#my first foray into real hard kinks

[zoeythegoodgirl]

New Pet

TW: drugging, kidnapping

It's been a long week, so you decide that this weekend you're going to treat yourself. You find your sluttiest dress, hoping to show off as much cleavage as possible. Satisfied with this choice, you look through your accessories and pick out matching bag and shoes, as well as a fur stole to give yourself a little air of elegance. You do your makeup in the mirror before setting off. You say goodbye to your roommate and make your way to the bar. "You're definitely getting laid tonight," you think to yourself.

You get to the bar and order yourself a nice drink. You were never much of a drinker, so you sip at it slowly and take in the atmosphere. It's not particularly busy right now. Some local band is playing a cover of some song you've never heard of from some band you never cared about. The lead singer isn't great, but overall they're still enjoyable. You relax for a little while before you're approached by someone.

You look behind you to see the most gorgeous woman in the entire bar. She towers over you by at least a foot, having to look up to avoid staring directly into her tits. Her arms are slender, but muscular. She could easily throw you around, something that makes your knees go weak underneath you. "H-hi," you stammer out weakly. Your thoughts are far from pure. She giggles in response to your meek greeting. Somehow you hold back the moan that tries to escape your lips.

The two of you hit it off very well. You seem to share a lot of interests, which makes conversation quite easy after the initial hiccup. After a little bit, she excuses herself, but says she'll be right back. Indeed, only a couple of minutes later, she comes back with two drinks. She sets one down in front of you. "It's a Slippery Nipple," she says in response to your inquiry. You hope that's an indicator of her intentions with you later that night. You take a few sips of it, noting that it doesn't taste like anything you've had before.

You wake up in an unfamiliar environment. Groggy, you reach out and feel what seem to be the bars of a dog kennel. No matter what direction you reach out in, you feel the coolness of metal, and realize that you're inside the kennel. The last thing you remember is being at the bar with this beautiful woman, and wonder what could have happened that led to this. Your thoughts stop when you hear a familiar voice. "Good morning, sweetie," says the woman from the bar. "I'm glad to see you're awake."

Your eyes widen as you realize what happened: the drink she'd brought you was laced, and you've been kidnapped. "You know, I've never rescued a puppy quite like you before. You never mentioned you had such a pretty cock under that dress of yours." You look down at yourself, just now taking in that you're completely naked. You turn your attention back to her, intending to say something angry, before you get cut off. "Now, I know it seems like what I did was extreme. But once you get the full context of your situation, you'll find it's not so bad." She claps twice, and three other girls, all seemingly around your age, appear, crawling on their hands and knees. Each of them is naked except for a collar around their necks.

"You see, I pick up lonely puppies like you, and give them a loving home. As you can see, you'll have plenty of other pups to play with." Her head turns in their direction, and she barks out a simple command: "Sit." They all sit back on their ankles, lifting their arms off the floor for the first time. Their owner turns her attention back to you. "All I ask is that you play with me from time to time. It may be a little rough, but I know how to keep it within limits." You turn to look at the other girls. They look healthy, with one having some hickeys but otherwise completely unmarked. There's no sign of fear coming from any of them. You look back at their owner, confused as to why they would choose to be there.

"In return, I take care of you. I'll make sure you eat well, and get you all the toys you could want. You'll be one of my spoiled pets. Isn't that right, pups?" They each bark enthusiastically. It's clear they're enjoying this. "No job...no responsibilities...," you think to yourself, "and I get to have sex with the hottest woman imaginable?" Things are starting to look appealing. You turn to look at your new owner, and whine softly.

"Awww, what an eager pup! Do you want out?" You bark a couple of times in affirmation. She unlocks the door to the cage, and points at the floor in front of her. Obediently, you crawl out of the cage and sit on the floor in front of her. You present your neck to her without prompt, on which a collar is placed. She ruffles your hair gently and gives you lots of gentle praises. Suddenly, she turns towards one of the other puppygirls still sitting there and makes some kind of motion with her hands. The other two leave, while the one she looked at bends back over and presents herself in your direction.

"Just to get yourself acquainted. Go ahead and play. Mommy needs to go to work, but I'll be home later. They'll show you where your food and water bowls are." As she leaves, you turn back towards the other girl, and see she's wagging her but at you like she would a tail. "You were trying to get laid," you think to yourself before crawling over to her and mounting her.

Before you're completely lost in the haze of being puppy, the last thought you'll ever have goes through your mind: "How did she know I needed this?"

[dew-journal]

I am having a hard time with not having any sexual partners. In all of this I have just felt so down bad for any sexual intimacy with another person. I probably did fuck up at least one chance to be with Jennifer, but I don’t know if that was going anywhere. Interactions felt forced and I have such an intense averse reaction to that. I’m not even sure she was going to be receptive to anything though (I do want to at least try and apologize, maybe I could get another chance but I doubt it). I still have my past experiences in my head and I just have no idea how to approach a long term intimate relationship when it seems like my sexual interest has a half life. Perhaps it is related to my kinks not being met though. Feabie was my first real foray into attempting to step into a kink community, and that so far has been a massive failure. And while I’m not giving up yet, I don’t know how much more I can take there. My main issue though is I have no idea how to approach finding folks who share some of my kinks. For example, (in)cest. DDlg has some of that aspect, but I don’t really vibe with that most of the time. Feedism again is kind of outside the norm although not on the same level, Bimboification is another that I feel is a little hard to bring up. And then there is my increasing desire to suck off a hot trans woman, which I would think would be easier to find a person into that alas. Again where do I look to find that? My NSFW twitter is full of it, although that could be confirmation bias. None of this even touches the possibility that I could be approaching the whole situation from the wrong angle. I might want to see if the role of a sub is more of a fit for myself as I have noticed that I tend to fall towards that in my behavior. But again this all leads towards me using more sites that I honestly have little patience for more and more as I put effort into them only to have nothing come of it. Maybe once I actually get everything settled at either home or work I’ll try to sit down and set up my fetlife fully, even though I kind of dread it. Or maybe by then I’ll have actually met one of the people I’m talking to and at least some of my problems will bear down on me less. Or maybe it’ll just be more of the same. Regardless, how hard is it to find some girldick to suck and get fucked by seriously.

