#i could not imagine 200 years of that sort of hell or the amount of time and work it would take him to even begin to mentally recover

[esterigermaine]

Astarion needs so much therapy.

[rametarin]

That Fujoshi has read too many bad romance novels. I'm not meaning to imply anything by this question but why not just tell your mom that you got a paycut and then squirrel away $50 or $100 a week under your mattress or in a new bank account? I imagine that you've thought of this already since you're pretty smart but I honestly can't think of why this idea wouldn't work. By the way, thanks for the response to my Alice in Wonderland math ask.

Because, had I a job, she'd be up my ass screaming about looking at my tax returns and insisting to "help" with my taxes. Under the usual threat of homelessness and police if she doesn't get her way.

I can't afford to leave with no buffer of cash to help me recover from the inevitable crash, and a few too many health issues to really risk it. so I don't.

It is impossible to keep any money from her because just as a course of living here she demands absolute involvement in anything I do that involves income, and then demands "her share."

Hell. I save holiday cards from a grandmother. I squirrel away that cash. But she knows that. And she considers that to be her money that I'm allowed to hold. I know this, because I purchased two books off the internet. She absolutely freaked out about this and then, lo and behold, she came at me the next week putting on a performance of how she was "overdrawn and needed money."

.. "How much?" I asked.

"Oh, how much do you have?" was her ominous reply.

I knew what this was when she said that, immediately.

I offered her $200 dollars.

Her response immediately was, "What? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. What?"

So I said it louder. "Two. Hundred. Dollars."

Again she feigned not being able to hear me and asked me to repeat- it was obvious by this point this wasn't an issue of "old bitch can't hear you" it was a dressed up "raise your offer."

So I screamed, "TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS."

She just sort of stood there aghast, started crying and screamed, "GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND MOVE OUT!!" Which is absolutely something you do after someone offers you $200 to help with a little "oopsie doopsie" bill she may've "overlooked."

Later on she came at me again and demanded I hand over all my savings, or consequences. She was absolutely pissed off that I'd DARE spend any of my emergency funds on anything but her, and wanted to collect that money and choice from me so I couldn't spend it on anything else again. She didn't want "a little money", she wanted over a thousand dollars I'd saved over 10 years.

Then later when I had a dental issue and needed the tooth filled, I asked her for that money back. She stonewalled. Told me instead to get a job (where she could then extract all my cash on penalty of leaving me homeless unless I cimplied) and pay for it myself, after taking what little savings I had.

Short of walk out immediately with nothing and nowhere to go but massive amounts of debt just to exist, and a ditch, I don't really have anything I can do. I really do not want a homeless shelter to be my one and only option. I put up with this bullshit solely because of the singular opportunity to try and study and learn my way out of poverty. The only problem is since she retired she has become an absolute attention demon that wants interaction with me as often as she can get it, and has a tyrant's view of engagement- someone that thinks you're engaged in a conversation with them from the minute they speak to you to the next minute they want your attention again, does not respect if you're doing something else.

I want you to imagine how painful it is to try and do math around someone that has the power to coerce you to get up and do some menial task, not because the task needs doing, but because they want to see you get up and make it your priority and do it.

And why? What is the point of interrupting someone whom is busy with something else? Repeatedly? Spacing out every intrusion and intervention to effectively play keep away with the person and what they're doing?

Oh. Because it's an authoritative way to distract and intervene. Because suddenly you manipulate the value of their time and absorb priority from them, so no matter how precious their time is, you're gobbling up that precious attention and seizing priority from them. It took me a while to really hash out why she is so obsessive about choosing the most inopportune times to want my attention and labor, but after testing it, she only really wanted that attention and action as distractions sandwiched between anything else I was trying to do- she didn't want this intense amount of attention between periods of unscheduled activity or inaction. It was only when I was trying to save time for myself that she decided, "no you ain't" and reserving and overruling that reserved time and space for herself.

So all my studies and practice are done with her thinking I'm just some bedroom NEET she "allows" to waste time playing videogames. If she thought I was actually learning anything I could use as an occupation, she'd be as antagonistic and time stealing as she was when I was trying to learn medical transcription.

[that-strange-vault-lady]

Entry: 003

Date: Sun, 08.18.2277

God damn my leg hurts, I used a stimpack on it which seems to have stopped the bleeding, I also wrapped it with some bandages to keep it from getting infected, but it still hurts so much. Who where those people? Why did they shoot at me, I was just asking for help, I was hoping they would have food or clean water, but the moment I shouted over they opened fire. The bullet hit me in the fleshy part of the thigh and seems to have gone straight through so at least I don’t have to go digging around for the slug, hell I saw dad do that once on a member of vault security after a misfire accident and it did not look good.

The surface has been, insane, to say the least. I didn’t expect to find anyone still alive up here, but the sheer amount of gunfire I have heard on the horizon alone leads me to believe otherwise. I was also attacked by this group of women. They came barrelling at me like they where possessed, eyes solid black, skin flaky and there bellies, well, there bellies where swollen almost like they where pregnant. I, I tried to talk to them but eventually one jumped on top of me, there teeth gnashing like they where trying to bite me, I had to, I grabbed my bat and just struck them. They fell backwards and hit there head on a rock. I didn’t even mean to hurt them, I ran away so I don’t even know what happened to them, I, I’m just trying not to think about it. Eventually I wound up loosing them by hiding in a farm house. That’s where I found this rifle, it seems to take these urm, let me see, that’s it .32 cartridges. It honestly seems in pretty bad shape, like it’s about to fall apart at a moments notice but, well, it’s better than nothing right? Plus there was an all be it half empty box of ammo for it in there too, so beggars can’t be choosers, is that the phrase? I think so.

It was shortly after that actually when I spotted those people who shot at me. I ran as fast as I could, trying to duck behind rocks as I made my getaway but I still ended up getting hit. N The gunfire actually attracted the attention of some random robot, from a distance, it seemed like some sort of RobCo eyebot, to think something like that must have been operating for more than 200 years, it’s pretty crazy to imagine anything lasting that long. It almost seems like a shame that the poor thing was shot down after so long, it did give me the opportunity to hobble away though, so I can’t complain too hard.

It was a little while after that I wound up here at this cal-de-sac when I actually noticed my pipboy making a beeping sound. It was beeping to tell me it had finished connecting to some sort of database and that the GPS function had be initialised. I read about this in a book once, the satellites that run the global positioning system are in near earth orbit it said, so seems they also survived the bombs unscathed, could Vault-Tec have planned for this? Maybe that’s one of the reasons why they gave us all these pipboys?

According to my pipboy I’m at a place called Jury Street in the D.C. area, I did actually find a house that was still standing, the rest of the houses around here are ether destroyed, half destroyed or obviously falling apart, but this one still seems structurally sound, so for now at least me and Mr. Patches are hold up here, say, hello Mr. Patches, oh, right you cant actually speak since you are a teddy bear and all. This place even has a nice bed, but, well I do worry whether I will get the chance to use it. With those, women out there and the people who shot at me, who knows what would happen if I just go to sleep tonight expecting to be safe.

Having walls around me does make me feel oddly comforted though. I guess being outside, nothing but the air and sky to all sides of you, well, it will take some getting use to. It’s not at all how I imagined it would be, my first time seeing the outside of the vault I mean. I thought that some day maybe we would all leave the vault together, just like the manuals say, slowly use the resources of the vault to rebuild civilisation, but, well, that was very naive of me. Even then though, I feel like I’m trying to keep calm, trying to keep myself together, but, in reality, I’m terrified. I thought when I left that cave a level of that fear would go away, but, everything I’ve seen today has only made that fear worse. At least I have you here though right Mr. Patches? So I’m not alone, I just have to keep telling myself that, I’m not, alone.

[bluejayblueskies]

Hey I hope I'm not too late for the kiss prompt <3

70 perhaps?

kiss prompt list!

70 - Starting With A Kiss Meant To Be Gentle, Ending Up In Passion

for jonmartin! takes place in an au where jon and martin are married when they first start working in the archives.

.

Three perfunctory taps on the doorframe are all Jon gets before Martin steps halfway into his office, a mug of tea in each hand and a soft smile on his face. “Hey. I brought tea?”

 Jon looks up from the frankly enormous pile of paperwork on his desk and manages a smile of his own that he hopes doesn’t look too strained. “Thank you, Martin. You can just…”

 He surveys the expanse of his desk, looking for an open space for the mug, before letting out a weary sigh and shuffling one stack of papers on top of another. It’s not like things can get even more disorganized.

 God, he hopes not.

 Martin sets the mug on the now-clear corner of the desk and leans against the wall, taking a careful sip of his own before cradling it between his palms. It’s a lovely mint green with little white flowers peppered across the ceramic. Jon’s pretty sure it had been a holiday gift from Tim several years prior, back when he, Tim, and Sasha worked in Research and Martin in the Library and he didn’t have to deal with stacks and stacks of horribly misfiled, horribly dusty paper.

 His allergies have not been pleased about the development.

 “Any luck on figuring out where to start?” Martin says, nodding his head at the papers. “It’s… it’s a lot.”

 Jon bites out a bitter laugh. “That’s a hell of an understatement.” He flips up the nearest paper distastefully, sets it down with a frustrated noise. “I don’t know what Gertrude spent all her time doing down here, but it was not archiving. I find it hard to believe it was any sort of work at all, given the state of the place.”

 “I- I mean, she was getting up there a bit…”

 Jon levels Martin with a flat, unimpressed look. “If she was no longer able to do her job, she should have retired. Or Elias should have fired her. Either way, this is unacceptable. I’ll have ‘gotten up there a bit’ before we finally begin to make a dent in all of this.”

 “Well, you’ve still got us.” Martin gives Jon what is probably meant to be a reassuring smile. “Four pairs of hands are better than one and all that.”

 We’d need a hundred pairs of hands to get this mess sorted, Jon wants to say. But he’s distinctly aware of the bitterness coating his tongue, and so he swallows it back and offers Martin the warmest smile he can muster. “Yes, well. Thank you. I suppose that’ll have to do.”

 “Ever the optimist, I see.”

 Jon buries his face in his hands and lets out a low groan. It’s been two days since he first stepped into this office and he’s already so very, very tired.

 “Hey,” Martin says softly, and then his hand is on Jon’s shoulder, warm from the mug and pressing down firmly enough to be grounding. “I’m sorry. I know it’s been difficult, but I mean it—we’re here for you. You picked us to be your assistants for a reason, right? Let us help you. You don’t have to wade through 200 years of dust mites and spooky stories by yourself.”

 Jon sighs and drops his hands from his face. He reaches for the hand Martin has on his shoulder and covers it with his own, squeezing gently. “I know. I… I know.”

 Martin presses a soft kiss to the crown of Jon’s head, and Jon feels a bit of the tension melt out of him at the contact. Then, with a hint of amusement in his voice, Martin says, “It is a bit weird, though, isn’t it? You being my boss.”

 Jon makes a face. “I… suppose. Feels a bit unnecessary to worry about- about power dynamics or what have you when we’re already married, though.”

 “I don’t know,” Martin says with faux gravity. “What’s to say you won’t fire me the next time I forget to get milk from the store? Or- or lose one of your socks in the laundry?”

 “Or steal all the covers in the middle of the night,” Jon says pointedly.

 “Hey, I apologized for that one.”

 Jon laughs softly at the offended expression on Martin’s face and squeezes Martin’s hand. After a moment, though, a thread of anxiety worms its way through the levity and he says, quietly, “You… you know I wouldn’t, right? I- I know it’s odd, and- and maybe it was a bit inappropriate, asking you to be here with me, as my assistant, but it’s not…”

 Jon’s mouth pinches into a small, unhappy line, and he lets his sentence trail off into silence. Martin seems to understand, though; his hand shifts underneath Jon’s, twisting until their fingers are interlocked, and he tugs gently on Jon’s hand until Jon gets the message and stands. Martin brushes his free hand against the side of Jon’s face, his knuckles ghosting across Jon’s cheekbone. “I know.”

 Jon lets out a slow, shaky breath before offering Martin a tired smile. “Good.”

 Martin brushes a thumb across the curve of Jon’s cheek, rests his fingers lightly against the shell of Jon’s ear, and leans down to press a gentle, closed-mouth kiss to Jon’s lips. It draws the last remaining tendrils of tension out of Jon’s neck and shoulders, and he makes a small, contented noise that elicits a smile from Martin in return.

 “You know,” Martin says conspiratorially, pulling back just enough to speak, “I’ve always wondered why ‘snogging your boss’ is such a common romantic trope.”

 “Oh?”

 “Mm. Yeah, never really got it. Felt a bit too clichéd for my liking.”

 “And now?”

 Martin gives Jon a pleased smile, almost a smirk. “Well. I can definitely see the appeal.”

 “Is that so?” Jon says, amused.

 Martin hums, then leans forward and gives Jon another kiss, light and lingering, his hands moving to rest gently against Jon’s hips. Then, with no more warning than the ghosting of Martin’s hands against the back of his thighs, Martin lifts Jon up with startling ease and places him on the desk, capturing Jon’s noise of surprise with another quick kiss. There’s the soft thud of folders hitting the floor, and Martin stifles a laugh.

 “Martin,” Jon says after Martin pulls back, and he’s not sure if he means to sound startled or offended. It ends up coming across as a bit of both.

 Martin bites back a laugh and rests his forehead against Jon’s. “Sorry, sorry. I just- got a bit carried away.”

 Jon makes a grumbling noise, but his tone is affectionate when he says, “Well, I suppose they weren’t going to get any more disorganized.”

 Martin hums, pressing another soft, gentle kiss to Jon’s lips. Jon tilts his head up, his hands coming to rest on Martin’s forearms and then moving up to his shoulders, resting gently against the side of his neck as he melts into the kiss like butter in sunlight. Martin slips his hands from Jon’s hips to the small of his back, holding him close as he allows his lips to part, deepening the kiss with a small sigh.

