#jeremiah x christine

[mutatedangels-a]

@nursc spun the underused muse roulette! ** ...and got jeremiah! [ based on this plot - #1 & #2 ]

"Look, love, I know finding a galactic emerald is a pretty tough concept for you to grasp but—" he takes in a long, deep, sharp breath, hands stretching out in a manner that only means to ask what the actual fuck?— "I'm pretty sure that's pretty obviously a baby, and not a shiny, expensive, soul-healing green gem in your hands."

Isn't anyone looking for this wrapped-up... thing? It coos at Jeremiah and he can't hide his disgusted expression. "Was it for sale?" They're in the middle of a market inside a vibrant, intergalatic, and perhaps baby-selling citadel on an unfamiliar planet, after all. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, anything could have happened when they initially split up for intel. "Because if it was for sale, you'd better hope there's a way we can give it back.

"'Cause, to put it simply, I am not taking that thing on our ship. What if it's an alien?"

[devil-takethe-hindmost]

some good food for the raoulstine, elizabeth welch, and the j stolle girlies (me)

meghan picerno yelling “kiss!” is an absolute highlight of this

[evermoresversion]

HIIIII!!!

Could you do promise rings with Jeremiah Fisher x reader where he goes all out, like walk onto the beach and rose petals and everyones there and all that fluffiness, and like promising to marry her after collage.<3

Have a good day/afternoon/night

-Nessa<3

🌺

CRAZIER, JEREMIAH FISHER.

A/N Thank you so much for your request, sweetheart. <3

I really got butterflies writing this, I can't believe it.

The name of the fic is because I was listening to that song while writing this.

PAIRING Jeremiah Fisher x Fem!Reader

TW/TAGS Pure fluff, established relationship.

SUMMARY You and Jeremiah have been in a relationship for a year now, both going more stable than ever, he decides it's time to take the next step.

REQUESTS ARE OPEN | JEREMIAH'S MASTERLIST | MASTERLIST

There was this day where Jeremiah woke up more affectionate than usual. And he was always affectionate with you.

The two of you have known each other your whole life, since your mother, Christine, Laurel and Susannah had always been best friends.

You grew up with the Fishers and Conklins. And while Susannah entrusted Conrad to Belly, she entrusted Jeremiah to you.

She said you were the one for her sunshine boy.

And that's what you did, you took care of Jeremiah's heart and soul as if they were your own, which led him to fall in love with you and you started dating.

That was at least a year ago, if not longer. Returning to the present it was summer, everyone was at the summer house, the day was starting and Jeremiah was already all over you.

His head on your chest so you could caress his hair while he hugged you around the waist. His eyes were closed and her legs were tangled between yours. All on top of you, pinning you to the mattress so you couldn't leave his side.

And you really didn't plan on doing it.

Until Conrad went to get you out of your love nest.

"Hey lovebirds, breakfast is ready." he announced and then left the room. Jeremiah groaned with his face now hidden in the crook of your neck.

"Let's stay here," he murmured tightening his grip on your waist. "forever."

"That's what I want the most, but I'm afraid that if we don't go down now my mother will come for us to get us off our ears."

He complained again getting up from the bed and stretching out his hand for you to take it.

When you got up, he hugged you from behind, resting his chin on your shoulder, letting you lead him into the kitchen.

"Good morning." Susannah greeted with a wide smile looking at the two of you. He was really glad that the two of you were together.

In addition to the fact that the reason for her smile was one that you didn't know.

You sat next to Jeremiah at the kitchen breakfast nook and both ate in peace.

That same afternoon you had returned from shopping with Belly and Taylor since both had insisted that they wanted to buy some dresses and they convinced you to buy one yourself.

"Where is Jeremiah?" you asked your mother who was with Laurel in the living room, she having a coffee while the other was typing something on her computer.

"He said he was coming in a while, don't worry." She nodded and you sighed going up to your room.

When you left, Laurel and your mother looked at each other knowingly, also knowing what was going to happen that night.

Later that day, once again the girls convinced you to get ready, put on makeup and do your hair because they 'felt like it' even though they hid the real reason from you by disguising it so you wouldn't find out anything.

"You look beautiful." Belly flattered smiling when she finished doing your hair.

"Never mind that she looks beautiful, she looks super hot." Taylor said, making you both laugh.

"How about we go for a walk on the beach?" the brunette offered as Taylor nodded her head.

"Dressed like that? I don't think so, I'm going to change and let's go." before you could move they both exclaimed a 'no' confusing you even more. "Okay girls, you always act weird but this time it's too much."

"It's just that I saw that there's a party on the beach and we're going to it, besides we're not so formal, they're casual dresses." the blonde shrugged and Belly nodded. When they convinced you, you agreed sighing.

You saw Taylor wrote something on her phone but you brushed it off.

"Good!" Each of them linked their arm with one of yours, each one being at your sides.

"Tonight will be unforgettable, I promise."

How correct was Taylor.

When you entered the beach you frowned not seeing any party on the beach.

"Where's the party, Tay?"

"We're almost there, wait." She tapped your arm twice and you kept walking.

Just when you were about to complain again, you saw something in the distance. You narrowed your eyes to get a better look and you could see... Jeremiah? What was he doing there?

And then you looked at the whole scenario.

The warm lights that shone where he stood. Along with Laurel, Susannah, Steven, Conrad and your mother. Jeremiah was standing in the middle of all of them.

And then you started connecting all the dots, but there was still something that didn't add up.

"Come on." Belly added smiling, leading you to where your whole family was.

When you got to where the others were, they left you in front of Jeremiah.

"You are welcome." Taylor commented making Jeremiah smirk.

Your face was totally a puzzle. And then Jeremiah took a deep breath, looking directly into your eyes and took your hands in his.

"I had a whole speech prepared but you look so stunning that you have left me speechless." he started by making you laugh softly and you heard some light giggles from the others. He took another breath of air, compose himself to be able to order a little everything he wanted to tell you.

"You've always been my favorite person, always, the only one I wanted to share my toys with when we were kids," you grinned at the memory, it was true. "The only one with whom I wanted to share my most deepest secrets and dreams." Your heart began to beat at an accelerated rate, and you waited for him to continue talking.

"And now I know that you're the only one I want to share the rest of my life with." when he said that suddenly everything stopped, even your heart. "I know that we are young, that we have a lot to live for, a lot to go through, but I know that I want all this together with you. With you I can be myself, with you I have everything. Everything I was looking for in a person I found it in you without even trying. You are the kindest, prettiest, funniest person I know. I want this to be eternal, for us to be eternal."

"So," he took a small box from the inside pocket of his jacket and bit your lower lip to keep from crying. Seeing him kneel in front of you. He opened the box letting you see a ring in it. "Will you marry me when we finish college?"

"Yes, Yes, Yes!" You exclaimed, nodding, and he rose to gently take your hand and put the ring on you.

He took your cheeks while you cradled his face in your hands to kiss him slowly, enjoying the moment.

When both parted, the mothers congratulated both of you, but especially Susannah and your mom.

"I know you will both be very happy." Susannah said caressing your face and once again you felt like crying, you hugged her tightly and she hugged you.

"Thank you so much."

When everyone congratulated both you, y'all returned to the house and when you and Jeremiah were in his room he kissed you again.

"You don't know how long I wanted to do this." he murmured joining his forehead with yours.

"I'm glad you already did."

disclaimer ── evermoresversion © 2023.

[jcmarchi]

Google at EMNLP 2023

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/google-at-emnlp-2023/

Google at EMNLP 2023

Google is proud to be a Diamond Sponsor of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023), a premier annual conference, which is being held this week in Sentosa, Singapore. Google has a strong presence at this year’s conference with over 65 accepted papers and active involvement in 11 workshops and tutorials. Google is also happy to be a Major Sponsor for the Widening NLP workshop (WiNLP), which aims to highlight global representations of people, perspectives, and cultures in AI and ML. We look forward to sharing some of our extensive NLP research and expanding our partnership with the broader research community.

We hope you’ll visit the Google booth to chat with researchers who are actively pursuing the latest innovations in NLP, and check out some of the scheduled booth activities (e.g., demos and Q&A sessions listed below). Visit the @GoogleAI X (Twitter) and LinkedIn accounts to find out more about the Google booth activities at EMNLP 2023.

Take a look below to learn more about the Google research being presented at EMNLP 2023 (Google affiliations in bold).

This schedule is subject to change. Please visit the Google booth for more information.

Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs Jiefeng Chen*, Jinsung Yoon, Sayna Ebrahimi, Sercan O Arik, Tomas Pfister, Somesh Jha

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies Alon Jacovi*, Avi Caciularu, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Bernd Bohnet, Mor Geva

1-PAGER: One Pass Answer Generation and Evidence Retrieval Palak Jain, Livio Baldini Soares, Tom Kwiatkowski

MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering Soravit Changpinyo, Linting Xue, Michal Yarom, Ashish V. Thapliyal, Idan Szpektor, Julien Amelot, Xi Chen, Radu Soricut

SDOH-NLI: A Dataset for Inferring Social Determinants of Health from Clinical Notes Adam D. Lelkes, Eric Loreaux*, Tal Schuster, Ming-Jun Chen, Alvin Rajkomar

Machine Reading Comprehension Using Case-based Reasoning Dung Ngoc Thai, Dhruv Agarwal, Mudit Chaudhary, Wenlong Zhao, Rajarshi Das, Jay-Yoon Lee, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Manzil Zaheer, Andrew McCallum

Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Abdou Aziz DIOP, Claytone Sikasote, Gilles HACHEME, Happy Buzaaba, Ignatius Ezeani, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Albert Kahira, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Akintunde Oladipo, Abraham Toluwase Owodunni, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Akari Asai, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Ayodele Awokoya, Bernard Opoku, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Christine Mwase, Clemencia Siro, Stephen Arthur, Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Boyd Sinkala, Daniel Ajisafe, Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Mofya Phiri, Orevaoghene Ahia, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Sonia Adhiambo

On Uncertainty Calibration and Selective Generation in Probabilistic Neural Summarization: A Benchmark Study Polina Zablotskaia, Du Phan, Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Jie Ren, Jeremiah Zhe Liu

Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation Markus Freitag, Behrooz Ghorbani*, Patrick Fernandes*

Sources of Hallucination by Large Language Models on Inference Tasks Nick McKenna, Tianyi Li, Liang Cheng, Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Mark Johnson, Mark Steedman

Don’t Add, Don’t Miss: Effective Content Preserving Generation from Pre-selected Text Spans Aviv Slobodkin, Avi Caciularu, Eran Hirsch, Ido Dagan

What Makes Chain-of-Thought Prompting Effective? A Counterfactual Study Aman Madaan*, Katherine Hermann, Amir Yazdanbakhsh

Understanding HTML with Large Language Models Izzeddin Gur, Ofir Nachum, Yingjie Miao, Mustafa Safdari, Austin Huang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Noah Fiedel, Aleksandra Faust

Improving the Robustness of Summarization Models by Detecting and Removing Input Noise Kundan Krishna*, Yao Zhao, Jie Ren, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jiaming Luo, Mohammad Saleh, Peter J. Liu

In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors Roee Hendel, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

Pre-training Without Attention Junxiong Wang, Jing Nathan Yan, Albert Gu, Alexander M Rush

MUX-PLMs: Data Multiplexing for High-Throughput Language Models Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Carlos E Jimenez, Izhak Shafran, Mingqiu Wang, Yuan Cao, Karthik R Narasimhan

PaRaDe: Passage Ranking Using Demonstrations with LLMs Andrew Drozdov*, Honglei Zhuang, Zhuyun Dai, Zhen Qin, Razieh Rahimi, Xuanhui Wang, Dana Alon, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum, Donald Metzler*, Kai Hui

Long-Form Speech Translation Through Segmentation with Finite-State Decoding Constraints on Large Language Models Arya D. McCarthy, Hao Zhang, Shankar Kumar, Felix Stahlberg, Ke Wu

Unsupervised Opinion Summarization Using Approximate Geodesics Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury*, Nicholas Monath, Kumar Avinava Dubey, Amr Ahmed, Snigdha Chaturvedi

SQLPrompt: In-Context Text-to-SQL with Minimal Labeled Data Ruoxi Sun, Sercan O. Arik, Rajarishi Sinha, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Pengcheng Yin, Tomas Pfister

Retrieval-Augmented Parsing for Complex Graphs by Exploiting Structure and Uncertainty Zi Lin, Quan Yuan, Panupong Pasupat, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jingbo Shang

A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection Tao Li, Gang Li, Zhiwei Deng, Bryan Wang*, Yang Li

Pragmatics in Language Grounding: Phenomena, Tasks, and Modeling Approaches Daniel Fried, Nicholas Tomlin, Jennifer Hu, Roma Patel, Aida Nematzadeh

Improving Classifier Robustness Through Active Generation of Pairwise Counterfactuals Ananth Balashankar, Xuezhi Wang, Yao Qin, Ben Packer, Nithum Thain, Jilin Chen, Ed H. Chi, Alex Beutel

mmT5: Modular Multilingual Pre-training Solves Source Language Hallucinations Jonas Pfeiffer, Francesco Piccinno, Massimo Nicosia, Xinyi Wang, Machel Reid, Sebastian Ruder

Scaling Laws vs Model Architectures: How Does Inductive Bias Influence Scaling? Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Hyung Won Chung, William Fedus, Jinfeng Rao, Sharan Narang, Vinh Q. Tran, Dani Yogatama, Donald Metzler

TaTA: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages Sebastian Gehrmann, Sebastian Ruder, Vitaly Nikolaev, Jan A. Botha, Michael Chavinda, Ankur P Parikh, Clara E. Rivera

XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages Sebastian Ruder, Jonathan H. Clark, Alexander Gutkin, Mihir Kale, Min Ma, Massimo Nicosia, Shruti Rijhwani, Parker Riley, Jean Michel Amath Sarr, Xinyi Wang, John Frederick Wieting, Nitish Gupta, Anna Katanova, Christo Kirov, Dana L Dickinson, Brian Roark, Bidisha Samanta, Connie Tao, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Vera Axelrod, Isaac Rayburn Caswell, Colin Cherry, Dan Garrette, Reeve Ingle, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Panteleev, Partha Talukdar

q2d: Turning Questions into Dialogs to Teach Models How to Search Yonatan Bitton, Shlomi Cohen-Ganor, Ido Hakimi, Yoad Lewenberg, Roee Aharoni, Enav Weinreb

Emergence of Abstract State Representations in Embodied Sequence Modeling Tian Yun*, Zilai Zeng, Kunal Handa, Ashish V Thapliyal, Bo Pang, Ellie Pavlick, Chen Sun

Evaluating and Modeling Attribution for Cross-Lingual Question Answering Benjamin Muller*, John Wieting, Jonathan H. Clark, Tom Kwiatkowski, Sebastian Ruder, Livio Baldini Soares, Roee Aharoni, Jonathan Herzig, Xinyi Wang

Weakly-Supervised Learning of Visual Relations in Multimodal Pre-training Emanuele Bugliarello, Aida Nematzadeh, Lisa Anne Hendricks

How Do Languages Influence Each Other? Studying Cross-Lingual Data Sharing During LM Fine-Tuning Rochelle Choenni, Dan Garrette, Ekaterina Shutova

CompoundPiece: Evaluating and Improving Decompounding Performance of Language Models Benjamin Minixhofer, Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulić

IC3: Image Captioning by Committee Consensus David Chan, Austin Myers, Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan, David A Ross, John Canny

The Curious Case of Hallucinatory (Un)answerability: Finding Truths in the Hidden States of Over-Confident Large Language Models Aviv Slobodkin, Omer Goldman, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Shauli Ravfogel

Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma

Ties Matter: Meta-Evaluating Modern Metrics with Pairwise Accuracy and Tie Calibration Daniel Deutsch, George Foster, Markus Freitag

Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute Yi Tay*, Jason Wei*, Hyung Won Chung*, Vinh Q. Tran, David R. So*, Siamak Shakeri, Xavier Garcia, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Jinfeng Rao, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, Slav Petrov, Neil Houlsby, Quoc V. Le, Mostafa Dehghani

Data Similarity is Not Enough to Explain Language Model Performance Gregory Yauney*, Emily Reif, David Mimno

Self-Influence Guided Data Reweighting for Language Model Pre-training Megh Thakkar*, Tolga Bolukbasi, Sriram Ganapathy, Shikhar Vashishth, Sarath Chandar, Partha Talukdar

ReTAG: Reasoning Aware Table to Analytic Text Generation Deepanway Ghosal, Preksha Nema, Aravindan Raghuveer

GATITOS: Using a New Multilingual Lexicon for Low-Resource Machine Translation Alex Jones*, Isaac Caswell, Ishank Saxena

Video-Helpful Multimodal Machine Translation Yihang Li, Shuichiro Shimizu, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi, Wei Li

Symbol Tuning Improves In-Context Learning in Language Models Jerry Wei*, Le Hou, Andrew Kyle Lampinen, Xiangning Chen*, Da Huang, Yi Tay*, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma*, Quoc V Le

“Don’t Take This Out of Context!” On the Need for Contextual Models and Evaluations for Stylistic Rewriting Akhila Yerukola, Xuhui Zhou, Elizabeth Clark, Maarten Sap

QAmeleon: Multilingual QA with Only 5 Examples Priyanka Agrawal, Chris Alberti, Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Ji Ma, Sebastian Ruder, Kuzman Ganchev, Dipanjan Das, Mirella Lapata

Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision Eugene Kharitonov, Damien Vincent, Zalán Borsos, Raphaël Marinier, Sertan Girgin, Olivier Pietquin, Matt Sharifi, Marco Tagliasacchi, Neil Zeghidour

AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System Jeffrey Zhao, Yuan Cao, Raghav Gupta, Harrison Lee, Abhinav Rastogi, Mingqiu Wang, Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, Yonghui Wu

Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions Jeremy R. Cole, Michael JQ Zhang, Daniel Gillick, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Bhuwan Dhingra, Jacob Eisenstein

PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs (see blog post) Rahul Goel, Waleed Ammar, Aditya Gupta, Siddharth Vashishtha, Motoki Sano, Faiz Surani*, Max Chang, HyunJeong Choe, David Greene, Chuan He, Rattima Nitisaroj, Anna Trukhina, Shachi Paul, Pararth Shah, Rushin Shah, Zhou Yu

LM vs LM: Detecting Factual Errors via Cross Examination Roi Cohen, May Hamri, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

A Suite of Generative Tasks for Multi-Level Multimodal Webpage Understanding Andrea Burns*, Krishna Srinivasan, Joshua Ainslie, Geoff Brown, Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, Jianmo Ni, Mandy Guo

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Seid Muhie Yimam, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Meriem Beloucif, Saif M. Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Alipio Jorge, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Davis David, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu-Bello, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Wendimu Baye Messelle, Hailu Beshada Balcha, Sisay Adugna Chala, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Stephen Arthur

Optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Reader Models via Token Elimination Moshe Berchansky, Peter Izsak, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Moshe Wasserblat

SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation Elizabeth Clark, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Gehrmann, Joshua Maynez, Roee Aharoni, Vitaly Nikolaev, Thibault Sellam, Aditya Siddhant, Dipanjan Das, Ankur P Parikh

GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong*, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebron, Sumit Sanghai

CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontanon, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai

Improving Diversity of Demographic Representation in Large Language Models via Collective-Critiques and Self-Voting Preethi Lahoti, Nicholas Blumm, Xiao Ma, Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, Sahitya Potluri, Qijun Tan, Hansa Srinivasan, Ben Packer, Ahmad Beirami, Alex Beutel, Jilin Chen

Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (see blog post) Xingchen Wan*, Ruoxi Sun, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Sercan O. Arik, Tomas Pfister

TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models Zorik Gekhman, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Chen Elkind, Idan Szpektor

Hierarchical Pre-training on Multimodal Electronic Health Records Xiaochen Wang, Junyu Luo, Jiaqi Wang, Ziyi Yin, Suhan Cui, Yuan Zhong, Yaqing Wang, Fenglong Ma

