#fact that we haven’t taken like a solid week as a society to process it all. the fact that i am socially mentally emotionally stunted in | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

willow-salix · 4 years

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TAG WIP game. I was tagged by @hedwigstalons to share a line or paragraph from my current WIP.

I'm usually pretty good in the fact that I work on one thing at a time, so I don't have that many hanging around undone, but I do have lots of random ideas in my notes which I can share too.

I've been working pretty hard on all my fun "Isolation on Tracy Island" series of random posts which I've been sharing on the Gerry Anderson Podcast Facebook group and on Ao3, so I've not been getting as many chapters out as I wanted to.

I've got a start of a new chapter to Opposites Attract :

John watched as Selene wandered aimlessly around the lounge, picking up the random items that his family seemed to scatter the length of the house if they were in a room for more than five minutes and tidying them away.

He'd be lying if he said he wasn't still worried about her. She'd been better since her talk with his father, more responsive and more like her usual affectionate self, but unless someone was actively engaging with her or she had something to occupy her thoughts she was quiet, too quiet for his liking. Where she would usually be the first person to insert herself into a conversation or to offer to help, but now she hung back, sitting quietly until she was spoken to.

He and his brothers had done all they could to keep her busy and included in everything they did, but there was only so much time they could devote to her. He could understand hee, while she wasn't numb with grief anymore she was having to process, to switch her view to a world where her father no longer existed in it and while Rufus hadn't been a very active part in her life, she was still feeling the loss greatly.

He and Scott watched her like hawks, constantly on the alert for a change in her moods. They saw the way she could be joining in with a conversation one minute, even sharing a laugh with them or watching a movie and without warning her eyes would fill with tears, as if she'd suddenly remembered or felt guilty for forgetting and enjoying herself. She would hurriedly brush them away, or make an excuse to leave the room for a few moments, not wanting them to see. But they knew and their hearts hurt for her.

This is the latest "Isolation Update" :

Day 29 of isolation on Tracy Island and I'm beginning to regret my life choices.

Picture the scene. I was innocently wandering, minding my own business, in search of a shady place to settle down and read my book, with nothing but the relaxing sound of the ocean for company...

A window somewhere up in the villa crashed open, shattering the peace as someone screamed at the top of their lungs.

"CANNONS!"

"Gahhh," I squeaked in shock, spinning round to see who was attacking. My foot slipped on a wet towel that had been left on the side of the pool and as if in slow motion I skidded sideways and went headfirst into the deep end.

I flailed and flopped my way upwards and came spluttering to the surface, managing to tread water as I swiped the wet hair back from my face.

"What the bloody hell was that?" I yelled, splashing my way towards the side of the pool.

I looked up to see a head vanish from the window.

"Gordon Tracy you are a menace to society!" I screamed up at him. "Someone help me out!"

It was Virgil who dragged me out and got me a towel.

"Why did we show them Les Mis? How dumb are we?" I sighed. "We should have been more careful. We should know them better than this."

"Everything is dangerous with those two, they can turn anything into trouble. If we stopped them watching everything that could influence them we'd never watch anything again."

"True," I acknowledged, "urghhh, I need to go dry off. I'm just glad I didn't have my phone in my pocket."

Honestly, those two had been a nightmare the whole night after they watched our last musical offering. They had managed to pick up key phrases and moments and had taken to blurting them out at random moments.

I'd been rudely awoken by Alan banging on the bedroom door shouting, "You at the barricades, listen to this!" And they wonder why I lock the door at night...

Gordon had walked into the kitchen late and, finding himself all alone, and more importantly to him, most of the breakfast offerings already eaten, had begun to mournfully sing,"Empty chairs at empty tables."

Alan had tried to get John to help programme in some new code to one of his games but when he was told he'd have to wait until later, had begun to bug him with random video messages. In each one he was singing "One more day all on my own. One more day with him not caring."

Gordon had annoyed Scott by loitering around in One's hanger where Scott was helping with some maintenance, waited until he dropped a spanner from high up on the nose cone, then yelled "We need as much furniture as you can throw down!"

But this last one had gone too far, I do not like suddenly finding myself soaking wet, especially not from an unplanned dip in the pool. They were just lucky real witches don't melt.

"Just be grateful they aren't dressing in fishnets and inviting us to see what's on their slab," V reminded me. I shuddered at that mental picture.

"They're going to be impossible to live with, aren't they?"

"More than they already are? Probably. But luckily for us they get bored easily. We just gotta wait it out. Not like we haven't got the time."

That sounded like a solid plan to me, and so far it's working well. I've been hiding out in this Pod for the past three hours. The WiFi reception is terrible, but I've got access to Virgil's secret snack stash, I've got two cans of Cherry Coke and a damp book from its plunge into the pool, and it's quiet. And at the moment that's all I need. Maybe if I stay here long enough someone else will cook dinner.

I have this as a note: John and Selene back on the island, and every time they try to kiss or be affectionate Jeff kinda just pops up and hovers there like… 😳😉🙄🤔😕

And this note: Selene is on a diet ready for the wedding, she's eating nothing but salads and healthy stuff. John and the boys are on a stealth mission to sneak in junk food.

Ive got lots more notes but I can't share them as that will give away too much of how the story will continue.

I'm also trying very hard to get Selene and John to behave and not keep trying to grope each other and demand I write spicy stuff, knock it off you two, I'm too busy for that!

I'm too busy because I've been researching for days to write questions for this weeks GA Zoom quiz, Captain Scarlet this week, and it's been testing me as much as it will the people tonight.

So, I nominate @samantha-tvandmovies and @hodgehegposts to share their WIP, sorry if you've been tagged before.

#thunderbirds #thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds fanfiction #workinprogress #should be working

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biglittletale · 8 years

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Gratitude

I’m writing this post late in the week and at the end of two and half solid weeks feeling so ill with a cold and flu. It sucks! I’ve taken as much medication as allowed and still hurts. In the midst of listening to author, Matt de la Peña’s Picture Book Summit 2016 talk on, Finding Music in Your Storytelling Voice, this morning, I broke down and cried my eyes out for 20 minutes. Not a good way to start a blog post, but, it’s honest. An absolutely beautiful recount of his writing process by the way. Beautiful.

It does bring me to the topic of my post. It started out as writing about my time with my mentor at Smarterartschool, Rebecca Guay. That will be in here. I’ve been working with Rebecca Guay off and on for several years now. I also thought about reflecting on 2016. It is the time people reflect on the past year and what the new year will bring. Some parts of that will be in this post! Most important to me, feeling so awful and feeling like I’m never going to get better, is GRATITUDE.

Above: pencil sketches for coaster art. We started our 15 weeks with Rebecca by submitted 10 thumbnails of personal work we wanted to do. Rebecca’s group is all about working traditionally, developing work for gallery, and past all that finding your voice in your personal work. Rebecca Guay’s work ranges from children’s books, graphic novels, book covers and now gallery.

So, first on my gratitude list has to be my husband and children. I could not be an easy person to grow up with but, life was never boring! Emotional and financial support and patience doesn’t begin to describe their never ending support of me. What I love most is that all four of my children have grown up to be amazing creative people in their own right answering their own siren songs.

After my family would have to be the amazing friends I’ve made on this journey of creative self-expression and into the realm of sequential image making and storytelling for young people. My very first portfolio review was with Dennis Nolan. The link will take you to what I think is a great article about Dennis. He was supportive and inspiring to this editorial illustrator and art director jumping into the mysterious world of children’s publishing. In my early days as a very new member to the Society of Children’s Book Writers (and Illustrators) SCBWI, I met amazing mentors; Jane Yolen, Uri Schulevitz, Tomi de Paolo, Dennis Nolan, and many others. In fact, moving into book cover, graphic novels and gallery artists, I’ve met so many others too; James Gurney, Mike Mignola, Dan dos Santos, Greg Manchess, Donator Giancola, Scott Fischer, Marc Scheff and more! When I start thinking about it, it’s amazing! I haven’t even gotten started with my beautiful critique groups and my time in Rome with Chris Oatley, Claire Keene and Brian McDonald and all the lovely visual story creators I met there. Much, much to be grateful for.