 Jon rests his forearms on Martin’s shoulders, his fingers slipping into the soft curls at the nape of Martin’s neck and tugging gently. Martin lets out a sound embarrassingly close to a moan (which sparks a small amount of pride within Jon) and sinks fully into the kiss, and Jon closes his eyes and lets the stress of the day melt away beneath the press of Martin’s lips against his.

 It’s too soon when Martin finally pulls back, his cheeks red and his mouth curled into a fond smile, and says, “I suppose I should get back to my desk. I can’t imagine statement number… 0147187 is going to follow up itself.”

 Jon lets out a groan. “I wish I could say with confidence that you made that number up, but then I’d have to have any confidence at all in Gertrude’s filing system, which I do not.”

 Martin presses a soft kiss to Jon’s forehead before stepping back entirely, his hands lingering on Jon’s hips for a moment before retracting. “One step at a time, yeah?”

 Despite the anxiety still clawing at the pit of Jon’s stomach, he finds that he means it when he says, “One step at a time. Yes, you- you’re right, Martin.” Then, more affectionately: “I love you.”

 “I love you too.” Martin reaches forward and tucks a stray strand of hair behind Jon’s ear. “It’ll be all right. We’ve got this.”

 Jon’s acutely aware of the mess on the desk he’s currently sitting on, of the even bigger mess sitting in document storage, of crates and crates of misfiled papers specifically designed to torment him. Still, he leans into the lingering warmth of Martin’s lips on his, gives Martin a small smile, and says, “Apparently so.”

[ghostbustermelanieking]

some thoughts on mag 200

i’ve been having trouble articulating this, but i wanted to get some thoughts down on mag 200, and the ending of tma as a whole, now that i’ve heard the finale twice and had some time to process it all. putting this under a cut in case people don’t wanna see it -- there’s gonna be a lot of praise here, but also some legit criticism. this is a way to sort through my feelings more than anything else.

first off, relistening to the finale, and sitting on it for a while, has made me feel a hell of a lot better about the whole thing. the episode comes off a lot better when you’re not vibrating with fear and anticipation, in my opinion. the final statement was very fitting and cool -- not my favorite ever, but i can appreciate it a lot as a final closing for the fears. and i don’t have an ear for soundscaping but the sound in that statement was cool as hell. the jonah magnus gets fucking murdered scene is incredibly satisfying. a lot of other people have said this, but i love that jon finally got his revenge, and was able to lash out against jonah for all the years of manipulation and beng used, and for tim and sasha and everything else. that was perfect. i genuinely thought we might not get a scene like this after 193 but i am so glad we did. incredibly satisfying. the girls made it out!! i am very glad that they’re ok and moving on and seem to be leaning on each other. (By God I Will Wring Found Family Out Of This Podcast If It Kills Me.) and the admiral’s okay. love that

and the jonmartin ending. oh my god. while i was never the biggest fan of the possibility of martin having to kill jon, the way it went down was so painful and good. i loved that final scene. i love the ambiguity -- that they might have died but maybe they didn’t, maybe they’re all right and happy and we can decide for ourselves -- i love that i got exactly what i wanted, that i get to have my cake and eat it too, all the angst of a jmart death and still the possibility of happiness... i am going buckwild. i love it. the longer i spend with this ending, the happier i am with it. i really really loved it

on another note... i do have some reservations about the finale and the season as a whole. i understand peoples’ irritations with the finale, and while i’m trying to focus on the things i did like, i definitely have some irritations. for one, i definitely wish the finale had been longer. i would’ve loved to see more of what wtgfs and basira were doing, and the actual lighting of the archives, etc. and while i completely understand why the scene at the panopticon went as quickly as it did -- it comes off very much as wild, frantic impulse in the heat of the moment where they’re in danger and trying to protect each other -- i do wish it had gone a little slower. 

in my mind, the biggest issue in season 5 ended up being pacing. and this might be a personal preference thing -- there’s a lot of things within the show that i don’t personally vibe with, but i don’t necessarily think they’re badly written. but i do think season 5 was slow. and while slow things can certainly work in a certain context (season 4 comes off wildly slow til you listen to 160), i wish more of what actually happened in season 5 had been baked into the end game. the season felt like it had a lot of filler, which drives me mildly crazy, because the end game feels rushed and i don’t think it NEEDED to be. i liked a lot of what season 5 did -- there’s some impeccable episodes, the character interactions are weirdly lighter and softer than they have been in previous seasons, and i wouldn’t trade a lot of the things that it’s given us (all the jonmartin interactions, jon and georgie briefly rebuilding their friendship, martin and melanie friendship, wtgfs scenes and intimacy, backstory, lore, etc) for anything. but i do think it could’ve been structured and paced a little differently. i also think it could’ve given some more screentime to the character stuff we got from episodes like 161, 170, 186, 190, 191, 192, 199... i absolutely love both martin centric monologue episodes, but i hate that we didn’t get anything like that for jon. (or for melanie or georgie or basira...) the best episodes of the season, imo, are the ones that broke from traditional form of domain statement domain, and the ones that focused in hard on backstory, lore, character introspection, character interaction... i wish we had more of this. 

when it comes to the jonmartin arc... i know this has been a point of contention with a lot of people, but i don’t hate it at all. maybe it’s just because i relistened to the majority of the season back in january, but a lot of the more grating moments that seemed large week to week (martin pressuring jon to smite people, the disagreements they had earlier in the season, jon using martin as bait in 176, etc etc) come off a lot more minor when you’re binging. personally, relistening to act i made those interactions come off as things they were struggling with through continued support and reassurance. there were absolutely things i wanted addressed, especially with the “kill bill arc” -- the disagreements early in the season, and how it seemed to turn on its head in the argument they have in 194. (i didn’t like martin blaming jon for the kill bill arc and i was hoping it would get brought up.) i also wanted to see a discussion of martin going with annabelle in 194 -- i wasn’t really ever mad at martin for doing it, but i did want to see them talk it out. 

but! after relistening to 200, i think i have a better handle on why that couldn’t have happened. martin goes behind jon’s back to go with annabelle and they don’t talk about it; jon goes behind martin’s back to sabotage the plan everyone agrees on in order to prevent the fears from spreading. if they’d had a big talk about trust, and working through martin going off with annabelle, and then jon turned around and did the same thing, more or less... it would’ve completely soured that discussion. jon and martin needed to be in a place of discourse for this ending to work. 

honestly, the more i’ve thought about this final JM arc, the better i feel about it. sure, jon and martin are in a bad place, and they’ve gone behind each other’s backs and been somewhat selfish, but i don’t think this ruins their relationship. for one, martin’s break in trust comes from a place of wanting to save jon and the world. and for another, jon genuinely feels he is doing the right thing, making a decision he can live with. (i have my own opinions as to how ethical jon’s decision was, but that’s another post. and i think the muddy ethics of this ending are on purpose -- it’s horror, a genre that often doesn’t offer ethical decisions.) their final decisions and final moments come from a place of love and protectiveness, and they change their decisions for the other. they still love each other, through all of it. i don’t think these late stage betrayals equivalate jonmartin necessarily being doomed as a couple (not that anyone has said that, but it’s worth saying). and i think it’s important to remember that this is still a relatively new relationship. it existed for approximately three weeks before the literal apocalypse, and it’s been under an immense amount of stress, as well as the constant fear that one or both of them would die. (which they did.) i’m not saying that excuses certain things they’ve said or done, but i am saying i don’t think the relationship is doomed. i think, if jon and martin have survived, they’ll need to work through things. they’ll need to talk it all out. and they’ll be able to! they’ll heal from this one way or another. the tragedy isn’t that jonmartin is doomed, or toxic. it’s that these moments of betrayal are what dooms them. and the beautiful undercurrent of it all is that they still manage to come together, and make decisions that mean they stay together. and that wherever they are, they’re still together. 

all in all, i don’t think season 5 has been perfect, and i can make my peace with that. (tma’s worst is a hell of a lot better than most shows’ best.) (i also think it might be worth considering how covid could have affected certain aspects of how the season was written -- pandemics are stressful, and i can’t imagine what it’s like to finish an enormous, in the works for years project like this in the middle of that. personally, i’m impressed they’ve managed to finish the show through all of this and keep it to a similar quality.) i think critiques are valuable and worth discussing. and i think plot aspects aside, there are several other critique related things that could be brought up about this season that people have articulated much better than i ever could. but i also, personally, want to walk away from the show feeling satisfied. i tend to be weirdly positive about things i love (the x files finale was horrendous, but i managed to get to a place where i was happy with it, for example), and i think that applies here -- even more so because i really did love so many aspects of that finale. i don’t necessarily want to linger in my own mind over what i disliked, especially considering the show is over. although i did want to air out my thoughts. 

i still love this show. i loved a lot of episodes this season, frustrations aside. season 5 will forever be my only live tma experience, and it got me through one of the worst years of my life, and i am very grateful for this. i genuinely did just want to air out my thoughts and get them all down on paper. these are just my opinions -- i don’t want to criticize anyone who feels differently about the finale, or the season as a whole. everyone’s opinion is their own. 

i feel a lot, lot better about mag 200, to the point of genuinely loving it. i hope my appreciation only grows as i get further from that frenzied first day and have more time to sit with it. and i can’t wait to see all the art and read all of the amazing fics that are going to come out of this ending (and write some of my own). it’s been a wild ride. i’m glad i was here for it.

[janiedean]

I feel bad for all the nice J*nsa shippers who like their ship for whatever reasons (tropes, pretty art, aesthetic appeal, whatever) and know it's not canon but get associated with the misogynistic Dany hating crowd who act like Jon being attracted to Ygritte is J*nsa foreshadowing because red hair (I guess Jon should fuck Edmure Tully too? Omg give me Dark!Jon getting revenge on Catelyn by seducing her brother!) Tell me something. I'm new to the fandom but was J*nsa popular before the show? And I've heard something about the OG J*nsa shippers being alienated by the new shippers who insisted it had to be canon and acted like the series is called, "A song of J*nsa #danysux." I don't find that hard to believe because I know people who are now ashamed of calling themselves J*nsa shippers. Like, at this point, it's not only rival shippers who hate it. Even Gendrya/Braime/Jon stans/etc have started disliking that ship. You know your fandom is a problem when people who have nothing to do with Jnsa have a problem with it.

me: reads this ask

me: iwastheregandalf.gif which I can't find now but

okay anon buckle up because I am sadly well-equipped to answer this ask but before I do lemme tell you dark jon seducing edmure to take revenge on cat is LITERALLY THE BEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD but *clears throat* ALL RIGHT THEN.

disclaimer: as anon says I have no issue with like the shippers mentioned by anon in the beginning and ngl I agree, I have ABSOLUTELY ZERO FUCKING STAKES in the j*nsa vs j*nerys war and the only het jon ship I gaf about is jon/ygritte and we all know where that ended up I just... have been here since 2011/adwd was over and all the fic around was just for the books under secret lj communities and asoiaf qualified for yuletide and I have... seen... things.... and I actually have like uh had... beef... with some people in there and I know things bc ppl who hated those others told me stuff so anyway *sigh* buckle up anon I'mma tell you the story of jon shipwars through the years

in order, the old gods help me here, under the cut bc this is long as fuck

when I got into fandom also given what numbers were on ao3 one ship was popular and it was sansan. no like sansan was lit. the only asoiaf ship on ao3 with more than 200 fics. jb had twenty when i checked first. jc had like around 100-ish because of the show but sansan dwarfed anything. I posted the first jon/ygritte fic on the ao3 tag and the fourth throbb fic and like the others were all reposts from lj kinkmemes. nothing was popular before the show except for sansan when it comes to huge numbers bc grrm doesn't like fic and it was all hush hush until the show made it impossible to control and that ship was the one with a huge enough fanbase it actually had numbers, so like... j*nsa wasn't popular in the way nothing else was popular until it got screentime on the show

now, that stated, j*nsa had a... fair amount of fic for a rareship which was mostly book-based and from og shippers that were there from before the show and liked it for what it was but literally none of them thought it was gonna be canon, like it wasn't huge or anything but it had a small but dedicated fanbase who did their own thing and thought it was fun/liked the idea but that was it

that fandom had their own niche of hcs that they cultivated and shit except that like... at the end of S5/beginning of S6 there was a surge in shipping for... well obvious reasons bc it was obv sansa was getting to the wall and that would have been all nice and good but a) it was the time puritanical shipping was starting to take root and the 'shipping sansa with sandor or tyrion is hella problematic' rhetoric had started to circle coming from sans*ery shippers mostly but I'mma not open that fucking can of worms here, b) while the ending of S5 had more of a theon/sansa spike, the j*nsa stuff started getting big

now here we have to mention my villain origin story ie: j*nsa fandom had this one stan whose name I won't make because honestly it's been years and if she's still around I don't want her to remember I exist who was a bnf, wrote for... the website that created the whole larry/carol thing etc who was really fixed on this thing that j*nsa was actually canon and started writing extremely popular meta about it. now you're gonna ask how do you know, I know because this person once wrote a meta named 'why robb stark is a dick' and I told her that it was really fucking bad meta and she took it so badly she kept on trash talking me on her blog/her podcast (I was apparently the insane robb stark fangirl l m a o good lord) and like that was when some sane ppl who argued with her informed me in pvt that she was basically harping on the CANON thing when they'd have been okay with like... it being crackshipping and that she was basically cultivating a hoarde of followers who were harping on them/the ogs and basically ostracizing them;