[mikelogan]

JDox Reclist (2022)

Previous JDox reclists can be found here

Up In Our Bedroom (After The War) by darknessandrageandkittens

Summary:  How DID Perry get his name, anyway?  JD’s curious, and for once, his lover opens up Rating: M Word Count: 909 My Thoughts: Everybody’s trans, we love to see it

A Study in Unconventionality by dashwood

Summary: “Well, you see…” JD trailed off, suddenly unsure of himself.  Just an hour ago, it had seemed like a brilliant idea.  He had even forfeited a round of ‘Find the Saltine’ to rush to the newspaper stand next door, proudly declaring, “Where’s the porn? It’s a matter of life and death. Trust me, I’m a doctor.” Rating: E Word Count: 7491 My Thoughts: This 3-part smut series is so good. Basically, Perry is a patient and JD needs to rule out conditions by testing whether or not Perry can… you know…

Pink in the Night by orphan_account

Summary: The music and din of the rag tag team was very pleasant if JD lingered on it. Which he was, by the way, lingering, in the kitchen and watching Elliot make that are-you-actually-this-sexist face as Kelso regales her with some ER story while the chief of medicine steadfastly gulps the spiked eggnog. Rating: M Word Count: 3601 My Thoughts: Christmas JDox? Yes please.

My New Schedule by backroombull (chinashopbull)

Summary:  The one where Dr. Cox sort-of-accidentally makes JD piss his scrubs, and of all the things, this is what leads to them boning for the first time. Rating: E Word Count: 24,942 My Thoughts: While this fic probably isn’t for everyone, the second chapter really Does It for me. Also brilliantly written. Daddy kink!

My Captive Audience by RumCove

Summary: JD has been told that he gets too involved.  He didn’t listen. He’s regretting it. Rating: M/E Word Count: 219,120 My Thoughts: Holy shit. Just. Holy. Shit. Absolutely heed the tags going into this series, but if you’ve followed me for more than like, a second, you’ll know how highly I recommend this author.  I will admit that I put reading MCA off for quite a while because the noncon part of it put me off, and while those parts are very difficult to get through, I cannot think of anyone better suited for navigating the trauma JD goes through than Rum. The second work, My Caged Performer, is even better than the first, in my opinion. Probably because it’s much more focused on JD and Perry together, but you really can’t read it without reading MCA first. The final installment made me cry so hard (in a good way) – like almost Cancer levels of crying, just without all the pain and long-term emotional damage.

Relativity by nikogio

Summary: A rewrite/post-episode fic for 3x14 My Screwup. Rating: E Word Count: 24,747 My Thoughts: NEWBIE, IT’S THE SPRINKLES! Okay, for real though, amazing series by this author. It’s so well-written and has the perfect amount of angst, fluff, and smut!

My Unorthodox Treatment by RumCove

Summary: Perry Cox finds being an alpha doctor working in the hellhole that is Sacred Heart something of a headache. Not as much of a headache as he finds his self-appointed beta “protégé” constantly trying to get his attention and some sort of goddamn hug all the time, of course, but neither are great.  Particularly not when deep down he really doesn’t find Newbie that bad.  At all.  And it just gets even more of a crazy, annoying headache when he finds out something that he really didn’t want to find out and can never not know again after a bad day in the ER. JD finds his entire existence something of a headache, when it all boils down to it.  And now his crazy, terrifying boss knows the one thing that he’s kept from everyone since he went to college.  This can only end badly, right? An alpha/beta/omega fic set in the Scrubs universe. Rating: E Word Count: 539,003 My Thoughts: This was my first foray into the world of A/B/O (I know, sweet summer child) and boy, do I love it. As stated above, I adore RumCove’s works, and obviously this is no different, but I also love her OCs and how they often make appearances in other works.  I’d die for Io, no questions asked. But anyway, if you already like A/B/O or you’re curious about it, this is the (and probably only) Scrubs series for you! 

My Thin Ice by RumCove

Summary: To Dr. Cox’s horror, the staff of internal medicine are being sent on a staff team building event.  In Alaska.  In goddamn Alaska. JD’s going through a personal crisis and maybe some time away will get his mind off it.  Or maybe not. Then when things take a more serious turn it’s suddenly a case of life or death. Snow! Ice! Cold! A rec room! It’s sort of Christmassy… Rating: E Word Count: 26,529 My Thoughts: I knew it was gonna happen, but damn it all if this reclist isn’t just turning into one big ad for Rum’s fics. But there’s a reason! They’re all so good, and well, she’s certainly prolific!

His Secret Santa by This_Desk_Set_Wants_To_Fly

Summary: For Christmas, Carla holds Sacred Heart’s annual Secret Santa, and, after drawing a name, Perry struggles to find the right gift for his recipient. Rating: M Word Count: 2884 My Thoughts: Sweet, fluffy Christmas oneshot? I don’t care if it is July, go read it!

Run Right into You by nikogio

Summary: “You know, Newbie, the harder you fight against quicksand, the faster you sink.” “I know,” I nod, aware of the fact, though not quite sure of the point. “I suppose that’s why I keep letting you in.” Rating: E Word Count: 2319 My Thoughts:  “He knows that he is home with me, and I know that I am sheltered wherever he is.”  BRB, screaming crying throwing up

Turning Points by tyrionsoftywin

Summary: We’re strangers, the thought hits me as he turns slowly to look at me, a small, sad smile on his face and I know he’s going to read in my face all the questions I’m not daring to ask him. Rating: G/T Word Count: 5167 My Thoughts: A series of four, kind of bittersweet oneshots. I really love the idea of exploring them at this later point in their lives, after the show.

Meant To Be (Hand In Hand) by DobbyRocksSocks

Summary: Post EP 05x21 My Fallen Idol: Perry really only needed to hear from one person. They got there in the end. Rating: T Word Count: 2943 My Thoughts: The noise I made while rereading this and then literally went, out loud, to myself and my cats, “Boys!”

My Puzzling Jewelry by RumCove

Summary: When JD discovers something unexpected about Dr. Cox he gets curious. Curiosity killed the Newbie. Or is in danger of killing him anyway. Rating: E Word Count: 8350 My Thoughts: Besties, I love this fic so much. We all need some PWP every once in a while, am I right?

Canoodle With Me by DobbyRocksSocks

Summary:  JD is exhausted.  Perry wants to know why. Rating: T Word Count: 2337 My Thoughts: I’ll take “Perry taking care of JD” for 1000, Alex.

Hospital Nonsense by Chaoskitten

Summary: A place for my various JDox oneshots and anything else in the Scrubs fandom Rating: G/T Word Count: 11,341 My Thoughts: I love these two idiots so much and these oneshots are so great!

you look like mine when you wear my clothes by DobbyRocksSocks

Summary: Perry has a rather… primal reaction to JD wearing his clothes. Rating: T Word Count: 1106 My Thoughts: That sound you’re hearing? It’s me REEEEEEEing into oblivion.