More coasters in process. One thing I learned when you put yourself into the hands of a mentor, be ready to do things over, and over, and over. As much as it takes.

These are all 3.5 inches in diameter. I’m still working on the other five.

At one point I sanded this one way back. Another learning point, don’t immediately start over when the process isn’t going the way you want it to. Stick it out! Even if it never sees the light of day, you are learning something about yourself and the work.

Final paint! This is the first time I worked with sealing layers of drawing a painting with acrylic gel medium.

Also sealed with acrylic gel medium between layers and as a sealant for top layer.

First go at Girl with Eel. There were plenty of things wrong with it, but I did like the idea!

Still a work in progress, but everything is starting to work. Loving working with graphite powder!

The artwork I’m showing isn’t for a children’s book or a promo. It could be for working up what I could do for black and white work for older fiction. I started my career completely in black and white work for editorial. What I’m actually doing is working towards diversifying into gallery work. Maybe one day I will completely be doing gallery work. In the meantime, I need to find myself. I’ve done artwork for children for a long time. My first picture book was published in 2000, but it took me 10 years to get to that.

Other things I’m learning along the way. It’s very difficult to get passed the working illustrator in me, to find my authentic voice. My goal to publish one day books or a graphic novel that is all my voice - from text to images - means finding out who I am. I’ve realised of late I have a lot of fear around telling my stories. Hence, illustrating for others or putting a wall of symbolism up around me. My goal for 2017 is to work passed the fear and tell the true stories that reside in me. So, we’ll see what happens!

Thank you everyone who has ever touched my life. I’m in this journey for better or worse and I’m looking at the beauty of human experience. Isn’t that what all stories are about?

I’m still ill. I am grateful. Now I can get back to putting those important ‘loving’ finishing touches, as Rebecca always tell us, to the watercolour cover I’m finishing this afternoon. Yes, Rebecca, I do hear your voice in my head!

#Anne-Marie Perks #gratitude #work in progress #black and white artwork #gallery #reflection on 2016

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carlsonjonathan92 · 4 years

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#Increase Height Workout Mind Blowing Unique Ideas #Increase Navbar Height Bootstrap

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strmyweather · 6 years

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35.

I know I’m supposed to dread getting older, but honestly, I never really have. That’s probably at least in part due to the fact that my parents have both aged incredibly gracefully, and I have every hope that I’ll follow in their footsteps—but also, I feel as though I’ve learned and grown so much through my late 20s and early 30s that it’s pretty hard to wish that process would stop. I definitely wouldn’t choose to go back, even if I could.

Still, thirty-five does ‘feel’ like a big birthday on some levels. I mean, I’m a whole new survey demographic now (not an ‘18- to 34-year-old adult’ anymore). I’m officially a CrossFit Masters athlete (yay!). And if I were to have a kid (which at this point is pretty unlikely), I’d now be formally classified as an ‘elderly primigravida’ (sexyyyyy).

At any rate, the steady turning of the earth just has me thinking this year, a bit more so than other years. So, just for fun, here are a few things I’ve learned—some silly, some semi-profound, but all thoroughly true, at least in terms of my own experience of the world.

Any of these ring true for anyone else?

1. In general, seeking out new experiences is more fulfilling than trying to recreate old ones. There are always exceptions — I’ve seen the Broadway show Wicked something like eleven times, in part because I honestly enjoy seeing the different actors’ takes on the characters that I (now) know so well. I ran the NYC Marathon a second time, because I didn’t have the race I wanted to have when I did it in 2014. But in general, our most cherished life experiences are special at least in part because of their uniqueness, and we’re happier when we accept that awesome day or event or moment as a beautiful standalone memory, versus trying to duplicate our joy.

2. At a restaurant, order the thing that you’d never cook for yourself. Restaurants are special, or should be. Most of us don’t eat out every day, or even every week—and we also don’t typically go out on our own; it’s usually a date with a dining companion (or two, or ten) with whom we’re looking forward to spending some quality time. So if you’re in it for the experience, then you kind of owe it to yourself to get the tuna tartare or the fried ice cream or whatever amazing thing you’d never go to the trouble of learning to make at home.

3. Nope, that to-do list is never going to stop scrolling through your brain… One unfortunate fact of adulthood, it seems to me, is that there will never not be something that you ‘should be doing’. There’s a certain level of baseline chatter that you just have to learn to shelve.

4. …but travel is one huge thing that helps with hitting Pause on that list. If you’re only focused on the next couple of hours—where exactly is that ferry port, how do you say ‘bathroom’ in Greek, and what should we have for lunch today?—then it’s hard to remember the closet cleanouts and plant repotting that you’ve been meaning to do.

5. Speaking of which—carry-on only. Always and forever. Even if you’re staying for a month. There is always a way to do it. Bag fees aside, it also keeps you from ever being separated from your stuff, and it’s also just so much simpler logistically—I’m a travel backpack devotee, and I can’t count the number of times my life has been made easier by the fact that I could physically manhandle my own possessions without assistance (up steep flights of hostel stairs in London, through a tropical downpour in Zanzibar, during an hourlong border crossing in Nicaragua).

6. You don’t have to love your job. I mean, it’s easier if you don’t HATE it, either, but… they call it ‘work’ for a reason. You’re not failing if your job isn’t the thing that drives you to spring out of bed in the morning. Despite what social media would have us believe, very few of us actually have the luxury of having our personal interests, our inherent talents, and our actual income all line up—and there’s nothing wrong with that. (And, also worth considering: if my paycheck actually depended on language-learning or CrossFit or international travel, would I still love those things quite as much?)

7. For the most part, vegetables are legitimately delicious. Subtitle: 'Please Stop Steaming Your Brussels Sprouts'. A food you think you don’t like is usually a food that you just haven’t had cooked properly. (Okra isn’t slimy if it’s sliced into medallions, tossed with a little cornmeal, salt, and pepper, and sautéed in just a tiny bit of oil. You're welcome.)

8. Just because you are CAPABLE of doing something—physically, mentally, or emotionally—doesn't mean that thing is necessarily the best FIT for you. As a teenager (with many natural intellectual gifts, but going through a rather unfortunate Shania Twain idolization phase), I was once told by an authority figure, “To whom much is given, much is expected.” Yikes. Talk about feeling like you’re not measuring up. Whether real or imagined, that burden stuck with me for decades—and my resume is sprinkled with some pretty impressive entries from my 20s and early 30s. But what you can’t see there is the associated anxiety, insomnia, weight gain, and general dissatisfaction. It’s taken a long time for me to shake off the reflex that I ‘should’ be aim to be the ‘best’ at absolutely everything—to internalize the fact that, while my abilities matter, so does my own personal happiness. I have a far better work-life balance—and feel like much more of a ‘whole person’—now, at age 35, by virtue of having accepted a position that (on paper) is a little less impressive. In my current role, I still make a difference in people’s lives—but it turns out that I actually have more to give to others by virtue of the fact that I’m also able to take care of myself.

9. Almost no decision is actually permanent. The one exception might be the choice to have a kid—once you take that leap, you’re kind of in it for the long haul. But everything else—romantic relationships, career choices, homeownership—sure, it’s all super stressful and keeps us awake at night… but almost all of it IS still changeable, if we need it to be.

10. Most people you meet are struggling in ways that you know nothing about... The ones who seem to have everything? Rest assured, they don’t. And the ones who are acting ‘off’ and making you second-guess yourself? Chances are good that their behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with you. We humans are inherently short-sighted, selfish creatures whose default mode is to look out mostly for ourselves—evolution made us that way—and yet, in this society filled with modern comforts, we can and should be kinder.

11. ...and strong people only get that way by having gone through something. When you meet someone amazing, remember that they usually had to pass through some kind of test to become the person they now are. I often find myself looking at brilliant, kind, steady, smart, capable people with equal parts admiration and curiosity—wondering, “What darkness did you fight?”