NAIL: Lexical Retrieval Indices with Efficient Non-Autoregressive Decoders Livio Baldini Soares, Daniel Gillick, Jeremy R. Cole, Tom Kwiatkowski

How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages? Ronak Pradeep*, Kai Hui, Jai Gupta, Adam D. Lelkes, Honglei Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler, Vinh Q. Tran

Make Every Example Count: On the Stability and Utility of Self-Influence for Learning from Noisy NLP Datasets Irina Bejan*, Artem Sokolov, Katja Filippova

[onscreenkisses]

DETROIT ROCK CITY + kisses

[degrassi-daily]

[saxieandbraley]

Degrassi: Archie Simpson’s Instagram 💕

[dont-take-a-chill-pill]

Chapters: 4/? Fandom: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Rich Goranski/Michael Mell, Christine Canigula/Jeremy Heere, Jeremy Heere & Michael Mell Characters: Rich Goranski, Michael Mell, Christine Canigula, Jeremy Heere, Jake Dillinger, Jenna Rolan, Jeremy's Dad (Be More Chill), Chloe Valentine, Brooke Lohst, The Squip (Be More Chill) Additional Tags: Abuse Mentions, We be gay, expensive headphones, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Slow Burn, First Time, Bisexuality, Canon Bisexual Character, bisexual awakening, Gay Male Character, Dumbass Rich, I will add more as the story continues, Depression, Anxiety, Panic Attacks, PT Cruiser, Slushies, Trans Jeremy,  Summary:

Rich Goranski doesn't remember how to act without his S.Q.U.I.P. He certainly doesn't know how to handle all his feelings, or how to fix all the problems he created. He feels like he's just now finding out how to live in his junior year of highschool. That antisocial headphones kid isn't make things any better.

Hey guys! This is my first fanfic I’ve written about Be More Chill, and I hope you guys check it out. I plan to upload once a week at least, but not sure how much that’ll actually happen. 

[macbookpro-hard-drive]

control [jeremy h. x squipped!reader] pt.7

wow it took 30 years didnt it. i did it, fuckers. please give me attention-

anyway, heres the final part :) do i know how to proofread? no. thats it thats all i was gonna say, i just dont know how to proofread.

warnings: uhhh none i dont think

                                                            -

              In the middle of August, the Ninja Sex Party dropped their newest album “Cool Patrol” and the two of you were in love. You were in Jeremy’s room, lying on his bed beside him sharing headphones as the album played, and it all felt so teenage rom-com that Jeremy was half-distracted the entire time by you and lost different lyrics because of that. “Orgy for One” played and you nudged Jeremy before mouthing “you” to him with a playful look in your eyes and a smile that set his heart racing. He laughed, and nudged you back just as playful before the beginning to “Danny Don’t You Know” brought the two of you back into reality. He was emotional, and so were you, and there was something about sharing an emotion with someone that was intimate enough to make his heart skip a beat. 

             Your phone buzzed after a while, and you sat up, pulling an earbud out. “Fuck, Jeremy-” You stood up quickly, scrambling to get your things together, “-my cousins were coming over to do that picture thing since we didn’t get a chance before - I gotta go, alright? I’ll text you in a bit.”

             He wouldn’t remember what he said to you, or the dumb joke you made as you were leaving his room. He would remember how the minute you left, he added “Heart Boner” onto your playlist with a devious little smile as if he were getting away with something. Just a little joke between friends. After all - you had that little moment together, how could he not not? 

                                                            -

             An hour after you left, Michael showed up with a plastic bag filled with Chinese takeout for three - eyes widening when he saw your absence. His smile fell as he looked towards the bag in his hand, frowning slightly as he began to delve into his thoughts. For what felt like minutes, the two boys just sat there in silence as Michael finally untied the bag to pass his friend his portion of their meal, frustration evident in the way he furrowed his brow and refused to look him in the eye.

             “They had a family thing,” Jeremy said. “Didn’t [y/n] text you?”

             “No,” Michael said, “they did not. I said I was coming with food and-”

             “It’s tradition,” Jeremy countered. “Y’know? It’s that little... sign-picture-thing. Some sort of family tradition their parents started when they were little.”

             Michael rolled his eyes at the sappy expression crossing his best friend’s face as he placed what had been your meal on the dresser, before collapsing back onto his bed - tilting his head back to maintain eye contact. “That’s cute and all, but what do I do with their orange chicken?”

             He shrugged, turning back to his computer to close out Spotify. “I dunno - we can go by their house later and see if they want it.”

             He heard his comforter shift and assumed that Michael rolled over onto his stomach. “But I have egg rolls for them,” he whined, voice muffled slightly by what Jeremy could only guess was Michael laying his face in his hands.

             A quick booting down of his computer. He shrugged again, chewing the inside of his cheek. “Just don’t eat them?”

             The moment of silence could have killed a man. “Jeremiah.”

             He spun to face him. “Michael.”

             They maintained eye contact for a moment, before Michael shifted so that he was now sitting up - pulling the plastic bag closer to him. “So did you two fuck yet?”

             A thousand broken words slipped past his lips as Jeremy struggled to say something - a question, a swear, something that didn’t make him look stupid. “Why would you ask that!?” he tried to ignore the way his voice raised an octave.

             Meanwhile, Michael seemed to have no problem with disregarding his panic. “So you haven’t.”

             “Uh. No? We’re just friends?”

             “You sure?” Michael asked, not even giving him the chance to answer as he looked away. “I don’t know, dude, you’ve been pining for a fuckin’ while now. Why don’t you just ask them out?”

             “I don’t like-” he paused, before shaking his head. If Michael knew, then he knew - there really wasn’t any point in denying it any further. “I don’t know, I like Christine still-”

             “You can like more than one person at a time, Jeremiah.”

             “I know, but...” “I don’t even know if they like me still.”

             “Dude. Bro. Homie. Broseidon. Buddy. They wanna fuck.”

             “Michael!” 

             “They’re at least interested in you,” he said with a mere shrug of indifference, “do you just not see how they look at you?”

             “I don’t-” Jeremy started, and then he stopped, the words he wanted to say sticky and catching in his throat like honey. “I don’t think-” He paused, shutting his eyes, “Michael, I don’t know why they’d still be into me. Like... they did the whole...” He tapped at his temple, “thing because of me.” He hesitated. That wasn’t entirely true, was it? “Or... they did it slightly because of me. I just - I don’t think they’d, uh, y’know... want anything to do with me like that.” 

             There was understanding in Michael’s eyes, lit up before he looked away to the carton in his hand. He dug through it with chopsticks, letting out a sigh, “Dude, I get that, but... they like you, dumbass.”

             Jeremy laughed it off. “Yeah, sure.”

             “I mean it!” Michael countered, before dropping the topic, “I’m gonna eat your food if you don’t.”

             “What-” Jeremy popped open his order, “fine, okay - but this conversation isn’t over, Michael.” 

             “Mhm. You’ll accept it later.”

             “That’s not what I meant!”

             “You really suck at hiding your feelings, y’know?”

             “Michael!”

                                                            -

             Two weeks later, and Jeremy wasn’t sure how to feel. 

             There were strings of these little... moments between the two of you. He realized how much time he was spending over at your house after Michael teased him over it, how often the two of you studied together and how flustered he’d get when you were close to him, how many times he found himself grabbing your favorite candy from gas stations just to make you smile. One Sunday night, he was sitting at the end of your bed with a pillow hugged to his chest, spending another night at your house while Michael was off spending time with his family (not that Jeremy wouldn’t have been there otherwise - he stayed over every now and then just because he wanted to. Movie nights were good. Dinner was good. Being around you was good). You sat at your desk, legs crossed awkwardly in your chair in a position that looked uncomfortable to him but you showed no signs of discomfort as you continued to draw. The two of you had been talking, and Jeremy had just sat there fascinated with watching you draw after years of not recognizing your progress.

             A question hit the air, heavy and loaded. “Would you have taken it?” You didn’t move to face him, the soft sound of your tablet pen tapping back against the surface as you scroll out and fumble giving away any nerves. “The... the SQUIP,” you went to clarify.

             But he understood, and he spoke quick: “no.” He shifted slightly, holding the pillow closer to himself, “not after what it did to you.”

             “But if you hadn’t known,” you said, pausing for a moment to gather your thoughts, “if... if it had been you, would you have done it?”

             “I mean... I don’t think-”

             “You can say yes, Jeremy,” you finally looked back at him. “I’m not gonna be mad or anything.”

             His shoulders slumped slightly, a bit relieved of the thought. “Okay, then... yeah. I mean, yeah - who wouldn’t?”

             You turned back to your work. “Yeah. Yeah, right? It sounds good. Like... you have a pill that’ll solve everything and tell you the right moves to make... who wouldn’t want that?”

             That’s when Jeremy realized you’d been doubting yourself. Blaming yourself for saying yes. “I think a lot of people would have taken it.” 

             “Yeah... I think so, too.” You stopped drawing after a moment, turning around fully to face him, “can I confess something?”

             He nodded slowly. “Oh. Uh. Yeah, sure?”

             “I don’t keep the Mountain Dew Red because I’m scared it’ll come back and destroy everything and leave me fucked,” you said in a rush of words, shutting your eyes for a moment. “Sorry. I just needed to get it off my chest but... I think it’s better this way.”

             “Hey, no,” Jeremy reached out, fingers brushing over your shoulder. “Michael and I would find more.” 

             You fumbled with your pen, it falling to the floor as you swore softly under your breath. Jeremy reached for it just as you did, foreheads clashing in cliche fashion as you immediately push back. A moment later, he offered your tablet pen back to you.

             He spoke after you took it. “Hey, uh, c’mere for a minute.”

             So you dropped your pen onto your desk and pulled your chair over to the bed. Uncharacteristically calm and soft, he took one of your hands in a motion less Jeremy and more... you... you weren’t sure. It wasn’t entirely Jeremy, that much was confirmed.

