishes. You dragged a hand through your hair in irritation, bending down to pick all of them up, biting back a choice word or two for the loud- but thankfully unbroken- glassware. You had just gotten the last plate into the sink when you heard the kitchen door swing open, and you knew exactly who it was.

“You can make more than one trip between the sink and the dinner table, you know,” Lukas started.

“It’s faster this way,” was the utterance with which you chose to defend your actions, as you plunged your hands into the soapy water and began to scrub.

“Not when you spend ten minutes every time picking up all the dirty plates, cups, and silverware that you drop all over the ground.” The man who was apparently deemed the backseat dishwasher quipped.

You didn’t bother continuing the argument, knowing that he would win one way or another. Instead, you huffed into your shoulder, scratching your chin against it in place of your wet, occupied hands.

Reading the mood like the book he had set down moments ago, Lukas decided to drop his very one-sided debate as well, instead walking over to join you at the sink. Rolling up his sleeves, he set to work on rinsing the dishes that you had scraped clean.

“It’s not your turn to do the dishes,” you pointed out. With a wry smile, you added, “And it won’t get you out of your next turn if you help me.”

“I know,” he replied. “I just wanted to help you.”

“Weren’t you reading, though?” You turned to him with this question on your lips, and he looked over at you once he saw your pivot in his periphery.

Taking one look at you was all he needed to confirm his decision to abandon his novel on the couch. With just a glance, he found every story he’d ever want to read written on your person.

He nodded, and turned the plate in his hands under the tap, washing the suds off the back.

Sweden:

... Once your arm jerked to the side to stretch. Your tired eyes could barely keep up with the speed that gravity lent the mug, but it definitely had your attention when the coffee inside of it spilled out.

“Ah, damn,” you muttered. “I’m sorry, Berwald.”

The man sitting across the table from you simply set his own mug down and moved to grab some paper towels, quick to sop the dark sepia tones up from the lighter wood of his kitchen floor. Not needing to be asked, Berwald poured you another cup of coffee, mixing with it just what you liked before handing the fresh brew off to you.

“Thanks,” you mumbled into the rim of your cup, rearing your upper lip to blow at the surface before taking a sip.

“You can go back to bed,” the introvert suggested as he settled back down, picking up his own mug and disrupting the still surface of the coffee with his own long draft.

“No, I want to stay up with you,” You protested, rubbing an eye and sitting up straighter as if to prove to him that you could.

“You said that fika is an important thing in Swedish culture, and if it’s important to you, it’s important to me. Plus, I looked it up, and you’re not supposed to do it alone. If...” You trailed off to look blearily behind you in an attempt at reading the microwave. “... 3:30 is when you want to fika, I’ll do it with you!”

Berwald gave your drowsy figure a long stare, while thoughts poured over his internal dialogue like your previous cup of coffee over his clean floor.

“I’m glad that you care enough to get up early and fika with me. And you look very cute, almost falling asleep into your coffee like that. Should I say that? ... No, too embarrassing. I’ll say it later.”

In the meantime, though, he afforded you a small smile, and that was better than any dream you had missed.

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batbirdies · 6 years ago

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Lol I also realized I switch between past and present tense in this all over the place. A terrible habit that I ignore when I’m trying to speed write, and fix later when I rewrite...so apologies.

#Batman #fanfiction #Jason Todd #I’m not going back or editing #or adding the italics that my google doc has #im sorry #btw I’m jeniceM on AO3 #if anyone cares

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hopevalley · 6 years ago

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Hi everyone! I hope you’re ready for another Tumblr Special™.

Let’s talk about some stuff that’s been on my mind lately.

I’ve been working on my pet project, When Calls the Heart: Reimagined, and my bud @trash-god has assured me that the current first draft isn’t complete garbage, but the discussion we had eventually led to talking about Mark Humphrey and then character-related stuff and as usual I couldn’t shut up.

Before that, I just wanted to drop the update about Reimagined. I don’t know if that’ll be its actual title or not. It’s hard to title a novelization. On one hand you have the option to title it the same as the show, but it’s not the show, so then you’re kind of stuck feeling like you have to come up with something at least slightly different, but it’s still also technically fanfic, and—

Yeah. There’s also the potential for something like this to really blow up in a big way, at least word-wise, so that makes a title even more important. I’ll definitely be out there barking my wares like a peddler on the street, but like...here on Tumblr and especially on Instagram where there are a ton of fans. Twitter too, probably. Considering I have to type this five billion times across social media to try and garner some attention (and hopefully feedback) for it, I’d rather not be embarrassed by the title, or turn people away from it because they think it’s a regular fanfic and not a novelization of the show.

Which leaves me with very few options.

When Calls the Heart: The Novelization

When Calls the Heart: Reimagined

Some other title with a subtitle of “A When Calls the Heart Novelization”

It sounds simple but it’s not. “The Novelization” makes it sound like it’s following the show super precisely. “Reimagined” makes it sound as if it deviates in a big way. Something else could just be too much to type but at least it implies it’s an interpretation. What if this ends up getting absolutely huge and needs to be split up into parts, though? That makes it more difficult.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve made it about five minutes into the first episode, time-wise, and have four thousand some odd words. It’s not even a complete chapter—more like an introduction and the beginning of the first chapter.

But something I noticed in those first five minutes of the television series is that...everything is so incredibly rushed. The pacing is awful. I think I might have talked about this a bit in my ‘episode write-up’ of the first episode, but even though it works well enough for this series (especially considering its S1 budget and everything) it would all be terrible for a narrative choice.

I mean, sure, the first chapter could start with Elizabeth on her journey thinkin’ ‘bout where she’s going, ruminating on her own hubris, and then BANDITS. Cut out and back in to her arriving in town without much of an explanation or showing how she personally handled the whole bandit thing. Then have Abigail, Cat, and Florence steamroll the heck out of her while the narrative laughs at rich, silly Elizabeth who isn’t afraid of hard work but is scared of a mouse.

But that isn’t what I want. Elizabeth as a character, especially the introductory character we’re going to get to know and love over the course of hundreds of thousands of words (in theory, of course), deserves better than that. The narrative cluster from the TV show served its purpose; it flung us right into the thick of things. Which is fine for TV and less fine for what would essentially be a book.

Again, don’t get me wrong, but I want Elizabeth to be the kind of character we don’t know everything about right away. I don’t want to spill every detail of her life right from the get-go. I don’t want her to come off as too obviously rich, especially in her own narrative. I want her observations and mannerisms and attitude to reflect the fact that she comes from money without stating it outright.

I also feel that Elizabeth as a character lacked a lot of attention in the show that, again, worked okay for a tv show, but would be doing her a disservice in a novel. She needs hobbies, passions, random relateable thoughts, habits, joys (especially the quiet kind), and motivation. Not to be That Person, but she needs a personality. As the main character it would just be completely unforgivable to have hundreds of thousands of words dedicated to a character that is dull to read about. Remember, books don’t give us the visually appealing scenes that the TV show does. Elizabeth’s smile, her hair, her fun outfits and hats... Those things can’t distract a reader from the fact that she isn’t a very well-fleshed out or understood character.

It also can’t distract from an insanely rushed narrative.

Tons of people watch WCtH for Erin’s performance of Elizabeth. They won’t be reading this novelization for that reason, because Elizabeth is not Erin.

(Though of course you can imagine her in the role if you want to and most readers will; it’s just not the kind of thing that can carry a book the way it can a piece of visual media.)

Reimagined is, as of right now, just a slight deviation from what we’re used to. Elizabeth has hobbies, interests. She is a passionate teacher who took the position in Coal Valley for Reasons You’ll Read About.

I really liked aspects of the Elizabeth portrayed in the film by Poppy and in the novel by Janette Oke, and some of those tiny things can and will work their way into this version of the story, too. I’m on board with Elizabeth being a writer, but I’m not on board for that being used as journal exposé writing for Narrative Ease and not to really go all-out in showcasing it as something she’s truly and honestly passionate about. If I want to see a movie that did a great job of showcasing a passionate writer, it’s Anne of Green Gables/Anne of Avonlea. Sure, Anne’s flair for flowery writing and drama was embedded into the voiceover bits and had some narrative function, but it was SO clearly a part of WHO SHE WAS that when you thought about who Anne was, you thought, oh, she’s a teacher for her job but she’s a writer at heart—especially when she learns to write from the heart (instead of what she thinks will make her successful).

I don’t expect Elizabeth to be that type of character (she’s far too sensible), but I need her to have a passion. A person doesn’t just take a teaching post in Nowhere Valley, Canada, in 1910 and not have a good reason for it. What drives her? What motivates her? What makes her happy?

And when it comes to writing...what is it about writing that she likes? Enjoys? What’s the best part of it? The worst? I wanted to like Elizabeth’s writing arc because duh, I’m a writer, but it didn’t spark any joy in me because it was just too flat. If you give me half a chance I’ll tell you all the best parts of writing, and the worst, and the most frustrating, and the most rewarding. I’ll talk about character growth and development. I’ll talk about cadence. I’ll talk about self-indulgence.

Elizabeth’s passion for writing existed for one reason: “she writes in her journal for easy skips in the narrative.”

I think she’ll keep her writing passion in Reimagined, but she’ll have other things that matter to her, too, and hopefully if it’s consistently presented it won’t feel like it’s there just to carry a plotline (only for it to disappear afterward).

It’s been fun so far! Elizabeth has been surprisingly nice to write. I won’t lie, though; it’s hard to follow the show enough to make things feel like a novelization while still deviating where it makes sense to. One small example is the conversation that Cat, Abigail, and Florence have with Elizabeth when she gets to town; the TV show didn’t do a bad job with it at all, but when it’s written out exactly the same it feels intensely rushed and out of character/unrealistic. Again, it’s something that got the job done in the TV show, but is nigh unreadable in novel format.

And it’s not the info dumping, either. It’s just the way the characters go about things; it’s not hospitable, it’s not kind, it’s not thoughtful... and we know from later episodes that Abigail is the pinnacle of hospitality and kindness, and Cat isn’t too far behind her! Even Florence isn’t a monster.

So there has been an attempt on my part to twist things slightly, where mayyybe what Florence says that sounds so rude is really just Florence Being Florence (and observing a truth/reality, not always being awful), and where Elizabeth isn’t mocked on top of being doubted, and of course where some concern is shown for her well-being after her stagecoach was robbed and no doubt didn’t show up in town IN THE FIRST PLACE. I mean, how could they NOT know why Elizabeth was late? Being late by a few days or a week was NOTHING back then. It happened ALL THE TIME. (Thanks, weather!)

So yeah! The project is going. I was really getting into writing it last night, and I’d be working on it now, but I’m just too tired to feel useful.

For those wondering about Abigail...she’ll be there. I like the original character and I’ll try to move forward with that person in mind.

But back to the whole thing with Mark and et cetera. It’s really interesting how many WCtH characters got the short end of the stick when it came to character development. They have too many characters for the amount of episodes they get a season, which resulted in like...everyone dating for absurdly long periods of time (that had nothing to do with character-reasons until they felt they had to add that stuff in there to force it to make sense). It wasn’t just Jesse and Clara, either. Obviously Elizabeth and Jack took way too long to get together...and Abigail and Frank dated for literal years and should have had something related to that being..a plot for them. I think it might have been interesting in ways Jesse/Clara can’t be, just because Abigail had a long marriage with Noah and she’s much older than Clara, so she brings all that into a new relationship. Clara’s got different issues and sadnesses to work through.

Obviously it didn’t just result in characters dating for insane lengths of time; it also gave us a lot of just..nothing. This conversation started with Frank, because we were talking about Mark Humphrey, but he’s just one example of a handful. The series focused a LOT more on plot driven stuff than character driven stuff, which makes sense, but look at Frank’s character. He got an arc, and then when it was over, he just kind of became a very backseat background character. We might as well have named him Abigail’s Boyfriend at that point, because he hardly did anything that wasn’t related to Abigail DIRECTLY. He didn’t even really get scenes with Cody, which...c’mon. We deserved those. (The best we got was the Christmas movie where the peddler has his old Bible from prison but that whole thing was...not nearly as good or meaningful as it could have been, and of course IT DIDN’T GO ANYWHERE.)

But then it also happened to Lee, and Jesse, and Clara, and Carson and Faith and—yeah, you get it. I feel like if we had 20 episodes a season this wouldn’t be so bad (each recognizable character could easily get a two part episode plotline), but it’s a symptom of plots > character storytelling. More episodes won’t fix that if they just dump in even more bad plots.

S6 was a large improvement in many areas but they REALLY dropped the ball with Bill overall (easily one of the worst parts of S6 just because he went from being such an involved character to kind of a joke/rag doll that nobody knows how to include in a sensible way) and the children aren’t characters so much as tiny plot devices...that frankly aren’t even particularly interesting.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what they’ll do with S7. I hope it’ll be good! I really want them to get their footing onto solid ground and do the best they’ve ever done. They have something really wonderful and I want to be able to tell people “this series found its way and is worth checking out even if it’s usually not your speed.”

But it’s hard to do that when the characters always end up feeling secondary to the (poorly constructed, not very engaging) plots.

So we’ll see! These are things I can improve upon in Reimagined, but I’d really like the show to do some of that work, too. (Better late than never, right?)

#wcth reimagined #and other shenanigans

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contrariancy · 6 years ago

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liner notes for ‘reach’.

So, uh. When I write, whatever I write, I always keep a separate “notes” file with things like general plot points, timelines, stuff I’m debating putting in, cut things, and deleted/rewritten bits. And needless to say, the notes for reach got a little, well, long.

Some of the cut stuff I’m actually repurposing for an upcoming series (tentatively titled ‘iƒ’, based on branching points in ‘reach’), but even when I remove that, it’s a lot. So I figured I’d just dump them here and hopefully someone will find them interesting or what have you.

➤ this fic was how I coped with chapter 295; chapter 1 was written almost in its entirety before 296 came out. I acted cool on tumblr and twitter, but I was absolutely sweating bullets and fully prepared to write bizarre fix-it fic because I wanted it. After 296, I lost some steam, but I had a couple friends tell me they really liked the first chapter and thought it was a good concept. I’ve done enough "lost scene" fics that I wanted to try a new challenge and see if I could create an engaging AU fanfic.

Here is exactly what spawned this:

➤ there were a few rules I created for myself before I got started. The first one was that I couldn’t post anything until the fic was mostly done and once I started posting, that was a commitment to finish it. The second was minimal to no OCs — I had to bend this later with Bathin, but I compromised by making his power fear-based and having him take other forms.