12. The way to tell a ‘good’ lie is to include one solid detail. I’ll preface by saying that lying in general just isn't worth it, not least because it becomes super hard to keep track of… and people can also smell overcompensation a mile away. But on the occasions when you need to tell a relatively harmless fib—to turn down an invitation, to spare someone's feelings, to get out of a party, whatever—include just one good bit of realism. “One of my friends is going through a breakup and I told her I’d meet her for drinks tonight.” “Turns out my parents are coming into town next week, so I don’t think I should commit to that quite yet.”

13. Art is the best travel souvenir. Food gets eaten, clothes blend in with the rest of the closet and lose their connotation. But art is a colorful home addition, a perfect conversation starter, and a constant visible reminder of the adventures you’re had. And if you can simultaneously support a local artist from whatever awesome place you’re traveling to, so much the better.

14. Trains are way more pleasant than planes. The trip might take just slightly longer on paper, but think about it. Free wifi, plenty of legroom, a café car, the ability to stroll, zero required ‘cushion’ time for security screening… and, in sharp contrast to airports, train stations are typically right in the middle of the city center, which (chances are) is likely where you were going anyway.

15. If you’re lucky enough to have a cool family, stay consciously grateful for that. Families look all different ways and have all different dynamics—but we hear so much about all the problems that we sometimes take for granted the millions of ‘normal’, down-to-earth, cohesive, functional family units. Plenty of people out there are doing a really solid job—supporting one other’s various life transitions, thoughtfully listening and providing navigational advice through unforeseen challenges, raising reasonably well-adjusted kids, and straightforwardly taking each other down a peg when needed. We all screw up here and there; that’s inevitable—but if you’ve got one of the awesome families who generally puts the ‘fun’ in dysfunction, it’s worth recognizing that fact and savoring it.

16. A little bit of real stuff is better than a lot of fake stuff. (Just read the famous Amazon reviews of the sugar-free gummy bears!) But really, this is true of just about everything. What would you prefer: one deep conversation or six hours of superficial small talk? One dense fudgy brownie or a whole box of SnackWells cookies? One pair of high-quality leather boots vs a dozen pairs of knockoffs?

17. Not everyone is going to like you. And this works in gradations as well as absolutes—some people are going to like you a lot more than you like them, and lots of people won’t like you nearly as much as you like them. It’s the law of averages in action, and there generally isn’t a lot you can do about it. The takeaway is that it’s a huge waste of emotional energy to continue seeking approval from those who aren’t going to give it.

18. It’s OK to make dumb decisions once in a while as long as you accept the consequences. One of the perks of adulthood is that we're allowed to make less than optimal choices. There are times when opting to stay on that sunny rooftop for a seventh cocktail with our friends really is the ‘right’ decision for our mental health.

19. Nobody else sees your body the way you do. For better and worse, 'perceptual adaptation' is very much a Thing. We see ourselves in the mirror twenty times a day. The holiday belly or PMS bloating truly is not visible to anyone else. Not only are we just so much more highly attuned to fluctuations in our OWN bodies than those of others, but, likewise, other people are also generally way too preoccupied with their own physical ups and downs to even notice yours.

20. This country needs a Life Skills class. In recent decades, we’ve (happily) been moving away from traditional gender stereotypes—and yet, objectively, there was a lot of practical value to some of the stuff our parents learned in Home Ec and Shop. When my sister and I were teenagers, my family once sat around the dinner table and drew up a curriculum that we thought every modern public school student should have to learn by the time of their high school graduation, featuring lessons like changing a tire, sewing on a button, balancing a checkbook, and cooking a couple of basic recipes. I freely admit that, while I am a shining example of a very ‘successful’ twenty-first century student, I’m also significantly lacking in a lot of knowledge areas that would have been considered ‘basic’ not so many years ago.

21. The majority of us wake up with an ‘earworm’. Start paying attention. It’s easy to disregard, but I’ll bet you wake up with a random song in your head first thing every morning.

22. Learning a second (or third, or tenth) language literally causes your brain to work in different ways. You know that pleasant collective lingering that sometimes happens after a group of people have eaten a meal together? Where they all stay around the table—conversing, laughing, relaxed, maybe sipping one last drink? Yeah—in English, we don’t really have a word for that. Dutch does, though: ‘natafelen’ (after-tabling). There’s also the well-known ‘gezellig’—which means ‘cozy’, warm, familiar, but can apply to people or events as well as to spaces. Or what about ‘uitbuiken’—which is basically what we do after Thanksgiving dinner, ‘letting our belly out’—that phase where you push back from the table and take a few minutes to relax and digest. And it’s not just untranslatable words—even concepts that are able to be directly interpreted just ‘feel different’ in other languages. 'Onzichtbaar' (literally: 'unseeable' in Dutch) ‘feels’ just sliiiightly different from 'invisible' in English. Another great example is the large number of ‘creative’ names and words that exist in the Harry Potter series—for instance, in English, the name Dumbledore just sort of calls to mind the image of a tall wizard with a white beard. In recreating that same feeling in Dutch, the translator settled on Perkamentus, a derivative of the word for ‘parchment’, which creates that same gut-level impression for native Dutch speakers. This kind of thing is why translation and interpretation are such art forms—and why the opportunity to learn a new language via adult immersion is so incredibly enriching. You don’t simply gain a new vocabulary; your world inherently becomes broader, because with new words and ideas also comes an ever-so-slightly different vantage point for perception.

23. Split your auto-deposited paychecks. Even if it’s just a little bit, diverting a percentage of each check into a separate account that you rarely access is a way of giving yourself a tiny safety net. If you never see it, you get used to living on what you have. And then, when the day comes that you really need three pounds of coffee and a carton of protein shakes, but are trying to survive until payday because Costco doesn’t accept American Express (ask me how I know)… well, you’ll be really happy when you realize you can make that grocery run after all.

24. Not everybody needs a four-year degree. We will always need skilled tradespeople. (Every single one of us has had that moment when we’ve been deeply, overwhelmingly grateful for an experienced plumber!) A college degree is a great accomplishment, but we’ve perpetuated the idea that possessing one is somehow a mark of intelligence and essential for lifelong success. In reality, four years of undergraduate study have become an increasingly expensive commitment that isn’t necessarily the best value—or the best fit—for everyone. Trade schools and community colleges are undervalued resources that are worth considering. Furthermore, a non-linear path is also okay, even preferred. Take a gap year. Do some service work. Try a part-time job or internship. Read some books. See the world. An expensive and lengthy education may, in fact, be the best choice after all—but give yourself the tools to make an accurate cost-benefit analysis before deciding.

25. Athletics are empowering. Being able to unconsciously trust your body is a wonderful thing. Furthermore, you learn fascinating things about your own individual physical and mental machinery when you explore its limits. This doesn’t necessarily mean deadlifting 300 pounds; your own personal light bulb might be learning to differentiate between the sensations of a high heart rate versus true muscular fatigue, or discovering that the reason your back often hurts is because your superior mobility has allowed you to slide through life with insufficient muscular stability. We all need to get more ‘comfortable being uncomfortable’—because that’s how we grow.

26. Let kids fail… The helicopter-parent epidemic is resulting in an exceptionally anxious generation. The fact is, the way that children grow into confident adults is by being allowed to calculate small risks (that feel large to them, developmentally) and experience both positive and negative consequences. Maybe that steep downhill on their bike will be the most exhilarating thing they’ve ever experienced, or maybe they’ll fall and get badly hurt. Maybe they know their exam material well enough that they can get by okay without studying, or maybe they’ll fail and have to work that much harder for the rest of the semester. Either way, their world is slightly broadened—and their fear slightly lessened.

27. …and, as adults, we should continue to move toward things that scare us. It is a reality of life that you will eventually be forced to confront just about everything you fear, whether large or small. So when the moment arises for you to confront a fear on your terms, that’s a growth opportunity—and, as with everything, having that degree of control sometimes makes all the difference. Actively choosing to undertake an experience is usually a lot more comfortable than being forced into it.

28. Pro-birth isn’t the same thing as pro-life. Meaning, if you’re staunchly anti-abortion, then you’d better also be pro-social programs to support those kids once they’re actually on the planet. (And ideally you’ll also be pro-contraception, pro-health education, and pro-living wage / paid family leave.) In other words: please make sure your moral opinions line up in a way that makes logistical sense.