Lay A Claim by DobbyRocksSocks

Summary: They’re away at a conference, and there’s only one bed.  But… it was only three nights.  Nothing would change between them, right? Rating: Not Rated Word Count: 3250 My Thoughts: Hi, welcome to the DobbyRocksSocks appreciation hour.  Please take a seat and screech with me. Okay seriously though, this might be my favorite fic from them, and while I would put every single one of their JDox works on here, I’ll save you the scrolling and just tell you to check out their AO3 page.

My Mentor’s Fugue by suedepony

Summary: A canon rewrite of JD and Dr. Cox’s interactions during S03E14, “My Screw Up,” from JD’s point of view. Rating: E Word Count: 3958 My Thoughts: Angsty smut? Hi yes hello, table for me and the 3 other living members of the Scrubs fandom

See Through My Beautiful by JusteAmusant

Summary: My little newbie is either hella scared of the consequences of his being late, or he’s off in a daydream that not even he can find.  He has yet to look me in the eyes, he looks like he hasn’t slept since I last saw him, and one of his shoes is untied.  “Hey.”  I give a sharp double whistle.  My chest tightens at how long it takes JD to look up at me.  “Anything you wanna tell me, Newbie?” JD shakes his head.  “No, sir.” Rating: M Word Count: 9590 My Thoughts: Another one that you’ll want to heed the tags on before reading, but protective Perry is one of my favorite Perrys.

(But I Want) To Go Home by JusteAmusant

Summary: “Newbie, finish that sentence and I swear to all the types of gods I’ll have you flat on your ass before you can say ‘Carla please come save me,’ capice?” “Flat on my ass that you want to spank,” I snicker. Dead silence next to me has me turning to face him, eyes wide.  “I… I mean um–” Dr. Cox’s face splits into a grin that has me unsure whether to laugh or run.  “See, Newbie?  Now you’re getting it.” That’s the scariest thing about Dr. Cox.  You never know when he’s messing with you, and when he’s dead serious on following through… Rating: M Word Count: 5986 My Thoughts: In the wise words of those kids in that one AT&T commercial: “WE WANT MORE, WE WANT MORE.” DADDY KINK Y’ALL

My talent, her bet, his awakened interest by BeyondMadness

Summary: Being a fourth year resident about to become a fully fledged doctor brings about a certain cockiness in JD that’s beginning to really irk those he works closely with.  Unfortunately for him the tables get tipped out of his favor which results in what is likely to be one of the most humiliating experiences of his life.  Or perhaps he should have done this years ago. Rating: E Word Count: 17,282 My Thoughts: Yeah, hi, so when I saw this get posted earlier this year I was a little skeptical because burlesque? Crossdressing? Perhaps not my typical cup of tea, but it ended up being so good and I feel bad that I was so doubtful at first!

My Ill-Advised Road Trip by lunarqueens

Summary: Perry Cox finds himself, yet again, reluctantly roped into what some might call a situation.  Except this time he’s on the road, in an RV, stuck in close confines with the world’s most annoying doctors.  One of whom he might, possibly, unfortunately be a little bit in love with. What could possibly go wrong, right? Rating: T Word Count: 11,397 My Thoughts: Still holding out hope that this one eventually gets completed some day!  I love this author and you’ll find a few works from them on my previous reclist from 2018.  So yeah, if you didn’t gather already, this one is unfinished at 2 out of 3 chapters posted, but it’s honestly still worth the read for the road trip shenanigans.

My Hypocritical Hippocrates by RumCove

Summary: JD makes a mistake.  A really big mistake.  A really dumb one that he should have absolutely avoided. Dr. Cox is, as usual, livid.  But for different reasons than usual and this one might just push him over the edge. Rating: E Word Count: 54,845 My Thoughts: A series of 4 works that are legit so good, I’ve literally lost track of how many times I’ve reread them.  The smut is also chef’s kiss along with everything else.

My Empty Rulebook (Working Title) by nikogio

Summary: I’m not really someone who lives by any particular rules.  In fact, I seem to have a basic aversion to most of them.  But there’s one rule I’ve long upheld, which, as long as I’ve had it, has been one hundred percent ironclad: No sex in the Porsche. Rating: M Word Count: 4311 My Thoughts: PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NIKOGIO, IF YOU SEE THIS, PLEASE FINISH THIS FIC, I’M BEGGING

My Dirty Imbecile by theOther_Will_Grayson

Summary: “Top surgery?” “You know, the titty chop.”  John does an exaggerated karate chop, paired with an uncoordinated kick.  “Whacha!” Turk doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or cry.  “Dude,” he says, more dead serious than he’s ever been in his life.  “I think we might be soulmates.” Rating: Not Rated Word Count: 7963 My Thoughts: It’s me, ya girl, back at it again with yet ANOTHER unfinished fic rec!! But trans JD is life and I’ll take anything I can get. Love that boy so much it’s stupid. This fic has actually been recently updated so there’s hope for us yet!

My New Perspective by RumCove

Summary: After a terrible accident, a doctor wakes up in Sacred Heart with no memory of who he is, who anyone else is or even why he’s the way he is.  Which is – basically – an asshole. And, since he doesn’t remember who anyone else is, why the hell is he so fixated on his annoying, whiny, girly doctor? Rating: E Word Count: 51,423 My Thoughts: Hello, I’d like to talk to you today about our lord and savior, RumCove.  Oh, you’ve heard of her?  What’s that?  I’ve recced literally all her other fics in this reclist?  Well, this time it’s an amnesia fic that hurts so good, so go read it right now immediately.

And now we’ve arrived at my favorite part of the reclist: shameless self-promotion!

My Leap of Faith by pcrrycox

Summary: JD, in his final semester of med school and preparing for his internship, signs up for an online dating site with the goal of finding friendship – or something more. Perry, recently divorced and being incessantly bullied by one of his best friends, also signs up for an online dating site with the goal of appeasing his aforementioned annoying best friend.  If anything else happens along the way, so be it. OR Two idiots fall for each other, all without ever having met in person. Rating: E Word Count: 42,659+ My Thoughts: This is my most current fic that I’m working on. Online dating AU, trans JD, smut, fluff, and angst?  What more could you want?  JK, but I do really love this one and the last chapter is going up on Sunday!