The third rule was that any character introduced had to have some sort of role to play; they couldn’t be there just to "be there" and exist to boost up other characters. Zeal was the only character in it out of necessity, as Guila would have been written entirely differently if she didn’t have her brother with her. Even then, I tried to give him something that wasn’t "[X] in distress." I think the character that came closest to being that was Hendrickson, honestly.

➤ originally, Hendrickson was going to have a phone that he talked to and would have run into Dreyfus while exploring the city. I opted against this because I didn’t want to write any OCs in this and a phone counts. Also, it would be ten times more interesting to have him bounce off of Dreyfus instead of some phone that the reader does not care about. It was also important to me that Dreyfus get introduced as soon as possible, especially in a fic like this where the reader is being asked to accept something different from the top.

➤ Jericho and Howzer were not in the initial draft notes. Then I came up with the pair concept early on (after realizing there was a pattern with Guila-Zeal and Hendrickson-Dreyfus and I could play with that for the eventual Merlin reveal). Fraudrin was an actual character briefly before I decided that Fraudrin as a villain was kind of a tired thing; if I was going to write for him at this point, I would want to explore more of the shades of gray with his character, and this fic would not give me the time or leeway for that. So Howzer became Gil’s paired partner instead, also because I just wanted to write Howzer. Jericho offered the most opportunity for writing things, and I wanted to play her off of Hendrickson and Dreyfus.

➤ Merlin was always going to be the deus ex machina. Merlin was always a factor and always the only Sin I was going to put in. The only thing that changed is she went from sweeping in and completely taking out Bathin and Fixing Everything Ever to coming in for the assist at the end with her OP skills.

➤ Helbram is only in it because he was the first dead character I thought of as a potential partner for Zaratras. I wrote the first half of interlude 1 before anything else and I loved the odd couple pairing, so he stayed and became kind of essential. He’s also very fun to write for and I thought he would be an interesting contrast to the others.

➤ Bathin was going to originally be a straight up Fraudrin clone and just the entity Bathin using Fraudrin’s guise as a persona or whatever. Again, I decided Fraudrin as a villain was a tired thing at this point and having the villain just be Fraudrin again was a bit of a cop out, even if I really didn’t want to write any type of OC. Bathin is like Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist, later complete with Velvet Crowe from Berseria’s arm (which is. also Meliodas and Derieri and I went "oops oh well"). I liked the mental image of Margaret beating everyone up too, so that’s why that happened. It’s also because they’re the two figures in Hendrickson’s life that get possessed and Bathin poses as both of them.

Bathin was meant to be cruel but fun, like an animal that plays with its food. His downfall is his hubris! He thinks he’s on top — and it’s his world, why wouldn’t he think that? — so he doesn’t see anyone as a real threat. The unknown terrifies him though, and that’s why he was tearing his hair out over the 'interloper.'

➤ ftr, Bathin is one of the many demons referenced in the Lesser Key of Solomon. I’d originally considered something else and even looked into a lot of Arthurian lore, but since Nakaba mines those for canon and I didn’t want to risk any overlap, I swerved in a different direction all together.

➤ epilogue 1.0 is hot garbage, I started writing this before 296 came out and it was built on assumptions that thankfully turned out not to be true. I trashed it quickly and I like 2.0 much, much better. It’s embarrassingly bad though and this is why you edit, okay. Also, it focused solely on Hendrickson and Dreyfus when the fic did become an ensemble piece and therefore, the other characters deserved to get closure. Some of the sentence structure and imagery got cannibalized for the very last part of the new epilogue, though.

➤ most of the chapter titles stayed the same from the beginning; only chapter 5’s changed. It was originally "in which a good boy questions a demon’s fashion choices" which was a reference to Howzer switching sides and Bathin-as-Fraudrin stuff. Bathin shifted to chapter 6 entirely though, so it became less relevant. The placeholder title was 'in which lightning strikes twice’’ which is a reference to Gilthunder and Zaratras, but since Zaratras doesn’t actually fight in that one, it didn’t make sense.

Everything from here on is from my notes in my project file; the only things I’ve done are rearranged the order for clarity and expanded on shorthand, though there are a couple of italicized notes in parenthesis that I added in later. Some of it is pretty disjointed tbqh! I have a bad habit of not writing in order.

Like I said before, I do a notes file for pretty much anything I write, as it’s where I dump ideas so I don’t forget or move cut text to in case I decide I like the older version better later on (it’s happened). This one just got ridiculously large, so hopefully someone besides me gets a kick out of it.

General notes

Hendrickson wakes up in an apartment, everything is taken care of, wtf

maybe Zaratras has been there for a bit and they're like ARE WE DEAD?? and he's just all HA HA you better not be.

Zaratras is the guy who has just been there!! Forever!! He runs a bar.

Gil is from just before the Kingdom Infiltration arc, so he is just sad and tired all the time.

Howzer is from early and a good boy but also devoted to Dreyfraudrin so it’s like. ??? When he sees those two. He will bond with Hendrickson and this time it will be Hendy’s turn to be like hey. Come. It’s fine.

The ultimate goal with Gil and Howzer is basically attempting to make people whisper "who hurt you."

Merlin shows up in the end like hmm you were all pulled into a pocket dimension but don’t worry, you should be expelled right back into the timeline where you left. No big deal. Bye.

Helbram and Hendrickson kind of. They’re not OKAY but they realize they are both shitty people who were in an impossible situation. Helbram is the petty type, so he’s not really going to forgive him, but Hendrickson doesn’t need his forgiveness either. The two of them work together though because it’s the only way out

Helbram just dunks on Hendrickson constantly because of course he does

Guila is from the same period as Hendrickson and Dreyfus, but she has been there for months by the time they arrive. Zeal is there too because otherwise she’d destroy everyone and everything.

They come in pairs, from similar points in time?

Guila and Zeal are just before the holy war, around chapter 252. Team smartass gen z

Hendrickson and Dreyfus are post 266 / 285 or whatever. Team old man

Zaratras and Helbram are team post death. Team DEAD

Gil and super early bro Howzer who work for Dreyfraudrin. Team dumb boys

Jericho and Merlin. Merlin just lurks for ages, there should be hints about her from chapter 2 on then she’s like lol hi. Post 197 for Jericho, Merlin plays coy because who cares. After 197, Merlin senses Bathin and is like gimme. Team Jericho Broke Nothing

Bathin notes

It’s powered by a crystal that preys on their fears?? Hence Dreyfraudrin existing. Zaratras kind of knows what’s up because he can sense it, since the energy sort of started when he got there, the dude gained a form when Gil showed up, then power when Guila arrived and later Jericho, and now Hendy and Dreyfus sort of complete the collection. It’s their fears all manifested. Merlin has no impact on it though and actually weakened it because ha ha ha you think she has fears, that’s cute. (this shifted to Bathin’s true form being a crystal — I was trying to stick to my "no OC" rule.)

Beleth or Bathin, a fragment of the sangréal? <— too complicated, stick with Ars Goetia lore interpreted for nnt-land. (I think my plan here was some ancient artifact?? Like the sacred treasures. It got really complicated really fast which is no good.) Belialuin Bathinal

Bathin is a demon, its true form is the crystal, it feeds on fears and created the pocket dimension to try and regain a more viable physical form, the weakened state is why its legions are so weak.

But also Bathin feeds on fears and craves Hendrickson and the others’ fears of Fraudrin and everything, and when Bathin finally gets Hendy and is like aren’t you afraid?? He’s just. Yes. I am absolutely terrified. But because Dreyfus took the time to punch him in the heart repeatedly he’s not going to roll over, he has to keep going. Helbram also yells at him like HOW DARE YOU. YOU CAN’T. (This shifted to Jericho in chapter 5 so it could become a more solid arc in the end with the confrontation in 6. Helbram got his moment with Hendrickson and Guila instead and, later, his goodbye.)

Bathin appears like Dreyfraudrin and Margaret, so when they strike Fraudrin down and are like ok?? We good?? Margaret turns and cuts them?? You have until chapter 6 to decide. (it’s pretty obvious what I decided.)

Outline

Hendrickson is the perspective character. Only the interlude, which is Dreyfus-centric, isn’t. (The other two interludes were added as I was writing later on.)

Chapter 1: Hendrickson and Dreyfus and general scene setting. Chapter 2: They actually go around town, Guila and Jericho are super introduced, we get glimpses of Gil and Howzer and they kind of talk to the latter. Kind of. Chapter 3: They get to the bar where there’s a bartender that dresses like a mysterious knight, spooky scary etc etc. It’s Zaratras. Helbram is there, too. More on Gil, Howzer should be questioning. Hendrickson leaves Dreyfus at the bar, runs into Howzer on the way out. Interlude 1: Dreyfus figures out Hendrickson’s plan re: Ludociel. Interlude 2: Jericho and Guila on Helbram. Interlude 3: Howzer and Gilthunder. Chapter 4: The confrontation between Dreyfus and Hendrickson. Howzer crashes their place because of course he does. Chapter 5: The Dreyfraudrin chapter. Vs Gilthunder. Zeal will guide them; alluded to in chapter 3. Chapter 6: The source, Bathin, is revealed, Merlin shows herself. Epilogue: The end. "I’m going to make you see how wrong you are." —> this promise HAS to be fulfilled.

TIMELINE:

Five+ months — Zaratras and Helbram

Five months — Gilthunder and Howzer

Three months — Guila and Zeal

A week — Jericho and Merlin

~Days — Hendrickson and Dreyfus

Setting

Eighteenth Plaza — Bathin is the 18th Goetia. Based on Shibuya 109 on the outside.

Pub’s name — Wandering Knight, Silver Helm

Possible Combos - Shot Purge (Guila-Hendrickson) —> Holy Shot?

Flats are like a venus fly trap, lulling them into a false sense of security and complacency so Bathin can keep feeding off their fear?? Maybe it was and then Merlin showed up like lol hi. (I dumped this because it overcomplicated things a lot; it just became very subtly and only partially implied in chapter 5 but ultimately not very important.)

Cut lines

Chapter Two: What the four of them manage to put together quickly — really, Guila and Hendrickson exchanging theories and ideas while Jericho and Dreyfus watch from across the booth in silent wonder, occasionally exchanging glances as if to say what is wrong with these two — is this: (I wish I could have kept the Jericho and Dreyfus bit, but it didn’t work. This was when they were in the booth, exchanging information.)

“Now hold on a minute, Gilthunder!” Dreyfus turns back to face him, squaring his shoulders. “This— this isn’t what you think! If it’s about M—”

It’s Hendrickson’s turn to yank Dreyfus back, hissing in his ear. “Don’t.” (I didn’t want to complicate it with Margaret. This was before I’d decided to have Bathin use Margaret as a guise as well, but I’d still cut it even if I knew.)

Chapter Five: “You should be.” Hendrickson counters, resting his hands on the back of the couch, leaning forward to look down at Helbram. “Because he brought you and Zaratras here before anyone else. It’s likely that he preys on the souls of the dead.” He pauses at that, glancing over at Guila who nods in agreement, before shifting his attention back to the fairy. “Even if we ‘get out,’ you can’t just live here. Bathin will continue to eat away at your very spirit.” (there are several logical flaws in this that got cleaned up in the final version, which reads very similarly.)

“That should be plenty of time.” Guila pats at Zeal’s shoulder lightly. “Some of us won’t even need that much time, certainly.” (The scene was dragging on for too long and this was ultimately unnecessary. I tend to be really wordy and not know when to stop a scene, so I cut a lot for the sake of flow later on or rework things.)

“Especially since this isn’t Dreyfus’s field of expertise.” (This was cut from the conversation Hendrickson had with Zaratras -- about strategy -- because frankly, it isn’t true and even if it was, Hendrickson wouldn’t say something like that. I cut a lot of stuff like this where it works for the plot but doesn’t track with the character. editing good!!)

The screech of tires can be heard in the distance.

“Ah, I believe they’ve managed to find a vehicle!” (god I really wanted to put Zaratras commenting on grand theft auto in this, even if it made no narrative sense.)

Chapter Six: “Huh?” Jericho gives her a confused look before looking back over her shoulder, where Bathin and Gilthunder were battling it out hand-to-sword. “Yeah, I just— this place is starting to fall apart.”

“Yes, it is, which is why we need to be careful. If you could provide a distraction—”

“Oh!” She snaps her fingers in response. “Yeah, okay, I can do that!” (Jericho was a bit too passive here and it was difficult to transition to the next beat. I reworked it in the final version.)

“Be careful. He’s using his weight as a weapon.” (This was somewhere in phase two of the Bathin fight. I was trying to set the character apart from other demons that they’ve fought, but this was too expository. Hopefully, the sentiment got across in description and whatnot and if not, uh. Oops.)

As he pulls away, flying off towards solid ground, the ice begins to audibly crack. Hendrickson stares up at it, almost resigned in a way. “So this is it,” he murmurs to himself, watching the cracks spider-web their way along the platform (I removed this and tweaked the final paragraph because it didn’t quite line up with Hendrickson’s character in this, especially given the turning point that comes only a paragraph or two later. That one line doesn’t line up with the rest of his arc in the entire fic; I was trying to make it obvious that the ice was cracking and wasn’t going to hold, but uh. This was not the way to do it.)

As an amicable silence falls between them — a far cry from the silence that lingered the last time he took this elevator up — (The transition in the elevator was hard.)

Gilthunder clenches a fist. “That’s exactly why I can’t forget. If I—” He swallows hard. (A lot of stuff gets cut because I start typing and can’t figure out where to go with it. It just didn’t work in the sequence and was too emotional for Gilthunder’s canon point.)

“By the way, have you seen Helbram?” (Zaratras was going to ask about Helbram as well, but that would have dragged the pacing down. Besides, I’d like to think that after their time together, Zaratras ‘gets’ Helbram on some level and knows he’d want to head out on his own terms.)

The orange hue fades into the black of the night, growing brighter and brighter with every passing moment, much like the world around them. And then, it reaches a point where it becomes blindingly bright, like a warmth washing over all of them at once. And then—

And then— (Did you know that this was basically the same format I used to end the pentultimate section of another fic because I sure didn’t until I just so happened to reread it before posting this one. god. damnit.)

Epilogue:

“I’m getting better, right?”

Jericho looks over her shoulder at Hendrickson, then gestures at a small patch of ice in front of her. The druid glances between her and the patch, looking mildly uncertain. “It’s progress,” he admits after a moment.

“You should have seen it the other day, though!” She stomps her foot. “Sir Dreyfus told me I had a lot of potential. (This was originally how Jericho’s epilogue was going to start. It didn’t seem right for her though, especially given the ‘reset’ tone, so I cut it and started from scratch. This would potentially work if it was Dreyfus, but not Hendrickson.)