             “There was this stuff that mom used to way when I was a kid,” he said quietly, dragging his thumb over your knuckles. “It was this whole...thing about how the ‘loudest voice has to be yours’ when you’re doubting yourself and shit - I don’t know, it just kinda stuck with me and... I’m glad I’ve gotten to know you, because you’re... different? Like - you keep going, and, uh, you’re a big nerd who laughs at my stupid jokes and... I’m glad you’re you, I guess?” 

             You cracked a small smile as you pulled back from him. Before he can question whether he crossed a line, you answer, “I’m saving this. I can’t focus on art with your sappy ass saying shit like that.” You stood, tucking your chair under your desk as you sat on your bed. “Fuckin’ sweet dork,” you mumbled as you pulled Jeremy into a hug.

             He stiffened up for a moment, only to wrap his arms around you after a moment. He smiled into your shoulder, saying a muffled “Shut up” into it as you giggled.

             You pulled away with a smile. “Why don’t you make me, Jeremy?”

             One of his biggest regrets was not asking to kiss you right then and there.

                                                           -

            Days later, you were in his room for once, sitting on his bed beside him. You were tired, far more than he was, looking at math problems that were blurry to you as you stifled back another yawn. Jeremy had stretched out, awkwardly leaning against his headboard as he tried to stay away until you finally resigned for the night - shutting your notebook and tossing it towards your backpack with a noisy clamor. You leaned against him, mumbling words long forgotten into his shoulder - likely about hating numbers - only to whine when he sat forward a moment later. Soon enough, he returned to be your pillow once more, laughing softly as you curled into his side contently and making some joke about how you only wanted him around for this reason.

            “Nope,” you had hummed, “too bony. Bad pillow.” 

            He snorted a little, reaching up to tuck back a strand of hair out of place. “You seem happy.”

            “I am,” you hummed. “Since it’s you.”

            He reached up, gently tugging you closer to him in order to worm an arm around you. “You’re tired.”

            “Mhm.”

            “Sorry I kept you up.”

            “That’s okay,” you mumbled into his shoulder, shifting slightly to be closer to him. “Math is stupid.”

            “It’s not stupid,” he countered, “you just aren’t good at it.”

            “Thus making it stupid, Jeremiah.”

            Eventually, you went quiet. At first, Jeremy thought you’d fallen asleep, but you sat forward slightly, looking up at him and it was almost like there had been magnetism between you. You had leaned forward, and he gently reached up to guide your face to his, and the two of you kissed for a soft, quiet moment. Soon enough, you had drawn away and cuddled back up to him. He wasn’t sure if he fell asleep first, but he remembered how warm you felt against him and he remembered feeling nothing but warmth in his chest as he eventually dozed off.

            There were a few things that hit Jeremy when he woke up. The pain in his back from falling asleep half-sitting against the headboard of his bed, the weight on him that confused him for a moment for a millisecond before he felt your hot breath tickling his skin, face buried in his neck. Then the memory of the night before - of a clumsy kiss he’d been craving for so long, and the way you kissed back and maybe that was his imagination? He wasn’t sure, but the thought was enough to nearly make him jolt - but you were enough to keep him as still as he could be. He looked at how peaceful you looked, and he felt his heart swell at just how warm you were against him and the memory of your lips haunted him as he felt his skin grow hotter. If remembering kissing you was enough to make him completely flustered, anything more would probably kill him.

            Eventually, you woke up, groggy and sleep-ridden still at first as you sat forward and rubbed at your face. “Jeremy, I hate to break it to you-” You paused, yawning, “-but you aren’t a great pillow.”

            He chuckled at that, sitting forward. “Hey, uh... sorry to, uh, ask, but, uh, do... do you remember anything about last night...?”

            You stared at him, uncertain at first before you thought back on what had happened. You threw your notebook at your bag. And then... It came back to you, striking you hard and fast. “Oh.”

            “I- I’m sorry,” he stammered, “I just - I was tired and I wasn’t thinking and I shouldn’t have...” 

            And he slowly trailed off when he saw the way you were looking at him, voice caught in his throat as your gaze flickered from his eyes to his lips and then back. He heard you whisper something - “fuck it,” he was pretty sure - before you started going in for another kiss - and he leaned forward to meet you halfway, a hand sliding into your hair as you grow closer to him. The night before had been gentle, sleep-ridden and warm - and now the two of you are awake and clumsy and so wonderfully alive during this messy kiss. His teeth had clashed against yours, your forehead bumped against his, but you correct. A little less force, a little more gentleness, a changing of an angle - the tiny ways to make things better and less awkward.

            In a bold move you definitely didn’t expect, Jeremy’s hand falls to your hips, pulling you closer to him by your belt loops (a cruel reminder that you were asleep in jeans). His kisses grew slightly more frantic, more hungry, more needy - the tiniest little whimper slipping past his lips once you finally pull yourself back, breathing softly as you stared at him. His hand slipped back to your jaw, thumb grazing your jawline slowly and gentle.

            “Jeremy?” you whispered, staring at him, “wait, you-”

            “I... I know we were gonna try to be friends, but... I think I like you.”

            You stared at him, flustered as he tore his gaze away from yours - a pretty rosy hue decorating his skin, blotchy and creeping up his neck to the tips of his ears. 

            “I, uh, I mean, I didn’t... I never planned on, uh... I just - I don’t - I, uh, I think you’re... a big nerd. You... you laugh with me and you, uh, you care about things - and you... you remember things about me - and, uh, other people do but... you’re just... you’re different.” He trailed a thumb across your skin. “You... feel like home. Even, uh, even if this... doesn’t really go anywhere, I - I’m glad that I know you and- I understand if you don’t, uh, don’t actually want this to go anywhere but-”

            And you laughed. At first his stomach dropped, anxiety taking over as he grew nervous over the thought of you rejecting him - but something about the way you laughed made his heart flutter, one hand steadying yourself on his shoulder while the other hid your face.

            “I... I don’t really know how to explain it better, but... can I, uh, can I kiss you again?”

            And you laughed again, reaching up to brush back hair from his face. “Yes, Jeremy. You can kiss me again.”

[gotankgo]

Movies I watched in 2020

January

A Quiet Place (2018)

At Earth’s Core (1976)

Gator (1976)

Master of the World (1961)

Brannigan (1975)

Five on the Black Hand Side (1973)

The Beyond (1981)

Young Guns (1988)

Young Guns II (1990)

Rats: Night of Terror (1984)

Eegah! (1962)

Message From Space (1978)

Dances With Wolves (1990)

Berserk (1967)

Hostiles (2017)

Foxy Brown (1974)

Bucktown (1975)

Hammer (1972)

February

Friday the 13th (1980)

The Bellboy (1960)

Squirm (1976)

Cube Zero (2004)

Man of the West (1958)

Shane (1953)

March

Terror in a Texas Town (1958)

Cedar Rapids (2011)

Blacula (1972)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

The Return of Count Yorga (1971)

The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)

Crawl (2019)

God Told Me To (1976)

What Keeps You Alive (2018)

Godfathers of Hardcore (2018)

Re-Animator (1985)

Attrition (2018)

April

Mr. Majestyk (1974)

The Wind (2018)

The Mercenary (1968)

Screamtime (1983)

The Church (1989)

Cell (2016)

The House That Jack Built (2018)

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Deathdream (1974)

The Cannibal Man (1973)

Hit! (1973)

A Simple Favor (2018)

The Bloodstained Shadow (1978)

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

Return of the Blind Dead (1973)

The Ghost Galleon (1974)

May

Night of the Seagulls (1975)

Frankenstein (1931)

Fritz the Cat (1972)

Messiah of Evil (1973)

C.B. Hustlers (1976)

Rolling Thunder (1977)

St. Valentines Day Massacre (1967)

Matriarch (2018)

StageFright (1987)

Guru, the Mad Monk (1970)

Us (2019)

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)

Seraphim Falls (2006)

Devil Fish (1984)

June

Tank (1984)

The Cannibals (1980)

Youngblood (1978)

The Black Cat (1981)

July

Manhattan Baby (1982)

Hero and the Terror (1988)

The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984)

A Blade in the Dark (1983)

Harry in Your Pocket (1973)

August

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

The Mechanic(1972)

Malone (1987)

The Ninth Gate (1999)

Nightmare at Noon (1987)

Pet Sematary (2019)

Incident at Loch Ness (2004)

Squirm (1976)

Trust (1990)

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

September

Will Penny (1967)

Sling Blade (1996)

October

Christine (1983)

The Deadly Spawn (1983)

Nighthawks (1981)

Mud (2013)

Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)

Species (1995)

Poltergeist (2015)

The Final Countdown(1980)

The Peace Killers (1971)

It Follows (2014)

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

Twice-Told Tales (1963)

The Curse (1987)

Squirm (1976)

November

Cracking Up (1977)

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) x3

To Hell and Back (1955)

From a Whisper to a Scream (1987)

X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963)

Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

The Shape of Water (2017)

The Fisher King (1991) x2

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

Kid Blue (1973)

Alligator (1980)

Belushi (2020)

Deerskin (2020)

Underwater (2020)

Ad Astra (2019)

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

Troll (1986)

The Stunt Man (1980)

December

Bender (2016)

Frogs (1972)

Martin (1977)

Blue Summer (1973)

Black Christmas (1974)

Smoke (1995)

Office Christmas Party (2016)

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)

ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas (2019)

Steamboat Bill (1928)

The Thing (1981)

The People Under the Stairs (1991)

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

[vole-mon-amour]

For the fanfic ask 1,6,12,43 😌

Ohh, thank you! I wasn’t prepared lol.

1. What fandoms do you write for?

Literally anything that clicks with me, you never know. I jump from one fandom to another & carry those universes with me everywhere. I have a LOT of wip’s & finished fics, the urge no mention as many as I can remember is STRONG.

Uncharted 4 (SamNate), Borderlands (Rhack), Marvel (SteveBucky, TonyPeter, WandaPietro, ClintWanda), The umbrella academy (Klive, DiegoGrace), Kurositsuhi (SebaCiel), Harry Potter (HarrySirius), Ready or not (2019; GraceDaniel), Dishonored. Even some RPF once, like EvanStan & Larry (L&H from 1D). There are couples I don’t write for, but then suddenly — boom,— I’m interested. Easier to ask the name of the fandom you’re interested in. 