My Heavy Meddle by pcrrycox

Summary: In the midst of a breakdown, Perry goes to the only person who will listen.  It turns out to be the best decision he ever made. AKA: The boys get together and are blissfully happy until someone has to open their big mouth and ruin it. Rating: E Word Count: 23,475 My Thoughts: This puppy had been sitting on my old laptop since 2017, and I recently resurrected it, changed it way up, and made it into an actual story instead of just a oneshot.  It’s very different from what normally happens in a JDox getting-together fic, at least in terms of who presents a roadblock.

I’d Rather Be With You by pcrrycox

Summary: JD receives shocking news and the least likely person he expects to help him get through it turns out to be the perfect man for the job: Dr. Cox.  But between navigating missed signals, inopportune timing, and other very annoying complications, things don’t exactly go as planned for the two of them. Rating: T Word Count: 21,162 My Thoughts: Heed the tags, but also I immensely enjoyed writing this one.

What A Feeling by pcrrycox

Summary: Perry doesn’t do weddings and he definitely doesn’t do receptions.  Unless, of course, they involve an open bar and one slightly lost-looking Newbie. Rating: G Word Count: 2781 My Thoughts: I know I’m biased, but I feel like this is one of the cutest/sweetest lil fics I’ve ever written for these dumbasses.  I love them so much!

Matters of the Heart by pcrrycox

Summary: When JD suddenly suffers a cardiac arrest, it changes his and Perry’s lives forever. Rating: M Word Count: 17,200 My Thoughts: Okay, I realize I keep saying how much I enjoyed writing these fics, but this is one that I routinely go back to and can say, wow, I’m really proud of this.

Warm Blood by pcrrycox

Summary: Revenge is a powerful thing and exacting it can have grave consequences.  The supernatural was something JD never even thought to believe in – until it was too late not to believe. Rating: M Word Count: 20,934 My Thoughts: VAMPIRE AU VAMPIRE AU VAMPIRE AU

Everybody Wants Something From Me, You Just Want Me by pcrrycox

Summary: When Perry is getting pulled in every direction, he realizes that the only person who doesn’t want something from him has been right in front the whole time. Rating: G Word Count: 2783 My Thoughts: The things this Adele song did to me when I first heard it! I went back and reread this the other day and like. I’m really really happy with my characterization of Perry and his thoughts.

And before I go, here are some fics I have in the works! Let me know which one you’re most excited about!

An absolutely massive Ben x Perry fic that I’ve been slowly working on since December 2020

An established!JDox fic in which they’ve been having problems, but Perry finds JD in a horrible situation

Another established!JDox fic where JD gets in a car accident just days before their wedding

A Ben x JD x Perry angst!fic

A very basic idea for a sequel to my vampire!AU

A Neighbors!AU

A getting-together fic in which Perry has a heart attack

A fake relationship Ben x Perry fic

And an absolutely massive doc with even more fic/oneshot ideas (lots of smut lmao)

All of these are in various states of WIP-ness, from literally just a couple sentences of an idea to multiple written chapters.  Anyway, I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who’s still helping to keep this tiny little fandom alive, whether that’s by writing fic, reading/commenting/leaving kudos, yelling at me on anon, or putting up with my various manic reblog-sessions!

[ourbrokeninsanity]

Hulk/Reader SFW and NSFW Headcanons

Hulk is my bae. I spend too much time thinking about this so decided to share. No idea if these are any good or if anyone other than me even wants this but *shrugs*

SFW aka Hulk is a gift

Hulk is a tactile guy. If you’re ok with it, he tends to touch you a lot - a hand on your shoulder, an affectionate back pat, hugs, have you sitting in his lap or on his shoulder like an pirate’s parrot. It’s a way for him to show you affection, but also he just enjoys non-harmful touching - it’s a reminder to you but mostly himself that he can, in fact, touch people without hurting them. If you reciprocate, he’s over the moon. 

So, yeah, you’re probably going to spend a lot of time in his arms. Which is pretty great, as Hulk is warm and surprisingly cosy.

Dates tend to be non-traditional - very little going out to the movies or to a restaurant here, people just don’t react well and everything is tense and no fun. You don’t mind much, the two of you find other ways to have fun. Movie nights at home in comfy clothes with loads of snacks - what could be better? Other date ideas include: playing pranks on the other Avengers/Smashers, helping him train (ie Hulk showing off his strength for you), cooking together (Hulk is fond of spicy food - he is technically from New Mexico after all, and he is always happy to eat the evidence of botched recipes. Also he is the best at kneading bread. If a recipe calls for an ingredient to be smashed he is on it, which becomes an inside joke.)

Hulk isn’t the most eloquent guy, but he’s serious about relationship negotiation. Hulk is very aware of just how much bigger and stronger he is compared to you and how the outside world would view your relationship - he needs to know that he isn’t pushing your boundaries or making you uncomfortable. If you’re willing to initiate these conversations or help him clarify his viewpoint he’s grateful - he appreciates that you understand how important this is to him.

He is protective, sometimes very protective. He’ll let you fight your own battles but he is always going to be watching, ready to wade in if he has to/you ask him to. Frankly, anyone who messes with you is on his ‘to be smashed’ list. If someone, anyone, actually hurts you (especially physically - he has the same reaction to emotional hurt but is aware that smashing isn’t always the best response here - especially if the perpetrator is a friend or relative) then they’re getting smashed. Hard. He will then stick to your side like glue, offering affection, protection, comfort and reassurance until you bat him away. This applies whether you are a superhero yourself or not.

Hulk is super supportive. He’s great to vent to, able to offer supportive silence with affirming noises and/or increasingly ridiculous and violent smash offers depending on the subject of the ranting. You try not to do so too much, aware that Hulk has enough anger issues himself, no matter how well controlled. He supports your hobbies, even if he doesn’t understand them. He may not be the most vocal cheerleader, but you know that he supports you. Really enjoys watching you do/talk about the things you’re passionate about, he finds it really sweet. He also trusts you with his hobbies - you are the one person trusted with The Zoo (also he absolutely has a figurine of you, made after he introduced you to Glorian. It’s one of his favourites. You blush when you see it).

You will fight anybody who calls Hulk a monster or a beast. Hulk will try and pull you away, but inside he is super touched. Also, he admires your left hook - for such a small person you’re a pretty effective smasher. You also get annoyed when the other Avengers treat Hulk like smashing is all he is good at - you see a side of Hulk that not many others are aware of but you insist that it’s there to see, if people bothered.

He has quite a few nicknames for you: Tiny (no matter your size you are tiny to him, Little Smash(er), Pretty Girl/Boy/One (when he’s feeling playful or wants to see you blush).