Detailed chapter breakdowns

Chapter 3: Helbram is disguised, Zaratras is in his armor, it’s a pub and they’re INCOGNITO ok. Helbram spills a drink on Hendrickson like an asshole before the reveal. They figure out that the bartender and server aren’t on the same “script” as the NPCs.

CHAPTER 4 ends with them meeting up with Guila and Jericho, Guila is like this is Bathin, the Eighteenth Duke of the Demon Realm.

CHAPTER 5 is the big planning chapter + infiltrating and fighting Gilthunder. At the end, Bathin’s legions converge on Eighteenth Plaza and Dreyfus stays behind to stop them. Zaratras helps, brothers!! They can have a sad scene with Hendy.

CHAPTER 6 will have a big fight scene in it, this needs to be carefully blocked and mapped out. (narrator voice: it was not carefully blocked and mapped out.)

THE PLAYERS

Bathin — via Dreyfraudrin and Margaret. A lot of darkness, demon powers, fear manipulation. Teleportation? Dreyfraudrin has strength, Margaret has Velvet Crowe-esque hand bs? Dark tendrils, like a cat’s tail.

Hendrickson — Purge, Acid. Purge can weaken Bathin’s power. Dreyfus — Break, Full Size. Full Size might be too much for the building. Dreyfus and Zaratras could hold off Bathin’s legions? Guila — Explosion. Combo with Hendrickson at one point. Jericho — Ice Fang. Someone can get thrown out the elevator at some point and Jericho uses ice to extend a platform and keep them from falling. Eventually uses ice to root Bathin in place so she can PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE!!! Howzer — Tempest. Gilthunder — Thunderbolt. Short circuits the electronics? Helbram — plays his part disguised as Gil to get everyone in, fucks off partway through. Returns to yell at idiots. (This plan was too complicated; what I settled on works better character-wise and narratively speaking.) Zaratras — Great Thunder. Works with Dreyfus to hold off Bathin’s THIRTY DEMON LEGIONS so the others can take him.

Merlin — Infinity. She needs Bathin to be weakened and have his guard down to strike, which is why she slinks in the background and waits. Probably steps in after they’ve done that but Bathin is like YOU FOOLS!! Etc etc. Uses infinity to keep the Holy Shot effect goin’ (see above notes about Merlin)

THE SETTING

Top floor of Eighteenth Plaza. There’s the massive office, the long hallway, and the elevator. This is the main area for Bathin.

In the lobby, Zaratras and Dreyfus will take on Bathin’s legions of demons after freeing Gilthunder from his influence.

Guila and Hendrickson get thrown out the glass elevator window, Jericho creates an ice shelf that they cling to, Howzer and Gil work on keeping Bathin busy while Helbram flies out and grabs Guila at Hendrickson’s urging. Hendrickson falls.

Small brief flashback to super young Hendy and Jenna? A call back to being shown how wrong he is. Jenna’s just like LOOK YOU’LL BE FINE, YOU NEVER LIKED IT HERE ANYWAY!! Gosh you’re such a dour kid sometimes, geez, but don’t worry, someone’ll show you how wrong you are someday.

Full Size Dreyfus catches him because gratuitous yes.

Bathin is unfair but so is Merlin.

. . . and that’s it! Hopefully that was interesting to someone and if not, uh. I’m very sorry. Thank you for reading! 🙏

#nnt #fic #liner notes

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dumpstersny · 3 years ago

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Ways to Overcome Waste Challenges for Colleges and Universities

Campus waste management plans can vary significantly with seasons. There may be a hive of activity in one month and absolutely nothing in the other. So, if you haven’t really paid attention to formulating a customized waste plan, now is the time to get going. You can start with educating the younger generation on how they can make efforts to fight environmental challenges and be part of an extended mission. Apart from that, here are three critical obstacles campuses like yours face and ways to overcome those.

Summer Break Waste Management

Unless there aren’t any summer camps or extra classes, the college or university premises can literally sit idle and unused. Winter breaks, too, can have similar consequences. The facility can instantly go from larger waste accumulation to almost negligible volumes.

And you must still be paying for the same services. So it is essential to conduct a thorough waste audit every year, especially during long breaks, so you can understand the type of services you require during those times. Talk to your garbage company about the volumes generated and discarded during summer break to better manage your time and expenses.

End of Semester Move-Out

Compared to summer breaks, end-semester move-outs generate massive amounts of trash, including furniture, bedding, clothing, paperwork, and more. Multiple, bigger-sized dumpsters with bulk pickups are needed to accommodate those volumes of waste and keep the facility clean.

During these times, authorities can implement recycling, reusing, donating, and shredding programs. In fact, find ways to reduce the stuff that will have to be thrown in the landfill. The less dump you have at the landfill, the more you save both financially and environmentally. The facility can work towards sustainable goals and also spread awareness among prospective students.

Waste Contamination

Waste and recycling contamination is a major challenge with college and/or university waste. It happens when the materials are not sorted into correct bins or ways. This costs the contractor significant time and money to segregate waste offsite, reducing the sustainability effort. The higher the contamination, the higher the landfill usage leading to multiple kinds of pollution.

Therefore, draft a comprehensive waste management plan with your garbage company. It must be thoughtfully incorporated into the facility’s design and structure. Locate specific containers strategically so everyone can avoid waste contamination. Apart from integrating proper waste sorting protocols, ensure students are aware of those policies to better assist your plans.

Also, if you’re yet to find a reliable waste partner, make a simple Google search – waste management near me – and you shall be able to find an experienced and certified service provider.

The Bottom Line

Campus waste management isn’t easy. Some facilities are so huge they’re like cities in themselves. However, no matter the size of the campus, each one must be a model for sustainability to protect its costs and the environment and leave a positive impact on the students. Also, find better, creative, and customized ways to manage and recycle waste and align with a larger, long-term vision.

#waste management

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anyway-i-love-vanderwood · 8 years ago

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✿ oops this has been mostly done in my drafts for like a week and i forgot to post it. Minor trio version of this post!

this poor moron doesn’t know how to deal with you.

he likes you, he realizes, fairly early on in his acquaintance with you. It’s after you say something interesting about one of his photographs - as per V’s usual - though the content of it is… odd.

Actually, you didn’t even mean for him to hear it, and he doesn’t even tell you for a long time that he even did. It was a quiet admission, mumbled under your breath as you stared at one of his larger prints.

“Is this… what it’s like to be happy?”

(you’re both sad and kind of screwed up, exactly V’s type.)

It’s way easier for you to admit feelings regarding inanimate objects than feelings regarding people, so you accepted that you loved V’s photography long before you understood that you also loved V.

At first, you attributed your constant thoughts of him to, y’know, having one of his pictures on your wall. You’d stare into space, chewing on your pencil and thinking about him, and when you realized what you were doing, you’d stop, shake your head, and briefly think about how weird that was before moving on.

A barrier was surrounded around your heart, one that prevented the realization of “damn, I like V”, and V realized pretty quickly that it was there. V also knew that he was a Trash Person Undeserving Of You, so he made absolutely no efforts to try to broach the topic of intimacy…

...but you were oddly open with him, due to your fascination with his photography.

You’d come to look at his photos. You’d ask him about what he was thinking, what he was feeling when he produced each shot, which often leads into deep discussions of emotions. these talks give you a deeper understanding into how people think, and V really is very patient with all your questions.

this makes things very difficult, because V really just wants to grab you by the shoulders and say, i like you!

but he’s terrifed of pressuring you, so he doesn’t!

UGH!

In the chat, you get weirdly protective of him. You’re defensive when Yoosung slanders him, you try to get Jumin to forgive him for the whole “oh yeah I kept the cult my ex-girlfriend was running a secret’, and you repeatedly tell V that, what the heck, he deserved literally nothing that Rika did. When asked to examine your motivations of why you’re doing this, all you can say is…

he’s too nice to have people say bad things about him!

No other reason, seriously!

No, Zen, STOP ASKING if you like him, YOU DON’T. THIS IS JUST A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE, OKAY?

All the while, V suffers under his crush, because every nice thing you do makes his heart skip double-time, but he keeps telling himself that he CAN’T like you, it’s RUDE, and confessing is just absolutely off the table.

Eventually, your interactions with the RFA start making you… envy the idea of a relationship. It’s Zen and Yoosung’s fault, mostly, they keep talking up the idea and how wonderful it’d be, but as you get more and more attached to people and figure out your own ability to handle emotions with V’s guidance, you start maybe kinda… wanting that.

And, clueless of his affections for you, you express that to V. How sad you are, that no one could ever love you because you’re a broken garbage dump of a person.

The resulting conversation gets impassioned due to V being desperate to convince you that no, that’s not the case. In the heat of the moment, he even says, “It’s not true! There’s someone who likes you!”

He regrets it immediately after, but when you press for more details…

He ends up being forced to confess.

and you end up being surprisingly okay with that.

V is comfortable. Safe. Considerate. He is pretty much the most non-scary person to like, and yeah, he has his Rika Hangups, but him not having it totally together makes you feel a bit better by comparison. And he’s been through pain! He knows what it’s like!

So… V ends up stunned as you accept his feelings with relative grace, and even after a month, he still can’t believe that you’re really trying this whole dating thing.

Saeran (Unknown)

look if you thought Jumin was a mess, then this is just a complete fucking disaster.

i can’t even articulate how badly this goes. neither of you have anything even approaching the proper faculties of dealing with Feelings, and Saeran just got out of a wackadoodle religious cult. His relationship with his brother is strained, his coping mechanisms are nonexistant, and he needs years of therapy before he’ll be anything even approaching normal. The only reason he’s even in a position to eventually end up in a relationship with you - and you, with him - is because of Jaehee.

Or, more particularly, Jaehee’s coffee shop.

Saeran, coming out of Mint Eye, is Completely Unemployable, and through a complex series of circumstances, Jaehee decides that screw working for Jumin, she wants to open her dream cafe. So, a few months after Saeran’s tumultuous exodus from the cult, he ends up working at Jaehee’s small start-up business as a barista…

...And you end up being their number one customer.

You tell yourself it’s because you want to support Jaehee in her business endeavors. You tell yourself that the atmosphere is nice, and that it’s a pleasant place to work, and that you like their cake. You tell yourself that Saeran is, shockingly enough, great at making coffee, and you other people’s lattes just don’t taste good to you anymore.

These are all, in some small measure, true - but that’s not the real reason why you show up like clockwork every day around the middle of Saeran’s shift.

He’s cute, and you want to see him.

Now, of course you attribute this attraction to his skill at making drinks. You’re just… happy to have such an amazing afternoon pick-me-up! And it’s - normal, that you’d be glad that Saeran seems to be slowly starting to smile, because he’s had a shitty life and you’re not totally devoid of human emotion. You can be inspired by his success! And Jaehee’s success! It doesn’t mean anything!

And Saeran, for his part, denies that he at ALL looks forward to your daily visits. He doesn’t anticipate it, watching the clock for it to tick down to your usual arrival hour. He doesn’t start making Your Usual as soon as he sees you walking down the street, and he NEVER, EVER gets worried when you show up a few minutes late.

that’d be silly, and saeran is not a silly man.

These lies pile up into a mutual crush that is half-adorable and half-exhausting for the surrounding bystanders. If anyone even so much as mentions that he might maybe like you, he flips out and stops speaking to you for a week. This, in return, makes you unhappy… but, unable to process why you’d be unhappy that Saeran is only responding to you in grunts, causes to to sulk and to escape the situation - i.e. halting your visits.

This distresses Saeran, who gets anxious around the time you used to visit… and annoys Jaehee, who now has to deal with a distracted, lovelorn employee.

This cycle of tiffs and spats lasts for over a year, where you find yourselves put in various compromising situations - i.e. being pushed to spend time together on Valentine’s Day, you ending up at the Choi’s place for Christmas, and you spending about two hours locked in a closet with the idiot tsundere. This… sort of gets you closer? Kind of?

After a really emotional, three-a.m. conversation where you both talk about how it Kinda Sucks not being able to make friends and seeing everyone around you happy while you… aren’t, the two of you think that, well.

maybe you kind of care for each other?

It’s - it’s a start.

Vanderwood

One day, a ‘manual of dating’ arrives on your doorstep, and you go through the entire RFA to find the culprit. Unsurprisingly, it’s Seven.

See, Seven has noticed something. You’re serious, severe, bad at jokes, and just in general at horrible at this whole human connection thing. You’re can be kind of prickly, and while you don’t really seem to take to most people, there’s someone who you’ve been getting kinda close to. Someone who’s often there for you, and someone who seems to genuinely like your presence, which the same is true in reverse.

That’s right, he’s talking about Vanderwood.

WHAT THE HECK, you say, because that’s DUMB, of COURSE you don’t want to date Vanderwood, they’re just… y’know, they’re not a moron. Of course you like them decently. If Seven stopped being a complete idiot, you’d like him decently, too.

Seven laughs, but shockingly enough, doesn’t press the issue. “Just read it,” he says. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”

Maybe you’ll learn something your ass. Hell, you’re about to throw it away when you think that it’s kind of a shame to throw a book out, even it’s stupid. Maybe you can use it as a paperweight or something. Bathroom reading material, maybe. It’d probably be good for a laugh, right?

That’s what you tell yourself that rainy day a month later when you pick it up again. ‘Good for a laugh’. Maybe you’ll find something funny.

Maybe you’ll text it to Vanderwood to laugh about with you.

Vanderwood has a heart attack at the first message, which is about how there’s an entire section devoted to date spots. Hahahaha, they laugh, that SURE IS FUNNY, the idea that they would want to take you to ANY OF THESE SPOTS.

(it’s not true, they tell themselves before planning to MURDER SEVEN FOR INTERFERING IN THEIR BUSINESS. it’s NOT TRUE THAT THEY LIKE YOU.)

You keep going on, talking about how ridiculous all this nonsense is (how to have conversations? great gift ideas? fun places to eat out - seriously?) and they keep sweating bullets, particularly when, in a fit of mania, you say

“Some of this actually sounds kind of fun. Want to try it?”

“what do you mean” they respond because oh my god are you asking them out

“I dunno, just as friends? It could be fun.”

so they go on one of these “fun expeditions” with you, just as friends.

The entire time, they are nervous and you are OBLIVIOUS. You have fun, so you ask them out again, because you’ve never really been good at friendship and you’re not an emotionless robot. You just have trust issues out the wazoo. But Vanderwood is reasonable, capable, and actually pretty funny, so spending time with them is entertaining…

And unlike Seven, they don’t make stupid jokes, which is a huge plus.