I would like to add that this person - before her tumblr got 'accidentally deleted' and remade it therefore deleted most receipts for, er, her so-called meta which included stuff like ned and cat raised sansa as a sexual object and only wanted to sell her like cattle - had at some point started a round robin fic thing where... some of the characters mocked openly said stuff that some of the og fans had said specifically targeting them and people in that side basically went harassing anyone who didn't agree with that specific notion

now never mind that this person basically coined an entire term to describe ppl who liked white guys and excused all their wrongdoings out of my conversation re robb basically lying about everything I said as if I didn't have the receipts and tried to sell shirts with it and it didn't work and like then she got kicked out of her own website because she was telling her commenters disagreeing pretty shitty insults (considering I was called psychotic for disagreeing with her that time I don't doubt it) I think at some point she stepped back from fandom bc idk wtf she's up to these days and I don't want to, but basically at that point the dam was broken and there was a bunch of puritanical shippers harping on anyone who didn't agree with j*nsa is canon endgame stuff

this also includes an incident when those ppl were like... passing themselves as throbb shippers and ended up trying to tell t*hramsay shippers off the theon tag based on moral reasons and I ended up arguing with all of them (and they were all from that crowd) which in turn landed me in contact with other og j*nsa shippers who were like detached from that fandom bc those same people harassed them away as well ssooooo fun

anyway when S6 happened everyone was high on it and whatnot but I wasn't gonna begrudge them that I mean... you shipped it for years, canon is delivering you, good for you, but then j*nerys happened

god j*nerys happened

aaand basically...... I mean personally I was there like are y'all seriously arguing about the best incest jon ship out there but like basically the j*nsa endgame side was like AH JON IS PLAYING DANY SEE IF IT DOESN'T HAPPEN, the j*nerys obv got defensive af and both sides were sort of alternatively shitting on jon/ygritte anyway and depicting any other romantic rship jon could have as abusive™ and during S8 it just got worse and like I tried to stay out of it but basically from what I'm seeing now idk how the j*neryses are doing but on the j*nsa one it's ah jon's gonna play dany anyway and she's going to go insane like in the show so SHOW TRUTHING EVERY OTHER WAY and like again denying that sandor exists or that tyrion exists and like I barely touch my corner (sansan) but I ended up arguing with j*nsa/th*nsa people on twitter who were antis and is2g it was white-hair inducing and I know for sure the sansa/tyrion shippers were harassed to hell and back throughout so FUN

and even if the show didn't go there now since everyone there banked on the jnsa endgame thing and admitting you're wrong is like... not a thing, they still haven't let go of it and attach to that ship any shred of evidence which honestly is grasping at straws half of the time (like... the sansa/alysanne parallels like guys please no) and which is why every other ship is starting to get fed up, attaching canon proof of stuff from other ships onto theirs see that batb argument and jb is platonic but jonsa is not nvm taking all the sansan stuff and throwing it on j*nsa but then denying that sansan has canon evidence (like guys I had to read sansa touching his shoulder when saying gregor wasn't a true knight wasn't meaningful and we were seeing things please) and blah blah blah

this also goes hand in hand with the fixation on like... villanizing dany at all costs and like is2g I have zero investment in dany or her storyline I don't even remember it and I don't particularly care abt her either way and sure af I'm not for j*nerys endgame but like.... some stuff I read is completely excessive esp when fixing on how she's a completely mad tyrant who's gonna have to be put down and like... guys no

(also there's some srs stannis hate in that corner which I honestly don't get why they even care abt stannis but I had to read stuff like ppl don't recognize that dany and stannis are the real villains in this saga and like........ idek)

I think most of the og shippers are gone or don't ship it openly bc they don't want to be attached to the drama but like I also think they're pissing off everyone else bc like... I mean a bunch of them also were down with sansa being paired with other ppl as long as it meant a good ending for her except those ppl were... like everyone but the ppl she has actual contact with in canon which meant that at some point sansa/gendry was a thing and like.... you can imagine why arya/gendry shippers & arya stans were fed up, and there's also this tendency to behave like sansa is the center of the entire saga which like these books is named a song of jon snow basically can we pls make peace with it and personally I've had it with both j*nsa and j*nerys people since they started with that dumbass JON/YGRITTE WAS AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP rhetoric but I'm also fed up with the total ignoring that sandor exists/depicting us as delusional and honestly I also was by proxy fed up from the harassing of the sansa/tyrion shippers soooooooooooo

there were also instances of 'well theon is an acceptable choice other than jon bc he can't threaten her' which... i mean we all know what that meant and I'm not even commenting it bc it's one AM and I have no force to but I don't have to explain why it's not a progressive take now do I

there were also metas about how cousin incest being legal in half of the world means that jondany is a worse incest and j*nsa doesn't count as such and I was basically there like guys please just fucking own up to it but honestly I chose to forgot where I read that and I couldn't find the link if I tried

tldr: no one wants to admit that it's not gonna be endgame which considering the amount of fic they have on ao3 is imvho useless bc they have more content than like.. anything I ship that's not jb or that's actually like canon *cries in joncon/rhaegar but I mean renly/loras is canon and has less fic than them* so idk what's the problem with enjoying that instead of insisting it's gonna be canon when not even the show validated it while show truthing anyway when the only show truthing that can be truthed is the small council made of minorities and possibly jon eventually fucking off with the wildlings but not like that but like most people who thought it wasn't gonna be endgame had left/were made to leave by the time S7 rolled by and at this point since wow isn't out yet everyone is fandom-grasping at straws to find stuff to discourse on and we're here beating dead horses *shrug*

so that's... how it is but I would again like to point out that I don't judge ppl on their shipping, I don't particularly care about this entire feud bc I only ship jon with ppl he's not related to in whichever way and I try to stay out of this mess bc I don't really care to argue with ppl who have already decided to bend canon to whatever they want and will have to realize that it's not what grrm wrote at some point but like I have a very good memory and the above rant is as objective as possible also bc again I don't literally have a stake in that race I just think romantic/endgame j*nsa is not a thing and that ppl should stay in their lane and not harping on other ppl who ship whatever in general but especially when their ship is the most popular thing in fandom in the first place /two cents

[cerastes]

Imagine W's ultimate show of trust to the Doc, if she ever decides to bring herself to that point somehow., being inviting them to share a ration with her out in the field. Or sort out some munitions over a chat about the places she's been. Or, as you said, indulging in the peace of just peeling some potatoes. I blame you for infecting me with W enlightenment.

! Yo. That’s some actual 200% Trust stuff right there.

W vaguely, casually inviting Doc out for a walk, telling them that if they decide to come, to give word that he’ll come back later. Doc says they’ve got a lot of work to do. W insists that Kal’tsit won’t give ‘em hell since she’ll explain. Never once has Doc seen Kal’tsit actually reprimand W, or W fail to finesse her way out of a lecture, so sure, why not? W’s reply is simply a smile, one that looks infinitely similar to her usual mocking smirk, but somehow, this time, it reaches her ears, and yet, it feels like it could deflate any time. Doc has seen this emotion before, and while they can’t put a name to it, they know it to be mutually exclusive with joy.

The ensuing chat is meaningless, but not unwelcome. Something about the Penguin Logistics girls being really good in a brawl for mailwomen and tour guides, something about the music room being quite lively, what with Vigna, Courier and Blue Poison habitually going there to play the guitar, with the “kiddos”, as she calls them, looked with admiration, Frostleaf trying to mimic them with her air guitar as Ifrit headbanged, something about how it was funny to see Aak and Warfarin wheel a very unwilling Fang into the infamous Doctor Blood’s lab, right before Dobermann and Kal’tsit caught them red-handed and dole out the appropriate pay docks and, worse still, lectures that seem unending as they are redundant, but ah, see, that’s the thing with Kal’tsit, she may say the same thing for the course of 3 hours, but she somehow keeps using different words, never sounding too redundant, it’s just like that time years ago when Kal’tsit caught raiding the pantry in the wee hours of the morning. How could Doctor not remember that one, it was a classic in Babel! A legendary pursuit that lasted two hours and was followed by four of lectur--

And then W stops.

That’s meaningless. 

They don’t remember that funny anecdote.

And if they did? Then she surely wouldn’t be walking down memory lane with the “Doctor”. She surely wouldn’t be here right now. 

It’s because they’ve lost all of that, that they have gained this little space, away from the mobile city, in the middle of nowhere, where they can talk.

They sit down across from each other, with the camp’s fire between them, on boxes tastefully labelled “Doctor” and “Me” with black paint. W throws Doctor a potato and a knife. There’s no Gummy or Matterhorn here, buster. You want food? Better get peeling while the water comes to a boil.

So they peel in relative silence. Potatoes. Onions. Dicing some carrots. Uncorking some cheap Kazdel ‘vintage’, if unused sewer lines from long-devastated cities could be considered casks, but hey, it’s got a nice kick and you can pick it right up after wandering back into an old campsite if you leave it fermenting before departing for the next battlefield. Just one of those nomad’s secrets, wink wink. Or do they call them “lifehacks” now? Reunion didn’t exactly have the latest in lingo, W laments.

Throughout all of this, Doctor cannot help but feel a certain tightness in their chest and a hollow pit in their stomach. It’s a feeling Doctor has heard others describe, but they’ve never been able to put a name to it, but they know it to be strange bedfellows with joy. Was this the same pain holding a tight grip on W’s smile before?

“Have we done this before? You know, before.”

But W only chuckles. “Maybe we did. Maybe we sat right here, maybe we had the very same cheap liquor, left to ferment in the same circumstances. Maybe we fixed the very same stew, maybe that knife feels oddly comfortable because that was the one we’d lend you.”

She stresses the plural, and the Doctor, too, stresses. She continues.

“Maybe you earned our trust, maybe you were just the way you are... Superficially, at least. Maybe that’s still something exclusively superficial. Maybe I’m intentionally tripping on the same stone twice, and if that’s the case, this time, it’ll cost me less than before, as it’ll be only one life.”

“As opposed to how many?” the Doctor doesn’t ask, doesn’t dare ask.

“This stew is perfect: Cheap, easy to prepare, nutritious, filling, and the pot is easy to clean afterwards. We make this stew a lot since it reminds us of ourselves as Sarkaz mercenaries... Convenient, gets the job done, and then you can just move on with your life after disposing of it. You used to love this stew.”

W gets real close to the Doctor, face to face, potato and knife gripped still, close enough that her warmth permeates through their mask, breathing audible, blood a frenzied mix of boiling and frigid.

“Do you still love this stew, Doctor?”

W’s explosive charges are less loaded than this question. Agonize, they did, trying to find the right way to diffuse this situation, but she doesn’t give them time to respond, fortunately. A dud, perhaps?

“If you still like the stew, then perhaps we can’t be friends, but... If you don’t find it to your liking, perhaps I can show you other rations and dishes we make out here, ones more nuanced, ones packed with a little more care, you know?”

Instead of sitting on a box across the fire from Doctor, W sits next to them now, finally abandoning the Doctor’s personal space.

“I’ve just been thinking very seriously about this, see? You really... And if I’m wrong about this, heh, shame on me, but you really don’t seem like the kind of person that likes that stew anymore. Just something I’ve learned from watching. Watching you. Watching the new blood. Watching the trust they place in you, the affection, the laugh and cajolery and jocosity of it all. And in the center of it all, what is it that you do? You reciprocate, and it drives me crazy.”

The Sarkaz’ voice raises just for a second.

“Because this could be much simpler, this could be as easy as click click boom, you know? Hit the switch, have a laugh, carry on, but no, you’ve made this far more complicated than it had to be. If you had remembered the anecdote, I could’ve just hit the button half an hour ago, and by now, I would be done picking up whatever was left of you, hiding it in an abandoned sewer line and then sealing it, and I’d be on my way to Columbia right about now. I hear they got some nice new settlement for Infected there now. If only you had remembered.”

But the Doctor did not remember. Not about the time when Kal’tsit lectured W for hours on end, nor about the time they disposed of the leftover stew. Not about a damn thing. The bombs in the box labelled “Doctor” were almost comically redundant, for whatever firepower they could hold, they’d never compare to the edge of Doctor’s conscience, twisting from within. 

“...I heard you carried that FrostNova girl’s body. Thanks for that,” carried on W. “And for that, in addition to everything else, I’ve decided that maybe we ought to eat more than crummy stew next time. Which side of you is the real one? I guess I’ll -- we’ll -- find out soon enough.”

After that, no more words were traded. Peel, they did, and eventually, dinner was ready. The stew was somehow bitter and bland. Doctor couldn’t be happier, and was already anticipating what they were going to make next.

Maybe they’ll have anecdotes the both of them remember to fill the silence while peeling potatoes next time. Not that silence is unwelcome. Silence is meaningful, and a surprising amount of times, what unveils the truth behind someone’s heart.

[stripper-patrick]

Work Shift❄️ Ethan Dolan

Warnings: strippers, lap dance, teasing, CEO! Ethan, little bit of fluff

Relationship: Ethan Dolan x black plus sized reader

My music hits and I take the stage confidently. I wrap my hand around the pole and bounce my ass to the beat of my song Beef FloMix by Flo Milli.

I like cash and my hair to my ass (I do)

Do the dash, can you make it go fast? (Go, go)

Fuck the fame, all I want is them bands (Money)

If she keep on muggin', I'ma steal her man (I got him)

I bend over letting it bounce. I can see a man watching me.

Damn he’s fine. I stand up straight and look directly into his eyes lifting myself up on the pole. I wrap my legs around it securing myself and I turn upside down sticking my tongue out. Money is flying everywhere and luckily I don’t see any $1 bills in sight. They’re all 20’s 50’s and even 100’s. The man is still watching me.

Soon the song ends and I grab all of my cash and walk backstage where I see my friend Kiana.

“Hey did you kill it?”

“Hell yes and there was a fine ass dude out there staring at me”

“Girl you better hop on it you know that’s rare to find a cute one here” I nod in agreeableness

“So does this mean your gonna have to quit being a stripper cause I don’t think I can do this without you” she smiles

“Depending on what time I get off” I start my new job tomorrow and I’m very excited but I will miss dancing.

“Well since you said there’s a cute one go give him a show” she winks. I stash my money away in my locker and nod. “Why not one time for the one time” I change into a very revealing 2 piece and go out to the bar. I watch the guys every move as he watches me. He’s so mysterious. I walk up to Joey who’s serving drinks.

“Lemme get a double decker”

“Make that two please” I look back seeing the man. I smile. He pulls out a $100 and hands it to Joey.