Hulk is rather protective, and proud, of the fact that you’re his s/o. Not Banner’s, his. He cared about Betty, but she loved Bruce over Hulk, and really only loved Hulk as an extension of Bruce. You, on the other hand, care and love Hulk as his own person. That means the world to him. He repays you by seeing you as you are and loving the real you, rather than what others try to paint you as. Basically, Hulk is a literal gift and you don’t understand why the world can’t see that.

NSFW (such sin, but good sin)

I personally headcanon Hulk as demisexual. As such, you’ve been together for quite a while before sexual stuff gets broached. He just notices one day that he’s attracted to you, and is honestly a little mind-boggled; when did you become so sexy???? It takes him a little time to get used to. For a little while pretty much everything you do turns him on a little and he gets all flustered. He’s very glad that his thick green skin means that his blush isn’t very noticeable. 

Hulk doesn’t really have a preference for physical characteristics on a partner. Rather adorably though, once you’re together and he starts noticing you sexually, he tends to notice people who have your traits more, simply because they remind him of you. Not that he becomes attracted to them, he just notices certain traits that match or nearly match yours. 

So much negotiation. Hulk is so worried about hurting you, it takes a lot of discussion and reassurance from you before he’s ready to do much more than kiss you. For this reason, you initiate pretty much all sexy times at first. Eventually he becomes confident enough in himself and his knowledge of you (your body, your boundaries) to initiate.

Because of the huge amount of discussions, your sex life is a slow build thing, which just heightens your anticipation. Like pretty much all aspects of your relationship it’s non-traditional, based not on societal expectations but on what feels good and comfortable to you both. Because of this it is very, very good. You realise you may be spoiled and now ruined for any future sexual relationships, Hulk takes such good care of you.

You tend to be on top. It makes the size difference easier to manage, and lets Hulk relax a little. He’s not going to fall on you or accidentally crush you. You approve of anything that lets Hulk relax. 

Hulk is a gentle and enthusiastic lover. He is super responsive to you and enjoys instruction. Tell him what you like, guide him, beg him and just watch him light up as he gets to it. It is quite possible that your first sexual foray started out as a make-out session where you pointed out how much you like his size (”your forearms are works of art, big guy. I could get off against that wrist.”) where you precede to do just that. Hulk has a Thing about you masturbating on him, whether that’s you fingering yourself/jacking off whist you’re sat on his lap or humping his arm/thigh. 

Unless you have some shapeshifting/sizeshifting/magic of some sort, penile penetration just isn’t going to be a thing, he’s far too big. Frottage is a large part of your sexual repertoire - but as you will smugly tell anyone who asks, penetration is over-rated. Hulk does not find this at all frustrating - he’d never want to do something that would risk harming you. Also his focus is on making you feel good over making you cum/orgasm - and it’s really nice that he takes the pressure off (especially if you’re female-bodied).

The absolute king of oral (fight me on this). Hulk loves going down on you, absolutely loves it. It turns him on (loves the smell and taste of you, and the noises you make, yes, give him more) and soothes his ego - see he isn’t just a monster he is also a beast in the bedroom who can make you sound like that. Whether you’re on your back or riding his face he loves it. He will totally sling your legs over his shoulders and effortlessly hold you up as he goes down on you - oral sex + showing off his strength = win. Sexual episodes where he doesn’t go down on you at some point are pretty rare, honestly. You learn some tricks to reciprocate but Hulk honestly prefers giving over receiving. He gets of on getting you off.

Also the king of making out, once you get used to the size difference (honestly you are starting to realise you may have a size kink). Lying on him, mouths locked together, scraping your nails against his scalp as you grind down on his bulk = the best way to spend a lazy afternoon. 10/10.

His fingers are the same size of other guys dicks. Do with this information what you will. 

Hulk lowkey has a praise kink. He doesn’t accept a lot of praise outside the bedroom but you notice that once you’re getting down and dirty he just soaks it up, so you keep giving it to him. Tell him how good he’s doing and he just gets even more enthusiastic.

He also likes some sensation play, which you figure out after witnessing his reaction to you wearing velvet. This leads to you incorporating different fabrics and textures in the bedroom - Hulk is pretty open to experimentation (your whole relationship has been pretty experimental really, figuring out what you both want and can give each other) as long as he doesn’t feel like an experiment and it doesn’t risk hurting you). Velvet is a favourite of his. 

He enjoys bathing with you. Showers can be a little awkward as he’s so much bigger, but if you have a tub large enough he’s pretty much always down to bathe with you. He loves the warm water and skin contact. He’s very relaxed and playful in the bath. Will both splash you and wash your back. Great bath buddy.

Hulk lowkey enjoys feeling you struggle against his strength. He’s not consciously aware of this, and would likely be horrified if he was - it screams harmful dominance, monster, to him because of his experiences. You are aware of it. And enjoy it. You know him using one hand to hold to hold your hips still as he gets you off (so you don’t get carried away and hurt yourself, he justifies) and enjoying the feel of you writhing and bucking against it, is a whole world away from forcing someone down to hurt them. 

[daggerzine]

R.E. Seraphin molds tiny shapes into big songs.

Though he’s been on the scene for a while now (with different bands) I hadn’t heard the music of Bay Area musician R.E. “Ray” Seraphin until this year via a cassette called Tiny Shapes via Paisley Shirt Records (more on the label below). His first real band was Talkies, which he discusses below (and I have enjoyed), but he seems to have really come into his own this year with that cassette and a new EP, A Room Forever, which came out just a month or so ago. In his music you’ll hear influences of 80’s jangle pop as well as some deeper post-punk stuff (and for more current stuff I hear whispers of Dean Wareham and his bands and Wild Nothing). Reading below he seems very well grounded and seems to have a great attitude about everything (even not being able to play shows during a pandemic or being in a writing slump). I think once this is all over this guy will go on 5-year tour and gain lots and lots of new fans. In the meantime do check out his stuff, you won’t be disappointed.

   Where did you grow up?

Berkeley, CA. The area I grew up in was filled with Victorian homes and dilapidated industrial warehouses. My family home was walking distance from a lagoon and an old, rusty set of train tracks. I felt I lived in an unremarkable college town. There wasn't much activity outside of the school. I discovered Berkeley’s storied political and musical history much later in life. Now, of course, there are many books written about Berkeley, but I thought it was a kinda nondescript city as a kid.

 Do you remember what band made you fall in love with music?

Dating myself hard here, but I remember being floored by The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl” video when I was 11. The Top 40 music making the rounds on VH1 and MTV at the time was beyond dreck — a lot of Train, Staind, Matchbox 20. The White Stripes were the first band I was exposed to that made succinct, catchy, no-frills music. I was genuinely enthralled. Plus, the Lego animation in that video still holds up.