This happens again, and again, and again, and Vanderwood just kinda takes it as it comes.

After date number five, you start feeling this odd, warm fuzziness when thinking about them - and you think about them a lot. Your hangouts have been on the weekends, and you start, for once in your life, anticipating something. You plan out your excursions with relentless detail, using the manual for guidance… because you know they like things organized, and the longer you spend thinking about what you’re going to do with them, the happier you get?

You tell Seven this at three in the morning, and he’s like, ‘It sounds like you’re in love.”

WHAT.

NO.

YOU ARE NOT.

...right?

You get sulky and grumpy about this, because you can’t really deal with the information. You’ve never liked anyone before, but in an effort to prove Seven wrong, you flip to the section in your manual titled ‘accepting and analyzing your feelings’ and

whoops.

it’s like finding your symptoms on a WebMD document.

Anyway, this causes you to shut down. In terror, you stop communicating with Vanderwood, who gets really worried about you because not only are you their crush, you are their best pal, and of course they’re going to worry when something happens to you. So, after a day of radio silence, they show up at your place…

and when they say ‘hi’, you slam the door in their face, unable to handle even looking at them.

What the hell is wrong with you? You question for the bazillionth time, because even just seeing them makes your heart do this weird, horrible skipping. This can’t be love, can it? You feel like you’re dying! How do people live like this?

Vanderwood is worried, and starts banging on the door to be let in. They don’t understand anything that’s happening, and all they want to know is if you’re okay.

You tell them to go away, and Vanderwood is heartbroken, thinking they’d done something wrong.

When they find out what Seven has been plotting, they’re PISSED. They go to you again, telling you that Seven is an IDIOT, don’t LISTEN to him, everything he has to say is stupid, but - speaking to them from the other side of the door - you admit that

no.

seven is right.

y-you like them, the book said so, and this is awful and scary and -

and you don’t know how to DEAL with it and -

As you start panicking, Vanderwood asks to be let in, and they help calm you down when you finally open the door.

They tell you a bunch of things. That dating is honestly pretty silly, that it doesn’t matter, and you can just… have fun with them. Stop working yourself up. It’s fine, a-and, well, if you do like them, that’s okay, because they’re… not going to reject you… because they…

kinda like you too…

BUT YOU DO NOT HAVE TO RUSH IT IS FINE DON’T LISTEN TO SEVEN AND HIS BAD IDEAS, HE -

They stop talking when you hug them, because ever since you read about it in that book, it’s seemed like a kind of fun thing to do.

#mysme #mysme headcanons #mystic messenger #mystic messenger headcanons #mysme reactions #mystic messenger reactions #mysme imagines #mystic messenger imagines #long post #mystic messenger spoilers #mysme spoilers #vanderwood #v #saeran choi

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junker-town · 6 years ago

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A Halloween candy draft, because we are a sports website

Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Eight GMs. 24 picks. 1 ultimate candy haul.

Halloween is for everyone. Kids who want to trick-or-treat. Adults who want an excuse to wear costumes outside of Comic-Con. But especially for the candy lovers.

While children trade cuteness for the primary currency of their adolescent world, the childless among us must wait an extra 12 hours to profit. There’s no sweeter day in this world than November 1, where the racks and racks of sugary sweetness at grocery stores across the world become a distressed asset. All Saint’s Day is America’s gift to the gluttons, the beginning of a one week period where, if you play your cards right, you can purchase your body weight in Milky Ways for $15.

But which candy truly reigns supreme? That’s too big a question for just one person.

[Related: 17 last-minute Halloween costumes for sports fans in 2019]

About two weeks ago, a handful of SB Nation staffers threw down the gauntlet on breakfast cereals. A raging debate between honey vs. fruit vs. chocolate eventually exploded into a three-round draft where the world saw James Brady reign supreme with a lineup of Honey Nut Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Reese’s Puffs.

Brady, oat-loving coward that he is, decided to retire with his mantle intact. In his place, eight other SB Nation writers stepped into the void to create their three-candy roster. Now it’s time to dive back into that sugar mine for Halloween season. Here’s how it turned out.

Round 1

1. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups — Whitney Medworth

It’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Do I really have to explain it?

David (Fooch) Fucillo: How am I supposed to shit talk peanut butter cups? Who would NOT have this atop their big board?

Tom Ziller: Easiest No. 1 overall pick since Zion. Disks over novelty shapes.

2. Skittles — Matt Ellentuck

Best fruity candy. It’s obvious.

Fooch: Y’all will trash me for candy corn, but as Eric Stephen put it, taste the lame-bow. Skittles are a perfectly fine candy, but who the hell takes it No. 2 overall? I feel like this will turn into the Ryan Leaf of #2 picks. If you had to go with “fruit” candy, Mike & Ikes would have been my preferred choice, but even Starburst feels like a better choice.

James Dator: Skittles are so overrated it’s scary. They’re way too sweet and literally dissolve into sugar crystals.

Ziller: Jabari Parker went No. 2 over Joel Embiid and Skittles went No. 2 over Snickers. Wow.

3. Snickers — Caroline Darney

Look, I didn’t think Reese’s would fall to three, so I’m happy going with Snickers. Snickers is one of the few candy bars that doesn’t loose that...je ne sais quoi...when it’s fun sized, but it’s a grand slam if you get a full sized one of these bad boys in whatever plastic pumpkin/pillow case you’re carrying through the neighborhood. This is a classic, and sure, I’ll build a team around it.

Christian D’Andrea: Regular Snickers aren’t even the best candy in their own brand extension. Crispers. Almond. Peanut butter. ALL SUPERIOR

Ziller: Both a delicious candy and a workout for your jaw muscles. Win-win.

4. 100 Grand — Tom Ziller

100 Grand is a classic candy that is best served in fun size (hence why full-sized bars are split in half). A lot of different textures happening here. A lot of complexity.

D’Andrea: Ziller, in either an act of hubris or just not being on Slack for draft day, missed his picks in the first two rounds and played catchup later. His first pick was a brick of mud dipped in rice. Nestle Crunch and Milky Way were both still available. This was a terrible idea.

5. Kit Kat — Christian D’Andrea

The chocolate is pretty great, especially if you can get your hands on the European version. The wafers don’t taste like anything, they’re just there for wonderful texture and to provide something to break apart with your teeth if you’re a nervous weirdo like me. Bonus points if you can break the candy down to its basic components like a Hershey Park diagram before eating it.

Eric Stephen: Gimme a break!

D’Andrea: God dammit, Eric.

6. Candy corn — David Fucillo

I get dumped on for picking Candy Corn in the first round and you’d think I was the Jets drafting a fullback. Most of y’all will argue I reached in a big way, but it only takes one other person to ruin my Halloween. I don’t eat candy corn outside of October 1 to October 31, but for that one month, it is truly a delight. The only opinion that matters is that of my taste buds, and they demand candy corn every October.

Darney: This pick has big “took a kicker in the first round” energy.

Ellentuck: Candy corn is good and I’m here to stan it actually.

James Dator: Yeah, I thought Fooch was tanking the draft like @boring_as_heck used to ruin NFL mock drafts. I still think he might have. I refuse to believe that in the pantheon of candy any reasonable adult with their faculties would look at a list of confection delights and say “why yes, I would like this honey-flavored wax please.” While the overall abuse of candy corn has gone a little far and is the cool thing to do (like trashing pineapple on pizza) this is still an absolutely garbage pick that would have been a UDFA. This is a worthless, awful, horrible pick that absolutely nobody should applaud Fooch for. I still love you dude, and I’m not mad. I’m not even disappointed. I’m just bewildered.

Ziller: What are we doing here? Is Fooch taking edible vampire fangs in the second round? Is he actually going to pick something like raisins?

7. Twix — Eric Stephen

I was worried that with such a low pick that I would have to draft a lesser treat in the first round, but instead I was fortunate enough to have a Mount Rushmore candy fall into my lap. Twix provides a perfect crunch with the inner biscuit, coated with the best combination of caramel and chocolate in the candy universe. It usually gets dark earlier around Halloween, but houses that give out Twix are beacons of hope.

Darney: I’ll say it. Caramel Twix are trash. TEAM PB TWIX FOR LIFE.

Ziller: Good value pick.

8. Reese’s Pieces — James Dator

Thanks to someone picking Candy Corn in the first round I got a sleeper here. I’m not going to say something ludicrous like “Reece’s Pieces are better than Reece’s Cups,” but the drop off really isn’t that far. This is a No. 1 pick adjacent candy I’m thrilled to get with the 8th pick.

Fooch: I don’t hate Reese’s Pieces, but the peanut butter aspect of them is missing something. They’re the M&M version of the cups, but frankly it just doesn’t go together as well. M&M type candies are best as plain chocolate (down with peanut M&Ms!), and going PB with them, I just am not a fan.

Round 2

1. Starburst — James Dator

I was a little shook at this pick, to be honest. I was sure I was going to be able to go Twix-Reece’s Pieces with my back-to-back selections and walk away knowing I owned these noobs. Good pick by Eric, so I had to pivot.

Starburst was my top fruit candy on the board and paired nicely with my Pieces pickup. Every flavor of Starburst is good. They are the perfect size and have a good tail end for medium-length enjoyability.

D’Andrea: All the flavor of Fruit Stripe gum, only with an added 3 percent chance of pulling out a filling with each lemon piece you bite into.

Ziller: Half the flavors low-key suck. So in the fun-size two-candy edition, you have a decent chance of coming up empty. Decent overall candy, bad Halloween candy.

2. Peanut M&Ms — Eric Stephen

A tried and true classic, M&Ms in the fun-sized bag is the perfect amount. I chose the peanut variety over regular because I love the combo of peanuts and chocolate, and each M is a perfect bite. Though who are we kidding, I’m not putting just one of these in my mouth at a time.

Fooch: Outside of peanut butter, peanuts are just bad. Why ruin a good little piece of chocolate with them? Frankly, any candy with a peanut in it has just been ruined.

Ziller: Fooch’s comment here explains a lot about his draft.

D’Andrea: I think we all came away from this pick more worried about Fooch’s wellbeing than Eric’s actual selection.

3. Nestle Crunch — David Fucillo

I pondered a Hershey’s special dark bar here, but that ricey chocolate mix of the Crunch bar has been a favorite of mine all the way back to a childhood. A Hershey bar is great on its own, but the “crunch” of a Crunch bar is unmatched amongst chocolate bars. Outside of candy corn and Reese’s peanut butter cups, this was #3 on my big board.

Dator: I’m supposed to shit talk you, but I’m subverting our structure just to tell you that I’m proud you made a good choice here.

4. Crispy M&Ms— Christian D’Andrea

By far the superior breed of M&M. I don’t know why they don’t sell these in five gallon drums.

Ziller: M&Ms aren’t great, but at least they are versatile (add them to cookies, popcorn, ice cream sundae). You can’t really do that with Crispy M&Ms.

5. Hershey’s Special Dark — Tom Ziller

This was a panic pick after missing the live draft, but to justify it: these always go first in that variety bag with Hershey’s, Mr. Goodbar, and Krackel, right? There’s a reason: dark chocolate is delicious. Even Hershey’s dark chocolate.

D’Andrea: Were baking morsels unavailable? There’s a certain brand of old man strength here, picking a chocolate bar that also sounds like a six dollar bottle of rum.

6. Tootsie Roll Pops — Caroline Darney

There’s going to be some sass on this pick, but 1. don’t tell me you don’t still search to see if you got a wrapper with the star on it and 2. any song related to these slaps. Don’t @ me.

D’Andrea: The taste of going to the doctor to get shots as a child, wrapped around the 20-year-old sweets eternally stuck to the bottom of your grandmother’s candy jar. Truly a winning combination.

Dator: Take a trash candy and put a stick in it so it’s even less enjoyable. Sounds like a winning combo.

Ziller: I haven’t eaten one of these in 25 years and I can still taste the cotton swab that stays stuck to the Tootsie Roll in the middle. Bleh.

7. Mike & Ike — Matt Ellentuck

Second-best fruity candy. It’s obvious.

D’Andrea: The perfect “my stepdad let me buy candy at the Dollar Tree” selection.

Ziller: Hot Tamales without any flavor. What’s not to like?

8. Butterfinger— Whitney Medworth

I can’t believe Butterfingers were still available at this point in the draft. There is nothing better than a fun size butterfinger in your trick or treat bag. Crispety, Crunchety, peanut-buttery chocolate bar perfection.

Stephen: Butterfinger has a rich history as one of Earth’s greatest candy bars, but since the flavor change last year it tastes like rancid cockroaches.

Ziller: I got so mad I left Butterfinger on the table. First-round talent. This is why sports teams “prepare” and “do research” and “make big boards.”

D’Andrea: Butterfinger is great. Especially the way it adheres to every crevice in your teeth so you keep tasting it for hours afterward.

Round 3

1. Wild Berry Skittles— Whitney Medworth

First off, my prior two picks were Reese’s Cups and Butterfinger so this pick is to round out my team and add that extra kick of flavor necessary. The combo is too strong: Berry punch, Strawberry, Melon berry, Wild cherry, and Raspberry. No weak links. No green. No yellow. Just good.

D’Andrea: Congratulations on selecting the fifth-best version of Skittles. Each one is a tiny trip to Smoothie King, only without the smug satisfaction of babysitting a 40oz jug of “vitamins” the rest of the day.

2. Cookies and Cream Hershey’s — Matt Ellentuck

Regular chocolate is basic as hell, but the cookies and cream version is not basic as hell. It’s actually the perfect complement to fruity candies like umm... Skittles. Or Mike & Ikes.

Ziller: “Want a cookie? Too bad, here’s a piece of chocolate with fake cookie inside it.”

3. Nerds — Caroline Darney

Nerds are the perfect Halloween candy because it’s not one that you’d really ever buy for yourself. October 31 is like the only night you accumulate these little crunchy nubs of sugar, and eating them straight out of the tiny little box is truly one of life’s delights.

Ziller: Pop Rocks without fizz. Why not just drink corn syrup straight from the bottle?

4. Whoppers — Tom Ziller

Obviously, based on my draft, I like chocolate and chewy candy. Whoppers hits both marks! Also, my daughters hate them so this is free money for me on Halloween. I’ll be rich in Whoppers on Friday and I can’t wait.

D’Andrea: I can’t say anything bad about a candy they package in old milk cartons. Whoppers are ...fine. Better than 80 percent of the selections available? Nope.