6. What is a fandom you will never write for?

Probably k-pop or some political things or... Something unusual for me. Otherwise? Never say never. I find myself in fandoms I never thought I’d end up. Again, if anything inspires me, I might try. Not saying i’ll FINISH, but I can still try.

12. Do you want to break your readers‘ heart or make them laugh?

I’d say I know how to work with drama & I love me a good drama. It’s very natural for me to either write drama or fluff/domestic bliss (i.e. characters comforting each other).. And because of that, I’ll choose make them laugh. I don’t feel myself very confident while working with humour, so when a reader says it was funny or hilarious, I’m like: “I know, right?!” but also full of joy bc hell yeah, I did it.

43. Guilty pleasure tropes and scenarios?

Suddenly my mind is blank. Guilty pleasures I’d like to READ are not always the ones I’m good at writing, so... You might look at the couples I mentioned in q1 & maybe connect some dots? There barely any guilty pleasures bc in this house we enjoy all kinds of fiction without shaming.

Lets see, I like brother/brother, sister/sister, brother/sister incest.

Villains obsessed/in love with a protagonist & there is any kind of relationship (disgust, mutual obsession, good sex; the protagonist actually falling for the villain). I am actually still pinning after my Wayleska AU where Bruce is in love with pre gas!Jeremiah, and then he goes with the flow aka falls for post gas!J as well. I’m not sure i’ll ever finish & post it, but ahh!! 

I adore Rhack & its alike tropes where two power partners take over [something; it’s the universe or Hyperion in Rhack’s case] & terrorise its citizens.

I like fix its where canon is so fucked up (like rape/non-con) and you take it and make them develop a (more or less) healthy relationship. Like Kilgrave/Jessica from the tv series.

Squirming blushing people (usually boys tbh) that slowly get tortured by their crush. They don’t know where to look, they want to disappear, but also want more and whimper under them. They are embarrassed for how they feel & react, and even more if their crush asks them to say all their feelings and desires out loud  (HarrySirius in some cases; a lot of Klive; SebaCiel in MANY cases, ahh!!).

Broken characters that get better with their partner (hiii to SteveBucky, also Erik x Christine from POTO, also Corvo/Outsider; Emily/Outsider from Dishonored).

Vampires!!

Age/size difference

probably UST (but NOT a slow-burn)

I DO have those tropes, but it’s hard for me to categorise it with actual words. Better five me examples & I’d recognise it as “yeah” or “nah”.

Fanfic ask thing.

[eddycurrents]

For the week of 10 June 2019

Quick Bits:

Age of Conan: Bêlit #4 sets up a rivalry with a high priest from Stygia in this penultimate issue. Tini Howard, Kate Niemczyk, Scott Hanna, Jason Keith, and Travis Lanham guide us through more of Bêlit’s family history and hints of madness.

| Published by Marvel

Age of X-Man: Marvelous X-Men #5 is the first of these minis to reach their end, but it’s far from a conclusion. While the team and Psylocke find out the nature of reality as everything starts unravelling, much still remains hanging, and the conclusion is set for Age of X-Man: Omega. Great art from Marco Failla and Matt Milla.

| Published by Marvel

Amber Blake #4 concludes what has been an entertaining thriller from Jade Lagardère, Butch Guice, Mike Perkins, Dan Brown, and Robbie Robbins. Some nice twists and surprises as this story ends.

| Published by IDW

Archie #705 is part one of “Archie & Sabrina”. I quite like the change to the trade dress to reflect that, giving the appearance of a limited series for the arc, while maintaining the ongoing numbering. Nice Spencer, Sandy Jarrell, Matt Herms, and Jack Morelli do a great job moving through Cheryl’s “Bachelor” plans to hints of things to come, along with impending conflict between Betty and Veronica.

| Published by Archie Comics

Batman & The Outsiders #2 spotlights the battle between Ishmael and the team as he goes for Sofia. Great art from Dexter Soy and Veronica Gandini. The little bits of occult belief and practice Bryan Hill gives to Ishmael are interesting.

| Published by DC Comics

Bronze Age Boogie #3 is another fun issue, pitting Li against Lynda for the Martians’ amusement. The pieces are all coming together nicely. Also, the “Major Ursa” back-up is just about the best thing ever.

| Published by Ahoy

By Night #12 is a bit of a weird one for the conclusion to this series, focusing almost solely on our side of the rift and what happens down the line for everyone. Still, this has been an entertaining series from John Allison, Christine Larsen, Sarah Stern, and Jim Campbell. 

| Published by Boom Entertainment / BOOM! Box

Calamity Kate #4 brings this series from Magdalene Visaggio, Corin Howell, Valentina Pinto, and Zakk Saam to a close. It’s still a bit of a head-scratcher, wondering how much is real and how much is a manifestation of Kate’s issues with her break-up, but it’s entertaining.

| Published by Dark Horse

Detective Comics #1005 concludes the Arkham Knight’s “Medieval” arc from Peter J. Tomasi, Brad Walker, Andrew Hennessy, Nathan Fairbairn, and Rob Leigh. It’s really weird seeing Anton Arcane as anyone’s lackey, but that aside this is still a decent conclusion. The art from Walker, Hennessy, and Fairbairn is incredible.

| Published by DC Comics

The Empty Man #8 is the end of the series. For now at least. It’s a satisfying conclusion for this horror story from Cullen Bunn, Jesús Hervás, Niko Guardia, and Ed Dukeshire, even as it leaves hooks for the possibility of more. Very interesting bits of body horror and ideas about infection.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

The Flash #72 continues “Year One” from Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter, Hi-Fi, and Steve Wands. Once again, the artwork from Porter and Hi-Fi is phenomenal. The layouts, the action, the sheer visual storytelling is incredible.

| Published by DC Comics

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #7 is the first part of “Feast or Famine” from Tom Taylor, Ken Lashley, Nolan Woodard, and Travis Lanham. It’s May’s grand reopening of the FEAST shelter and it appears as though people are angry that it’s happening.

| Published by Marvel

Gogor #2 is possibly even better than the first issue, giving more focus to the tale even as Ken Garing does more world-building. This is a very interesting fantasy story, with fascinating characters and regions, and beautiful artwork.

| Published by Image

Hawkman #13 gives us a single-issue story from Robert Venditti, Will Conrad, Jeremiah Skipper, and Richard Starkings & Comicraft on the endless cycle of war. It’s a good bit of decompression following “Cataclysm” and Bryan Hitch’s run, using Carter’s endless resurrection to show the toll of battle on one planet.

| Published by DC Comics

Immortal Hulk #19 is another incredible issue in this amazing run, with Al Ewing, Joe Bennett, Ruy José, Belardino Brabo, Paul Mounts, Rachelle Rosenberg, and Cory Petit delivering hard on the new Abomination and Harpy. The body horror aspect of this story is ratcheted up even higher.

| Published by Marvel

Infinite Dark #7 looks like it’s building for a catastrophe for the end of this arc at a magnitude even greater than losing the outer ring in the first arc, as the remaining portion of the station gets plunged into the dark here. The level of tension that Ryan Cady, Andrea Mutti, K. Michael Russell, and Troy Peteri are creating here is about to explode.

| Published by Image / Top Cow

Joe Golem: Occult Detective - Conjurors #2 sees Joe brought back to life by Simon Church, against the objections of Simon’s ghost friends, and sets up the road to what looks like might be a new status quo, bringing forth an old direction. Great art from Peter Bergting and Michelle Madsen. I really quite like the murky appearance of the underwater scenes.

| Published by Dark Horse

Justice League Odyssey #10 gets a new logo while the team continues their search for relics for Darkseid. Also, more intrigue as they still don’t exactly know whether they can trust one another. Dan Abnett, Daniel Sampere, Juan Albarran, FCO Plascencia, and AndWorld Design are telling an interesting story here.

| Published by DC Comics

The Life & Death of Toyo Harada #4 enacts Angela’s plan on the rest of the team with explosive results. It’s interesting to see everything burnt to ash along the way. The flashbacks into Harada’s life this issue are illustrated by Diego Yapur and they’re worth it on their own, but you also get the present day material beautifully rendered by CAFU.

| Published by Valiant

Outer Darkness #7 begins the second arc from John Layman, Afu Chan, and Pat Brosseau. We get a little bit of Rigg’s past, more of the crew’s aggressive behaviour towards one another, and a rescue mission as an 18th century mansion tries to swallow another ship. This is the good, weird stuff.

| Published by Image / Skybound

The Punisher #12 begins Frank’s trek back to New York in the first part of “War on the Streets” from Matthew Rosenberg, Szymon Kudranski, Antonio Fabela, and Cory Petit. Great art from Kudranski and Fabela as Frank fights off a squad of Hydra goons on a remote island.

| Published by Marvel

The Ride: Burning Desire #1 returns for The Ride’s 15th anniversary, with a lead story from Doug Wagner, Daniel Hillyard, Laura Martin, and Ed Dukeshire, and a back-up illustrated by Adam Hughes. Nice set-up picking up on where Vega is now fifteen years later. And more depraved cops.

| Published by Image

Silver Surfer: Black #1 is another leg in Donny Cates’ redefinition of the Marvel Cosmic, joined here by Tradd Moore, Dave Stewart, and Clayton Cowles. This reminds me a bit of the George Perez/Tom Grindberg run from ages ago, with some incredible artwork from Moore and Stewart.

| Published by Marvel

Sonata #1 is a fairly imaginative sci-fi/fantasy debut from David Hine, Brian Haberlin, Geirrod van Dyke, and Francis Takenaga. It introduces us to to races of colonizers in the Ran and the Tayans, bringing conflict with them as they try to carve out new lives on Perdita. Beautiful artwork from Haberlin and van Dyke.

| Published by Image / Shadowline

Star Wars: Vader - Dark Visions #5 closes out this series of takes on different perspectives on Darth Vader with a barkeep suffering hallucinations as he tries to flee from Vader’s wrath, from Dennis Hallum, Geraldo Borges, Marcio Menyz, and Joe Caramagna.