 Was guitar your first instrument?

I started on bass. My first instrument was an extremely cheap, pointy BC Rich knockoff monstrosity. I believe I was 13. I had no idea how to play and little interest in learning. For the first year, I putzed around with a Pro Co RAT, a wah pedal, and a tinny-sounding Crate practice amp. I just tried (and succeeded in) being as obnoxious as possible. When I started writing songs, I eventually graduated from playing bass poorly to playing guitar poorly.

 Tell us about your first band.

My first band that played shows was called The Phil Spector Shotgun Experience. That was primarily a cover band I put together with my high school buddies and my mom. We covered Radio Birdman, the Pink Fairies, and the MC5; we also had an unwittingly hilarious original called “Nitroglycerin Man” — the first song I ever wrote (maybe I was subconsciously inspired by Wages of Fear). At some point, we kicked my mom out of the band and started playing as the Impediments. That band kicked ass — we made pridefully dumb American punk music. That was also my only band to sign a record contract, so it’s quite possibly been downhill from there!

 Tell us about The Talkies (unless that was your first band mentioned above).

Talkies (no article!) was a group I started in 2014 as a vehicle for my songs. My previous bands had been more of a shared vision, so Talkies was my first foray into being the lone genius of a group. The sound was mostly drawn from what is disparagingly known as power pop. Basically, I was heavily into the band Shoes for a few years.

We released a few albums and EPs. Did a couple short tours. During that time, the project was dragged from the Bay Area to Austin and back before I finally, mercifully pulled the plug last year. It was time.

 When did you transition from Talkies to the solo stuff you’re doing now? Did it feel comfortable?

Talkies had run its course, but I had a smattering of songs leftover from that project that I wanted to record. Around that time, I learned my good friend Jasper Leach (Burner Herzog) was getting ready to skip town. I had always wanted to work with him and, seizing my final opportunity to do so, we banged out my début, Tiny Shapes, last summer. The whole experience was fairly serendipitous. The stars aligned for that one.

I wouldn't say the process was comfortable. Recording the album felt necessary, urgent — almost compulsory at times. My heart was ready for a new project and I truly wanted to center myself for the first time. I’m glad I did. This is the happiest I’ve been musically in some time.

 “I think therefore I am”

I love the songs on A Room Forever. How did they come together?

So glad to hear that! I got asked to contribute to a compilation back in April. With the deadline approaching and inspiration still eluding me, I took a glance at my bookshelf, noticed a particular Carson McCullers title, and whipped up “Clock Without Hands.” After my trusty collaborator Owen Adair Kelley added his parts, I felt we had stumbled upon a great sound. I tried to harness the creative spirit and pushed myself to finish a few ideas buried deep in the recesses of my Voice Memo app. I got friends Matt Bullimore (The Mantles) and Yea-Ming Chen (Yea-Ming & The Rumors) involved, and that was that. No great origin story — just pure American ingenuity and elbow grease.

 Tell us about Paisley Shirt Records. Who runs it and how did you hook up with them?

Paisley Shirt Records is simply the man, the myth, the legend — Kevin Linn. He is a San Francisco-based musician and artist who records as Sad-Eyed Beatniks.

I met him when I was looking for someone to release my album, Tiny Shapes. He had just put out a tape by Hits — a great local band featuring some friends of mine — and I felt a kinship with his roster. So, I reached out to him. Foolishly, he agreed to put out my album and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Solid dude. High marks.

 Have you done any solo tours? If so where and how did they go?

Ha! No. I had only notched two shows as R.E. Seraphin before the pandemic hit. Likely not doing anything beyond the odd live-stream show for a while. That said, if any tastemaking European touring agencies are reading this — give me a ring!

The latest EP

 What are your top 10 desert island discs?

Ah, jeez. This question. I’ll just say these are 10 (plus one) that I come back to quite often. In no order:

 Marquee Moon by Television

The Everly Brothers’ Best

Forever Changes by Love

Let it Be by The Replacements

Third/Sister Lovers by Big Star

The First Songs by Laura Nyro

16 Lovers Lane by The Go-Betweens

In a Silent Way by Miles Davis

A Different Kind of Tension by Buzzcocks

Something Else by The Kinks

Old No. 1 by Guy Clark

 What are a few Bay Area bands that we should know about.

This is a golden-era for weirdo pop music in the Bay. To name just a few: Galore, Cindy, The Umbrellas, Tony Jay, Flowertown, Healing Potpourri, Latitude, Cocktails, The Reds, Pinks, & Purples, Yea-Ming & The Rumors, Anna Hillburg, the 1981, Toner, Frank Ene, Neutrals, Owen Adair Kelley, April Magazine, Telephone Numbers, Hits, Sad-Eyed Beatniks. Essentially every act associated with Paisley Shirt Records and/or Mt.St.Mtn. My bias is strong.

 Do you feel that the pandemic has helped your songwriting or hindered it (if either)?

A li’l column A, a li’l column B. I’m a natural procrastinator, so I’ve definitely savored the lack of band practice and shows (things that often necessitate new material). That said, I doubt I would have finished A Room Forever had I not been quarantined at home. Without having many obligations and without being able to leave my house, music definitely became my raison d’être for the first time as an adult. I was fortunate to not be deemed an “essential” worker and to be able to focus energy on my passion momentarily. Silver lining.

 What’s next ? A new record by the end of the year possibly?

Hopefully continuing to promote my music and play shows on the ol’ webiverse. A Room Forever will be receiving a small vinyl and tape pressing at the end of September via Mt.St.Mtn. and Paisley Shirt Records. So, looking forward to that.

I was creatively tapped for a few months after A Room Forever. While a new album is possible, it’s not probable. I am plugging away at a few tunes, but I tend to conceptualize albums as a thematic whole and not as a collection of songs. Haven't stumbled onto my next Big Idea yet. Don't count me out, though. I could see myself dashing off a covers album for sure.

 What is one song you wish you’d written?

Too many to name! I’ll reframe that question to mean a great song I could see myself capable of writing in an alternate time, place, or dimension. Maybe one of Peter Holsapple’s songs from The dB’s — “Black & White” or “Neverland.” Also: anything by Wreckless Eric or Martin Newell.

 Final thoughts? Closing comments?