29. Knowing what you don’t know is just as important as knowing what you do know. And people respect you more when you own that fact confidently. This is true of any life situation, but is actually a concept that I learned firsthand as a healthcare provider. We PAs are exactly (and only) as good as our own self-awareness; we can do so much, but only if we remain acutely aware of the boundaries of our knowledge and experience.

30. The relationships that stick (romantic and otherwise) are the ones that you don’t have to look for—they just find you. This is true of lots of things, actually—career options being another big one. The takeaway is that when something is ‘meant to be’, it tends to be ‘easy’. That’s not to say that we don’t still have to put in work—rather, that the way forward is clear and obvious; the path opens itself up to you, unforced.

31. On the flip side, letting go of a relationship that is no longer serving you—romantic, friendship, or otherwise—is a vital skill. It’s also one that we never truly master, because the context is different every time. But this is one of those situations where life experience pays off big time—not because you necessarily have more tools in the toolbox, but because you’ve had more practice at the flexibility with which you can wield them.

32. Parents learn just as much from their kids as the other way around. I’m not a parent, but I have parents—a couple of pretty awesome ones, as a matter of fact. And while I definitely have one of the ‘good’ family stories and still tend to run straight to my folks anytime I have a ‘life question’, I also recognize that they’ve been stretched, pushed, and challenged in many ways by virtue of the people that my sister and I are. I’m sure they’ve lain awake at night worrying about me at times, but I’ve also nudged them into traveling to new cities and countries, have introduced them to people from different walks of life, and have indirectly forced them to examine their own ideas and beliefs. I’m at a point in my life now where it doesn’t look likely that I’ll end up having kids, at least not biological ones, and this is really the biggest piece of regret that I feel about that: missing out on so many unknown (and unknowable) experiences. What might I have learned—how might I have grown—from those hypothetical kids?

33. Stress is stress is stress. Your poor little body is always trying to compensate for the various abuses of life. It does not know whether your cortisol is high because you had a crazy workday, because you’re in a calorie deficit, because you did a two-a-day training session, because you had a fight with your partner, or because you only slept four hours. It does not know whether your sympathetic nervous system is activated because you just did 100 GHD sit-ups, because you had an awesome birthday cheat day with a couple thousand more calories than usual, or because you just completed a 12-hour road trip in bad weather. It just knows that it’s stressed. Treat your body kindly. After all, you only get the one.

34. One of the absolute greatest things about getting older is self-awareness—learning how to drive your own individual machinery. There’s a lot to unpack here, but basically: life gets a lot better when you can ‘manage yourself’ proactively instead of simply reacting to every small event. Personally, I know that I’m wired for an early bedtime and an early wakeup; that I need a lot of time alone to recharge my batteries; that I’m a more settled and positive person when I make time to write first thing in the morning; that I am prone to become unduly stressed in a competitive setting; that I shouldn’t commit to anything in the evenings after a full workday; that week two of my monthly cycle consistently delivers my strongest days in the gym; that I’ll sleep poorly if I don’t eat enough on a given day; that my emotional intuition is generally accurate even if I can’t put it into words; that endurance training beats up my body much more than heavy barbell work; that I consistently underestimate the physiological stress of driving a long distance; and that despite often dreading a task beforehand, I will almost always immediately commit to doing it perfectly once I’ve actually started. TL;DR—if you know your inherent patterns and tendencies, you can build your life around them in a way that makes you a better, happier, more optimally functional human.

And, 35… Comparison is the thief of joy. A pediatric surgeon I used to work with, when discussing his surgical outcomes with parents, would often put it another way, “The enemy of good is perfect.” Either way, this is probably the single most important thing I’ve learned thus far as an adult… that it’s so much easier to savor your own small accomplishments if you aren’t constantly focused on how you stack up next to others. Social media perpetuates this issue in spades, because there will always be someone smarter, prettier, stronger, funnier, or more accomplished—and nowadays, it’s harder than ever to avoid having that fact thrust in one’s face. But if we’re happy inside ourselves—if a patient tells us we’re appreciated, if we squat five pounds more than we did last week, if we love the way a new shirt looks in the mirror, if we’ve internalized a few more life lessons at the age of 35 than we had by 25—shouldn’t that quiet satisfaction be enough?

#thirtyfive #35 #lifelessons #alwayslearning #life #birthday #progress #contemplation #thinking

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doycetopia · 7 years

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Masks, Actual Play Analysis, Sessions 11 to 15

We’re back! It’s another long flight, so let’s run through Masks sessions to the latest and see what to make of them…

Issue 11: When Sablestar Strikes! (hell-day part 3)

Issue 11 on YouTube

AP Report

I like when we can start things in media res, if only to skip the fiddly front-loading on a session.

In this one, I skipped away from the school, working off the assumption Leo and Adam would want to get the action as far away from the school as they could. The players agreed, though in hindsight I probably didn’t need to play it so coy with the framing and just tell them what I was thinking. Lesson learned, though unfortunately not until now, and not when I needed it in session 13. More on that in a few.

At any rate, this fight went off quite well, I thought. The team has only had a few fights up to this point, and I was starting to think I’d need to bring in at least a 1-for-1 matchup to really test them, since they pretty much wiped out everyone up to this point.

Sablestar provided an additional and very different data point, proving a real problem for the heroes without me needing to bring in any further bad guys. Part of that was simply using mixed successes to complicate the scene with additional ‘stuff’ – when the heroes can take out a villain with 3 or maybe 4 solid hits, giving them something to do besides punching is much more interesting. This was definitely the most dynamic and interesting combat scene we’d had up to this point, and started to add some great backstory to Adam/Concord.

As things wrapped up, the last big move saw me handing out a pile of ‘take a powerful blow’ moves. I hemmed and hawed about this during the game – it felt right, and normally that’s enough, but for some reason I’m way way way more tentative with GM moves and even narration in this game. I have no idea why, and honestly I don’t think that extra care has benefited anyone very much, so I think I need to trust my instincts a bit more.

Weirdly, this is born out by a fairly egregious overstep I made a few sessions later. More on that in a bit.

Issue 12: When the Dead Walk!

(Hell-day part… four? seriously? – or part 4 and part 0, maybe, due to a flashback? It’s complicated)

Issue 12 on YouTube

AP Report

This session was a bit weird, and weirdly short.

We started off with a flashback to cover what Ghost Girl had been up to during her Condition-clearing reckless investigation (a scene I should have had in the previous session and never got to). This ended up taking a long while, and didn’t involve anyone else, so that’s just poor use of time on my part, despite the fact I was happy with the stuff we got into and found out. Good narration, bad group-involvement. No GM cookie for that one.

The only other thing we got to was the big reveal that the robot that assembled itself in Link’s home base and came after him at school was actually a back-up of Pneuma that had activated after some kind of “Emergency: Go To 10″ protocol was activated when something bad happened to her.” There was some drama (and comfort/support moves) around this that I liked.

Buuuut, there is a problem I didn’t recognize until it was too late – putting Pneuma in danger is basically a board-clearing, table-flipping deal for Link, which presents problems when we already have a couple-three major plot chainsaws in the air. Bill gave me some good tips on ways to make that sort of thing a bit more of a timed slow burn, and I’ve tucked those away for later, but lesson learned.

Issue 13: If This Be In Media Res!

Day of Hell, part the Fifth

Issue 13 on YouTube

AP Report

So I screwed up.

The obvious thing I screwed up is that I started in media res and framed the heroes into the middle of a major assault on… the secret basements and sub basements beneath the evacuated Halcyon International Airport, and I did so without checking with anyone first.

Which, when I sum it up like that, is so blindingly obvious a fuck-up it seems impossible I didn’t see it coming.

Now, that sort of framing is fine if you’ve taken the measure of the team and know that’s where things are going and just decide to skip to the higher action parts of things.

But that’s not what I did. Bad me. -2 GM cookies.

The thing is, it wasn’t DOING those things that was the actual screw-up.