“They’re very expensive I hope you know” I say

“I know” He whips up our drinks and his eyes are trained on me.

“What’s your name?”

“Honey you?” “Ethan”

“Nice to meet you” our drinks are set in front of us and I grab mine.

“A toast?” He suggests. I nod and wait “to tonight”

“To tonight” we cheers and throw it back.

“That’s good” I smile

“Do you want a dance?” I ask

“Sure” I grab his large hand and take him to the back of the club. He sits down and I straddle his lap grinding on him slowly. “How long you been doing this?”

“About 3 years” he nods

“Can I?” His hand is near my ass and I nod. He rests it on there squeezing occasionally. I bite my lip and wrap my arms around his neck grinding upwards “So Honey... what’s your real name?”

“I don’t disclose that” I stand up and turn around. He smacks my ass and I smile laughing.

“You single?”

“Maybe maybe not”

“Mhmm” Once the song is over I stand up. He hands me 200 dollars “the dances are only $50”

“I know Honey” he winks and stands up walking away. I stuff the money in my bra and keep working.

...

I wake up and turn off my alarm. I groan standing up and walking into the bathroom tripping over my duffle bag. I brush my teeth and wash my face before starting on my hair and makeup.

I finish within 5 minutes not wanting to do too much for my first day. I go to my closet and grab a blue blouse. I pair it with some black pants and nude heels. I grab some jewelry and my purse making sure I grab my computer before leaving out.

...

I enter the building on time and take a minute to look around. There are people running around like crazy and I look at the big office with the foggy glass. A girl approaches me with a smile.

“Hi you must be new. I’m Courtney”

“Nice to meet you I’m Y/N” I shake her hand and we begin walking.

“I’m gonna take you to the boss’s office so you can get settled” we arrive and she knocks lightly.

“Come in” his voice sounds familiar. Courtney opens the door and I look ahead seeing Ethan from last night. No fucking way. I can tell he’s just as shocked as I am.

“Shut the door” Ethan says sternly. Courtney shuts it coming in and he stares at her. She nods leaving and closing it behind her.

“Please have a seat”

“Good morning Mr. Dolan”

“Good morning... Honey”

“I notice you remember me from last night”

“I do in fact you were on my mind all night” his voice is deep and his cologne fills the room in the best way.

“Was I? I’m glad I left a good impression but I’m also nervous that it will impact my career here”

“Don’t worry about that” he grabs my resume and reads over it smiling to himself “ok so your good in math excellent if I may add”

“Yes sir”

“So you’ll be on my team where you’ll calculate business deals and offers seeing if they’re good or not”

“Great”

“In fact we have a meeting today and I’d like for you to accompany me since I recently fired Madeline. She had the same job as you but acted inappropriately towards the dealers”

“If I may... what did she do so I know to steer clear of that behavior?”

“She tried to fuck me and other men here” he says bluntly as if we were talking about the weather.

���Yes sir” I nod. Ethan stands tall and I do the same. He opens the door for me and I walk out waiting for him to lead the way. He locks his office and we walk outside.

“I’ll show you your office tomorrow” I nod trying to keep up with him in these damn heels. He stops abruptly in front of a Ferrari. My jaw drops and I look at him.

“What”

“This car is beautiful”

“Thank you” he opens the door for me

“Where are we going?”

“The meeting” I look at him and step in the car. I sit my purse under my legs and he shuts the door before jogging to the other side. His car is so luxurious that I’m afraid if I move I’ll damage it. I most definitely can not afford the repairs.

Ethan gets in and starts the car letting it rev up. He places his hand behind my headrest and backs out before pulling off at a lightning speed.

“So this meeting will basically entail these three company’s are each offering x amount of money to be partners with my business which is number one in the world”

“It must be fun doing this and alone I assume”

“It’s only fun if you make it which I try every now and then” I nod

“You look stiff”

“If I damage your car in any sort of way I’ll have to give you my liver for it” I smile. He watches me then goes back to the road.

In due time we arrive at a large building in the heart of California. It’s called Jefferson Trade Co.

We get out and he helps me. His hands are soft and I see a few tattoos as well. He shuts the door and walks in ahead of me holding the door. A real gentleman.

“Thank you” he walks up to the reception desk and I look up looking at the ceiling. It’s very intricate and beautiful. “Y/N” I snap my head forward and Ethan is waiting for me along with the receptionist.

“Sorry” I catch up and we get into an elevator. It has clear windows which view the entire city.

“Wow” I turn around and feels Ethan’s eyes on my butt. He comes down to my ear “last night was amazing” I smile to myself continuing to look. The door dings. I look at the floor and we’re on the 15th.

“We’re really high up”

“Yea”

“Right this way” we exit the elevator and head to the huge meeting room. It looks like it could hold 200 people. I see a row of gentlemen and a middle seat. I’m assuming for Ethan.

“Mr. Dolan it’s nice to meet you”

“Ethan please” he smiles shaking everyone’s hand. I’m the only woman here. “Who’s this?” The men eye me like a full course meal. Pigs. “This is Y/N she’s the brains of the room she’ll be calculating for us”

“How do you do” a man kisses my hand and I smile.

“Now if you gentlemen will stop staring at her like that and we can get this meeting started” Ethan sits and down and I realize there’s no more chairs for me. Luckily there’s a long table for high chairs... but no high chairs. I set my purse down and take out my computer opening Microsoft word and getting started on the notes. “Uh can you please say your name once you present so I can write it down” they nod and the first man stands up.

“Ok first up August Montgomery” Ethan says “do you want a chair?”

“No I’m ok”

“Get her a chair” August walks out and grabs a chair for me. Ethan pulls it next to him and I smile thanking him. I set my computer on the table and sit next to Ethan.

“Thank you Mr. Dolan” “Ethan” I nod. August starts his presentation stating why his and our company would be a perfect match.

I grab a pen and my notebook writing down his calculations as well as ours seeing if there’s more damage than prosperity to our company. I’ve done my research on us.

Once Mr. Montgomery is finished with his presentation next is the man that kissed my hand. Ethan looks at me “Kevin Cordell” I nod typing his name. His hand accidentally touched my thigh and I blush slightly and keep typing.

....

We’ve concluded the meeting and I place my laptop in my bag. “Uh do you wanna grab something to eat?” He asks

“Sure” we walk all the way back to his car where he helps me in and gets in himself.

“Have you heard of Sarabellum?”

“I have but there stuff is expensive”

“I know have you ever been though?”

“No”

“Let’s go”

“Wait Mr. Dolan-“ “Ethan” he corrects

“Ethan I can’t possibly afford the food”

“Ok I’m paying for you”

“No Ethan I can’t ask you to do that”

“Your not asking me sweetheart I’m telling you”

“I’m going to pay you back”

“Ok” he smirks

....

We’re in the restaurant and I’m looking around.

“I love how observant you are. That’s a good thing for the work you’ll be doing for me” I smile and the waitress comes up and orders our drinks.

“Can I have a water please”

“Bourbon” she nods and leaves. I look at the menu and my eyes settle for a chicken Caesar salad. 27.67 for a salad.

I look seeing Ethan’s eyes already on mine.

“What?” he shakes his head “Nothing I think I’ll get the chicken breast”

“Are we ready?” The waitress asks. Ethan looks at me and I nod. “I’ll have the chicken Caesar salad”

“Are you sure?” I nod he nods “I’ll have the chicken breast”Once we finish eating he drives me back to the lot and walks me to my car.

“You can go home for the day I couldn’t imagine doing that much math” I shrug “It’s easy if you don’t think about it”

“What about mistakes?” I smile “There are none of you’ve been doing it as long as I have” I smile. I grab my purse going in it. I give him $30 and he shoos it away. “Nope I’m not taking it. I could make that money in a minute”

“Ethan please”

“No it’s 100% ok”

“Fine” I shove the money back in my purse and shake his hand before walking back to my car.

Part 2??

[arcanalogue]

The Tower + The Force of Impact

This week is a sort of special anniversary for me. Exactly five years ago, I fell through the fire escape outside a friend’s apartment and broke three ribs. It was a serious injury, the bones were “grossly displaced” (I was morbidly delighted to learn this term), and the healing was very slow. And friends, as some of you may remember, the timing absolutely could not have been worse. 

You see, just a month beforehand I’d moved out of the apartment I’d shared with my partner of over a decade. Not sure of my next steps, I packed everything into a storage unit, like so:

The unit was located in this fascinating old historical building, an old glue factory which had been converted into public storage. I’d ridden my bike past it so many times, I took a perverse pleasure in finally having an excuse to go inside, rent a tiny piece of it:

From there I embarked on a month of traveling across the country, mainly to get a leg up financially by not having to pay rent. It didn’t work! And when I returned to the city, I kept everything in storage while I took shelter in a temporary room I could scarcely afford. I decided to keep it monastically empty, like so:

Not even a bed to sleep in, because beds are FURNITURE, and furniture is not only EXPENSIVE, but signifies a symbolic COMMITMENT to the way things are going to be for a while. 

I was determined to avoid defining my new reality that haphazardly, This, I imagined, was my one big chance to find the path forward, into THE FUTURE.  I wanted to remain staggeringly open-minded, which would require the utmost clarity and simplicity. Starting anew with only the basics, I would hone my sensitivities and let them guide me to what was truly important. 

And thus, the only piece of luggage I brought to the temporary room was the suitcase containing all of my ritual equipment, like so:

But then, within a week of setting up in the new space, came the fall. And with the injury came the kind of pain and fear that you simply can’t retreat from. I couldn’t rest, couldn’t think. I could barely commute to my storage space, let alone haul anything back from it. I didn’t have any goddamned money. Overnight, that spartan living space appeared quite different to me: it was devoid of comfort, and of possibilities. I was just a person with nothing, trapped in the borderlands, and my surroundings reflected that. 

You almost had to laugh. Except I couldn’t, it hurt my bones.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but that winter ended up drop-kicking me into the deepest depression since my early twenties. There’s a special component of failure that age imparts to illness: fifteen years of growth, of important milestones and observations, but suddenly none of that is useful, or even accessible. Poof, gone.

And that carefully-packed suitcase full of ceremonial tchotchkes? It might as well have been filled with sand.  

I made a lot of terrible decisions that winter, but can’t bring myself to regret them. I also made a lot of okay-ish decisions, and even some pretty good ones, all considered. A drowning person will grab onto anything that floats. At one point I spent about $200 of the money I didn’t have on new clothes: red socks, red pants, red sweaters, red everything. My gothic black-and-gray wardrobe suddenly felt like it was killing me, pulling me down. I needed to draw power from an external source, and color seemed to help.

That was the winter I began using the Salvador Dali tarot deck – I’d actually purchased it just hours before falling from that fire escape. 

One of the few joys during those long months was discovering that these cards finally made sense to me, seemed to come alive in my hands. When I’d first explored them fifteen years earlier, Dali’s abstract impressions of the arcana had been too advanced for me; now the deck had practical use.   

The colors in these cards inspired me to start painting again, and when I couldn’t think of anything to practice on, I’d just copy illustrations from the deck. It didn’t feel like I was making art, just crudely using water to push the paint around, constraining my focus to subjects that brought the kind of comfort and illumination that expired opioids barely scratched at. 

The winter passed, and then the spring, and I managed to pull it all together just in time to lose it again, in the fall. Another heartbreak, concurrent with another physical injury, and many of the same conditions: another temporary room with no bed, my best things in storage, nothing in particular on the horizon suggesting that significant change was possible. Again. Again.

One of the ugliest parts of all this was knowing how much worse it could get, how many people have it much harder every single day. Some end up living their entire lives that way. Having risen out of such conditions earlier in life, I’d always been sympathetic to those who were still trapped; now, even sliding backward into hell, it felt uncharitable to complain too noisily.

However... and this is a pretty big however... I hate the idea of failure so passionately. It’s offensive to me on a profound level. Having climbed out of the depths of complete isolation and a shitty, abusive childhood, having catapulted myself across the country and gradually proved (to me, if no one else) how frightfully attainable so many dreams can be... 

All that effort, and for what? To just implode and lay there dying in a nest of red socks? 

From the first day I put my things in storage inside the historic Miller building, I wanted to climb it. Not the outside, silly. I wanted to find out how high one could actually ascend into that great big noggin perched on top. Considering how much of NYC building stewardship seems to resolve around making things LESS INTERESTING, I assumed it would be completely inaccessible.

I was wrong, friends. There was a staircase in the middle of the building that went up, up, all the way up! Due to a fair amount of recent construction on that wide plane of roof halfway up, they hadn’t bothered to block anything off. And from that midpoint, the stairs just kept going up. How far?

Finding out would be tricky, because I couldn’t afford to get caught and risk having my rental agreement canceled. And then once I broke my ribs, urban exploration was off the agenda for quite some time. 

But at some point in 2015, I actually went back and climbed it several times, went all the way up. 

On the plus side, there seemed to be no security cameras in the stairwell... but also, above the roof level there was no electricity, and the wooden stairs from that point upward hadn’t been inspected in... gosh, maybe fifty years?

Don’t worry, I was as “careful” as one could possibly be, even if there seemed to be nothing left to lose.

In that middle section of the building, three stories worth of crumbling wooden staircases climbed in total darkness brought one to the final threshold: a ladder leading to that uppermost chamber, the steps thin enough to bounce slightly underfoot.

It seems ungrateful to describe what I found up there “anticlimactic.” What did I expect, skulls hanging by the eye-sockets from chains? It was simply musty and derelict and mostly undisturbed. A bit of light came in from cracks between the boards, reminding me that I was at least a hundred feet above street level.

I had wanted to find some kind of ultimate truth up there in the darkness, even if it scared me all the way to death. So, the excitement of setting foot in a space that had remained unoccupied for so many years seemed like a mere consolation prize. I’d been bracing myself to be shattered, torn all the way apart. 

Why was it almost a disappointment to survive, to ease myself back down the rickety ladder, descend those crumbling staircases through the guts of the Miller building, and scamper out onto the sidewalk no worse for wear, no one the wiser, completely unwarned and unscathed? To face the daylight again, no end to this journey in sight?