5. Sour Patch Kids — Christian D’Andrea

Because some days my tongue can just go to hell. Midnight Milky Way and Baby Ruth were strongly under consideration here, but a strict sugary diet of only chocolate would be a wasted opportunity. Throw about 20 of these little guys into a cup, microwave it for about 10 seconds, and then to go work on the softened mess moments later. And then ignore the filmy coating of corn syrup that lasts on your teeth for days afterward.

Ziller: Make a meal of it with Cap’n Crunch and just completely destroy your mouth for a week. Sadist candy.

6. Sun Maid raisins — David Fucillo

Halloween may be about indulging, but why not have a sugary treat that offers excellent fiber?! I was that kid who loved a box of raisins and am perfectly comfortable with it. There was no way any of these heathens was taking raisins, and since we did not have a UDFA option, it made sense to ride it to the last round of the draft. It gives me a well-rounded Halloween bag of waxy, chocolate, and fruity — the perfect Halloween for me!

D’Andrea: I swear to god this pick was emailed to me in all caps from [email protected]. Which one of your grandchildren showed you how to use the internet, Fooch?

Dator: I take it back. I hate you so much, Fooch.

Ziller: Unbelievable. So like Werther’s Originals and peppermint candies were a little too adventurous for you? Love to eat a box full of the worst part of basic trail mix.

7. Krackel — Eric Stephen

Halloween is Krackel’s time to shine, since it’s just about the only time you can find the crispy deliciousness in regular stores. Don’t listen to the heathens: Krackel is wonderful, a Nestle Crunch with even more crunch. Krackel is the highlight of those Hershey variety packs.

D’Andrea: Exactly like Nestle Crunch, only worse! I’ve never seen this bar in non-mini form.

Ziller: Almost always the last chocolate candy remaining in any modern Halloween basket. It’s the mid-November desperation chocolate when all the good stuff is gone.

8. Baby Ruth — James Dator

I will get down on some Baby Ruth. You know what a Baby Ruth is? A Snickers for an adult. Instead of some pressed peanut sweepings you get whole-ass peanuts and its makeup is essentially identical. If someone says “I like Snickers, but I hate Baby Ruth” they’re either pedantic, a liar or a sleeper agent.

Also its wrapper is silver and I like shiny things because I am actually a bird.

Darney: It’s no surprise the candy bar that is used as a euphemism for a turd went last in the draft. Good pick, James.

Ziller: Good pick, though inferior to its close, more exotic cousin Almond Joy, which I can’t believe I didn’t pick in retrospect.

The final results?

So who had the best draft? Vote below so we can mercilessly mock the loser, who will almost certainly be Fooch.

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greenscissors · 8 years ago

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Name chart

-this has been in my drafts for a while, so fuck it, I'm just gonna upload it. Its really just for me to keep track of who’s who.

Also, this was updated randomly for a while, though most of it I just dumped here today.

Will keep updating whenever.

Victor: Sad sad purple man. A curious, happy child, who turned into a sad, scared, timid child, who turned into a sad, timid man. His life has changed SO much for the better after meeting Wonder. He actually started going out. Thank you Wonder, you turned this hermit into less of a hermit. L.O.V.E.S pretty clothes. Wanted to learn how to sew at a young age, finally learned when he was around 20. Has had many years to practice. He’s around 110. Not sure exact age. Around 110. Past a little. Maybe he's 118?? Around. After his mother died, would constantly have nightmares and night terrors about it. Couldnt sleep. Eventually turned to not so great methods of getting to sleep once he got older. Has a fondness for butterflies. He likes their wings, they're pretty. Likes pretty things in general. A fan of tea. Its the only thing he can cook. Has started to get cooking sessions from Ilo. Loves Ilo. He loves Ilo. God does he love Ilo. Have I mentioned he loves Ilo? He does. A lot. Is planning a life together with his boyfriend, soon to be maybe husband?? (Ilo.) Is happier now because of that. Recently got his mom back, in a way. The tree she turned into is planted near his house now. Constantly visits her. Like everyday, if possible. Just talks to her. Would like to think she's listening. Taught himself French, English (writing, their language is spoken the same as English (CAUSE I WASNT ABOUT TO COME UP WITH A WHOLE NEW FUCKING LANGUAGE, FUCK THAT, FUCK YOU FOR THINKING I WOULD THATS TOO HARD I BARELY HAVE PLANTS AND ANIMALS OH MY GOD MY WORLDS BARREN AS HELL PLEASE HELP) but not written the same), ballroom dancing, sewing, and piano. Maybe other stuff? Is smart (he better be, he's had more than 100 years of life to learn stuff.) Soft spoken. Was a lot more sassy, and I need to bring that back, I've fallen into this awful pit of writing him WAY too timid, I need sassy Victor back I miss him. Was totally freaked out the first time he found Earth. Now has gills. (thanks Ilo) Helpful. Now he will not drown when he spends time with his fish boyfriend. Likes spicy food. His favorite fruit are cherries. Now has half a pair of matching earrings with Ilo. Like rings. It's very hard to draw. :/ Gay. Taken. (by Ilo)

Sage: Hound Wonder and Victor tamed in the Little Vic older Wonder AU

Rascal and Lifur: Two chitters Victor tamed in the LVOW AU

Ruler: Victor’s favorite fish that lives in the pond in the, you guessed it, the LVOW AU.

Raphael: “Pet shop” owner. Probably smokes. His voice sounds like it. Idk where he is now??? He MIGHT be alive??????? I hope he is he's garbage and I wanna use him. Loves to fuck with people. Good at mind games. Smirks way too much. My most anime character yet.

Sirin: Pronounced Seer-E-in. Hates Raphael with a burning passion. Black Market leader. Used to be shit, but now is less shit. Actually pretty nice. He’d punch someone for saying that though, he has a reputation to uphold. Loves Ari and would murder armies for him. If he ever gets his hand on a guitar or bass, would love to learn it. Trying to learn how to write English. Has not the best handwriting. Its not awful though, he used to have to write a lot. H A T E S paperwork. Likes his hair slicked back. Loves snakes, a snake from his world specifically, called the Spiked Bandit. Got it tattooed on his back. I have been told it looks like a tramp stamp. Oops. Snakes are his favorite, but he likes lizards too. Is not a fan of squishy animals. Got his name from shop keepers as he was growing up in the streets. Loves his name. Its a word in old Grey language. Means “snake”, “thief,” “trickster,” “lier.” God he was so proud of that name as a kid. Since he had to steal to get food, it would be a pretty good thing to literally be called thief I guess. Anyway, he was good at it. Got kidnapped at a very young age, and “used” at the black market. The old boss had taken a liking to him. It was not a good time. Once Sirin got a little older, he started to be able to use his magic, at the same time the black market decided he’d be good as an actual worker. As he trained for whatever common workers in the BM do, (I dunno, scale buildings and stuff. Learn the lay of the town, good spots to run, hide. Steal people. Sell drugs. Ect. Illegal stuff.) he would teach himself how to use his magic at night. Doesnt like fighting close. His magic usually manifests as chains, appropriate. Can change the density (?? how much they would hurt. Ex: getting hit by a pillow, vs, getting hurt by a chain.) how many they are (can make up to six at a time), how fast they can move, can suspend them for a few seconds, if they are spiked or not. He can also form spikes along his body. Is mostly a reflex, and he can accidentally hurt people with that. EXTREMELY scared of accidentally hurting Ari that way. Born High Winter day 15 probably. Was dumped in the trash shortly after being born. (his mom was young, she couldnt take care of him. shes dead. Dads still alive in a different town.) Used to have a tattoo marking him as “property” of the black market, PROMPTLY sliced that off once he killed the old boss and took his place. Actually, now that i think about it, his back is REALLY fucked up from that. Wow. Okay. Will update that when drawing him. Besides that mess, his back is littered with smaller scars, along with the edge of his shoulders, a bit around his neck, a little on his sides, and some around his hips. Will not allow people to see his back. If someone gets to see his back it means he really trusts them. Halfling, unknown to him until recently. I'm not really sure about his age yet. He could be like around 40, but maybe not, cause like, its more like he's in his 20s so maybe he's just in his 20′s idk. Is perpetually tired. Seems to always have some dark under his eyes. Would eat pure sugar if he could. He could. He has. One of the first things he did once he was no longer under the black market was buy a few cakes then ate cake until he threw up. ......Then started eating cake again. Skin is a light green, and a little rough if you rub it one direction. Sorta like shark skin, but less. Can see in the dark. Eyes glow when under stress, or extreme emotions. Once Typheous was killed (by him) he put Sena in charge. Checks up on her occasionally. Put an old abandoned building to use, made it free housing for some of his lower ranking workers, as well as the orphan kids around town. Would always bring food to them. Can't really do that anymore, he's never around. The building looks kinda like a warehouse/hotel?? Idk. No body really knows who started the house, only that it's a safe, if dingy and kinda cold, place to find shelter. It's dry at least. Sirin made sure no one knew who did it (reputation.) He has a small apartment there. Keeps his clothes in the cupboards. Not a lot of furniture in there really. Has a habit of going out in the cold without proper clothing. Sits and just thinks sometimes. Used to sometimes just sleep in a tree outside of town when it was warmer. Has anger problems. Still a little bit of an asshole, depending on who he's talking to. Has a burning hate for apples. Will still eat them though. Hates spicy food. Likes meat. Has had a hole punched through him by Seldom. Was briefly a doughnut. A person doughnut. Gosh this boy is just fulla injuries past and present. The hole situation is better now. Pansexual. Typheous: (Tie- fee- O ss) Used to be Sirin’s second in command. Meaning, Sirin loved to annoy the hell out of him. Used to be in charge of a lot of the stuff in the market. VERY homophobic. Was garbage, not the best kind. Was the “new leader” for a short time, as Sirin was stuck with Victor/Wonder/and Ilo. Poked around in stuff that was none of his business, was an asshole about it, and is dead now. Bye. he was straight. Very. Very. straight.

Cisor: (Si- sore) Raph’s hound. Aggressive. Was probably a cute puppy.

Ciro Niver: (Si- row Nigh- ver) Gilli and Lita’s little brother. A. Dor. A. BLE. Wonder did something to him, and I guess he has a little magic now??? Idk. Will clarify. Almost died cause Seldom’s an asshole. I think he's 6 at the moment. Somewhere around there. Pretty sure it's 6 though. Never met his dad. Loves fluffy animals the best. A rascal. Thinks his sister is loud. Would be the kid that says girls have cooties. His sister has cooties. He loves his sister. Hates when his mom makes soup with the gross green leafy stuff in it. Likes when they have meat. Likes the new house, but misses his old room. He shouldn't. He used to live in a tiny cold attic. His mom used to have to crouch when she went up there. And she's short. EVERYONE had to crouch when they went up there. Kinda misses the squeaky stairs. Straight, when he's older? And I guess now?? Does it work like that??? Idk he's 6. His greatest love is his toys at the moment.

Tide: Gilli’s boy friend. Has a smoking problem. Likes to never wear a shirt. That doesnt work too well in Winter. Gay.

Itella: (E- tell- la) Victor’s caretaker and guardian. Seldom killed her. Was totally cool, a complete badass. I miss her. Had a spider torso. Loved to wear low cut dresses with tons of ruffle at the bottom. Kinda mean, but for the best. Loved Victor. Super smart. Used to be an assistant/ partner with Nico. Kept lots of plants around in her house. Her house was a mess. Books and plants everywhere. Dusty in places. Never ate in front of Victor, didn't want to frighten him as a child. The habit stayed even when Victor was older. Asexual, aromantic.

Seldom: Victor’s father. Dick. Was banished from whatever the name of his people’s lands are called. I gotta name stuff. Conquest’s son. Blind in his lower eyes, and had his lowers arms removed when he was born. They didn't work. Straight.

Rune: Victor’s mother. Dead. Killed by her husband, Seldom. Very nice. Now a tree. Still very nice. Died Summer day 2???????? Same race as Rapheal, whatever that is. They turn into plants when they die, I still gotta develop them. Straight.

Nico: Reformer. Knows Tulli. Is someone close to Itella. Not sure of their relationship yet, besides partners in business, like, coworkers. They do science or something? Aromantic. Pansexual.

Riva Niver: Gilli's mom. Super sweet. Has a stutter. Extremely relived to have a new house, thank you Wonder. No longer has to worry about brittle stairs that Ciro woNT STOP RUNNING ON. Still sad about her husband’s death, but tries not to let her children see that. Loves her kids more than anything. Straight.

Sena: Silver. Girl left in charge of the black market in Sirin’s stead. Used to just work the shop they used to hide an entrance. Was understandably freaked out when she was just put in charge of the whole market. Many people would like her dead now. She's got a good bodyguard though. I hope she doesn't die, she's nice.

Lita Niver: Ciro/Gilli’s sister. An adorable miss. Best friends with Miki. Loves cute clothes, sweets, going out and getting drunk and hitting on cute guys. Wishes she had a boyfriend. Works at a cafe across the cafe Miki works at. Isn't treated so great there. :/ Is optimistic. Has a shitty apartment that she refuses to believe is shitty. Its shitty. its basically a closet. Very small. I love her. Straight

Ryko: Centipede man. Will wait days at a time for food. Could eat any animal really, but prefers the taste of people. Sadistic. An asshole. I love him. Has cool tattoos on his arms. They might not be tattoos and just markings. They're probably markings. He's a fucking centipede man who lives in the fucking jungle, WHO IS GONNA GIVE HIM TATTOOS?? They're markings. ????? I dont know What the fuck he is. Straight??? Maybe.

Serena: Purple haired man’s sister. A human. Getting married soon. A no-nonsense attitude. Straight.

Arrvin: Human. Serena’s brother. Has dyed purple hair. Has a pigeon named Randy. Sweetest guy he's so great. ;w; Wants to be an architect probably. He lives in an apartment. I dont know how he gets the money yet. He sure does have a job though. Maybe a few. Can make bomb ass waffles. Birds love him. Maybe he just always has birdseed in his pockets. Can birds smell that?? Asexual, panromantic.

Cena: Reformer who lives out in the jungle. Has a relationship of sorts with Ryko. Is blind, but good at getting around. Unlike the other Reformers, doesnt keep “helpers” around. Isn't lonely though. Prefers silence and tea. On rainy days, she likes to sit in her library near the window and just listen.

Ossis: Wolvos who lives up North. Friends of Felix, and Cole. A good good happy boy. Likes eyeshadow. Kinda tough to get where he lives, whenever he goes to a big enough town he's sure to pick some up.