| Published by Marvel

Supergirl #31 is pretty much concurrent with Superman #12, though you should probably read Superman first if you’re reading both of them. There’s no need to read both, though, as it stands well enough on its own. This one presents the reunion of the House of El from Kara’s perspective and then continues on the battle against Gandelo.

| Published by DC Comics

Superman #12 reunites the entire House of El amidst the battle with Rogol Zaar and the fleets trying to kill Jor-El. There’s foreshadowing of more “everything you know is wrong!” about Krypton’s destruction and Superman’s origin, which may or may not rub you the wrong way, but I find it entertaining. Especially with the beautiful artwork from Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert, and Alex Sinclair.

| Published by DC Comics

Transformers #7 is part one of “The Cracks Beneath Your Feet”, with Brian Ruckley, Angel Hernandez, Andrew Griffith, Anna Malkova, Joana Lafuente, Josh Burcham, and Tom B. Long picking up again in the present, following up on the second recent murder on Cybertron. It’s fairly morose, as you’d expect, as Bumblebee laments the loss of the new spark, Rubble.

| Published by IDW

Trust Fall #1 is a great debut from the Dead Letters team of Christopher Sebela and Chris Visions, with Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou providing his usual outstanding lettering to round out the team. It’s another crime drama, with the interesting twist of a family member with teleportation powers. Visions’ art is amazing and the hook of the family being set-up to fall right as they’re ready to move on to bigger and better waters is enticing.

| Published by AfterShock

V-Wars: God of Death feels more like a tease than a discrete story. The good news is that you don’t need to have read any of the previous V-Wars stories, as this fills you in on what you need to know, the bad news is that there’s no indication as to anything else coming next. Still, great art from Alex Milne and Brittany Peer.

| Published by IDW

Other Highlights: Accell #21, Age of X-Man: Apocalypse & The X-Tracts #4, Amazing Spider-Man #23, Asgardians of the Galaxy #10, Catwoman #12, Champions #6, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark #6, Event Leviathan #1, Five Years #2, GI Joe: A Real American Hero #263, GLOW #2, The Grave, Grumble #7, Gunning for Hits #6, House of Whispers #10, Invaders #6, Ironheart #7, James Bond: Origin #10, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Sirens #3, Jughead’s Time Police #1, Major X #5, Marvel Action: Spider-Man #5, Morning in America #4, Oblivion Song #16, Orphan Age #3, Penny Nichols, Princeless - Book 8: Princesses #4, Prodigy #6, Red Sonja: Birth of the She-Devil #1, Rick & Morty Presents Mr. Meeseeks #1, She Could Fly: The Lost Pilot #3, Spider-Man: Life Story #4, Star Trek: The Q Conflict #5, Superior Spider-Man #7, Symbiote Spider-Man #3, The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion #7, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #45, Unnatural #10, Venom #15, War of the Realms: Giant-Man #3, Wonder Twins #5, Wonder Woman #72, Xena: Warrior Princess #3, X-Force #9

Recommended Collections: Avengers: No Road Home, Dark Souls: Age of Fire, Hawkman - Volume 1: Awakening, Hulkverines, Ice Cream Man - Volume 3: Hopscotch Melange, Lollipop Kids - Volume 1, Road of the Dead: Highway to Hell, Moonshadow, Star Trek vs. Transformers, Swamp Monsters, United States vs. Murder Inc. - Volume 1

d. emerson eddy likes pie.

[devil-takethe-hindmost]

Christine, I love you 💕✨

first time making some gifs, with the help of @apileofpans !

[ferns-garden]

Girl Advice (Michael x Brooke)

Chapter 1 - Dating Girls

Read it on Ao3 here!

This was originally for @robot-anon‘s competition, buuuuut I took it too far and now it’s a multi-chapter fanfic. “Oops”

“Jeremy. Jeremiah. My heterosexual friend. My cishet pal. My dude,” Michael rambled, totally not trying to avoid whatever he’d called Jeremy over to talk about.

“You’re rambling, Mike. Just spit it out,” Jeremy mumbled in response. Michael nodded and took a deep breath before letting it out.

“I need girl advice. Like, dating girls advice.”

There was a short pause, in which Jeremy gave Michael the most confused look Michael had ever seen.

“Michael, you’re gay,” Jeremy stated plainly, causing Michael to suddenly shift forward in his beanbag and startle Jeremy.

“I THOUGHT SO TOO, DUDE!” Michael exclaimed, waving his hands. “Like- I’ve only liked dudes before. Jake? Hot. Rich? A solid maybe. But girls? Always been a pass for me! Until, like, yesterday-ish!” Michael flopped back into his beanbag, dragging a hand through his hair.

Jeremy cocked an eyebrow, grinning slightly. “So what you’re saying is… you have a crush on someone?”

“Yes!” Michael exclaimed. “Not just, like, some random gal either! I’ve known her for, like, a year now!”

“Oh my god, do you mean Christine?!” Jeremy asked, eyes wide. “You know she’s dating Rich, right?”

Michael made an exasperated noise in response, nodding. “Yes, I do,” he huffed, crossing his arms. “It’s not her, though. It’s Brooke.”

There was a moment of silence before Michael heard Jeremy snickering. Michael gasped, sitting up. “Traitor!” He accused in mock-seriousness. “I’m here in emotional distress and you laugh at me?! How dare!”

That just made Jeremy laugh harder before he got control over his giggles. “Okay, okay, I’m here to help, man. For real,” he said, giving Michael a soft smile. Michael smiled back. “But there’s, like, nothing I can do to help.” Michael stopped smiling.

“Damn. You’re, like, my go-to het friend,” Michael grumbled. Jeremy punched his arm playfully in response, chuckling.

“Shut up, man!” Jeremy joked, falling back into his beanbag chair with a giggle. “But for real- what made you notice? Like, what made you realize you liked Brooke?”

Michael blushed lightly, shrugging and sinking into his chair a bit. “I dunno, man, just, like… she’s just super nice and so smart and giggly…” He paused for a second, smiling at the ceiling. “I think I realized yesterday, when we were all at the mall together. Like, we were wandering around in one of those fashion joints and she came up behind me and told me to follow her. She showed me this display of patches n’ shit and said she noticed I liked patches so she thought of me.” Michael let out a big, happy sign and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I guess just kinda the fact that she thought of me solidified it? I dunno, man.”

Jeremy gave a soft “awww” and put his hand to his chest. “That’s super sweet!” He chirped. “Super sappy, though.”

“Shut up, man. You were the same way with Christine!” Michael protested, crossing his arms before looking back up at Jeremy. “Speaking of relationships, how’re you and Chloe doing? Still good?”

A light blush dusted Jeremy’s cheeks as he gave a shy smile. “We’re still doing great, yeah,” he replied, glancing away. “She recently started, um, started gymnastics! Well, she didn’t start gymnastics, but she told me about it recently!”

“Oh sweet! Have you seen her do it yet?” Michael asked, leaning forward a bit in his beanbag chair.

At that, Jeremy’s blush darkened and he gave a nervous chuckle. “Uh, yeah, she has! She’s, um, she’s super good at it. Like, it’s so beautiful how she’s just s-so, um, so confident i-in what she’s doing! She’s also just, uh, j-just, like… crazy flexible, a-and the costumes she wears for her performances, and-” Jeremy rambled, face progressively growing darker before Michael cut him off.

“Jeez, okay, ya perv. I get it, gymnastics are sexy,” Michael teased, smirking at Jeremy. The taller was instantly stammering, embarrassed.

“Gymnastics a-aren’t sexy, Michael!” Jeremy blurted out, flapping his hands slightly. Michael replied with a mumbled “Whatever you say,” which made Jeremy fall back into his beanbag chair with a huff. “I’m seriousssss,” he groaned, crossing his arms.

“I know,” Michael chuckled. “Doesn’t mean I won’t tease you for it, though.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes, huffing. “Whatever, man. Let’s just, like, play AotD or something. Enough feelings talk.” He paused for a moment. “Unless you have anything else to confess?”

“Wouldn’t call it a ‘confession’, but nah. That was it. Brooke’s pretty hot,” Michael hummed in response, earning a nod from the other boy.

“Gotcha. Level 10 of AotD it is, then.”

“You did what now?” Michael asked his friend, who shifted nervously across the shitty cafeteria table from him.

“Kinda sorta set you up. On a date. W-with Brooke, though!” Jeremy explained, fidgeting with Chloe’s hand in his. The brunette nodded, giving a small smile.

“Jer and I have been planning on going out to a movie or something for a while, soooo I thought, why not bring our best friends to help these nerds find happiness with each other?” Chloe explained. Michael was quiet for a minute before squinting at her. “Bringing me was originally a joke, wasn’t it?”

Chloe nodded. “Pretty much.”

“Well, I appreciate the honesty,” Michael mumbled, rolling his eyes. He stood up, tray and half-eaten lunch in hand. “So, when is this thing?”

“Tonight?” Jeremy offered sheepishly.

Michael shrugged. “Could be worse. I’ll see you there,” he hummed, turning around and taking a step before realizing his mistake. “Where is it, by the way?” He asked, turning back to face the couple.

Chloe shrugged, taking a sip of her iced tea. “We’ll figure it out later. Jer’ll text you the details.”

“Cool, cool,” Michael nodded, calmly turning around again and heading to the trash can. Little did anyone else know, Michael was anything but calm. He prayed his hands weren’t shaking as the realization hit him that he was going to go on a double date with Brooke. He was going on a date with Brooke.

“Tonight” couldn’t come fast enough.

[jaceyourself]

End of Year Wrap-Up 24/12/2018

Happy Merry to all you readers!