The mistake I made was in getting talked into a hard-framed in media res thing in the first place, because I hadn’t prepped for it or really thought about it much, so I was ad-libbing the whole thing without communicating first, during, or after. (My only defense is that I was tired and punchy going into the night, but that’s pretty weak tea.) If I’m going to do something like that it needs prep, and communication. That was the real mistake.

This reinforces, in a weird way, the ‘need to trust my instincts more’ note I made a few sessions back, because my instincts were to not do this, and I didn’t listen.

So that’s both ways not trusting myself (not doing and doing) messing with me, inside two or three sessions. Bleh.

On the Bright Side

It was a deprotagonizing set-up, but everyone agreed the assumptions made were fair, if extrapolated without anyone’s input (damn it just seems to stupid and OBVIOUS every time I think about it). “If we’d played through the whole lead-in,” went the response, “it wouldn’t have looked exactly the same, but it would have been darn close, so it’s okay.”

Put another way, I’m annoyed with what I did, but I think the results in the fiction were good and added a lot of great stuff to the campaign – the introduction of Rosa Rook gets associated in everyone’s mind with the situation being out of their control and with high-handed manipulation by adults, and I guess that’s a plus, there; she’s a great addition I think the whole game really needed.

So… I really wish we’d gotten there differently, but I was glad for the final destination? I dunno.

The very best suggestion in post-session discussion was that getting everyone on the same page with the start of the session could have been handled beautifully with love letters, like that ones I used in Session One and which, in one player’s words “I’ve hoped we’d use more.” Great, great idea.

AEGIS swept in for a PR coverup (“those young heroes were at the airport to stop a power-suited terrorist!”), which leads us into the next session, where I’d take the love letter feedback to heart.

Issue 14: Love Letters… Unleashed!

Hellday 6: The Helldayening

Issue 14 on YouTube

AP Report

I started off the session (and, really, pretty much filled up the session) playing off of love letters I’d written for each character.

I distributed them days earlier, giving everyone time to process and consider their choices, which gave everyone a lot more buy-in. I was also open to feedback and modification of the letters, but all the feedback was positive, so nothing to do there.

As I said, playing through all this stuff pretty much filled up the whole session, and saw the realization of the 6- rolls from the past three or four sessions that I’d had on my to-do list for awhile.

Jason started … let’s call it ‘hallucinating’ a 10-year-old version of Alycia Chin, bringing the total number of holographic AI relationships on his dance card to something like 4 or 5. I’m pretty happy with that result, and I think Dave was as well, as he had mentioned during the week wishing he could get all the success AND failure results from the love letter.

Concord’s … ‘shard’ finally woke up, which is going to give him something else to contend with – a ‘voice’ for the superhero side of his Superhero/Mundane existence, which we’ve both been looking forward to. The final scene with him and his family was awesome and brutal.

I was happy to see Link protecting his people to the press – I think that was really nice to see after a couple sessions of having them at risk. Also helped us highlight his friend Otto’s accessibility issues.

I was VERY happy to have Harry in a position where we could see him being more of an expert in the public side of being a superhero. It went well, and rolled into some good stuff in the following session as well. I really liked him in that space, and alienating him from his family a bit, which we haven’t seen yet, but will.

Everything else was revealing information (background about Ghost Girl) and laying the groundwork for same (Pneuma has a weird memory error in her backup, and AEGIS has a video of the moments surrounding Jason’s Dad’s … death? which Agent Waters slipped to Quill).

All in all, very happy with this session, and the use of the love letters. I’m thinking about using a “lite” version of this for the coming session to get things sorted out a bit more.

Issue 15: In the Clutches of Late-Night Melodrama!

Thank god this Hellday is ov- WHAT DO YOU MEAN PART 7?!?

Issue 15 on YouTube

AP Report

I need to get better at rationing time based on how many characters are involved in the scene. I’m not good at that, and I need to get better.

Link moves in with the Gales, a twist I did NOT see coming. Need to think more about that, because there’s some completely unexplored territory there. Yet more good stuff with Harry, which I really liked.

Jason gets some information about his dad, working with Achilles Chin, working against someone… else? Who? What? Jason’s response says he’s expecting this to really blow up in his face in short order, in a big way. I’ve got some more stuff to lay out here.

Concord’s parents tell him they want him to stop working for the Concordance. Maybe. They want to talk about it. I think Mike and I are both excited about where that’s going.

And… a couple rolls go sideways and Ghost Girl starts out investigating her family’s ties to mystic secret societies and… ends up in the Sepiaverse.

So that’s gonna be a thing.

Thoughts

I love this game. I haven’t been pushed like this in years.

I also haven’t doubted myself as much either, which really needs to stop.

original post

#masks #masks rpg #pbta #randomaverage

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kim26chiu · 7 years

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Now That Tech Titans Agree the Internet Should Be Regulated and Censored…

Image via Shutterstock

As the punchline goes, “Now that we’ve established what you are, we’re just negotiating over the price.”

Something similar just happened with the tech companies. Reversing all of their previous “hands off the internet!” argumentation about the need to keep the internet free and open, they have now embraced the logic of regulation and censorship. Now the only question is who gets to be the censor.

Marginal Revolution made this very point in reaction to my article about Google and Apple banning Gab from their app store, writing:

I also fear that Google and Apple haven’t thought very far down the game tree. One of the arguments for leaving the meta-platforms alone is that they are facially neutral with respect to content. But if Google and Apple are explicitly exercising their power over speech on moral and political grounds then they open themselves up to regulation. If code is law then don’t be surprised when the legislators demand to write the code.

The internet companies have been the beneficiary of an incredibly hand-off approach by the government. Telecom legislation in the 1990s exempted internet services from most regulation that had historically applied to telecom. It exempted internet platforms from any liability for content posted on their sites (the idea being that they were simply platforms, not publishers). They were given tax exemptions, etc.

Many attempts were made to add regulation to the internet, but these companies were able to successfully fend them off by arguing that the internet needed to remain free, open, and uncensored. For example, a great new article in the New Yorker called “Who Owns the Internet?” talks about the case of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA):

Google entered and more or less immediately took over the music business when it acquired YouTube, in 2006, for $1.65 billion in stock. As Taplin notes, just about “every single tune in the world is available on YouTube as a simple audio file (most of them posted by users).” Many of these files are illegal, but to Google this is inconsequential. Under the Digital Media Copyright Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton shortly after Google went live, Internet service providers aren’t liable for copyright infringement as long as they “expeditiously” take down or block access to the material once they’re notified of a problem. Musicians are constantly filing “takedown” notices—in just the first twelve weeks of last year, Google received such notices for more than two hundred million links—but, often, after one link is taken down, the song goes right back up at another one. In the fall of 2011, legislation aimed at curbing online copyright infringement, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was introduced. It had bipartisan support in Congress, and backing from such disparate groups as the National District Attorneys Association, the National League of Cities, the Association of Talent Agencies, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In January, 2012, the bill seemed headed toward passage, when Google decided to flex its market-concentrated muscles. In place of its usual colorful logo, the company posted on its search page a black rectangle along with the message “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” The resulting traffic overwhelmed congressional Web sites, and support for the bill evaporated. (Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, who had been one of the bill’s co-sponsors, denounced it on Facebook.)

Google and these other firms have now forfeited any moral claim to stand for an uncensored internet. They have fully embraced the logic of censorship – with themselves in the role of censor.

This might hold in the US, with its supine approach to corporations, but other countries will not so impressed. Who do you think Xi Jinping wants censoring China’s internet, himself or Mark Zuckerberg? The answer is obvious, and other countries are likely to come to the same conclusion very soon.

Even some of these corporate CEOs now seem to have belatedly discovered that because of their own actions they no longer stand on solid ground. Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a DDoS protection service, who kicked off Nazi site the Daily Stormer after he, in his own words, “woke up in a bad mood,” wrote a WSJ op-ed saying that maybe he shouldn’t have that power:

When standing up to government requests or angry Twitter demands to silence unpopular speech, it was powerful to be able to say we’d never terminated a customer due to political pressure. I’m not sure we can say that anymore.