That’s how I feel sometimes about all the wonders that have come into my life since then, five years onward. The residual gloom isn’t dark enough to be horrifying, and the illumination is never quite bright enough to dispel the shadows. 

I prayed to find this kind of equilibrium, and worked my way toward it so painstakingly; it’s such tedious work, if only because the extremes can be so attractive. The motion of flying back and forth between them is so exhilarating, the impact of a high-speed collision so marvelously unambiguous.

But if it’s truth you seek, the tedious work is literally all there is. Here’s a quote cadged from the last chapter of that book I’ve been studying again lately, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism:

“He who aspires to authentic spiritual experiences never confounds the intensity of the experience undergone with the truth that is revealed — or is not revealed — through it, i.e. does not regard the force of impact of an inner experience as a criterion of its authenticity and truth. For an illusion stemming from the sphere of mirages can bowl you over, whilst a true revelation from above can take place in the guise of a scarcely perceptible inner whispering.”

Ah, but some of us have to learn everything the hard way. 

Five years onward, I’m still the same person, would probably make all these decisions the same way. The only difference is that I can finally hear the whispering, a steady stream of it, and doubt I’ll ever again confuse the intensity of an experience with its “authenticity,” whatever that is. And the more urgently I’m tempted to do so, the more I have to question what it is I really hope to find out there, in the vastness of the future.

There’s a notorious phenomenon described as “failing up,” wherein some people manage to succeed in spite of their obvious shortcomings, spared certain consequences due to certain privileges such as wealth, gender, racial identity, etc.

But I want you to know, friends, that despite certain inescapable factors, there’s hope for any of us. Down can become up quite suddenly, and up can let you down. You can get flattened by a feather, or trip over a shoelace and end up on the roof.

You just have to stay alive long enough to see what happens next. And then for five minutes after that. 

And then, gradually, five minutes at a time, this becomes five years. That’s about all I can really say about it from experience.

Wait, that’s not true: thank you, all of you, for helping me span those years and find my footing up and down the ladder. 

Here’s hoping that we’re still brushing past each other in the dark in another five years, on our way to... somewhere, anywhere, but slowly, and according to scarcely perceptible whispers. 

[stileslady-blog1]

Enslaved Real Estate - Seven Figures Easily

I often convey to people that becoming a millionaire in the real estate business is an uncomplicated thing to accomplish. They usually give me a look for bewilderment. I say that you don't have to understand every aspect in real estate in order to begin investing. The best thing to do is as well as a basic buy-and-hold strategy purchasing whatever type of property you may be capable of buying with as little money down as possible. The way buy something with as little money down as possible is determined by your financial situation and what types of mortgages you're capable of being approved for. Since guidelines for mortgages and government treatment changes daily, it's impossible for me to tell you the obvious way to do that. I can tell you how I did it for years using the all-money-down technique I described earlier in the book. But I'm going to give you a quick refresher course below. If you bought $100, 000 house through conventional means, you may have to put 20 percent down is $20, 000 plus closing rates that will cost you approximately $3000. In this example, you fit $23, 000 down to buy $100, 000 investment real estate. Using the all-money-down technique, you would buy a $100, 000 building for cash putting all $100, 000 down as well as closing costs of $3000. At this point, you have $103, 000 down on the property and you begin to invest an additional $5000 to fix the property up. You now have a total of $108, 000 of your money into the property. You put the house and property up for rent and you find a good tenant, therefore now you're empty investment property is a business making profits and shows a profit. Now you go to the bank or investment company and you get the property appraised with the intention of doing any cash-out refinance. Because you fixed up the property and it's a fabulous money-making business, the property appraises for $114, 000. The financial institution is willing to lend you an 80 percent property loan on the $114, 000 appraisal giving you a mortgage of $91, 200. You originally put down $103, 000 and been given back a mortgage for $91, 200 making your out-of-pocket costs $11, 800. When using the all-money-down technique as compared to the purchase of a property through conventional methods, you save $11, 180. Now of course, you're going to have a higher mortgage and less money flow coming from the property, but you're also going to experience $11, 200 to buy the next property with. Sometimes typically the homes you buy are going to cost you $10, 000 to buy; other sorts of times you're going to break even on the deal. You might sometimes be lucky enough to actually get paid to buy a house, which has manifested to me once or twice. The goal was simply to just continue to keep buying as many properties as possible until you build up a selection worth millions of dollars. You will make a profit from the cash flow, but most probably that's going to go back and do things like repairs and vacancies in all the other issues that come up with real estate. If you do end up banks and loans $10, 000 during the year from the cash flow of your properties, there is your down money to buy an additional property and even expand your portfolio further. I have constantly repeated are actually not going to find the cash flow to be something of remarkable value to you. The cash flow will help pay for the necessary matters and give you down money for future deals, but also in the end you will work hard for very little money. The surprise will come when you've ridden the cycle as a result of bottom to top and created a gap amongst the portfolio's value and the amount of mortgages that you owe for those building. Accruing equity in your buildings, you will slowly learn to see your net worth increasing as the years start on. For example let's just say you bought one property one year for five years valued at $100, 000 a home. Since the five years that you bought the properties, worth have gone up somewhat and the mortgages have gone down, additionally your net worth is the equity in between. As you begin to look at this throughout your investing career, especially when the market will be on the rise, it can be an exciting time. Your expectations should be to exist off of the income from your job while the profit from the nightly rental property business is used to fuel its needs. You can usually get to a point somewhere when a real conflict will develop between your current career and your real estate investments. It's very hard to be in two places at once, and ultimately it will begin to catch up with you. For me this conflict was easily reconciled since I only wanted to be doing real estate anyway, and yet if you love your day job and you plan to continue it by means of your life, you're going to have to make some tough decisions. You could potentially keep your day job, but someone is going to have to jog your portfolio. I maintain that getting a seven-figure netting worth in equity strictly in your real estate holdings isn't that difficult to do. I recommend you join real estate investment clubs not to mention read as many books as you possibly can. As you begin to make investments, you will discover friends in the businesses that relate to your industry which includes people in the mortgage business. I recommend that you associate with plenty of of these people as possible so that your knowledge of the industry expands a lot. A friend of mine who's an intelligent guy took a handful of this advice and began moving quickly. In his first of all year, I think he bought two properties, but through his second year he was already doing $300, 000 flips and buying multiunit investment properties with a partner that she has. First of all, I'm not a big fan of collaboration for the deal size he was doing, and subsequently, I think he was growing a little too fast. If the person didn't have a job, I wouldn't have a problem with the rate of his growth, but because he had a well-paying job, I cautioned him not to move too swift. The second half of 2009 was a rough year just for him as his $300, 000 flip was not reselling, and he's already had to do two evictions. Lugging the mortgage and his $300, 000 flip was basically expensive and was already causing some tension in the partnership. It's not going to be all fun and games; because your portfolio grows, your problems grow with it as well as workload grows. Another thing I can say about the issues from the real estate business is that they seem to come in waves. If I owned dozens of homes, I would go six months whereby I wouldn't need to change a doorknob and then out of the blue all hell would break loose. I'd be managing an eviction, two vacancies, and apartments that were demolished. When it rains it pours in the real estate business enterprise; at least that's the way it worked out for me. I remember in two separate occasions during the summertime one year followed by a subsequent summer a year later I was bombarded with all issues. In this business, you can't let a vacant place sit and wait because you're losing money every day it is far from rented. The process of getting it renovated and re-rented will be highest importance. As bad as I make it sound, It is my opinion you'll find it all to be worth it in the end. It seems that no matter how much cash I made, I have learned in my career I never ever really save. As you earn more money, your lifestyle increases and you will upgrade your homes and cars to the point where your own bills go right along with your salary. The real estate enterprise is almost like a bank account you really can't touch easily with out selling a building, so it continues to grow and feed off from itself. It's a terrific feeling when you realize that your $550, 000 portfolio experienced a 10 percent increase in character in the last year and you're up an additional $55, 000. I'm using the same principles today in the commercial arena selecting larger buildings with similar strategies. I can't buy a $3 million building with the technique, but there are many other things that may be worked out in the commercial world. Nowadays I use strategies that focus on complex negotiations with the sellers where I convince the crooks to carry paper or lease option the building. I'm also able to borrow money from banks for commercial investments presenting the bank that piece of real estate I am buying as security as well as existing pieces of real estate as collateral. I label it redundant collateralization and am seeing more and more of computer every day from banks. If you can go from broke for you to seven figures in one real estate cycle as I've proposed easily making yourself $1 million during your first housing cycle, then just imagine what you can do in your second real estate menstrual cycle. I plan to be carrying a real estate portfolio using the value north of $10 million and have that past record under my control before the real estate market begins to show any specific gains. I expect the gains will begin to show sometime all-around 2013 or later. Can you imagine if you're holding an important $10 million portfolio and the real estate market goes up a meager five percentage points? It doesn't matter how much money I made who year in income because as long as I can keep the business afloat I am up half a million cash in equity in one year. If I'm ever fortunate to see the crazy increases that we saw in 2005, can you imagine what it will feel like to see a 20 percent increase in values in one year when you're sustaining a portfolio worth eight figures? "Far better it will be to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank through those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer from much because they live in the gray twilight that recognizes neither victory nor defeat. " Theodore Roosevelt Let me dream about holding a portfolio worth $12 million after the market goes up 20 percent giving me a one-year tax free gain of $2, 400, 000. I feel that this is a realistic expectation for my second circuit of the real estate business. In the year 2025, I will be sixty years old. I feel certain that if I continue to just do exactly what I've been doing my whole life, I surely should have the net worth of many millions of dollars strictly for my real estate property holdings. I know of no other way to make money through these types of numbers as easily as I do in the properties business. I don't deny that other people have the means to make this kind of money or even more, but I am not familiar with the methods. I consider myself an expert on real estate, and also I certainly feel as some of the things I'm speaking about here will happen to me as long as I'm lucky enough to still be breathing when 2025 rolls around. This is why I love the estate business, and this is why I'm pumped every day so you can get out and keep it going because I can notice my future is filled with bright and sunny months. I feel terrific about getting up in the morning and going to perform, and when you have that kind of attitude, there's no way you possibly can fail. This morning I woke up at 5: 33 a. m. and went to my office building to reorganize some equipment in our communication room. I'm spending numerous afternoon hours on a Sunday working on my book plus feeling great about my possibilities. If you love what you achieve, you will be much happier and much more successful at whatever you try out. I don't even consider the things that I did this morning or perhaps writing this book as work in the regular technique people think of it. Obviously, it is work that Now i'm doing, but I don't have a negative feeling about the the word work or what it entails. I get a great sense of accomplishment from getting up in the morning and building things that happen furthering along my career each day on baby steps toward the ultimate goal of massive huge selection accumulation. I hope that some of you reading this book will probably really grasp the things I'm talking about above. I feel specifically the most important message in the entire book. Here's an idea you might want to think about after you buy your first property. Make sure that you take some time when you have bought it to really analyze what's going to be involved in being a realty landlord. If you like it or even love it, let's get the blowout started, and if you don't get out right now. If you're going to commence in the business just for the money but despise dealing with tenants as well as working on buildings, you really have to be careful and reconsider the things you're about to do. This business is not for wimps, also it takes a heck of a lot of guts to be a real estate real estate investor. To get to the level that I have achieved, you may have to take 1 / 2 your net worth and roll the dice regarding some large commercial building risking the twenty years regarding hard work on one deal. Until you go through that process, I could never truly explain to you what that will feel like. My name is Phil, and I'm addicted to real estate.

[psychobender]

The Principles of the Specialist

These principles were designed and are currently being perfected in order to make someone so good and so focused on something that there is virtually no one better than them at something than themselves (Except if there’s an identical specialist who studies for more time with the same quality. Quality here meaning perfection or near perfection on the learning process). Results on this are based on 2 subjects, so... Not a lot of scietific value to that but hey, getting past the basic principles is already hard enough, imagine getting past the excelence principles. If I were to guess, I’d say 0.1% of people getting past that is already too much of a high expectation to rely on (But then again, that’s an opinion. Do your research. Maybe you find out I’m wrong).

1 - Study the area for at least 2 years (5 years is the recommended)

To acquire this, there are 3 steps: First you must have learned and conditioned all of the Basic Principles and almost all of the Principles of Excelence (With the exception of the 2nd, 6th and 7th. Although not having the 7th would be very risky, it could still work, but if you do not have the rest of them... There are simply too many drawbacks for me to consider you a quality self-learner). Second you’ll need to follow IN.ORDER. the 6 steps to be a self learner. Third you’ll need to keep yourself on the same track for at least 2 years and the reccomended would be 5. So yeah... Good luck with that.

First of all, if you do not have the 2nd, 6th and 7th of the principles of excellence, you’re gonna have drawbacks. Not having the 2nd can lead to depression, giving up or accepting authoritiy’s opinions instead of yours and many other fallacies based on the lack of self-esteem. Not having the 6th will make possible for your thoughts to be clouded by judgement and bad feelings that will hold you back in your learning because your brain will be clogged with anxiety, tension and pain. Not having the 7th is gonna hurt your descriptions unless you’re capable of distinguishing objective from subjective and judgmental apart with 100% of accuracy. Now to the actual main problem: If you study something for one year, (With all the principles ready) it may take sometime until you get understand and map ou your entire area and be presented to all the common arguments you find to defend each position. Again... It is possible to do that in 2 years if you’re an absolute beast (That’s why I say 5 years is reccomended).

2 - Recognize pseudo-sciences inside your own area

To acquire this, you need to understand the 8 steps of the scientific method. Respectively: Ask a question; search for answers and informations related to the question; form a hypothesis; plan an experiment to test the hypothesis; perform the experiment; analyze the data; draw a conclusion; share the results. If you understand all of that you can identify a pseudoscience if you see one. Be aware of logical fallacies and remember the 8th and 9th principles of excelence. Once you’re able to do that practice everytime you look at something that says it’s scientific and judge it from this perspective.