I’ve had a great year but all us music fans have had an even better one! Streaming services mean that now more than ever we can experience the musical output from all corners of the globe (though overwhelmingly the English-speaking parts of it) to understand different points of view, learn of the goings on in other parts of the world and most importantly indulge ourselves in a bit of a boogie. All the moods, genres and feels you could think of are out there, so over the holiday period perhaps try and listen to something new. Who knows it might break the tension with that younger/older relative round the xmas table when you find they also happen to like k-pop/jazz-funk/grindcore or at the very least you can bicker about the tragedy of the current album charts (Greatest Showman: 21 weeks!). To aid you in your quest for knowledge/excitement/small-talk I have spent almost 30 minutes curating a best-of for both albums and singles in the year of 2018. 

(NB even with my album-a-day policy, there’s no way I can get through everything I want to within the 365, so if your fave appears ignored, let it be known that I probably haven’t heard it yet. The full list of everything I’ve listened to this year is at the bottom)

So in no particular order:

Albums 

Jinx Lennon- Grow A Pair!!!

The Beths- Future Me Hates Me

The Pistol Annies- Interstate Gospel

Travis Scott- ASTROWORLD

Mount Eerie- Now Only

Cardi B- Invasion of Privacy

The 1975- A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

The Aces- When My Heart Felt Volcanic

Singles

Confidence Man- Out The Window

Cardi B- I Like It

Janelle Monae ft. Grimes- Pynk

Lori McKenna- People Get Old

SOPHIE- Immaterial

Marie Davidson- Work It

Car Seat Headrest- Stop Smoking (We Love You)

BLACKPINK- AS IF IT’S YOUR LAST

The 1975- It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)

https://open.spotify.com/user/jaceyourself/playlist/1kFex3QLVv0l3cCqjVC6dT?si=_GqTJXrOSoSXYaMC9ra_lg

Have a great festive period and I’ll see you in 2019 :D

2018 Albums what I listened to

Floating Points- Reflections – Mojave Desert

James Elkington- Wintres Woma

Miguel- War & Leisure

Ride- Weather Diaries

Sidney Gish- No Dogs Allowed

Emperor X- The Orlando Sentinel, Oversleepers International

Broken Social Scene- Hug of Thunder

MC5- Kick Out The Jams (Live)

Public Service Broadcasting- Every Valley

JJ Doom- Key to the Kuffs

HAIM- Something To Tell You

Camila Cabello- Camila

Sheer Mag- Need To Feel Your Love

Taylor Swift- reputation

Shabazz Palaces- Quazarz vs The Jealous Machines

This Is The Kit- Moonshine Freeze

Japanese Breakfast- Soft Sounds From Another Planet

Tune-Yards- I can feel you creep into my private life

Jupiter & Okwess- Kin Sonic

Various Artists- The Passion Of Charlie Parker

Waxahatchee- Out In The Storm, Great Thunder

Offa Rex- The Queen Of Hearts

Dizzee Rascal- Raskit

Alvvays- Antisocialites

Childhood- Universal High

Marmozets- Knowing What You Know Now

Declan McKenna- What Do You Think About the Car?

Paul Heaton- Crooked Calypso

Lana Del Rey- Lust For Life

Charles Lloyd New Quartet- Passin’ Thru (Live)

Rip Rig & Panic- Circa Rip Rig + Panic

Avey Tare- Eucalyptus

Justin Timberlake- Man Of The Woods

Rio Mira- Marimba del Pacifico

Oddisee- The Iceberg

Aimee Mann- Mental Illness

Katie Von Schleicher- Shitty Hits

Arcade Fire- Everything Now

Girl Ray- Earl Grey

Ezra Furman- Transangelic Exodus

Randy Newman- Dark Matter

Dead Cross- Dead Cross

Chronixx- Chronology

Mondo Cozmo- Plastic Soul

Kesha- Rainbow

Lal & Mike Waterson- Bright Phoebus

Steve Reich- Pulse / Quartet

Orchestra Baobab- Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng

Ratboy- SCUM

Prince- Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, Parade, Sign ‘O’ The Times

Stanley Cowell- No Illusions

Oneohtrix Point Never- Good Time Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Downtown Boys- Cost Of Living

Screaming Females- All At Once

Rob Luft- Riser

Sibusile Xaba- Open Letter To Adoniah

Jen Cloher- Jen Cloher

Everything Everything- Fever Dream

Grizzly Bear- Painted Ruins

Bob’s Burgers- The Bob’s Burgers Music Album

Superorganism- Superorganism

Maren Morris- HERO

Courtney Marie Andrews- Honest Life, May Your Kindness Remain

Stefflon Don- Real Ting Mixtape

Ghostpoet- Dark Days + Canapés

Young Fathers- White Men Are Black Men Too, Cocoa Sugar

Queens Of The Stone Age- Songs For The Deaf

Thurst- Cut to the Chafe

John Moreland- Big Bad Luv

Aruan Ortiz- Cub(an)ism [Piano Solo]

Mount Eerie- Now Only

The War On Drugs- A Deeper Understanding

Various Artists- Pop Makossa

Liane Carroll- The Right to Love

Fickle Friends- You Are Someone Else

Nadine Shah- Holiday Destination

Various Artists- Howsla

George Ezra- Staying at Tamara’s

The Doors- The Doors

Filthy Friends- Invitation

Susanne Sundfør- Music For People In Trouble

LCD Soundsystem- LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver, American Dream

Mogwai- Every Country’s Sun

Kacey Musgraves- Golden Hour

The National- High Violet, Sleep Well Beast

The Klezmatics- Wonder Wheel

Hercules & Love Affair- Omnion

Mount Kimbie- Love What Survives

The Aces- When My Heart Felt Volcanic

Matthew Bourne- Isotach

Finished- Cum Inside Me Bro

Forced Into Femininity- I’m Making Progress

Heron Oblivion- Heron Oblivion

Hamell On Trial- TACKLE BOX

Confidence Man- Confident Music For Confident People

Swet Shop Boys- Cashmere

Princess Nokia- 1992 Deluxe, A Girl Cried Red

Steely Dan- The Royal Scam, Aja

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard- Nonagon Infinity

Sparks- Hippopotamus

J. Cole- KOD

Fat Tony- Macgregor Park

L’Orange and Jeremiah Jae- The Night Took Us In Like Family

Little Simz- Stillness In Wonderland

Lady Leshurr- Queen’s Speech

RAY BLK- Durt

Brand New- Science Fiction

Janelle Monae- Dirty Computer

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever- Talk Tight

Fred Thomas- Changer

Myra Davies- Sirens

Laraaji- Sun Gong

The Killers- Wonderful Wonderful

Descendents- Milo Goes To College

Frank Turner- Be More Kind

The Horrors- V

Moses Sumney- Aromanticism

Arctic Monkeys- Whatever People…, AM, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Oxbow- Thin Black Duke

Dee Byrne’s Entropi- Moment Frozen

Mike Stern- Trip

The Vampires- The Vampires Meet Lionel Loueke

Gogol Bordello- Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, Super Taranta!, Seekers And Finders

Umphrey’s McGee- Zonkey

Hard Working Americans- We’re All in This Together

Courtney Barnett- Tell Me How You Really Feel

Jllin- Black Origami

Various Artists- Rough Guide to the Music of West Africa

Wolf Alice- Visions Of A Life

The Young’uns- Strangers

Fever Ray- Fever Ray, Plunge

CHVRCHES- Love Is Dead

Oumou Sangaré- Oumou, Mogoya

Charlotte Gainsbourg- Rest

Daniel Avery- Song For Alpha

Daphni- Joli Mai

Kanye West- ye

Cécile McLorin Salvant- Dreams and Daggers

Trio Da Kali, Kronos Quartet- Ladilikan

Kelela- Take Me Apart

Bob Dylan- The Times.., Another.., Bringing.., Highway.., Blond.., John.., Nashville.., New.., Blood..

Lily Allen- Alright(,) Still, It’s Not Me(,) It’s You, Sheezus, No Shame

Fanfare Ciocarlia- 20

Wolf Parade- Cry Cry Cry

SOPHIE- OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES

Zara McFarlane- Arise

St. Vincent- MASSEDUCTION

Margo Price- All American Made

Bebe Rexha- Expectations

Motörhead- Under Cöver

Orchestre Les Mangelepa- Last Band Standing

Drake- Scorpion

Various Artists- Gentle Giants: The Songs Of Don Williams

Noga Erez- Off The Radar

Baxter Dury- Prince of Tears

John Maus- Screen Memories

Lankum- Between the Earth and Sky

Shamir- Revelations

Years & Years- Palo Santo

Converge- The Dusk In Us

Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino- Canzoniere

Fred Hersch- Open Book

A. Savage- Thawing Dawn

Big Thief- Capacity

Kelly Clarkson- Meaning Of Life

Dirty Projectors- Lamp Lit Prose

Robt Sarazin Blake- Recitative

Shed Seven- Instant Pleasures

Spinning Coin- Permo

Call Super- Arpo

Laura Perrudin- Poisons & antidotes

Ellen Andrea Wang- Blank Out

Lori McKenna- The Tree

Wu-Tang Clan- Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Lee Ronaldo- Electric Trim

Deer Tick- Vol. 2

The Paranoid Style- Underworld U.S.A.

Youssou N’Dour- Set, Joko- From Village To Town, Nothing’s In Vain, Seeni Valeurs

Gaika- BASIC VOLUME

Kasai Allstars- Around Felicite

Carly Rae Jepsen- Emotion

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds- Who Built The Moon?