I’d like to fall back on the First Amendment. I’m the son of a journalist. I grew up with discussions around the dinner table on the importance of freedom of speech. But the First Amendment doesn’t compel private companies to let anyone broadcast on their platforms. Moreover, Cloudflare operates infrastructure in 70 countries, few of which have anything approaching American-style speech protections.

Yet in all nations, there is (or should be) a reasonable expectation of due process. It is the idea that no one is penalized without first receiving a fair hearing and a fair shake. In civilized societies, the law is applied equally by independent decision makers, not capriciously by mobs and tyrants.

Did we meet the standard of due process in this case? I worry we didn’t. And at some level I’m not sure we ever could. It doesn’t sit right to have a private company, invisible but ubiquitous, making editorial decisions about what can and cannot be online. The pre-internet analogy would be if Ma Bell listened in on phone calls and could terminate your line if it didn’t like what you were talking about….My moral compass alone should not determine who gets to stay online.

Prince clearly sees that by setting himself up as the arbiter of who can be online, even someone like the Daily Stormer no one is sorry to see go, he has mortally wounded his own company’s ability to resist not just the pressure of the crowd, but government pressure as well.

As a recent Axios piece by David McCabe put it, the walls are closing in on Silicon Valley’s tech giants. Conservatives are concerned about political bias from Silicon Valley’s far left politics. But a host of leftist critics are also baying at the door. The social justice crowd has some pointed questions about their hiring practices, for example. That New Yorker piece, from a center-left publication, also gives voice to concerns over concentrated power, saying:

Thirty years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales. Such dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown), is essentially monopolistic. In his account, the new monopolies are even more powerful than the old ones, which tended to be limited to a single product or service. Carnegie, Taplin suggests, would have been envious of the reach of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

And a recent must-read piece on Facebook by John Lancaster in the London Review of Books is scathing.

The fact is that fraudulent content, and stolen content, are rife on Facebook, and the company doesn’t really mind, because it isn’t in its interest to mind. Much of the video content on the site is stolen from the people who created it. An illuminating YouTube video from Kurzgesagt, a German outfit that makes high-quality short explanatory films, notes that in 2015, 725 of Facebook’s top one thousand most viewed videos were stolen. This is another area where Facebook’s interests contradict society’s. We may collectively have an interest in sustaining creative and imaginative work in many different forms and on many platforms. Facebook doesn’t. It has two priorities, as Martínez explains in Chaos Monkeys: growth and monetisation. It simply doesn’t care where the content comes from. It is only now starting to care about the perception that much of the content is fraudulent, because if that perception were to become general, it might affect the amount of trust and therefore the amount of time people give to the site.

Silicon Valley has acted, and continues to act, in a very arrogant manner. That mentality worked when they were young upstarts, but is now drawing critical attention. They seem to want to take over everything and run the world. Maybe they will. But if outside forces eventually hobble those ambitions, this period of time in which they abandoned the idea of the free internet in favor of the regulated and censored one may be seen as the turning point in their history. No one will ever take them seriously as champions of openness again.

from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/08/24/now-that-tech-titans-agree-the-internet-should-be-regulated-and-censored/

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barb31clem · 7 years

Text

Now That Tech Titans Agree the Internet Should Be Regulated and Censored…

Image via Shutterstock

As the punchline goes, “Now that we’ve established what you are, we’re just negotiating over the price.”

Marginal Revolution made this very point in reaction to my article about Google and Apple banning Gab from their app store, writing:

Google and these other firms have now forfeited any moral claim to stand for an uncensored internet. They have fully embraced the logic of censorship – with themselves in the role of censor.

And a recent must-read piece on Facebook by John Lancaster in the London Review of Books is scathing.

from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/08/24/now-that-tech-titans-agree-the-internet-should-be-regulated-and-censored/

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marie-allen-on · 7 years

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Madame Claw and The Mirror Mask - Part 2

Hillwood's superhero duo are just your average high schoolers. Oneshot. Now told in three multiple parts. Rated T for language. Can be found on Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own.

Part 1 >> Part 3

The Aftermath

It had all been a blur after Arnold confirmed he was her masked partner, but she did remember the urgency she felt of not being able to get out of the boarding house fast enough. She had grabbed her bag and bolted out faster than she could formulate a response. Holy shit, Arnold was The Mirror Mask? Arnold? When had she fallen into this Twilight Zone episode and how was she supposed to wake up?

Gerald had sent a text along the lines of hoping she felt better, but she couldn't really recall exactly; it had been Arnold's obvious cover as to why she had bailed on them and missed out on those yummy subs. Nor could she figure out if it had really been her that had written five pages towards their report, because if someone were to ask her anything about those cultures, let alone how they viewed women, she wouldn't have been able to tell them shit.

Yet, when she had gone to school on Monday, Gerald had freaked out on her in response to her email from the night before, wondering how she had been able to do the research and knock out that much when he himself had just finished reading the first book.

She just brushed him off, telling him that she obviously was a natural at research.

School…what a nightmare that had been so far. Despite their shared classes, she had avoided Arnold like the plague. As soon as the bell rang, she bolted out of class. She took her lunch alone these last few days and in different places because, dammit, the football-headed dweeb was actually looking for her.

She avoided Mask during Tuesday and Wednesday night's patrol, too, instead keeping to the ground rather than the roofs that they were usually so fond of.

In fact, she was doing pretty well for herself…until last night with the two insignificant minions. The first had been so quick and easy to get rid of; she had been able to defeat him before Mask had even shown up. The second had been just as easy but because she was so worried about trying not to get anywhere close to Mask, she had almost royally screwed up. Before Mask could corner her, she had taken off.

And now it was Friday in the last class of the day. Helga couldn't wait to get out of there, especially since she shared it with Arnold. Then she could hole up in her room until she was needed. If she was needed. Besides that mess up the night before, there hadn't been much happening around town.

However, as much as he had tried getting her to talk to him the last few days, he hadn't even looked at her today. They had one other shared class earlier in the day and she had been too busy trying to ignore him that she didn't realize it until he sat down in his desk in front of her. No comments, no pleas or passed notes; he just sat and prepared for the class. Surely he wasn't actually mad at her? She just needed time to process all of this. She wasn't like him and didn't need to talk things out. She preferred to internalize.

It was small group discussion time about last night's reading, but she ignored everyone in favor of trying to actually do the reading that had been assigned. Normally she wasn't so flaky in her classes but she had genuinely forgotten about it. This avoiding thing was really taking its toll on her.

"Did you see the news this morning?" It was Claire speaking to Arnold. Even if they were supposed to be discussing the reading, it wasn't uncommon to talk about other things.

"About what?" Helga unconsciously perked up when Arnold responded. So he would talk to Claire instead of her, huh? So what if she had been ignoring and avoiding him all week? He was her partner and he should know that she needed to keep him at a distance but, dammit, he shouldn't ignore her! So what if that's what she'd been pretty much asked for these last few days?

"About Madame Claw and The Mirror Mask. It was kind of weird."

"What was weird?" interjected Gerald. It actually kind of freaked her out, but Gerald was a total fanboy for Claw. Not that she would have ever brought the superheroes up in front of anyone, but she always steered clear of conversation of Claw and Mask when Gerald was involved.

"The footage that they showed from last night. Madame Claw almost fell off the building and then she just left without checking on anyone or anything like she normally does. I hope she didn't get hurt."

Gerald nodded at Claire's observation. "Oh, yeah, something was definitely up with her. Like her head wasn't in the game."

Helga continued to look down at the pages, but wasn't actually reading anything. Truthfully, she was a bit surprised that Gerald and Claire had paid that enough attention. Not to mention she was almost touched at their concern. To be fair, she didn't do it for the fame and glory – it was pretty much a requirement on her end. And even if she couldn't really accept praise (thanks a lot Bob and Miriam for that screw up), it was nice to hear her peers talk about her in a positive light.

"Do you think they're having a lover's quarrel?"

She instantly thought she heard a violin screeching. A WHAT now?