If you fail to recognize a pseudo-science when you see one, chances are you are going to believe it and use it to explain the world around you causing contradictions that don’t actually exist and ultimately leading you into a downward spiral to conspiracy theories that are fundamentally innaccurate.

3 - Completely map out the area you are studying

To acquire this you’re going to need a good amount of meditation (Roughly a month or 6, once you are well rounded in your area). You’re gonna ahave to name every field there is in your area and finally describing each one very briefly. Take me in education for example. Education is divided in times of learning, types of learning and finaly the definitions and discussions of learning. Respectively: Pedagogy (Study of learning in children); Andragogy (Study of learning in teenagers and adults) Geragogy (Study of learning in old people); Heutagogy (Study of learning in Self-Learners); Epistemology (Study of the study); Art of teaching (Various ways of passing on the rationalization and conditionings down to others).

If you fail to do that, your brain is going to have a hard time linking the informations and arguments it has into a solid chunk of your memory and is also gonna have an even harder time trying to come up with neural pathways to understand the area you are studying and where each thing fits directly. A great example of this is how people learn history in school. They may know that the Egyptians were building pyramids and that mamoths lived long ago but they’d have no idea that both these things happened at the same time...Which is horrible to think about. Litterally everyone who learns history in school fucked up in their learning process.

4 - Use all the 9 types of teachers

To acquire that you’ll need to check if you have used and if you still use all of them on your learning process. Which is absolutely crucial for not having your learning limited by a 10 thousand year old book that claims to have all the answers. (http://psychobender.tumblr.com/post/160738209793/the-types-of-teachers-preme) 

If you fail to do that your learning process will most likely be lacking in some aspects such as never having tested your conclusions, trusting books to tell you the truth, trusting your own anecdotal evidence to help you master anything. How bad could this be? Just look at every person who has joined a talent show believing they had a great talent only to have their dreams obliterated in front of a milion people audience.

5 - Access contents in the world’s common language (currently english)

To do that you must first understand the spoken and written language as well as be integrated in the international culture (Such as understanding references and common knowledge of it). Given you have this, you will need to check if everything you learned has a double check in the english speaking world. Once you meditate enough to know if everything you learned, you checked the english field, you can be safe that you looked at a reasonable amount of intelectual variety.

If you fail this, you’re going to limit your expertise to the information present in your native language only. And that is specially harmful if you are living in a country that doesn’t speak english as a second language. Even if you’re talking about the history of a local tribe, having access to the interpretation and arguments of people from all over the world is crucial to build any robust knowledge.

6 - Study at least 3x a week

To acquire that it recommended that you find a need to study instead of simply building a routine. For example, if you are studying random ass texts and articles just for the sake of studying, it’s not gonna be much of a useful talent, unless you get lucky to use those later in life. It must come from demand. If your happiness depends on helping people and in order to do that you need to study psychology, now THAT is demand. It could even be that your happiness comes from looking smart in front of people but it needs to come from somewhere. Pure conditioning won’t save you here. NOTE: 3x a week is the bare minimum for you to get any sort of absoluteness out of your talent. I’d recommend 5 - 7x a week.

If you fail this, that is, underdoing it, you’re gonna be travelling on below average grounds for expertise and that is NOT what I’d recommend for any specialist of any area. Also, having an purely conditioning driven study routine is going to increase your stress (Cortisol) levels and your brain will interpret studying as a punishment instead of reinforcement (With reason), further decreasing any chances you thought you had of becoming the best.

7 - Be capable of explaining your expertise to all ranges of people. (4 year olds to 20+ and layman to world renowned genius)

To acquire that you need to understand what you do in the simplest terms. For example in education: Simplest terms is: “I teach people how to learn better”. Hardest terms would be “I study Pedagogy, Andragogy, Geragogy to understand the mind’s development in learning, Heutagogy to understand the process of acquiring with different levels of autonomy, Neurology to complement the use of the brain, a bit of nutrition of the brain for the same reason, Epistemology to be able to question the very base of learning as a whole and psychology to be able to use their technologies to boost the mind and it’s development throughout learning”. 

If you fail this, you’re gonna have a hard time selling yourself to work somewhere or even to provide a service or justify your expertise to other people and in the end it won’t matter how much you know since you’ll never be able to put your ideas to the test or even make them useful for someone else who might wanna hire you. Might as well pretend you’re good at something. You’ll get the same results, if not better by simply pretending.

8 - Love what you do

To acquire this, you can’t just like it, you can’t simply enjoy your work. It must be one of the main, if not the ultimate priority in your life. The stepping stones are simple. Find out exactly what makes you happy (I personally suggest the archetype family test but anything that can pin down the actions that make you happy will suffice); try to find happiness in different ways on the same area; use your area as a tool to find happiness and pleasure. After you’ve done that for 2 to 5 years, you'll probably keep this passion forever (Unless we find a cure for aging. In which case, I’d say you’d keep it for about 200 to 500 years).

If you fail this, you’re going to lose 90 to 99.99% of all your potential willpower towards your expertise since there will be no reward (Reinforcement) for the effort in the end. It’s going to build up stress and every day on the job will feel like hell until the point that the only reason you have to go is gonna be that you’re 1 day closer to retirement. You may even get to the point where you’re the best but everytime someone comes up to you with a request, you’re gonna look at them as if they just asked for an organ transplant of your left lung.

[timeisacephalopod]

Moral Alignment

My parents were watching some dumbass reality cop show and I got an idea lmao. So here’s a soul mate thing with Sam/Steve because I really don’t write them enough. This is basically just a long ass crack fic tbh.

Steve kind of hates being a cop. When he was a kid he had all these delusions about saving people and being a good person but all he does is deal with people being assholes and do a lot of running mostly. And the useless calls because some parent wants to teach their fucking kid a lesson. Ugh, if he never gets another one of those calls it’ll be too soon. At the moment he’s stuck patrolling around, which is literally doing nothing for a stupid amount of time but whatever. 

He’s driving down a darker street just to waste his own time when he notices a guy walking along the side of the road dancing a little to whatever is playing in the headphones he’s wearing. When he walks under a street light Steve’s eyebrows go up because wow that guy is hot.

So, like a complete moron, he pulls off to the side of the road where the guy is walking, noting that he’s pulled his headphones off and Steve asks for his name. Technically its something he can do not that he does it often because he thinks its mostly a waste of time but it works for him now. Or at least it does until the guy looks at him, going from somewhat confused to absolutely irritated in a matter of moments as he feels it too. 

That warm, pleasant feeling in the heart that indicates you’ve met your soul mate but there’s also the words, barring that. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” the guy says and Steve’s cheeks heat a little in embarrassment. He had always sort of hoped his words would be wrong but apparently he’s not so lucky. No one ever is but it’d be nice to cheat the system given his um... rocky start to things.

“I mean I’m not that bad...” he says in his own defense.

“‘Not that bad’? You just randomly stopped a man minding his own damn business to ask for his name and you have that nasty mustache,” he says.

Steve touches his face gently, “I busted my razor this morning and I haven’t had time to buy a new one,” he says. “And I only pulled over because I thought you were cute,” he adds, a little embarrassed.

His soul mate rolls his eyes and honestly its the most dramatic thing he’s ever seen and he knows Tony Stark personally. And Clint, for that matter. And Bucky. “You pulled me over because you think I’m attractive? You are a complete waste of my tax dollars,” he says, arms crossed in annoyance.

“I can’t even argue with that,” he mumbles. “I’m a shit cop. Also my name is Steve Rogers, and I still kind of want yours. For soul mate purposes, not cop purposes,” he clarifies.

“Sam Wilson. Are you always this easy to throw off guard? Because that seems like a bad trait for a cop,” he points out.

Steve sighs, “I am unflappable. I once had a woman throw actual turds and vomit at me and I was fine, everything worked itself out. But talking to people I find attractive? Never been good at it.” God knows how the hell he and Peggy managed a relationship when he constantly tripped over his words. She found it endearing until she met Angie but Steve thinks they’re a sweet couple. Very loving.

Sam squints, “and what, you never find the people you arrest attractive?” he asks.

Yeah, its happened. “Usually I have a partner with me so you know, he does stuff. Not much stuff, he’s a way worse cop than me. Once we were trying to deescalate a situation and he hid behind the trash cans with the civilians and left me to it. Thankfully raging drug addict with a gun is not my type.” Bucky though... should not be a cop. Usually Natasha sticks him on desk duty because his ability to organize paperwork is actually pretty good.

“Are there any not shit cops that you work with?” Sam asks, squinting again.

“Pretty much everyone but me and Bucky. Ever seen Brooklyn Nine Nine? We’re Hitchcock and Scully even though we both want to be Rosa or Holt. In that order.” They suck at the job mostly because they have no passion for it, which is what makes anyone good at their job, but now they’re kind of stuck with this so whatever. 

It pays the bills and sometimes Steve gets to rescue kittens from trees so that’s decent. That time he had to chase that one woman through a haunted house with his easily scared best friend and completely useless cop though is far less ‘decent’ as far as career choices go. Bucky damn well knew they were all fake, why did he keep screaming at the ghosts? And everyone thought they were wearing costumes. Fuck Halloween, Steve’s tired of being mistaken for a stripper gram.

“Hmm,” Sam mumbles. “Well, at least you don’t seem racist even if you’ve got all the makings of a ‘go back to your own country’ starter kit going on,” he says, waving an arm around at the car and his face. Steve so resents that but the mustache is a little much. When Natasha saw him this morning she told him he looked like he’d be willing to dry fuck a truck’s tailpipe and Bucky laughed so hard he almost choked to death on his donut.

“Did I really give off that racist of a vibe? I want to know because I don’t really want to give that vibe off,” he says seriously. He might hate being a cop but he doesn’t want to be intimidating either, especially not in a racist way. Though if anyone knew about the Princess Bubblegum and Marceline bobble heads in his car they’d probably not find him intimidating in any kind of fashion.

Sam gives him a look that indicates he’s 200% done with Steve and he really doesn’t know what he did aside from generally being a useless cop. “You pulled over because a black man was dancing around a little on the side of the road? I know I’ve got the rhythm of a drunk white girl grinding on some guy to ‘shake it off’ by Taylor Swift in a club but that’s not illegal,” he says.

Steve lets out a groan and drops his head to the steering wheel, ignoring the sharp ‘beep’ that sounds from the car. “Oh my god you thought I racially profiled you,” he mumbles.

“Bingo,” Sam says. “But... in your slight defense I’d arrest me if I witnessed that too,” he admits. “And also in your slight defense I guess I could have looked like someone you were trying to arrest.” He’s intentionally reaching but its sweet that he’s trying to let Steve off the hook especially since he out and out admitted to pulling him over because he thought he was cute.

He should probably find a new job. “So um. When we tell people how we met we’re telling them I heroically saved your life,” he says.

Sam snorts, “hell no, we’re telling them the truth- that your useless cop ass pulled me over to get my name because you thought I was cute and what were you even going to do after that?” he asks.

Steve winces again, “I didn’t think that far ahead, I was just hoping to strike up a conversation and get your number,” he admits.

“Alright honey, I’m taking pity on you because you are clearly a clueless, yet harmless, human being. Don’t hit on people in uniform, they’ll feel obligated to flirt back. What are you doing?” he asks and Steve lets out another groan.

“God damnit I am not usually this clueless, I swear. I think I might have sensed the soul mate thing because I’m not this stupid normally.” Jesus, he can’t believe he hadn’t thought of that. Thankfully Sam is the brains of this operation of god knows where this would go.

**

Bucky grins, enthused by Steve’s utter embarrassment regarding how he met his soul mate. “Natasha!” he calls, “come here, Steve’s got his best ‘dumb gay slut’ moment yet and it involves his soul mate!” And it’ll probably be his last so he’s pleased that this one is a damn good one.

Natasha immediately sticks her head out of her office, “on a scale of Clint and Phil meeting to you and Tony meeting how good is it?” she asks.

“Better than me and Tony, for sure,” he says and Nat grins, plodding over immediately. Yeah, he would too if the story was better than that time Bucky met Tony literally falling out of the sky and using Bucky as a cushion. He pities Tony for having the noise he made permanently tattooed on his body. Its worse than that noise in that song by Imagine Dragons- Radioactive- after breathing in the chemicals. The good news is that Steve finally topped his ridiculous story with his own.

He explains to Natasha what happened and from start to finish its a damn ride. Natasha snickers, considering Sam for a moment and the man is brave because he stares back. Sometimes when they have trouble getting confessions they send in Nat and most people are so scared they give up basically five seconds into her stare down. “So,” she says, “where do you fit in the Moral Alignment Test?” she asks.

Steve gives Sam a panicked look because this is a trick question- they all made up their own types years ago but Sam just smirks. “I’m chaotic asshole,” he says and Steve’s eyebrows fly up as Bucky gasps.

“You’re my mortal enemy. I’m lawful scared,” he says.

Sam squints at him for a moment before he turns to Steve, “I hope you don’t like this one much because I hate him already. Where do you sit on the alignment?” he asks Steve, who sighs.

“One, that’s the best friend I told you about. The Scully to my Hitchcock even though he’d rather be the Scully to my Mulder. Actually he’d be Mulder. Anyways I’ve been told I’m lawful super slut,” he mumbles, obviously hoping that would get lost in the rest.

Sam snorts, “guess that explains you ‘dumb gay slut’ reputation. Actually, you know what, pulling over to question me because you thought I was hot gave you away. And your lawful scared best friend needs to go,” he adds.

“Don’t be rude, I became a cop so I can arrest annoying people and you’re getting on my nerves,” Bucky tells him.

“How’s that going for you?” Sam asks, deadpan.

“See any annoying people around here?” he asks and from the look on Steve’s face he’s just pulled an Icarus, except he’d flying into the sun, not too close to it.

“I see you,” Sam says, power bombing him verbally through the precinct floor. Well, ok. He set himself up for that.