Anna Ternheim- All the Way to Rio

U2- Songs of Experience

Mônica Vasconcelos- The São Paulo Tapes

Travis Scott- ASTROWORLD

Nabihah Iqbal- Weighing of the Heart

Van Morrison- Versatile

Jim James- Tribute to 2

Criolo- Espiral de Ilusão

Maciej Obara Quartet- Unloved

N.E.R.D- NO ONE EVER REALLY DIES

The Beths- Future Me Hates Me

Maryam Saleh- Lekhfa

Naomi Bedford- Songs My Ruiner Gave to Me

Jens Lekman- Night Over Kortedala

The Spirit of the Beehive- pleasure suck

Tom Rogerson- Finding Shore

Paul Jacobs- Pictures(,) Movies and Apartments

Ariana Grande- sweetener

Rina Sawayama- RINA

Marcel Khalife- Andalusia of Love

Gunter Hampel- Bounce (Live at Theater Gütersloh)

BAYNK- Someone’s EP

Omar Souleyman- To Syria(,) With Love

Blood Orange- Negro Swan

Open Mike Eagle- Brick Body Kids Still Daydream

First Aid Kit- Ruins

Shame- Songs of Praise

Homeboy Sandman- Veins

Playboi Carti- Playboi Carti

Eminem- Kamikaze

Troye Sivan- Blue Neighbourhood, BLOOM

Joey Bada$$- ALL AMERIKKKAN BADA$$

Priests- Nothing Feels Natural

Rhiannon Giddens- Freedom Highway

King Krule- The OOZ

Django Django- Marble Skies

Bon Iver- For Emma(,) Forever Ago

Calexico- The Thread That Keeps Us

Mary Gauthier- Rifles & Rosary Beads

Hookworms- Microshift

Aphex Twin- Collapse EP

Rae Morris- Someone Out There

Field Music- Open Here

Rhye- Blood

Shopping- The Official Body

MGMT- Little Dark Age

Christine and the Queens- Chris

Alela Diane- Cusp

Sonic Youth- Sister

Brigid Mae Power- The Two Worlds

Deafheaven- Sunbather

Various Artists- American Epic: The Collection Disc 1, 2, 3

Rich Krueger- Life Ain’t That Long

Lil Wayne- Tha Carter V

Modern Mal- The Misanthrope Family Album

Rejjie Snow- Dear Annie

U.S. Girls- In a Poem Unlimited

The Orielles- Silver Dollar Moment

Tal National- Tantabara

Marie Davidson- Working Class Woman

Superchunk- What a Time to Be Alive

Brandi Carlile- By The Way(,) I Forgive You

Car Seat Headrest- Twin Fantasy

Loma- Loma

Quavo- QUAVO HUNCHO

Marlon Williams- Make Way For Love

Nipsey Hussle- Victory Lap

Insecure Men- Insecure Men

Kendrick Lamar- Black Panther

Rapsody- Lalia’s Wisdom

Khalid- Suncity

Tracey Thorn- Record

Anna von Hausswolff- Dead Magic

Jinx Lennon- Grow a Pair!!!

Gwenno- Le Kov

Judas Priest- Stained Class, FIREPOWER

Robyn- Robyn, Body Talk, Honey

The Magic Gang- The Magic Gang

Essaie Pas- New Path

Bob Dylan and The Band- The Basement Tapes

The Decemberists- I’ll Be Your Girl

Pistol Annies- Interstate Gospel

BCUC- Emakhosini (Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness)

Jack White- Boarding House Reach

Yo La Tengo- There’s A Riot Going On

Sidi Touré- Toubalbero

Lil Peep- Come Over When You’re Sober(,) Pt. 2

The Breeders- All Nerve

The Vaccines- Combat Sports

CZARFACE- Czarface Meets Metal Face

Laurence Pike- Distant Early Warning

Chopteeth Afrofunk Big Band- Bone Reader

Leo Kalyan- The Edge

Hayley Kyoko- Expectations

Tristen- Sneaker Waves

Thelonious Monk- Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Brad Mehldau & Mark Guiliana- Mehliana: Taming The Dragon

Amy Rigby- Til The Wheels Fall Off, Little Fugitive, The Old Guys

BLACKPINK- BLACKPINK IN YOUR AREA

Rose Cousins- Natural Conclusion

Nora Jane Struthers- Champion

Lilly Hiatt- Trinity Lane

The Rolling Stones- The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones No. 2, Out of Our Heads, Aftermath

MAST- Thelonious Sphere Monk

The 1975- A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

Jhene Aiko- Trip

Don Bryant- Don’t Give up on Love

EMA- Exile in the Outer Ring

Small Believer- Anna Tivel

Vera Sola- Shades

Cardi B- Invasion of Privacy

Darkthrone- A Blaze in the Northern Sky

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers- Years

Goat Girl- Goat Girl

Vic Mensa- HOOLIGANS

Unknown Mortal Orchestra- Sex & Food

Alasdair Roberts, Amble Scuse & David McGuiness- What News

Kali Uchis- Isolation

Wye Oak- The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs

Migos- Culture II

Hinds- I Don’t Run

DRINKS- Hippo Lite

Alexis Taylor- Beautiful Thing

Jenny Wilson- EXORCISM

[jeremiah-and-jerome-valeska]

(Chapter 1) Prologue to my Jeremiah x Ecco fanfic: Learning to Smile

Part 2

Part 3

I hope you all enjoy!

No warnings for this part (possibility for later parts though).

This part goes into Ecco as a child, visiting the circus.

_______________________________

Flashes of color painted the people, each filtered in bright lights. My eyes were consumed by the excitement of the elaborate displays. Clutching my mother’s hand, I pulled her around to each amusement.

“Slow down honey. We have time to get to them all,” my mother tried calming me.

“How can I slow down? We finally came to the circus after years of asking to come,”

“I know you’re eager, but I promise you we could come back tomorrow night if we don’t see everything. Okay?,” she responded softly.

I contemplated her offer, walking in a less frantic pace, “Alright,”

We walked by a few show booths, stopping at ‘The Strongman’. The man stood with his arms folded as he was hit with frying pans, bricks, and bats. He remained unfazed by the attacks, reacting only slightly. The show went on for a few more minutes of brick throwing then with one last swift swing to the man’s head, the audience clapped. The man had suffered no injury to the hit, amusing the crowd. I clapped, curious of the biological factors which allowed him to face such force of attack.

My mother and I decided to see what deserts we could get ahold of, so we walked through the food stands. A sweet aroma filled my nose. I could tell the scent of baked cookies anywhere. My mother had been drawn in as well, both deciding on what desert we craved. We walked up to the food trailer, finding a bearded man who wore a white apron.

My mother gave her order, “One chocolate chip please. And...what would you like honey?”

“I would like a snickerdoodle, please,” I requested.

The man turned to get the cookies and came back with a large one, handing it to my mother, “Here’s the chocolate chip,”

The man looked down to me and said, “Sorry kid, all out of snickerdoodles. Blame my sneaky nephews. You want another kind? I have sugar, chocolate, and peanut butter cookies left,”

“Um...I’ll take peanut butter,” I said with some disappointment.

The man offered, “I could warm it up for you a little bit, so it seems more fresh if you would like. It should only take a few minutes,”

My mother looked to me, “How’s that sound?”

“I would like that. Thank you,” I spoke to the man, moving further into the trailer to bake the cookie.

My mother noticed my disappointment, “Do you want some of mine?”

“It’s okay. I know how much you love chocolate chip,”

“You sure? I have plenty,” motioning to the cookie’s massive size.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I gave reassurance.

She nodded in acknowledgment.

We stood waiting in silence, then a voice caught our attention, “Hey Christine!”

We turned towards the voice. I didn’t recognize the young man, but my mother seemed to.

She greeted the tall, slim man with a hug, “It’s nice to see you. We haven’t talked in a while. How are you doing?”

The man responded, “I’m doing well. I just got my doctorate degree. It took a while, but with hard work you could achieve anything. How’s life treating you?”

“I’m good. My daughter and I are having fun,” my mother smiled, urging me to greet the man.

“Hi,” I waved shyly.

He asked me, “You like the circus?”

I nodded a yes. My mother saw I was a little shy, so turned attention away from me, asking the man about his career.

My attention strayed from the conversation, shuffling my feet and moving to a nearby bench which I could wait for my cookie. I kicked my feet through the air, getting impatient. I heard shuffling nearby, seaming to come from the back of the trailer. I poked my head around, trying to find the noise’s cause. I couldn’t see anything and my curiosity grew. I sat up from the bench and followed closer to the source. I came the the trailer’s side, peaking around the corner.

I saw two ginger-haired boys struggling on the grass. One held what appeared to be a cookie as the other tried to climb atop the other boy, reaching for the cookie

The one holding the treat held back the other, “It’s mine! I’m not going to give you any!”

The other protested, “I found it first!”

“Well, you didn’t grab it first!”

“You know snickerdoodles are my favorite!” The boy with glasses pleaded.

I gasped in realization. So they’re the ones who took the last one.

I moved into the open, “I think that belongs to me,”

The two stopped fighting, looking at me. I found identical features between them, concluding they were twins.

The one without glasses intrusively asked, “Says who?”

“Me,” I stated with confidence.

The twins got up from the ground and moved closer towards me.

“We- I got it first. It’s not yours,” the one holding the cookie taunted.

I argued, crossing my arms, “Well I had just ordered a snickerdoodle from your uncle’s trailer, but he said he had no more because you two stole he last one. So that cookie should be mine,”

The ginger with glasses mentioned to his brother, “She has a good point,”

The one with the snickerdoodle pouted, shoving the cookie to his brother and stomped away “You’re no fun,”

The kind ginger approached timidly, handing me the cookie, “I’m Jeremiah. My angry twin who just stomped off is Jerome. Sorry about him,”

I accepted the cookie and smiled, “It’s okay. He’s nothing I couldn’t have handled,”

He smiled back and laughed a little at my comment, “So what’s your name?”

“All my friends call me Ecco,” I offered happily.

“Nice to meet you Ecco. You enjoying the circus?”

“Yeah, it’s my first time and it’s so fun. I finally convinced my mother to bring me this year. The shows are incredible to watch,”

“That’s cool. Do you have a favorite act?”

“I don’t know yet, but I thought the snake dancer was interesting,”

Jeremiah perked up, “That’s my mother. I’ll tell her you liked her performance today. Maybe she’ll introduce you to her snake Sheba,”

“I’d love that. Thanks Jeremiah,”

After a few moments he gave a goodbye and started walking away, “Well...I’ll leave you to enjoy your cookie. I hope I see you again,”

Before he left I stopped him, “Wait!”

He turned around and I broke off a part of the snickerdoodle, offering the piece to him, “Snickerdoodles are my favorite too,”

He accepted the piece, “Thanks. I hope I see you again,”

Waving my goodbyes, I begin to return to my mother ”I think you will. See you around Jeremiah,”

He waved back with a smile, “Bye Ecco”