Gerald sputtered. "What! No way! They're totally not together, Claire! I can't believe you're one of those people! Not to mention that she'd never go for a dork like Mask."

Helga sunk lower in her seat and held up the book to cover her warming face. She couldn't believe they were talking like that. And ha! If only you knew, Gerald. Helga couldn't help but snicker at the thought of what Gerald would say or do if he ever found out that Arnold was Mask.

Crap, now she was thinking of The Reveal. Her stomach fell.

"What are you talking about, Gerald? It's completely obvious that they care for each other."

"Care, yeah, I can see that; they're partners. But there's no way they're dating," he argued.

Claire rolled her eyes to Arnold. "You boys are all alike; absolutely blind to the truth of love."

Helga gripped her book. Don't you dare, Football Head.

"I never said I agreed with Gerald."

"You don't?" responded both his best friend and Claire in sync. Helga gripped her book tighter and narrowed her eyes at a random spot on the page, wishing she could shoot daggers to the boy in front of her instead.

"Yeah. In fact, I don't just think they're dating, I know they are."

There was a squeak but Helga couldn't honestly say if it was she or Claire. Her book dropped to the desk and she could feel the color that had been starting to show immediately drop down to a level that would make Snow White envious. "What!"

"Seriously, Arnold?" Claire was grinning and practically bouncing on the edge of her seat. "How do you know?"

Helga could only see half of his face, grinning that idiotic way he did when he was about to get cocky (seriously, how the hell did she not see it before?) and he didn't miss a beat. "I've seen them a couple of times while they're out patrolling since I typically hang out on my roof. Besides, a blind man can see how in sync they are with each other. How could they not be together?"

"Oh my god, Arnold, you are so full of shit." Three pairs of eyes landed on her: two round in surprise and one hooded in obvious challenge. Damn, had she really said that? Well, no turning back now. "Stop gossiping about stuff you don't know."

"Why Helga," he began, a smile forming on his perfect face, "I didn't realize you cared so much about the topic. You're usually not interested in the lives of our superheroes."

"I can't stand rumors," she snapped. "And while normally I would stay out of this crap, I have a civil duty to stop it from spreading before it gets out of hand. Besides, shouldn't we be discussing last night's reading?"

Arnold shifted in his chair and rested his arm on her desk. "What does it matter what people think? It's not harming anyone."

"Yet!" She shoved his arm off and he promptly put it back. "Before you know it, the whole town is going to act crazy. They're going to start interfering with their battles and getting hurt. I don't need my tax dollars paying for the ignorant's hospital bills!" She tried to shove it off again but he held firm. Damn, his arms really were solid.

"You don't work, Helga."

"Every time I buy an ice cream or coffee, I'm paying taxes, Football Head. I'm a contributing member to society."

"So what are your reasons for thinking they're not together?" As much as she knew Mask, Mask knew her. And to make it worse, Arnold knew Helga. It was obvious to him that she was trying to distract him with another argument and he hadn't taken the bait.

She rolled her eyes and leaned back against her seat, folding her arms across her chest. "Tons of crap. It's almost impossible to hide a relationship. People make too many mistakes when they try and Claw and Mask haven't made any of those mistakes."

Arnold's ever-widening smile made her blood boil. "Enlighten us."

She glared at him. "They never touch each other."

"Oh, I have to disagree with you there, Helga." It was Claire again. Helga was momentarily startled that she was still there, having almost forgotten about her and Gerald.

"And I agree with you, Claire," was Arnold's response but continued to look at Helga. "They touch all the time. Claw is always doing that hair ruffle thing to Mask," (she does?) "he's always holding her a little bit longer than he probably should when he catches her or pulls her to safety in one dashing move or another," (Oh, god, she was instantly reminded of all the times Arnold seemed to mancrush on Mask. It made so much more sense now! Seriously, Mask, how narcissistic can you be?), "they high-five, push each other around-"

"They seem to always be holding hands!" Interrupted Claire. "And what about The Kiss?" she giggled.

Helga groaned and rubbed her forehead with her left hand. "It wasn't a kiss, Claire. It was obviously photoshopped." Of course she would be referring to that stupid tabloid picture that popped up a couple of months ago. It had taken weeks for that to die down, even if it was blatantly altered.

"No, no. Not that one. When The Mirror Mask was attacked by The Galloping Knight." Oh. That had been a particularly nasty fight. But there hadn't been anything remotely close to what could have been assumed as a kiss. Helga frowned, trying hard to remember the play-by-play.

"Oooh, right!" Arnold was grinning at her again. "He was cornered, probably thinking he was on his final lance when Knight stabbed him just as Claw swooped in. If I recall correctly, which I most certainly do, she fought particularly harder than normal."

Helga scoffed. "That proves nothing. Her partner was hurt. Of course she had to save his tail." Arnold's grin widened even more and she suddenly realized the pun. Helga flushed and slammed her hand on the desk, completely ignoring her stunned classmates. "Dammit, that doesn't count! It wasn't intentional!"

He didn't respond to her outburst but she knew just how giddy he was over that. Dammit.

"So he's laying there, bleeding, and Claw defeats the minion. She rushes to his side, perhaps thinking he's dead…" he trails off, his grin still wide, instantly knowing she would remember what happened next.

That wasn't fair, though. She really thought he had been injured pretty bad. So what if her emotions got the better of her that one time? It had been scary, thinking that he had been seriously injured. And there had been so much blood. It had been a no brainer for her to rush back to him, to make sure the minion hadn't punctured something important. And of course she had been relieved to find out he was ok and, still emotionally charged, she had hugged him and kissed his cheek.

Her face warmed a touch more, but she brushed it off with a roll of her eyes. "A kiss on the cheek means nothing. Especially after that particular fight."

"Yeah. Timberly kisses me all the time, especially whens I get hurt," Gerald finally contributed.

"Claw and Mask aren't siblings, though." Helga paused a moment when Gerald gave her a 'are you kidding me? I thought you were on my side!' look and mentally kicked herself for giving more fuel to Arnold and Claire. She should have just kept her big mouth shut from the beginning.

Arnold couldn't have been happier if he was a pig in mud and he had the laugh to show it. She glared at him again for good measure. "See, Helga? You're on the MirrorClaw ship whether you realize it or not."

"Shove it, football face. They are not together. Never have been nor will they ever be. They have a strictly business relationship and that is all it will ever be. She respects him too much."

Her face, once again, turned a shade of pink at that slip up, especially since his grin got even wider with a raise of an eyebrow that was elegantly arched up. She could just feel his arrogance oozing off of him in waves, the jerk.

"You guys are crazy." Although she heard Gerald, she continued to glare at Arnold as he grinned back at her. "I can't believe we're even talking about this. Arnold, I love you bro, but you're whack to think anything will ever come of your shipper fantasy."

Arnold turned to smirk at his best friend. "So you can have a go with her? And ruin your chance with a certain someone else?"

Any other time, Helga would have given Gerald a hard time about how his face turned redder than the shirt he was wearing, but the bell rang and Helga had to get out of there. Even if they had a têt-à-têt just a moment ago, she really didn't want to have to deal with Arnold alone.

Not even bothering with putting her book away, Helga grabbed her bag with her other free hand and ran out.

In fact, she ran all the way home, not even stopping at her locker or to walk with Phoebe to the bus stop. She'd text an apology later. The most important thing is to get away from school. And it looks like it was a good thing she had ran because she beat the bus by a good twenty minutes.

With Bob gone until dinner and Miriam suspiciously but blessedly absent, Helga leapt up the stairs with ease and ran into her room. Success! It was officially the weekend! No more dodging Arnold in the hallways and classes, no more sitting on edge whenever she spotted him coming towards her, and no confrontation. Now if only she could get through the weekend without seeing Mask and –

Helga let out a started scream as she skidded to a stop at her doorway. There, standing in the middle of her room with his arms folded across his chest and a scowl on his face was none other than the football-headed jerk himself.

She slammed the door behind her and barely reminded herself to gently put down her bag as her beloved sprite was hiding out in there, the very being that made her Madame Claw. "What are you doing in my room?" she yelled, advancing onto him. "In fact, how did you even get in here? And how did you beat me from school?"