[confessions-of-a-former-fat-guy]

Confession: Fuck Judgment

I am not perfect. In fact, I am probably the furthest thing from perfect. Whatever perfect is. So often we tie physical appearance with what we consider perfection to be. I know I have. I still do, at times. It’s the one thing that causes me the most distress. Walking by a mirror and catching a jiggle out of the corner of my eye. A pair of pants not fitting like it used to. A shirt hugging a curve that didn’t used to be there. It all eats at me, which in turn causes me to eat. Emotional eating has always been my downfall. It’s no shock that in my 20s I ballooned to well over 300 pounds not once, but twice. I was an emotional wreck for that entire decade of my life. I was as lost as a person can be and I turned to food, really crappy food, to deal with it. I still do it. And I hate that I do.

After losing 120 pounds and finding CrossFit I told myself, and others, that I would never go back to that person I used to be; the one who woke up wanting to stuff Taco John’s breakfast burritos in my face on my drive to work. Eating as fast as I could so no one would know I had eaten it. The funny thing about hiding what we’re eating is that we can’t. People may not see what, when, and how much of the garbage foods we’re eating, but they sure as hell don’t miss the effect it has on our bodies. We’re lying to ourselves thinking nobody knows what we’re doing to ourselves. I’ve been doing it for months. And that person I said I would never be again is exactly who I’ve become. I’ve come full circle and I’m at the point on the circumference where I feel, look, and perform the worst.

This blog is called Confessions of a Former Fat Guy because the fat guy was supposed to be in my rearview fading into the distance, never to be seen again. But I took a wrong turn somewhere and I can see the fat guy on the horizon. I see his pillowy silhouette waiting for me. Welcoming me with open arms and a bucket of fried chicken. There is a fork in the road between us, though. One turn will take me right back to stretchy pants, sweating uncontrollably, and an early grave. The other to the produce aisle, fitted shirts, and a long life with my wife and, God willing, future children. It’s up to me to choose which road I take.

I’ve always considered myself lucky to have avoided addictions. I’ve never smoked. I don’t care for drinking. I’ve not once ever felt a desire to try drugs. Again, though, I’ve been lying to myself. I haven’t avoided addiction. I am addicted to an unhealthy lifestyle full of sugar and being sedentary. I’ve broken that addiction twice. The first time I went from 305 to around 245. I was back over 300 in less than six months. The second time I dedicated myself more than I’ve ever dedicated myself to anything. I went from 325(ish) to 205 and, for a very brief moment, just under 200. I maintained that for close to four years. I thought the addiction was gone for good.

I was wrong.

In the past I’ve fallen off the wagon after something devastating (or what my feeble little mind considered devastating) happened. This time around, that’s not the case. I think that’s why I’ve been so perplexed and hyper-critical of myself. Nothing bad has happened. It’s been the exact opposite, really. Life, aside from putting on weight, has been incredible.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this a lot and there are two possible explanations. First, and probably the obvious choice, is I just got lazy. After busting my butt and eating 100% clean for so long, I just felt like I needed a break. A stupid, derailing break. The other, more hopeful sunshine and rainbows explanation, is that all of the effort I had been expelling to work on my health and fitness needed to be diverted in order for everything else in my life to come together. I’m hoping that’s the case, but the pessimist and realist in me assumes it all comes down to being lazy.

I wrote in my previous post about how I’ve been dealing with some overwhelming depression for quite some time. I’m prone to it. I sort of always have been. It comes in waves, often unprovoked and unannounced, as many who have dealt with and continue to deal with depression will attest to. My depression has absolutely, without a doubt, taken its toll. It is partially to blame for how off track I’ve gone. To my previous point, though, I do think that all of the life changes I’ve gone through over the last year needed the majority of my focus, effort, and devotion.

And, if I’m being honest, I don’t regret that. Sure, I’ve put about 30 pounds on in the last 12 months. That’s bad. I will never dispute that. But here’s everything else that’s happened over the last 12 months. I started a new job. I got engaged. I got married. I (we) built, moved into, and continue to furnish/decorate our house. Each one of those things is on the list of biggest life changes. Any one of those happening in a 12 month period is enough to disrupt a person’s status quo. All of them taking place in a 12 month period is, as the kids say, stressful AF. It’s no shock I got overwhelmed and went into an extended period of depression. It’s just a lot to handle in such a short amount of time.

But I will repeat, I 1000% do not regret any single part of it. The life my wife and I have carved out is more, better, than I ever imagined life could be. And it’s only going to get better. So, if the price for me to build the life my family wants and deserves is to have put on some weight, then so be it. I’m done beating myself up for that. I’m done feeling guilty about it. I’m done worrying about if anyone is judging me for it. I put the effort I had into what was most important at the time. Yes, my health is still very important to me. I will get back on track. I’m finally in a good spot where I feel like I can start focusing on myself again. And I will.

I am not perfect. I will never be perfect. But my life is great and my health and fitness will be again, too.

[iamtaekooked]

Vanilla Rules || Ch 5

Genre: Badboy! au, romance, drama, angst

Word count: 2.3k

Warnings: Sexual themes (don’t read if uncomfortable or underage)

SYNOPSIS:

After the incident in the gym you completely lose interest in everything, including your dislike for Jimin. Your complete avoidance doesnt sit well with Jimin and he comes up with a plan to get your attention. 

A/N: Here is Ch5!! I hope you guys enjoy reading it!! Thank you so much for all the love and support you have shown this fic!! ❤️ I hope you guys like it! Also thank you for getting all the chapters over 200 notes!

Ch 1 || Ch 2 || Ch 3 || Ch 4 || Ch 5 ||  Ch 6 || Ch 7 || Ch 8 || Ch 9 || Ch 10|

It had been a week since the incident in the gym. A week since you had been to college. You didn’t have the strength to do get out of your bed much less the comfort and warmth of your house. All motivation had been replaced by a sense of doom. You couldn’t find the courage within you to face your peers but most of all Jimin. You hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything else other than the moment that you had kissed him, albeit forcefully.

The image swam even in the depths of your mind becoming the cause of your sleepless nights. Your stomach refused to take in any food and settled on feeding the anxiety that had managed to grapple you in the past couple of days. You were not ready for whatever hell he was about to unleash on you this time. Never had you ever imagined that a boy named Park Jimin would become you own personal form of hell.

Taehyung had been the only link to the outside world and he managed to tell you the goings on around the college each day, and you would sit and listen to him forming images in your head of the incidents he would tell you about. Sometimes it would be about him getting in trouble in class and sometimes it would be stories of his own clumsiness landing him in trouble with girls. Other times he would open his mouth to tell you about what Jimin did that particular day but he would seal his lips because of the sharp stare you would throw his way.

“Till when do you plan on hiding my dear friend” he flopped down on the couch next to you, propping his feet up on the coffee table. He looked just as tired if not more and you snuggled up to him, placing your head on the expanse of his chest. His arm came to wrap around your shoulder. If you were being honest with yourself the one reason you needed his comfort was because you hadn’t been able to stop worrying about what Jimin would do next.

Taehyung glanced down at you and saw your sullen expression. “I wonder what he’s going to do next” you mumbled against Taehyung’s chest and he caught your hushed words. “I could still beat him up for you ,you know?” you felt his chest vibrate as he let out a chuckle.

“There’s no point. My life is ruined as is” you wearily lifted your head from his chest and let it fall against the sofa. You didn’t think it was going to get better because you knew you had become the talk of the town. The groundless rumour based upon a single forced kiss had made it way around town and you had given up hope that you would ever go back to the days before.

You found yourself pinned against your locker by Jimin who was staring down at you. Closing your eyes you huffed out, a hint of hopelessness apparent in your flaccid body language. He noticed the slumping of your shoulders, the hunch in your back, the dullness that had replaced the usual glow on your face, your chapped lips, dark circles under the eye. He was surprised at the amount of details he noticed about you because he had always assumed he never paid enough attention to what you looked like. But the worn down look on your face and the lifeless look in your eyes caught him off guard. He had never seen you looking so defeated no matter how much he messed with you.

He had grown accustomed to your feisty behaviour, your cold glares, and the some what third grade insults you threw at him. It had become and second nature and hobby for him to annoy you. One could say that the past week had been as boring and dull for him and even a good fuck couldn’t lift up his spirits.

“I was beginning to think you were dead” he chuckled. You quickly glanced at him, and looked away when the image of you kissing him resurfaced in your mind. The awkwardness of the situation wasn’t something you appreciated because he was the last person who was supposed to make you feel as such. Jimin’s face fell as your disinterest in him made itself apparent on your features. The way you refused to look at him, the way your eyebrows didn’t pull together in a frown, the way you didn’t pay any mind to him and just stood there almost lifeless made him feel  something akin to anger.

He wanted to ask you if something had happened but he didn’t know how to communicate that because not only would it make this awkward but he wasn’t supposed to ask you such things and he wasn’t supposed to care about what you felt.

“It’d have been better if I was dead” you mumbled the words and sighed lips curving down in a frown. He wasn’t expecting such a response so his lips parted to give way to a shocked expression. You were staring at the ground with unfocused eyes seemingly looking lost in your own thoughts. He stared at you with concern reflecting in his eyes as they traveled all over your face. Softly exhaling he licked his lips, eyes narrowing in question at your behaviour as he studied you.

He didn’t have a smart reply for your statement ,for your behaviour had him confused so he let his hands slide down the locker from either side of you ,freeing your way to leave as you pleased. Without a parting glance you started to make your way towards your class dragging your feet heavily across the floor. He turned in your direction crossing his arms over his chest as he surveyed you while you bumped shoulders into a few people still looking as miserable as ever.

Jeongguk’s head had begun to spin as he watched Jimin pace around with thumbs twiddling with each other nervously. He lost track of how long Jimin had been at it for. “Hyung! Stop it” he finally had had enough as he marched upto Jimin, grabbed him by shoulders and shook him. “Will you please just come to your fucking senses”

Jimin blinked a few times as if brought out of his trance by the sudden interruption. He sighed heavily , puffing out his cheeks as he returned Jeongguk’s stare. The internal conflict that was facing with himself was eating at him but he didn’t how to convey his frustrations to anyone. In fact he wasn’t even sure what he was feeling because he had never felt such a way before. He was overwhelmed with all kinds of emotions and thoughts. The biggest botheration was the fact that he was perturbed by your behaviour and even more puzzled at himself for feeling so.

He tightly shut his eyes as he massaged his temples, hoping to gain some sort of relief. He couldn’t even admit to himself how he had been unable to rid his mind of your sunken expression, along with the hopeless look in your eyes as if you had lost your reason to live.

“Why the hell are you behaving like this? Not getting enough v?” Jeongguk cockily raised his eyebrow, feeling proud at himself for figuring it out. But he had no idea.

“Once a fuckboy always a fuckboy” Jimin’s hand came up to hit Jeongguk on the side of his head. Flinching in pain Jeongguk glared daggers at the older boy. If it were up to him he would have Jimin cowering in front of him but he loved and respected Jimin too much to insult him.

“Then why the fuck are you acting like this?” he raised his eyebrows questioningly at Jimin.

“Dont your dare take this wrong way” Jimin pointed at him warningly before breathing out heavily and looking heavenward.

“Its y/n. She’s been acting very weird recently” Jimin spoke the words gulping down the disgust was feeling at himself for caring. Jeongguk’s hands fell to his sides in shock as he stared wide eyed at the man in front of him. He blinked a few times in confusion to process that he had heard right and scratched the inside of his ear in case he missed something.

“Wait. Back the fuck up. You are telling me that y/n- Y/N is behaving a certain way and its getting to you?” A vertical line formed between his eyebrows to express his lack of understanding.

“What the fuck did I say to you before? I don’t fucking give a shit about her” Jimin’s voice rose a little as he stared at the younger boy.

“Doesn’t sound like it…” Jeongguk murmured to himself. Jimin heard him and threw a thunderous glare his way in response to which Jeongguk there his hands up in the air.

“Okay look. You know how I like messing with her? I can’t do that anymore because she hasn’t given me a single reaction today. Not a single fucking reaction. I am not used to it. My day doesn’t go well if I don’t bother her in one way or another. This has been a regular thing for 3 years now. I am so fucking used to it,  that now when it’s not happening I feel fucking weird” he huffed.

“You do realize that you sound like a whipped ass boyfriend who isn’t getting attention from his girlfriend right?”

Jeongguk stepped a few paces back just in case Jimin decided to hit him. He waited for 5 seconds and when Jimin stood rooted in his spot looking lost in his world he assumed his remark hadn’t been heard and sighed in relief.

“We need to do something to piss her off. Something major” Jimin piped up, looking back at Jeongguk the corner of his lips lifting up into a single sided smile clearly indicating that some sort of devilish plan had occurred to him.

Jimin was standing next to the girl’s bathroom, back trained against the wall and hands clasped behind his back. He was waiting for you to show up. His phone chimed and he opened it with a click and found Jeongguk’s message.

Jk: Spilled the juice. She’s going to the bathroom ;)

Before turning off his phone he frantically typed on the screen.

J: Where the hell are you? The bathroom is empty and I need your help. Hurry the fuck up

He impatiently tapped his foot on the ground waiting for both women to arrive so he could get started on his plan. As soon as he saw the newbie coming he gestured hurriedly with his hand. She broke out into a jog and immediately latched her lips onto Jimin’s neck. He couldn’t help but silently gag at the smell of her sickeningly sweet perfume invading his nostrils.

He had to do a double take as he saw you walking in his direction and he hurriedly pulled the girl in the bathroom dragging her behind him and pinning her against one of the stalls. He immediately unbuckled his belt and pushed into her with a strained groan. He didn’t realize how hard it was to actually fuck someone unless he was in the mood. But he had to. As he heard your steps approaching he sped up making the girl moan in pleasure.

“What the fuck Jimin!?” You shrieked in surprise as you fell onto your butt on the floor. Immediately covering your eyes with your hands.