Kai: Leader (?) of the Wolvos. Kinda hate loves Felix and Cole. Like, the kinda love where they’re just constantly exasperated with them. Lives up North, with the main tribe. I still really need to work on him.

Gilli Niver: (Gi- lee) Tide’s boyfriend. Lita and Ciro’s big brother. Very easy going. Owns a little shop with Tide. I think its a bakery?? Favorite season is Spring. A fan of bitter drinks paired with sweets. Used to do drugs. Bad, bad Gilli. Doesn't anymore. Hates Winter. Gay.

Miki: The coolest. Best friends with Lita. Speaks with a bit of an accent. Would kill to protect Lita. Probably knows how to properly hide a body. Buff as hell. She’s so fun to draw, I love her. Gay. Gosh she loves girls.

Felix: Wolvos. Adorable. A soft boy. Gets into trouble sometimes. Seems to know everyone. A person who would always have “"a pleasure to have in class” written on their report card. Prefers always being in semi wolf form. Likes running for miles when he's out of town, and is an actual wolf. Owns a stand with his brother. It's across from the fabric seller Victor always buys his fabrics from. Has heard a lot about Victor (everyone has, only bad rumors though), and would like to actually met the guy one day. Has a favorite scarf and likes to wear it. Dresses well. Bisexual.

Lokell Niver: Riva’s dead husband. Was a nice dude. Died in an accident.

Silis: Some guy Sirin's friends with. Owns a building company. Said company will work for the BM when hired, usually through Silis being paid in both money, and organs. He eats em. Looks bored half the time. Loves gold stuff. Trans. Is already done with someone's shit before he even meets em. Naga.

March: A cute goat (maybe fawn, idk yet not set in stone, I think he's a goat) guy. Can disguise his voice to sound like anything. Loves masks. Has a neat lil collection in his house. Prefers loose clothing. Likes reading. His magic takes the form of purple electricity. Trans. Unlike Tulli, Nico, ect, he can't really change how he looks (ex: Tulli can turn into a bird, “dyes” his hair, Nico’s a tree, ect) but makes up for it with the voice thing.

#The Tailor and co.#oc descriptions #name list #list #my ocs #world stuff

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bepolaris · 8 years ago

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The Small World We Live In

Genre: Romance/Humor Rating: Teens and Up Main Pairing: Tsukishima Kei x Yamaguchi Tadashi Side Pairings: KageHina, IwaOi, KyouHaba, BokuAka, KuroKen, DaiSuga, EnnoTana, AsaNoya and more. Summary: A series of events how Tsukishima Kei and Yamaguchi Tadashi met, and the small world they live in. (Or the Manga Artist x Aspiring Singer au that nobody expected from me) Also available at AO3 xxx Tadashi scrunched his nose as he removed his hair tie again. Sweats are beginning to trail down his jaw, threatening to mess up the concealer that hid his freckles. He’d been in front of the mirror above his dresser for a few minutes now, arranging his messy hair and tying it to his liking, but he can’t for the life of him smooth down his cowlicks just for today. He also knew that his dorm mate, Kageyama was shooting him confused glares, barely hiding it behind a Shoujo Manga, from his side of their shared dorm room. By the time Tadashi found satisfaction at the style of his hair, he’s already late to his part time job. He grabbed his guitar case, carefully slinging it on his shoulder with keys jingling inside his ripped jeans’ pocket as he quickly ran to the door. His long legs stride the hallway of their University’s dormitory, taking big steps until he reached the lobby. And after he left the building, he ran as quickly as he can to the nearest bus stop in the campus. When Tadashi arrived at Crows Resto Bar, he was greeted by the familiar smell of frothy beers, mixed alcohols, burnt charcoals, smoked sea foods and grilled meats wafting the air. Every Friday night, Tadashi works as a part-time guitarist in Crows Resto Bar owned by his professor in World Literature class, Takeda Ittetsu. It’s always packed of patrons who wants to live the TGIF life and relax before the weekend even starts. “You’re late, Yamaguchi!” Tanaka lively greeted him as the bald waiter balanced a tray of empty plates and beer mugs when Tadashi passed by. Tadashi could only chuckle in embarrassment while rubbing the back of his neck as he made his way to the backstage to double check if his Acoustic Guitar is finely tuned before the lead singer, Yahaba Shigeru entertain the costumers with his lovely voice. As Tadashi fiddle with the tuners, he felt his phone vibrating inside the back pocket of his ripped jeans. He carefully tucked his prized guitar in his body before flipping his phone open and placed it between his ear and shoulder.

Tadashi answered the call without looking at the ID caller, “Hello?” “Oh! Thank goodness, Tadashi!” Tadashi heard his Uncle Makoto’s relieved tone. “Wha- why?” Tadashi asked in confusion to his Uncle as he straightened on his seat; green flipped phone snugged in his hand. “Tadashi, can I ask you to watch the store this week? I kind of have an appointment.” He heard his Uncle muttered at the other line. Appointment? Or more like a date with Takinoue-san. Tadashi thought smiling as a few sweats trailed his temple, though he didn’t need to tell his Uncle what he knew and tease him about it. He just agreed to watch the store as usual when his Uncle have plans with his long-time, high school boyfriend. “Yamaguchi-kun, are you ready?” Yahaba asked Tadashi when he arrived at the backstage with the bleached-head drummer, Kyoutani Kentaro. He’s straightening his ruffled shirt and smoothing his slight messy brownish, silver hair. If Tadashi noticed the mess in Yahaba’s clothing or the swollenness of the singer and drummer’s lips, he didn’t mention this and just smiled at them; his right ear piercing, glinting at the dim light of the backstage as he stood up from the backstage chair. He clenched his fists and took a deep breath. Yamaguchi Tadashi is ready for his first solo live performance on stage later! – – After dusting off the eraser dusts on his drawing board, Kei concluded that it’s enough; he’s done with the last page of his manuscript. He pushed his thickly, black-framed glasses up to his noses and gathered the cluster of paper mess on his study table, neatly stacking it with the other finished papers near his desk lamp. “Stingy-shima!” He heard his idiot roommate called outside his bedroom door, “It’s Friday, so I’m going to hang out with Kageyama’s dorm in campus tonight.” Kei rolled his eyes and ignored his roommate, focusing more on clearing his study table before once again perusing the twenty seven pages of manuscript in front of him. He needed to proofread his manuscript even though Akaashi-san had already beta read his work. He just needed to make sure he didn’t make any mistakes in the dialogues before sending it to his exasperating Editor. Deeming his manuscript fine, Kei placed his manuscript at the document feeder of his fax machine and pressed the send button. After the process of sending it to his Editor’s office, Kei just dumped the manuscript carelessly on his study table and buried himself in the comfort of his unmade bed. He grabbed his phone, texted his Editor about his manuscript, and finally, placing said phone and eye glasses on his bedside table and calling it a day. Kei rose from his sleep when he heard the loud beeping of his fax machine and the cacophony sounds of the printer, followed by his Jurassic Park themed ringtone. He lazily reached for his phone, swiping the screen without even glancing at the Caller ID – which will make him think of his life choices and his pathetic life later – to answer the bastard who called him at the early hour of three am. “Kei-chan~” Oikawa’s voice boomed in Kei’s speaker, “How have you been?” Kei wanted to curse his Editor for calling him at ungodly hour. What do you want, Oikawa-san?” He asked as he rolled over, placing his arms above his eyes. “I was flirting with Iwa-chan earlier and then, I saw your text. Of course as your favorite Editor–” “You’re not my favorite.” Kei deadpanned and pinched the bridge of his nose, deciding in his sleep deprived mind that his Editor is drunk calling him. “–I convinced Iwa-chan to drive me to my office, and did a few edits to your manuscript for you to plosh! Wait… what is plosh?” Kei just wanted to bury his face and groan on his pillows at his exasperating Editor’s slurry words and his 3am drunk call, he did though, internally. “Anyway, I send it to your fax machine!” Oikawa gleefully added. “Can’t it wait until sunrise?” Kei sighed as he forced himself to get out of bed. For a few seconds there was no sound, coming from his Editor. “It can’t wait?” With that, Kei scowled and hanged up the call, pressing his smartphone on his forehead while gritting his teeth in aggravation. When Kei finally calmed down, he reached for his glasses on the bedside table and stood up to inspect what his Editor had done this time to his manuscript. Upon perusing the edited manuscript, Kei found himself throwing the complete garbage drafts of his manga in the air, muttering the need to change his Editor immediately. But first, he needed to contact his assistants. It seemed the subtle begging in his rubbish manga to change his Editor went unnoticed and didn’t work. – – Tsukishima Kei has never been a fan of manga himself. Specifically, a Shoujo Manga for the matter. That’s why it’s still a big surprise to him that he became a Manga Artist; that he created with his own hands a rubbish manga called “Charley in Love”. And that people actually read and love that trash, which is monthly serialized in the Parliament Clowder’s magazine called Shoujo Mangazine– specially targeted for stupid young girls (Kuroo’s words). Speaking of stupid young girls who should be studying and reading textbooks, but spending their precious time and money to a rubbish manga made by a part-time mangaka, who’s still in College… “Tsukiyama-sensei’s chapter this month is really sweet!” A high school girl loudly gushed to her friend beside the magazine rack at the counter of Shimada’s Mart. “Princess Tobiko is really lucky to have her General to protect her~” At the Aisle 1, Kei pretended he couldn’t hear their annoying giggles with his headphones on. He distracted himself whether to get the strawberry flavored Pocky sticks (to hog for himself) or the macha flavored one if ever his visitors needed the light sweet snack in the apartment while they took a break. Said friend hummed and nodded in delight, “General Hinao is making me love him more and more!” And you’ll be disappointed to see the shorty General, getting hopelessly gayer and gayer for his Royal Highness in real life. Kei thought in amusement as he placed a few boxes of Pocky sticks in his basket full of instant noodles, salty snacks and drinks-in-can for his visitors tonight as he proceed to the counter of the store. When the high school girls left the counter with their purchase, Kei lazily set down his basket at the counter. He just noticed then that the usually gleeful Shimada-san, who’s always there to enthusiastically offer his costumers to purchase a discounted item for the day, was missing in the counter box. In his place is a new face Kei had never seen before in the store. Not that he’s a regular costumer to know the workers in this franchise. Kei removed the headphones on his ears and settled them around his neck before he cleared his throat to get the punk-looking cashier boy’s attention, who’s more preoccupied to his notebook to notice another costumer. Said cashier boy looked up to him and quickly stood up, rattling the chair. The notebook he’s occupied with fell on floor along with the pencil, which he nervously picked up first before facing Kei with a sheepish smile on his lips. “I’m sorry.” He apologized, his freckles more prominent at the light blush coloring his cheeks in embarrassment and the distracting cowlicks on his brunette head, bobbing from his quick movements. Kei didn’t utter a single word and just eyed his basket before looking at the boy again. “O-oh yeah!” He laughed awkwardly and started to scan his purchase at the register. An awkward silence engulfed the two of them save from the beeping of the scanner, the sharp tinkling of wind chimes at the entrance/exit door and the seemingly loud ticking of the clock on the wall for a few seconds before the freckled cashier boy started to hum in an unfamiliar tune. Kei was staring at the screen of the register when his eyes caught the piercing on the boy’s right ear. His short ponytail and the way his skinny jeans fit his slimmed body. Kei almost hummed at his observations at the boy, who seemed about his age. His golden eyes wandered on his plain long-sleeves, where he found the lack of nametag on his chest or the apron with printed names on it that every workers and/or part-timers wore in the store. He almost chocked when he caught what he was doing. Kei pushed his glasses up to his nose and leaned his weight from one foot to another. He didn’t just eyed the punk-looking yet cute freckled cashier boy in Shimada’s Mart like how he sometimes eyed an expensive strawberry treat! “That’ll be 8,615 Yen.” The freckled cashier boy told Kei with a smile plastered on his lips. His soothing voice broke Kei’s internal debate whether he’s checking out the boy or just merely judging him. After all, that’s what he’s good at. Kei handed him a crispy 10,000 bill. “I received 10,000, Sir.” He announced adorably while his long fingers expertly tapped at the keyboard in the cash register. Kei slightly narrowed his eyes. He didn’t have lewd thoughts in his mind when he saw how long the boy’s fingers was. Few minutes later, after Kei left the Mart with his change, receipt and bags of items, he’s pondering if he should frequent in Shimada’s Mart more… not because of the freckled cashier boy. Kei convinced himself that it’s because of the new strawberry flavored Pocky sticks in their shelf.

#tsukkiyama #mangaka x aspiring singer au #mangaka!tsukishima #aspiring singer!yamaguchi #fanfic #mine #strawberry and fries

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batbirdies · 6 years ago

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NaNoWriMo 2019 Batfam fic

So, apologies to anyone who already reblogged or liked this post because I Accidentally DELETED like a MORON.

I’m posting rough excerpts from my NaNo project this year which is a fanfic centered around Jason Todd eventually agreeing to dog sit Titus while Bruce and Damian are out of town. Involving some deep seated issues, unintended animal therapy, snarky text messages between robins and eventually, some reconciliation between father and son.

Takes place in a murky in between time sometime after Damian was resurrected.

A NOTE: These are very rough drafts, I’m copy and pasting from my google doc, I switch tense all over the place, so apologies, but I want to share.

Part 1

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He dreamed that night.

It wasn’t unusual, he had them at least a couple times a week, sometimes more, depending on different factors, what cases he was working, what kind of crap he ran into on patrol, and whatever damn lottery his brain was playing that night.

The downside: They were never good.

Sometimes they started out that way. Completely innocuous.

He was in a grocery store, and he was looking for something he couldn’t find but he couldn’t remember the name of it, or what it was. And he was walking down aisle after aisle of endless produce and there was a puddle on the floor, one of those yellow caution signs set up next to it, a janitor turned away from him, mopping, whistling as he went and it was far away, a long ways down the aisle but Jason recognized the tune. He knew the song but again he couldn’t place it. But it kept getting louder and the closer Jason got the less it sounded like music and the more it sounded like - like laughing.

Jason was shivering, it was suddenly freezing and when he looked down his clothes were all torn up and he - he was bleeding.

Suddenly he realized the shelves weren’t full of produce at all, they were packed full of bombs and the next step he tried to take he tripped, his ankles were tied together. He fell on his face, right in that puddle on the floor and it wasn’t water, it was blood and the janitor was gone but that sound - the laughing, it was so loud, and it was everywhere, and he heard this awful scraping noise in the distance, something thin and metal dragging on the floor and Jason couldn’t breathe.