Just finished reading an interview with the great James Purdy, and thought this quote summed up iur current political climate well:

“You go out into the world and no one knows you, you can be ruled because you’re programmed. Everything is stamped, put on the shelf, described, thrown out into the garbage. It’s a political process, and behind that an economic process. But to be nothing, that is the worst of all possible things.”

   www.reseraphin.com

www.paisleyshirtrecords.bandcamp.com

[thewritingcaptain]

the Spider-Man: Introduction: The Buildup

Full story on AO3 (Smidget) and FF (CaptainS10).

Summary:  A novel version of Spider-Man's journey in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from shortly after he was bitten through all of the movies.

Note: Hello, Marvel fans! So this is my first foray into the world of MCU fanfiction, and I'm super excited! I have been wanting to write something for this fandom for a long time, but I felt like I didn't have any decent ideas. This one came to me on a whim yesterday, after chasing scenes from the two Spider-Man movies in my head around for days that I really liked. Why not do a novel retelling of the movies? I have no diea if it's been done before for this fandom, although I realize it likely has been; but one can never get enough of something they love, right?

I'm starting with Spider-Man for a few reasons. A, because I've always loved Spider-Man, and I had always wanted to write something for him anyway. B, because I recently saw both of the new MCU Spidey movies, so they were fresh in my brain. C, because I'm still recovering from Endgame, and I'm desperately craving to write some Tony Stark and Peter Parker scenes.

So yeah! This will follow the canon of the movies pretty closely, but it's not going to be a carbon copy of it either. I will keep major story and major conversations the same in their essence, but I'm hoping to fill in some of the missing pieces of things in the MCU and give us some more of what we want to see. I do hope to do at least a few of these - Iron Man is next on my list to try - and while each will include bits and pieces of other characters, the main ones will be the main POV focus for each. Surely there will be some crossover later, but I'll sort that out when we get there.This has been a long author's note, so sorry! If you're here to check this out, then thank you, and please enjoy! <3

Story below the cut! 

INTRODUCTION: THE BUILDUP

Everything seemed… grey.

For weeks after the funeral, things seemed out of focus. The only time it ever seemed in focus was when the pain hit, and he couldn’t deal with it, not for long. So he didn’t. He let things slip out of focus, instead of fighting it. Everything that was happening was unimportant now. Even his stupid powers.

Those powers he’d gotten - oh, he didn’t even want to think about them. They were the source of this issue, without a doubt. If he hadn’t been so distracted messing with them, reveling in them instead of trying to figure them out and put them to good use, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe it still would have, but maybe he’d have actually had a shot at stopping it. Maybe he at least would have seen it coming. Maybe he could have done something, at least, or tried to. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel so guilty. 

It was worse, of course, because it wasn’t just him. No - death rarely ever left only one hurting person in its path. Just as it had been when it was his parents, his aunt was also left behind to suffer. Only this time, the person who had helped her through it was the one that had died. Now they were the only people they both had left, and yet… Oh, he wanted to help her. He wanted to ease her pain, so badly, but he couldn’t even ease his own. 

In the aftermath of it, and in the weeks after the funeral, things were just grey. And not just for Peter Parker; the loss of his uncle was hard on his aunt, too. And while he knew that the whole time, it wasn’t until the night that he heard her weeping from her own room, quietly, trying to cover her pain for him, to help him, that he realized how big of a mess he’d been. And then he realized he needed to fix it.

He wasn’t the only one mourning. And doubtless, he wasn’t the only one who had ever mourned like this, either. His scenario was a wretched one, at times, but he was far from the only one who’d ever experienced anything like this. Seeing his aunt mourn was enough to remind him of that. 

Seeing her pain was enough to dull his. It was enough to bring the world back into focus. That included making him face the amount of pain he was in, and the thoughts that accompanied it, rational or not. But his mind was sharp, as it always had been; and he knew enough to know, when he was thinking clearly, what lines of thought were rational, and what ones were not. 

And despite it all, the one that had stuck with him, the one that bothered him the most, was oddly the most rational of them all. He may not have been able to stop his uncle’s death either way, but part of the reason he was so upset by it was that he had a chance to, if he’d only stepped up to the plate. And from that realization came a determination: he needed to step up to the plate. He had these powers now, like it or not. He had to decide how to use them. 

It didn’t take long to come to a decision. So long as he had these powers, he had a responsibility to use them. And that meant to him that no one around him would ever feel like this again if he could help it. His reach may not have extended the world over, and he may still have other things to do, and other obligations to attend to, but this would become number one if he could help it. Number two, perhaps, if he absolutely couldn’t. 

And so he stepped up to the plate. His grades, which had slipped to minimal while he was in his practically catatonic state, went back up, as high as they ever were. He came back out of his shell; he took the time to catch up with his old friends - or old friend, specifically, as fate would have it - and with his aunt, talking with her, trying to work through things, He knew it was still painful for her, but she was managing. She was handling it all better than he ever did. To think she had lost everyone she’d ever cared about and managed to go on like this… Hell, he’d got bitten by a genetically altered spider and went off the rails for a while. His uncle died, and he completely lost his mind, for a lot longer than a while. And then there was her, taking it all in stride.

That was the difference between an adult and a child, he supposed. Perhaps next time he would be able to handle it like an adult.

He shook the thought away. There wouldn’t be a next time. He wouldn’t let it happen again. 

Anger became his drive. Pain became his fuel. 