“What the fuck are you doing here!?” You heard him fumble with his belt buckle.

“What the fuck am I doing here? What in the fucking hell are you doing in the girl’s bathroom you fucking perv” you yelled back at him making sure to keep your eyes covered from the horrendous sight in front of you.

“Cant you fucking see y/n?”

“I did see and now I am scarred for life you dumbass” with stumbled steps you stood up from the ground keeping your eyes tightly shut.

Their gross sounds had failed to register in your ears thanks to the music that had been blaring through earphones. You didn’t see them at first but then as you proceeded towards the mirror with the intention of cleaning up the spilled juice on your shirt you saw them behind you.

“Why the fuck are you here you idiot?” his chest heaved up and down as he yelled at you.

“Oh I am sorry but did I fucking fail to mention that this is the girls fucking bathroom. Get the fuck out dumbshit” you held your eyes tightly shut and stood with your back against the wall. You felt a shadow pass you by and you figured it was probably the girl who he was banging, since you could still hear him muttering all sorts of profanities under his breath.

Jimin glanced over at you and couldn’t help but smile as he had finally managed to get a reaction out of you. As he was walking by you he stopped in front of you and muttered under his breath. “Thats better isn’t it?” Although you couldn’t see the smile on his face you heard his words and automatically your eyes flashed open because what in the hell he meant you didn’t know. But before you could even open your mouth to ask ,he was already making his way out of the bathroom. You didn’t realize how frantic your breathing had become, how your hands had clenched into fists at your side until you felt your nails digging into the pain of your skin and your knuckled becoming painfully tight by the second.

Your legs gave out beneath you and sliding down the wall you dropped onto your butt. You couldn’t believe what you had seen. Your stomach churned at the thought , your chest felt heavy and once again you felt bile rise to the back of your throat along with the sour acid pooling under your tongue.

If there was one person who could remind you to be aware and vigilant at all times it was Park Jimin.

[thewineauctionroom]

New Post has been published on https://wineauctionroom.com/pyramid-valley-vineyards-featured-in-country-calendar/

Pyramid Valley Vineyards Featured in Country Calendar

An American couple’s chosen this unique site in Canterbury to make world-class wine.

Claudia: “You know we took the old world model and brought it to the new world, this wine tastes like wine from nowhere else in New Zealand; nowhere else in the world and that’s precisely what we set out to do.”

Mike: “It’s always a risk, it’s farming you just can’t control mother nature and you’ve got one chance every year to get it right.”

At Pyramid Valley Vineyard in North Canterbury they do things the traditional European way and that takes a lot of people power.

Claudia: “We’ve got a team about 10 people here today we’re just shoot positioning and lateral thinning. They’re going through with snips or with using just their hands and pulling off the laterals like you do with your tomatoes, and that’s exposing the fruit to wind air sunlight everything moving through to prevent disease from happening.”

Claudia and Mike Weersing have their own way of doing things, they’ve planted their grapes close together and low to the ground in the French style and it’s taken some kiwi ingenuity to ease the backbreaking work.

Claudia: “When you have vines that are so low to the ground, it was really hard for us to constantly be bending over. So we’ve kind of over the years created these trolleys, we started with skateboards which was kind of funny, but they’re not great when you’ve got muddy soil so we came up with these aluminium frames — everybody grabs a pad and you can sit on that really comfortably. There’s no back injury and it also brings you into the fruit zone, it brings you right against that fruit and that canopy so that you could have a really close look at what you’re doing and feel more comfortable about doing it.”

Claudia: “Fruit sets just really in balance, yeah it’s probably a little bit more meticulous than what you would see in a normal vineyard but we’re aiming for quality here and we’re aiming for a very low yield and we can’t take any risks on detritus so we’ve really got to get it right the first time.”

Claudia: “Everyone here at Pyramids are part of our family and I think that’s one of the nice things when you come to Pyramids there’s that people talk about the energy here and it feels like home and it’s a place that we share and we’ve shared from the beginning. And mike and I didn’t have kids so it’s really nice to see the next generation thinking about viticulture and what’s here for them. It’s wonderful.”

Claudia and Mike have established their vineyard using biodynamic principles which focus on creating healthy soils.

Mike: “Well we know for a fact that in a vineyard ninety percent of the biomass is from the soil surface down. We see a vineyard as being what’s up in our part of the universe up here, but if you get your 90 percent wrong your 10 percent is never going to be what it should be. It’s like asking to have lustrous hair on a corpse, so you farm your soil first and we we found our soil first and now we farm it and the vine just happily follows along. You know we’ve made mistakes along the way but biodynamics is something we would never take back and we would never abandon.”

Claudia: “So this is fresh manure I collected this morning and we’re just going to put a little bit into the horn like that and then we’re going to use our stick to push it in. I just use my fingers because I don’t worry about it you’ll be eating lunch with your forks and not your hands today.

Claudia: “People think it’s a little crazy that you fill it with cow dung, but once you’ve got that vessel and you fill it with the manure and then you put it in the ground six months later you lift it and you’ve got that really amazing compost with all that microbial activity.”

Claudia: “This is six months on so what I’ve got here is this incredible compost. It’s got more microbial life to it than you’d ever find in a compost. We then put this into a drum, we stir it for about an hour with a stick and we put it into the sprayer and then we spray it onto the land just like you would a normal fertilizer. It’s really the magic of biodynamics this is just feeding the soil you know, looking after the land caring for the land and this just keeps everything alive and everything going.”

Vineyard manager Stuart McDuff has adapted to using biodynamics too.

Stuart: “The only word that’s guaranteed to get you fired around here is weed killer. And it is it’s just something all of our weeding done by hand. There are times honestly where the crew would just love to get out there with the weed killer because it’s not a flash job but it’s a great environment. It’s the people basically, it’s a good place to work and it’s a hell of an office, it really is.”

Claudia and Mike moved from California 18 years ago following a dream to create a wine unique to the site.

Claudia: “It’s funny when we first met each other, he used to have his nose and a Pinot Noir book every single night and I thought oh this guy’s having an affair with Pinot Noir you know, it was kind of weird but um I got attached pretty quickly. There’s something really special about being in the wine industry and I felt like this was a really good direction for myself.”

Mike: “It’s so lifted this year, it’s so violent, it’s really pretty. This wine tastes like wine from nowhere else, nowhere else in New Zealand, nowhere else in the world and that’s precisely what we set out to do I can’t imagine wishing to be anywhere else.”

Their love for the land has seen them turn a former swamp paddock into an irrigation pond and native wetland.

Mike: “So we had to do was simply dig it out like a swimming pool essentially. And then because our clays swell when they get wet it lined itself and it filled itself. Of course all the neighbors were laughing saying those crazy Americans, they’re digging this gigantic hole and it’s never going to fill. But we had one big rainstorm in the winter and it was full.”

But the Weersings needed a solution to deal with algae and weed that could take over the pond.

Claudia: “With the challenges of having the pond, we knew that we needed a management system and we needed to find someone to do that for us and that’s when we came across Gray. He drives all the way from Takapuna down here and we catch up with him about four times a year. He checks on the pond and make sure the levels of the algae aren’t getting out of control.”

Gray Jamieson has introduced two new species of fish to manage the water quality naturally.

Gray: “We use grass gap to eat the weed and the filamentous algae, and silver carp to filter out blue-green algal blooms. I just wanted to show you this time the silver cup they’re now in size. So oh right that’s the silver carp, we’ve had the grass carpet in the past but this is the first time that we’ve actually put the silvers, and the silvers now are of size and they’re the ones that are going to swim around in the water and filter feed out all the algal blooms, so the water will start to go clear. One of the biggest issues we have putting them in different places is that they’re confused with the koi carp, silver carp and grass carp aren’t that at all we we’ve actually changed the name to white and silver and muir they can’t breed in New Zealand that’s been proven and they can be easily managed i mean you look at a pond the same as you look at the amount of stock you put in a paddock you work out your stocking rate and then you put them in and you just adjust it to suit. Well here they are,  here’s the first of the silvers to be released in here. They’ll probably go about 10 kilos minimum, they could even get as much as 18 to 20. Also the freshwater mussels they filter feed on blue algal bloom, they’ve got toxic blue green algal blooms as well. That’ll take a couple years to build up the numbers but then it will actually turn your water clear. Well what we’ll do when we put them out is we try and keep them together so that when they spawn, it’s easy for them to fertilize each other so we’re just going to chuck them out in the water.”

Mike: “He’s so committed to what he does. And he really does believe that there’s much we can do to help clean so many polluted waterways in this country that if it requires a non-native carp to do so and there’s no danger in releasing it that seems a better way than many.”

The pond may be getting cleaner but with some of the jobs around here you’ve got to get your hands dirty.

Vineyard worker: “It’s not as bad as I thought.”

Mike and Claudia Weersing grow grapes on a former sheep farm in North Cnterbury.

Mike: “The farm is 200 acres, we only have two hectares five acres planted. We wanted to concentrate on just the areas that had the correct soil mix and the right sort of aspect. We have four different blocks, two of pinot and two of chardonnay in those two hectares. To be perfectly frank we haven’t even planted our best ground yet because I didn’t want to make mistakes on what I considered to be the very best plots.”

A specific soil type is at the heart of this vineyard.

Mike: “The soils are a mix of clay and limestone that’s very important. … full content could be viewed in below video clip.

[script-a-world]

I wanted to start by thanking you: all your posts have really helped me but I found myself stumbling over this and I'm not sure you can help but I thought it was worth a try? (Maybe scriptchemist?) My world is a post apoc world where there's a ton of radiation damage and only small patches here and there that are livable. Realistically do you know how long it would take for the earth to sort itself out? Do you know if with that much radiation there'd even be seasons? ⅓

I’m building a religion for when the earth is less harsh with more and larger areas being sustainable. I was trying to answer some of the questions you gave us when I realized I didn’t even know if it was going to be scientifically possible for them to have seasons or specific weather conditions… The religion’s main figures are characters I’ve already created who survived and built the civilization when the radiation was at it’s peak and just beginning to lower enough to be survivable. 2/3 

So it has to be far enough in the future that people have time to make art and write down stories, but not so far that everyone forgets and muddles up the details of what really happened too much. Any ideas? Thank you so much I really appreciate it! 3/3 

First off, we’re glad we’ve been able to help!

Bina: You could look up information on the Chernobyl exclusion zone for information on how radiation impacts nature. It probably won’t give insight on seasons, but for things like plant- and animal life, it might clear some things up. (As for seasons, unless whatever caused the radiation also impacted the tilt or rotational speed of the planet itself, I think the seasons would stay roughly the same. With the exception of things like “so much radioactive smog in the air that the summers are unbearably hot now” and nuclear winters (I’d take a look at that too)). 

 As for ideas for your religion…If someone’s old enough to remember the times before the nuclear fallout, I can imagine their stories of the old clean world enrapturing those who are used to the desolate post-apoc landscape. Little, everyday things that might not be recorded in the documented stories and art. How people would play in rain puddles that were safe to jump in, opening the window on summer nights to let the air in, how numerous and musical birds used to be, etc, etc. If not that, then someone whose parent or grandparent told them stories of how the world used to be.

Synth: Extremely high global radiation levels won't affect the seasons. If the Earth still exists, and is still orbiting the Sun, the seasons will keep on going. Nuclear winter is caused by the large amounts of dust and debris that such massive explosions hurl into the air (really big volcanic eruptions do this too; see: Krakatau, Tambora), so if your world became post-apoc due to nuclear warfare, an overall colder planet is very likely. It took about five years for global temperatures to return to their pre-eruption levels when Krakatau went kablooey in 1883. (Energy release estimated to be approximately 200 megatons, 4x more powerful than the biggest nuke ever detonated, but it was just the one bang. Extrapolate accordingly to plot the potential results of global nuclear war.)

The weather patterns will keep on keepin' on, so assuming nuclear warfare, where the bombs detonated will combine with things like prevailing winds and ocean currents to concentrate the radiation in certain areas more than others (the rest of the world became aware of the Chernobyl disaster when it set off radiation detectors in Sweden). Your post-apoc culture might have developed some sayings about things like "if the wind shifts to blow out of the north-east, get the fuck indoors because it brings death," or maxims about avoiding certain locations at specific times of the year, perhaps something about avioding big rivers during spring thaw (because they carry down loads of contaminated silt or whatever), kind of like the old adage about only eating oysters durning months that had an R in the name.

As for how long the radiation will linger at dangerous levels, it varies. It can vary a lot depending on what caused it in the first place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki got bombed with nuclear weapons, yet they are perfectly safe places to live. Enewetak and Bikini Atolls in the Marshall Islands were used as nuclear testing grounds in the '40s and '50s; with decontamination work they cound be safe for resettlement by the mid- to late 2020s, about seventy years after the last bomb blast, which is a timeframe that could fit your story (although there might be some plot problems if so many people died and the world got so trashed that there are massive logistical difficulties in running any kind of clean-up operation). Chernobyl, on the other hand, is estimated to remain unfit for human habitation for the next twenty thousand years.

The differences in timeframe have a lot to do with airburst vs. surface burst detonations, which is nicely explained over here: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/02/what-the-nukemap-taught-me-about-fallout/

That blog also has the NUKEMAP http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/, a tool that might be useful for planning your world. Pick a location, pick a bomb yield, pick surface or airburst, choose a wind direction, select for mapping a few other options like ionizing and/or thermal radiation, then detonate the bomb. It'll tell you things like estimated number of casualties, how big the resulting crater and fireball will be, and where the cloud of fallout will drift based on your chosen wind direction.

Links for further research/inspiration:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Recent_modelinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disasterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zonehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa#Global_climatehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enewetak_Atollhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atoll

I would also highly recommend giving https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/ a read through. It's a fascinating article about a major issue facing long-term nuclear waste disposal: how to communicate to potential future civilizations that there is dangerous stuff buried here and it's in their best interests to stay far the hell away. It's talking about a timescale quite a bit longer than your story seems to be dealing with, but you might find some inspiration there regardless.