He tried to push himself up but his wrists were tied behind his back and everything hurt, it all hurt so much. The scraping on the floor got louder, closer, he heard footsteps, and the laughing stopped echoing all around him because it was clearly getting closer too. “Robin, kid, you’re really falling down on the job tonight.” And that awful laugh, that stifled giggle. “I really think you can do better.”

He felt the tip of the crowbar graze his side, just enough to make him shudder.

He was face down in a puddle of blood and Jason couldn’t breathe, he couldn't breathe, he couldn’t breathe-

He came to like a dying fish, gasping and choking on nothing, sitting bolt upright in bed with a cut off scream. His chest felt like iron, like no matter how hard he tried his lungs wouldn’t expand, they wouldn’t take in the air around him.

Jason threw the blankets off, feeling hot and cold all at once, and shoved his face between his knees, trying in vain to slow his breathing because there was nausea crawling up his throat and - and, shit- he managed to make it to the garbage can in the corner before he lost what little he ate for dinner. But like other times, at least, the vomiting felt like a relief. The coughing and gagging that followed were no fun, along with the racing heart and shaking hands. He spit into the can a few times, his teeth chattering together.

It felt like there were ants under his skin, just looking for a way out. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand he managed to stumble to the doorway, stepping over the mess of stuff that had spilled out of the box at the foot of his bed, and flicking on the light. It burned his eyes but it at least gave him something to look at outside of the visions clouding up his head.

He still felt the sharp point of the crowbar dragging up the side of his ribs and his stomach gave another awful squeeze that had him rushing to the bathroom just to dry heave in the sink. Turning the tap on and splashing his face with water helped just a little but his mouth tasted sour and his stomach was still knotting up inside him.

Grabbing his toothbrush off the counter he nearly dropped it while running it under the water his hands were shaking so much. He could hear the awful stupid voice in the back of his head even over the stifled groan he let out when his stomach heaved again. He applied way too much tooth paste to the brush and jammed it in his mouth, barely managing not to fall down when he sat on the edge of the tub.

His ribs ached and his knees and shins and his head felt like it was gonna split open. He knew it was a phantom pain maybe because he’d been close to hyperventilating for a good few minutes at that point and he was having some kind of premature brain death from low oxygen but the knowledge very rarely helped. Instead he sat there in the blindingly bright bathroom with his eyes squeezed shut, scrubbing jerkily over his teeth and tongue trying to wash out the sour taste of stomach acid. Trying to scrub out the echoing laughs in his head, the sound of the crowbar dragging across concrete, the muffled thud of it against flesh and bone.

Of all his nightmares, the ones of the joker were always the loudest.

Sometimes he’d talk out loud to himself, or hum, just to try to drown it out but that just ended up making him feel crazier. He brushed his teeth for a long time, concentrating on the sound of the bristles against his gums, long enough that his mouth was just full of foam and there was blood mixing in with it, and then he’d forced himself to stand and spit in the sink. He splashed water over his face and just stood there for a minute, staring down into the drain and watching drops fall from the tap, gripping the edge of the sink with white knuckles, trying to support his weight with his arms cause his knees were shaking something fierce, listening to his own labored breathing.

Amazingly enough Jason Todd did not have cable, and his internet was spotty. It was annoying but the bunker he’d set up for Red Hood had better internet than you could buy plus access to the cave computer and when he moved into his place he reasoned that’s all he really used it for. He didn’t have money to burn and the apartment didn’t come with cable. But on nights like this, when the skeletons in his closet were rattling around like percussion instruments he really wished he could turn on the tv and listen to some bullshit telenovelas or cartoons or reruns of Titanic or he really didn’t freaking care.

He could read a book, that’s what he usually did, but after Joker dreams, sometimes it just - wasn’t enough. There were little tricks, little things he’d learned that helped and he went through the list in his head as he finally wrenched himself away from the bathroom sink, when it no longer felt like the bottom of his stomach was trying to climb up his throat.

There was a lighter on his nightstand next to a heavily scented candle that he lit with shaking hands, nearly burned himself before he set it down to the side and breathed in the biting scent of pine. There was a half empty carton of cigarettes stashed under his bed but he’d been trying to quit and he saved them for when things were really bad.

The trash can in the corner was a problem, one he’d rather not address right then but didn’t want to leave overnight because disgusting and so he took a spare moment to rinse some water in it and dump the contents in the toilet. He splashed some bleach in it and filled it the rest of the way with water and left it soaking in the bathtub.

Music was the next step, he didn’t remember where he tossed his cell phone when he came in and he had to stalk around the apartment before he found it sitting on the kitchen counter just inside the front door, unplugged and with a dead battery. He stared at the screen with an unexpected twist in his chest. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Abruptly, even though he’d woken without tears, just the pounding of his chest and head, he felt like he was going to start crying immediately and he sucked in a deep, noisy breath before making a point of plugging in his damn phone and going back to his room where the smell of the candle was enough to at least put him more in the present. It was the music that helped with the Joker dreams the most though and without it Jason was left feeling jittery and anxious in a way that only seemed to be getting worse the longer he sat on the edge of his bed, staring at his bookshelves trying to decide which one would be the winner for the night.

His knee was bouncing enough he’d probably wake up his downstairs neighbor before something occurred to him. The smashed up box at the foot of his bed was still just where it was when he’d demolished it on his way in. The thought of it made a different anxiety twist in his stomach.

The box was from Alfred. Sort of. The box was full of Jason’s things so he wasn’t sure if it was really from anyone except that one day after patrol when Jason had been high on pain meds, half lying down on a medical cot in the cave with Alfred working on his stitches he’d admitted he missed some of his old stuff, his books, his CD’s, some video games. The conversation wasn’t meant to go anywhere and Jason had no idea why he said anything but Alfred had told him he was free to take whatever he wanted from his old room - it was still his, after all. But the very idea of going back in there made his skin crawl.

He’d heard from Dick that it hadn’t much changed since he died and that kind of made it worse. Jason didn’t want to step back in time, no thanks. The idea that Bruce had turned it into some kind of museum to before he had died did weird things to his insides and he’d told Alfred as much. He didn’t think he could stomach it.

Alfred had left it at that, didn’t push him to keep talking about it or try to tell him he should try anyway, like Dick probably would have. Jason always appreciated that about Alf.

Instead, about a week later Alfred had shown up at his apartment with a weeks worth of meals and a box of things he’d thought Jason might want. It was a nice gesture and Jason had appreciated it but he’d found, despite his earlier musings, that he held the same sort of apprehension to the box as he did to his old room. Everything inside it was part of his old life and most of the time it all just felt - untouchable.

He didn’t know why exactly, just that his years at the manor felt like some weird mix of dream and nightmare he could never quite suss out.

But now, with the Joker’s laughter ringing in his ears he thought it might be the lesser of two evils and he hoped to anyone listening that Alfie packed his old MP3 player.

Jason slid down across his rumpled bed and slipped over the frame, nearly tripped over the crushed box at his feet but fumbled around it until he could sit cross legged on the floor in front of it. He didn’t know where to start exactly, but he decided the best option was getting the MP3 player first. So, he dug in, pulling out old sweatshirts, a couple knit scarves, an old throw blanket. The soft things were all wrapped around the more fragile ones.

Underneath his old clothes and the blanket he finds a stack of CD’s, too bad he doesn’t have a CD player anywhere...There’s a stack of notebooks, a larger stack of book books, an old baseball, and there, the headphones wrapped neatly around it, is his MP3 player. An old iPod shuffle Bruce had gotten him more because it was something other kids had than that he’d known Jason wanted one.

What he was counting on, was good old Alfie, because while the charger for the device was neatly wound up next to it, it had been literal years since Jason had touched the thing and the idea that it might have any battery left was absurd unless Alfred had gone to the trouble of charging it before packing it away for him. With still shaking hands he unwound the headphones rapidly and shove them in his ears, pressing the home button and just praying for some kind of miracle.

“Bless you Alfred.” Jason whispered out over the heavy beat of hip hop music he didn’t ever remember downloading. He took a moment to breathe, sucking in the smell of wintergreen and letting the music drown out the noise in his head. The rest of the contents still sat there in stacks, pushed to the side of the torn open cardboard or still organized neatly inside it.

This was as far as he’d gotten in a month and Jason decided to just bite the bullet and get it over with. He reached for the first thing that caught his attention and pulled out a framed photo of Bruce and Jason at a baseball game. The same one, if Jason remembered correctly, that he’d gotten the ball in the box from. Bruce stood behind Jason, a hand on his shoulder, a half crooked smile on his face that meant it was real, while Jason at 13 years old stood in front of him, grinning from ear to ear with a mit and a baseball held up in his right hand.

He doesn’t remember who took the photo, it must have been some random person at the game, but he remembered being breathless and excited about going, that he’d never been to one before. He remembered telling Bruce that the closest he’d ever gotten was scalping tickets outside the doors of a hockey rink once and being chased off by a security guard. Bruce had gotten a weird look on his face that Jason never knew how to take before he clapped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed in a way that always made Jason feel weirdly warm in the chest.

“We’ll go to a hockey game next.” He had said. And Jason had been beyond excited.

He swallowed convulsively at the twist in his stomach and set the photo to the side. He wasn’t sure he wanted it anymore. Thinking about the good times with Bruce was always bitter sweet to him now.

Usually more bitter than sweet. The phantom image of a Robin uniform always coming to mind, filled out by some other kid, standing tall and smug. Jason shook his head. He’d decide later.

Next was an old backpack, still filled with his school books. He rifled through one, finding a doodle of a bow an arrow in the corner of one of the pages, a note scribbled underneath he couldn’t actually parse. There were pages of math homework, old assignments with marks ups from his teachers, little notes in red pen.

‘Good work’

‘Nice word choice’

‘Correct formula but you made a common mistake, see me after class and I can explain it better.’

Absently he wondered why Alfred had given him his old school stuff. Not like he had any use for it now and reading through it felt like going through some other kids stuff. It did give him a weird pang of regret. Because Jason had liked school. He’d thrived despite little shitheads in a rich school who thought he didn’t belong there and some teachers alike. Jason felt a weird sort of disgrace at never having graduated High School. Hell, he’d barely started. He stashed everything back inside the bag and set it to the side. He probably wouldn’t get rid of it, thought he wasn’t sure why.

The stack of books was probably what he’d missed the most and he pulled the top most copy off and flipped it open. Jason had a pretty large stash of books at this point, and he had replaced nearly, if not all the novels he’d had in the manor when he was younger already. But it wasn’t the books themselves exactly that he missed.

When Jason had moved into the manor the idea of having books of his own to return to had been a new and glorious thing. On the street, when you needed to keep something for yourself you found a way to mark it, or make it so other people didn’t want it. He’d half ruined most things he’d snatched from stores just so they wouldn’t bother wanting them back if he got caught.

Before his mom had died he’d had access to the Library, which was great, but it meant that none of the books were his and he’d had to keep them nice and neat if he wanted to be able to keep checking them out. It hadn’t been all that easy either, with a drug addicted mother and a lowlife dad who was always bringing other lowlifes around. He’d ended up stashing them under his bed anytime he wasn’t reading them.

The books in the manor were different. They had a library, which Jason treated as such, but Bruce had also expressed that Jason could have his own books. Ones he got to keep in his room that he wasn’t required to return to anyone else or share. He could even make notes in them if he wanted, highlight whatever text interested him or that he wanted to return to.

The idea of marking them up in anyway had horrified Jason when Bruce had made the suggestion, but he liked part of the idea. It made reading feel more like he was an active participant, like he could go back and forth with the characters, like he was involved in the story.

He’d never taken a pen to a book, but what he had done was fill all of his favorites with sticky notes.

Jason still did it sometimes, though he didn’t read as much as he used to as a kid when he was only patrolling on the weekends and just had school to think about. He flipped through the first few pages of Frakenstein, one of his favorites, perusing his own messy handwriting on bright pink paper, faded with age. Again though, the nostalgia twisted hard in his stomach. He was glad to have them back, thought he might actually read through them someday, but what had been something he missed...felt a lot like something he could still never have, now that he was holding it in his hands.

There were all these mixed up, tangled feelings twisted around Jason’s childhood. Sometimes when he was high on pain meds, or drunk maybe, it softened the edges enough to make all this seem like a good idea. But harshly sober and coming down off a nightmare….they just felt kind of like a sad joke.

Like looking at the props from a movie you used to think was real life.

“Whatever.” He mumbled to himself as he grabbed a pile of the books and stacked them back up in a haphazard pile. His bookshelves were neatly organized, lining his bedroom walls on three sides. He made sure to leave room for more, and the second bedroom still had blank walls he’d thought about repurposing for just such an occasion that he ran out. Normally things were organized by genre, then author, then title. But this particular collection he would keep together. He shelved them all on the lowest empty shelf near the floor, next to his dresser.

The picture frame he stuck face down in the drawer of his nightstand to think about later, the baseball, and the mit he dug out to match, he left sitting on his dresser. The couple sweatshirts smelled like fresh laundry, which wasn’t surprising, so he didn’t bother washing them, just hung them up in the very back of his closet. They’d never fit him now, and just looking at them when he tucked the arms of the hanger through the neck hole nearly had him reeling at how tiny he used to be.

His notebooks he didn’t even open, remembering clearly enough the awful drawings he used to make and his own amateur attempts at writing. Journaling had initially been a suggestion from Bruce, back when Jason had frequent outbursts of temper and never wanted to talk about it afterwards. Bruce wasn’t exactly a shining example of talking out your issues, so the journaling had probably been a nice cop out for him, but he still occasionally did some.

The throw blanket, Jason realized when he picked it up, was the same one that Alfred had knitted him for his first Christmas at the manor and that did get him a little choked up. It was red, and a little faded, the color clashed pretty badly with his bedspread if he was being honest but he didn’t care. He took the time to make up his blankets and folded the throw neatly at the end of his bed. Then he settled himself back on the floor in front of the nearly empty box.

There wasn’t much else he expected to find in it. It was large enough that Alfred had managed to fit his old skateboard, which Jason chuckled to see. Despite his skills as robin he had never gotten very good with the thing. He left it leaned up against his bedroom wall behind the door and went in for the last item, sitting neatly at the base of the box. It was wrapped in brown parchment paper and tied in twine, about the size and shape of a book if Jason had to guess, and a badly wrinkled card was tucked underneath the string.

Jason assumed at first that it was a gift from Alfred, stashed at the bottom of the box as some sort of surprise but the obviously crumpled and reflattened card couldn’t have been the butler. So Jason slipped out the card, a nice stock with a simple picture on the front of a sailboat that looked oddly familiar to him.