Still scowling, he pointed to her mirror. She kept herself from smacking her forehead, not believing he had used his powers to get the upper hand.

Oh, shit, he could have done that all week…

She'd think about it later.

"You've been avoiding me."

She scoffed. "You're imagining things. Now get out of here."

"No. Not until we talk."

"There's nothing to talk about!"

He frowned and lowered his arms. "Why are you so upset that I'm Mask? Do you hate me that much?"

Helga was taken aback by that, wondering where he had put that together. Besides the typical insults and teasing here and there, she and Arnold had actually gotten along pretty well in high school. They were civil in the worst of times and almost pals in the best. Not in the level of hey-I'm-bored-let's-hang-out type, but if they saw each other alone while they were out, which was pretty frequent, they would keep company for a bit.

"What? I don't hate you."

"Then why are you angry?"

"Why aren't you?" she cried, throwing her arms up in the air. "There are so many things wrong with this. First of all, we were never supposed to know each other's identity, let alone actually know each other in civilian form. Do you know how dangerous this is now?"

"So…you're upset because of that and not because it's me?" The relief that showed on his face and in his tone took Helga by surprise and stopped her retort. To be honest, she had been so consumed with the fact that Mask was Arnold that she hadn't really thought about Arnold being Mask. And what freaked her out the most was that she had just started to accept her feelings for Mask and, low and behold, he turns out to be the one other guy she had ever had feelings for. And that was putting it lightly.

It was for purely selfish reasons why she had freaked out. And she was still uncomfortable with it: her getting over Arnold, Mask constantly making his feelings known for Claw, her new feelings for Mask, finding out that both boys were one and the same…it had just been too much. And if she didn't let go of that, her own insecurities would have taken over and crush her.

Helga wasn't Claw. Helga was crass, rude, tomboyish, and definitely not someone anyone would want to be with. In fact, she had been so sure that if Mask would ever find out who she really was, he would be so disgusted with himself that he would bail out on her and hang up his superhero gig for good just to get away from her.

And now that this confrontation was happening, her fears were surely about to become reality: she was going to lose him.

But, then he had asked if she had been upset that it was him. The anger that she had lashed out towards him just moments ago drained, sucking out most of her energy.

"Of course I'm not upset it's you, Arnold. Yeah, I was surprised, just as you were, but…it's just..."

She couldn't continue and looked away, not wanting to show any weakness in front of him. She had only shown Mask insecurity a couple of times, and those had been in moments of weakness for both of them, but right now she was in front of Arnold. It was still weird.

Arnold reached out and took a hold of her left hand. It had been scratching her arm, as she was wont to do when she was nervous, and she looked back up at him with a frown. There was that familiar twinkle in his eyes as he gave her a crooked grin and squeezed her hand.

"You don't have to feel guilty, Helga. If I wanted revenge against you for all the years of torment, I would have done that when I first discovered my powers."

She blinked up at him, confused at first before rolling her eyes and punching him in his shoulder, freeing her hand from his grasp. She was relieved that he had taken the comedic way out of that instead of getting her upset with trying to talk. He really did know her.

"Yeah, right. You're a goody-goody both in and out of the mask, Arnoldo. There's no away you'd beat me up, anyway. I'd kick your butt any time, any where."

"Is that a promise?"

Helga brushed passed him with a roll of her eyes, heading to her closet (which had thankfully be sans shrines for years now), and hung up her jacket. "Call it whatever you want, Lotte, it's all the same to me."

When she turned back to him with a smirk, closing the closet behind her, she was taken aback by the look on his face. It wasn't something that she could immediately identify because she had never seen it on Arnold before. Maybe…tenderness?

"For the record, Helga, I'm glad you're Claw. I feel stupid and blind for not seeing it before, but out of all the girls I know, I'm glad you're her."

It didn't go unnoticed by Helga that he had referred to her being Claw and not Claw being her. It was telling and it hit something deep inside, causing her stomach to do a funny flop. "Oh yeah? Was that before or after you blew chunks realizing that you'd been flirting with the devil?" She smirked, feeling a stab in her gut. She took his cue from earlier and stuck with humor even though she knew that any minute now he was going to do a one-eighty and reveal just how disgusted he was and leave her, even if it would be out of character for either of his identities.

He chuckled at her instead, prompting a frown from her. "Are you kidding? I couldn't have asked for a better person than you."

"What?"

He flashed her a genuine smile and stepped towards her, but not enough to close the distance. She mentally applauded his instincts because if he had come any closer, she would have struck out. She was tightly on guard, ready to spring again, especially since she was cornered in her room. If there was one thing she couldn't do, it was handle any sort of praise.

"I'm glad it's you because if it had been anyone else, they wouldn't be able to handle both worlds. You're strong, smart, funny when you're not trying to act like a bitch –"

"Hey!"

He grinned wider. "You aren't the same bully-in-hiding that you used to be when you were a kid. You've always had a good side to you and you were always so afraid to show it. You're actually pretty compassionate when you want to be. I feel like now you finally get to be the person who you've always been inside. I've always known she was in there and she's finally been coming out these last few years." That was true, at least. He had been telling her that she was good since the first grade and she had been pretty chill since freshman year. Even more so since she became Madame Claw. Maybe it was because the long nights were making her too tired to be a brat to everyone like the years prior. "We all get to see who Helga Pataki really is; the one I've always known about.

"And then with Claw… Hillwood gets a superhero and a positive, female role model to kids. Which," he cut her off when she was about to protest, "is very much the case, Helga. Whether you want to admit it or not, she's done a lot of good for this town. And there aren't a lot of good, female superheroes out there. They're all guys."

"They're all in movies and books, too, Football Head…" she trailed off, instantly regretting what she said as it just helped to prove his point. She hated when she did that and it happened almost too often.

It seemed as if he was expecting it, because his grin was triumphant. She rolled her eyes away from him, looking towards her bookshelf to keep from looking up at him.

Really, she didn't know what to say. While Arnold had always insisted she was good growing up, she didn't realize how deeply he believed that until now. He always looked on the bright side of things but to see it in her was just crazy. And even if what he did say made sense to her, especially with the positive things about Claw, it was still hard for her to accept it. She was mean ol' Helga deep down. Not this great thing he obviously believed her to be.

But even despite that, she knew that he saw her for who she was, and not some unattainable figure that she joked with Mask about whenever he flirted with her.

Oh god…how could he want to stay with her knowing who she really was?

"Helga." She looked up at him, blinking back the tears she didn't realize were forming. "You're overthinking things."

She scoffed at him and folded her arms. "I'm not."

"Yes you are, because I did and kind of am still doing it, too."

She sighed then, knowing that was probably true. He had always been good at reading her, just as she was good at reading him. At least, that was the case during battles. It's one of the things that made – make – them such a great team.

"Claw wouldn't be anywhere without Mask, you know. If you were to say that you couldn't do this anymore…" she trailed off and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She couldn't do this alone.

Before she realized what had happened, she found herself enveloped in his arms. She tensed, prepared to push him away but found that she really didn't have the energy to. "Chasca…the only way that I would leave would be if you told me to. You're my partner. I would never leave you willingly and never on my own."

Helga closed her eyes, the lump in her throat growing larger. It finally clicked for her that Arnold wasn't Mask, and Mask wasn't Arnold. They were both one and the same and, just how she would never give up on Mask or Arnold, he would never give up on her. Neither side of her. It was a surreal feeling, one that, even if she recognized it, she would probably not be able to full grasp for some time. But now, standing here in his embrace, she realized that it was something she would eventually come to accept.

There would be no Madame Claw without The Mirror Mask, just as there would be no Helga without Arnold. And even if the latter had distanced themselves over the years, they had always really been together. This, she realized, just solidified it and made it factual. Together, Mask and Claw had been one hell of a force. And now, together in both worlds, they would be unstoppable.

As long as they were together, they would be undefeatable. Dark Matter didn't stand a chance.

Part 1 >> Part 3

#fanfic #fanfiction #helga pataki #Arnold Shortman #hey arnold #marie allen

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