Upon opening the card he was momentarily confused. There was obviously a decent amount of text written out at one point, but it had all been scribbled out pretty damn thoroughly, he squinted at it for a moment, trying to make out the words as a slow dawning unease settled on his shoulders. He couldn’t quite make out the words but somehow the handwriting still looked familiar, a messy but somehow still graceful looping cursive that could only be Bruce’s.

Jason swallowed roughly, eyes scanning the card over again and then peering into the box like it might now suddenly contain a poisonous snake. It didn’t make sense.

That there was possibly a….gift stashed somewhere in his room from Bruce that he had never known about didn’t make any sense. And the idea that Bruce would have for some reason gotten him a gift since he was out of the manor and asked Alfred to deliver it made even less. Unless it was something related to their vigilante lives maybe. Maybe it was useful to Red Hood somehow and the scribbled out card was code for something.

But something told him it wasn’t. Bruce was ridiculous and paranoid and overly dramatic at the best of times but a secret message disguised as an old gift instead of making a phone call or telling him in person on one of the not infrequent times they might run into each other on patrol made little to no sense. And the gift did seem old he realized.

Reaching in and picking it up out of the box he found the brown paper covered in a layer of dust, brushed off in a pattern that could only have been someone’s hands moving it to begin with. The twine was brittle and snapped at the knot with a very light tug.

There was a feeling Jason sometimes got, like he was swimming in the ocean and he could sense some huge and dangerous coming up beneath him, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. In general it didn’t usually represent (wrong word) anything positive but he was already waist deep in this whole thing and that feeling didn’t tend to leave him until the cause was addressed. So he took a single deep breath and tore the paper off, trying to brace himself for any possibility.

However, when the paper came off he was left with a complete absence of any reaction. He hadn’t known what to expect but somehow what he found was still entirely unexpected.

It was two items, stacked neatly one on top of the other. One, which was, upon retrospect, predictably a book. A hardcover copy of Pride and Prejudice, with a swirling and beautifully designed cover in deep navy blue, overlaid with gold.

On top of that was a slim DVD case with a photo of Kira Knightly looking artfully to the side with a blurry Matthew Mcfadyen in the background.

“What the hell.”

Jason yanked the headphones out of his ears, suddenly feeling the need for the quiet to digest whatever the heck he as seeing. He grabbed up the crumpled card again and opened it flat, smoothing it out on top of the book and squinting in concentration at the scribbled lines of pen. If Bruce wasn’t a pretentious asshole who always wrote in cursive he thought he may have been able to make it out but as it was the only thing that wasn’t in cursive was a cluster of numbers in the upper right hand side of the card that had only been partially scribbled out. He should have noticed them immediately but he had been more intrigued by what he was apparently not supposed to see.

The numbers though, they were clearly a date. A date that Jason stared at with a numbness in his bones while his brain calculated where he was and what he was doing when it was written. It was dated nearly a year ago. Right around the time that….that the two of them had talked. That Jason had agreed to play by Bruce’s rules.

“What….the hell.” Jason repeated to himself. His voice strangled and clipped. Dropping the card he suddenly flipped the book open, flipping the pages in a fan and looking for something more, turning the book face down and shaking out the pages hoping for some other information. Nothing.

He cracked open the DVD case next, popping the disc out and the little leaflet of information thinking there had to be some kind of hidden message somewhere.

“This is such bullshit.” He whispered to himself, incredulous and weirdly lost.

A strangely frantic idea was occurring to him and he picked up the card again, stumbling to his feet and going for one of the notebooks he’d stashed in his closet. He took the one on top and tore out the first blank page he came to and then spent ten minutes digging around for a pencil, ending up with the single sheet of notebook paper and the card, standing in his boxers and a t-shirt in his kitchen. The card he laid out on the countertop, putting the notebook paper on top of it. He angled the pencil carefully and began brushing gentle strokes across the paper.

It was an old hat trick Jason used to read about in ancient detective novels like it was some genius level trick, it would create a negative image of whatever had been written on the page before it was scribbled out, provided the original script was written with enough pressure. Bruce tended to have a heavy hand so he thought it’d be enough but the way the card was crumpled up made it a special challenge, leaving other divots and lines through the text.

When he was done he stared at the sheet of paper with a scrutinizing gaze.

“Damnit.” It looked like scribbles, which was exactly what it was, but maybe a tiny bit more like actual words than before. He studied it, trying to make out the individual first and last letter of each word.

The first word was clearly his name, he took the pencil and carefully wrote out “Jason” below the scribbles.

The first line he could make out sparing words from. He went through the note methodically, writing down words he could make out, leaving a line on the page for each word he couldn’t, carefully counting each word until he was at the bottom of the card and his hands were shaking again, worse than when he’d woken up from the dream.

He stared at what he had, trying to make heads or tales of it.

Jason,

I know ___ ___ ___ this book, ___ ____ ____ more ____ ___ copy. I think I remember ____ ____ me at some ____ ____ I ______ you of Mr. Darcy. ________ I was ______ and _____ _____ if my ______ ______ right.

Maybe you’ve ____ the _____ _______ too, ____ for me to say. It’s ____ a _____ _____ ____ talked _____ books and movies. But I saw this pair _____ sold ________ in a classics __________ at the ______ Bookstore in Gotham and I _______ of you. ____ _______ you might _____ it, ___ a good _________ of the book, if ___ _______. _____ __ _____ watch it ________ and _______ notes.

I miss you.

The vast majority of it didn’t make much sense beyond being clearly about the story and probably not some hidden message, but Jason didn’t care a whole lot.

Instead he stared at those last three words, feeling a tremor run up his spine. He dropped the paper on the counter like it burned him and took a step back, swallowing convulsively. His eyes were burning and his chest felt tight and this was not the bullshit he’d been expecting in that damn box.

“Fucking Alfred.” Jason scooped up the crumpled card and the sheet of paper and stomped back into his bedroom, grabbing the book and the movie and dumping it all in the bottom drawer of his dresser with old electronics and chargers he wasn’t sure went to what to be forgotten about. The drawer slammed closed and he stood there breathing like a freight train for a split second before he went back to the foot of his bed where he tore the empty box until it was flat and recyclable, he stashed it under his sink and he fumed.

Glancing at the clock on his microwave told him it was nearing 5am, meaning he’d gotten maybe three hours of sleep and that the the sun would be coming up in a couple hours. He stomped around his kitchen, dragging out coffee beans and milk and generally making as much noise as possible while making coffee just hoping his downstairs neighbor would come pounding on the door so he could scream in someone’s face.

“Fucking Alfred.” He hissed again, feeling utterly unsteady and hollow. Like someone had scooped out his insides with a spoon. It was such a bullshit move.

Jason wasn’t an idiot. No way Bruce knew that was in Alfred’s little care package. Bruce had probably forgotten the thing existed, had probably thought it had all been thrown away. He’d clearly meant to dispose of the card, probably had, and Alfred had rescued it from the trash and kept it on hand, just waiting to leave it like a bomb for Jason to find. Probably hoped it would open his eyes.

Make him see the light.

Jason was not going to be manipulated by some shitty card that Bruce had thrown in the trash rather than actually give him. And what kind of bullshit was that? Bruce thought he could give him some crappy copy of a book and a movie with a casual little note and things would be good?

He was insane. Bruce was insane and Jason had known it for years.

Jason was shaking his head, pulling a mug out of the cupboard for the coffee and setting it down harder than he needed to. What had he even been thinking? What? That if he gave Jason a present he’d just forget about all the other shit?

Oh, except that he didn’t give him the gift. Instead he threw away the card and put the gift somewhere it was gathering dust for the past year.

There were dishes in the sink from his dinner and he went about washing them by hand instead of using the dishwasher, needing to move, needing something to occupy his hands.

Needed something to work out his aggression on so he could keep hold of the anger in his chest.

He’d bought Jason a gift.

He leaned against the counter sink, gripping the edge hard and feeling the sharp edges of his indignation stuttering and losing their shape. He tried to grab onto it, hold it in place like the shield it was.

But - Jesus he doesn’t really know what to think of it. So Bruce bought it for him, and then what? Couldn’t bring himself to actually give it to him? His stomach twists in knots over it. He remembers meeting up with Bruce, sharing burgers on the hood of the batmobile and agreeing to work by Bruce’s rules.

He remembers he’d been in a good mood that day, that he’d felt more exasperated and amused by the request/demand than he would otherwise normally be. He remembers Bruce being blank and awkward and the good feelings slowly draining. Remembered Bruce cutting the meeting short and making some excuse for it and leaving Jason with that same souring bitterness he always ended up with with Bruce.

He hadn’t gone back on the agreement, he wasn’t really sure why exactly. Except that maybe...maybe him asking meant he didn’t believe Jason was some kind of lost cause.

Not that Jason cared, he had nothing to prove, not to Bruce.

But sometimes there were reasons to prove things to yourself and Jason wasn’t sure he had yet.

It didn’t matter. For now he wasn’t killing anyone and he was on the Bat’s good side. It didn’t explain the movie. There was a date on the card but for the life him Jason can’t remember exactly when they had their chat at the Batmobile. It was....around that time, but was it before or after? He can’t remember, and for some reason that really bugs him.

He doesn’t want to think about this stupid shit.

But Bruce had thought about him apparently. He….he missed him.

It was ridiculous. It wasn’t true.

Jason had to resist the urge to go dig that stupid card out of his dresser and try to parse out the words again.

“God damnit!” He slammed his hands against the edge of the sink.

He wasn’t supposed to care about this crap anymore. He didn’t. He didn’t care.

Jason didn’t care and he was going to stop thinking about it.

…..God he was going to need a shit ton of coffee to make it through the day.

#Jason Todd #Fanfiction #nanowrimo #Batman #Batfam

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rolandfontana · 6 years ago

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How to Move Your Manufacturing from China AND Protect Your IP

With no sign of a peace breaking out any time soon on the U.S.-China trade front, an increasing number of businesses are turning their eyes toward alternative manufacturing destinations, such as Vietnam, Thailand and Mexico. Understandably, such relocations will present all sorts of new and headaches, but I suspect that before long many folks will look back at their China days (perhaps as they lounge at a beach in Ko Samet or Da Nang) and ask, “why didn’t we do this before?”

Business is business, and whether the beaches near Bangkok are better than those near Beijing (they are, of course) or the coffee in Saigon is better than that in Shenzhen (it undisputedly is) is ultimately of no consequence when thinking of the bottom line. The point, however, is that once companies get a handle on the challenges of relocation, many of them will see that the “new” kids on the block can actually be pretty good places to do business. They may have preferred to stay put in China and avoid the hassles of moving—but when all is said and done, they will see that, give or take, the Vietnams of this world are just as viable and in a whole host oof ways perhaps even better, all things considered.

Unfortunately, one area where things are not likely to get better for foreign companies is intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. That may be hard to believe to those who have had their products blatantly counterfeited in China, but the fact is that IPR protection is in many respects even less robust in the lands across the Red River. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s IP Index 2018, China’s score on protecting IP is almost half that of the United States and Britain, but considerably higher than Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, with Mexico and Malaysia essentially ranked the same as China). Myanmar is not ranked, but presumably its score would be rather low, given that it only passed its trademark law this year.

These Chamber of Commerce rankings necessarily reflect mostly in-country written legal protections. They do not much account for the likelihood of your own manufacturer or your own employees or anyone else stealing your IP, nor do they reflect whether the theft of your IP will include your product showing up on Alibaba or on some other international online marketplace for sale around the world. On these things, China is still (and will likely be for a long time) in the undocumented/unofficial first position. These rankings also do not reflect how the likelihood of your IP being protected in China depends on whether your product is central to China’s security or technological future. Nonetheless, the other countries to which so many foreign companies are increasingly moving their manufacturing are not IP paradises by any means.

As when in China, in the face of a reduced ability to rely on the legal system for protection, savvy businesses need to do all they can to protect themselves—and protection starts at home. Through preventive efforts at their manufacturing facilities, businesses can go a long way towards minimizing IP and related risks. What sort of prevention are we talking about? Obviously, you want to guard against unauthorized (i.e., third shift) production by your suppliers. You will also want to prevent sensitive prototypes from being photographed or extracted, as well as digital files with design specs from being leaked. You will also want to exercise strict controls over any materials that could help criminals improve the quality of their counterfeits, such as genuine accessories.

Clear, comprehensive guidelines are a cornerstone of product security in China and everywhere else. If you have experienced professionals on your payroll, they can draft those guidelines, but you should not wing it. Copying and pasting something you find online may not account for country- or factory-specific conditions. For instance, in some locations, legal protections or labor agreements may prevent workers from being directly recorded by CCTV. If that’s the case, you will need to find a workaround (and they exist) to monitor staff at key locations.

Having established guidelines, the next step is to ensure staff actually comply with them. Though some factories do a pretty job monitoring themselves, most don’t. This is why you need specialized compliance audits, by professionals who understand the underlying risks.

Beware of lazy auditors who will sit for a couple of hours in the air-conditioned conference room, sipping coffee while they tick off checklist items based on self-serving answers from staff. Proper auditing requires getting your hands dirty—literally. Rummaging through trash is an essential part of any product-security audit. Trust me, it’s no fun to look around a garbage dump in the middle of a tropical summer, but the finds can be worthwhile. I once audited a factory in Cambodia that was contractually barred from working for my client’s competitors. As we walked around, we saw nothing fishy in the main office, production floor or warehouses. But a casual peek inside a wastebasket in a side office revealed trashed work orders . . . from a competitor.

Just as is true with China, (see China Trademark Theft. It’s Baaaaaack in a Big Way) you also need to register your IP with the relevant authorities. And oftentimes most importantly, your contractual framework with your supplier must include product-security considerations, such as your right to audit facilities and provide remedies for IP-related breaches. You almost certainly will also need country-specific NNN Agreements and Manufacturing Contracts for each new country in which you are having your products made. See China NNN ≠ Foreign NDA and Overseas Manufacturing Contracts (OEM, CM and ODM). You may also need a Product Development Agreement, a Product Ownership Agreement, and a contract protecting your molds and tooling. With all the tariffs and duties coming (and even occasionally going), it also makes sense to have your manufacturing contract deliniate who will ultimately be responsible for paying what.

Bottom Line: Moving your manufacturing from China does not change the need to protect your product and your IP with the proper trademark and patent and copyright registrations and the proper country-specific contracts. This is all good for my law firm’s international manufacturing lawyers and international IP lawyers, but not so good for the companies that fail to understand this.

How to Move Your Manufacturing from China AND Protect Your IP syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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