And that’s when the hero began to form. 

~~~

By the second month after the funeral - three months since he’d been bitten and discovered he was getting strange capabilities - he had started to work out the kinks in this whole hero thing. 

For one thing, he’d finally started to come into his powers. He kept discovering more things he could do as he went. 

The first one he’d discovered, invariably, as it had developed on its own and was near impossible to miss, was his heightened senses. He suspected they had been heightening over time, a simple way his body had changed after the bite, in response to whatever the hell it was it had actually given him. He didn’t experience the full height of these new senses until after he’d came to from his grief, so to speak. He’d been catatonic, and his pain had literally taken the world out of focus, dulling everything, including his senses. When he got them back at what should have been normal, full capacity, they were much stronger than he remembered. The only logical conclusion was that they were. 

The next few showed up in quick succession. He again suspected that these had been developing before, but due to him being catatonic, he rarely was in a scenario where he may have accidentally used them, and even when he did, he was too out of it to notice. When he settled back into the real world, he began to realize how often he would run into things, or grip something too hard and leave a dent in it. Super strength, agility, speed, and even the ability to heal cuts and bruises quicker. He knew these couldn’t just be in his head, because he’d never seen anyone crush their door handle like a crumpled wad of paper, or stab a fork through a plate and into the table when they tried to spear a bite of macaroni and cheese a bit too hard. Both of those were fun to hide from his aunt. 

The last one was rather unusual, but not to say useless. It showed itself in a rather weird way as well. He didn’t often go outside at night, so it was no surprise that night vision was both a shock and a late revelation to his list of powers. But there was no other explanation for how clearly he saw things in the dark dead of the night. In retrospect, maybe he should have expected that with his heightened senses, but it was still an odd experience when it happened. 

Armed with these powers and all the knowledge he possessed, he also spent this time to work on the making of some sort of suit. Every hero had to have a suit. Even Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, still had one, despite revealing his identity years before. And Peter wasn’t so sure how he felt on that front; keeping it a secret seemed a better idea for now, not least of all because if his aunt found out… well, it was likely his vigilante days wouldn’t last very long, to say the least. She didn’t need that extra stress in her life right now, anyways. 

So he knew he needed a suit, and a name. He could always try for something sophisticated, something to make him sound smart, like he was worthy of trust and leadership, but… well, he also knew he needed to keep it simple enough to be recognized, and he was still a kid, regardless. He could sound as cool as he wanted, but it meant nothing if he couldn’t back it up. And right now he had nothing but basic superhero powers. He had nothing to set him apart, nothing to make him worthy of trust or leadership even if he claimed it, and worst of all, he had no experience. He had nothing to back any fancy-sounding name or costume up.

In the end, he had to keep it simple. He had to stick with something he could do, and a name he could back up. And what better way to stay true to his roots than to go with a name related to what gave him his powers in the first place? Besides, a spider-like costume would be easy enough to make. Some colors and some stripes - he couldn’t go all one color; he didn’t want to seem like he was ripping off the only other spider-related hero there was - and he would be all set. He could do some basic sewing. It just wouldn’t be fancy. 

And of course, every hero needed a signature, something to be known by. For him, that was easy. He was a spider-man; he would have webs. He went to a science and technical school; he had access to everything he needed to make them. 

By the end of that second month after the funeral - the end of his third month coming in to his powers - he had everything he needed. A suit, basic control over his powers, some rudimentary webs… he’d even quit the robotics team to make the time to practice and work on actually doing this whole superhero thing. He was set. 

And so Spider-Man, officially, was born.

~~~

End Note: So, I know the Russo brothers decided doing a retelling of his story of becoming Spider-Man and all that was redundant, but I wanted to explore a little of what made this particular version of Spider-Man tick, and I also wanted to do some sort of intro before just jumping right in to the story. And I know this chapter seemed a bit distanced - I did that on purpose. From here it will actually be from Peter's perspective (though still third person).

From here, after perhaps a chapter of Spidey doing his thing, we'll go in to the MCU versions, starting with Civil War as that's canonically his first appearance. I hope to upload this on a schedule, probably a chapter two days a week if possible, but we'll see how it goes at first before I set it in stone. And if you liked this and are interested in seeing more of this, then great, and thank you for reading!

[troiings]

"perfect twin arcs, curving toward one another, red and sore against the meat of Pippa's shoulder, just above her collarbone. It takes her several seconds to process that the marks are from a bite, and another horrifying moment to accept and understand that they are from her own teeth, her mouth. Bitter treason against Pippa's body, her perfect skin, an affront to the sweetness of her, a betrayal of all her own self-control."

ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT under a cut for sex stuff lol good times w/ the fic with narry a sfw paragraph!!!

so this is not their first time together; they’ve developed some level of comfort and recognition of each others’ unspoken signals, that kind of thing. so they’re still learning each other, but it’s not fumbling first times or anything like that.

and it’s not really about biting at all, because like… Hecate literally nipped at Pippa’s thigh a little earlier on in the fic. but it wasn’t hard, it was sort of absent-minded; they’ve probably nipped and nibbled at each other a lot at this point as part of foreplay etc, but it’s never been with the intent of marking or creating a pain response. basically, this is kinda their first real foray into kink, and it sorta happens accidentally (to recap for those in the back, Hecate had such a mind-numbing orgasm she saw stars and bit the shit out of Pippa’s shoulder without realizing what she was doing. ‘cause Pippa gives orgasms that good, all the time. thanks for coming to my TED talk.)

what’s happening here is framed as a crime against Pippa - the undercurrent of thought being that Hecate is the traitor, the villain, the betrayer. she doesn’t even take a hot second to think about whether or not she liked it; she instead gets immediately caught up in the fact that she did this to Pippa, which is accompanied by the unspoken assumption that Pippa is this bright and pure and ethereal being who would never ever like this… and also functions on the unspoken assumption that Pippa wouldn’t say that something bothered her?

like basically Hecate’s relationship with sex is very… limited and problematic. she’s learning, with Pippa, but there’s also a lot of unlearning to do.

so Hecate freaks the hell out because she’s done this to Pippa, but Pippa takes it in stride and just moves on with the interaction.

i like to think that Pippa does 100% realize what Hecate is thinking though, that she’s sort of unintentionally set Pippa up as the victim in this situation by setting herself as the instigator and.. .i’m not really sure how to phrase all this, but the point is Pippa recognizes the problematic nature of it but also realizes now isn’t the time to talk about it. like, for one, she’s having a lot of fun and wants to show Hecate that assumptions are silly things and communication is always, always key, but second she needs to give Hecate some time to chill and mellow out and let it all sink in. i definitely imagine that later on they had a conversation about communication, in which among other things Pippa is really blunt in sharing that if she ever dislikes something she’ll say it, just as readily as she shares that she likes things, and she really expects the same from Hecate. it’s a good, frank conversation, if a little stilted on Hecate’s end, but it’s an important one and they both recognize it as such. and not only does it resolve the issue at hand, but it allows a smoother segue into later conversations about things they might like to try, etc.

[auramaydaydreaming]

Favorite MM Romance Books: Caught Running

Caught Running by Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux was my first foray into proper published MM that did not read completely like bad fanfiction, and I have to say, I could not have made a better pick.

Spoiler free review:

The book follows Jake and Brandon - former schoolmates, who years later ended up teaching at their old school. In youth, Jake was the popular jock, while Brandon was a typical nerd, but beneath their cliche exteriors both men had more to them than the stereotypes they appeared to embody. Nonetheless, the strict social dynamics of highschool life kept them from discovering each other. Until now.

The characters of Jake and Brandon were an absolute joy to read. They were definitely based on tropes, and even the way they weren’t really as one sided as they seemed was a bit on the cliche side. However, their little personal quirks and *gasp* actual personality traits really did make them extraordinarily compelling characters. At least for the genre. And they seemed to adapt to their situations in realistic patterns, which definitely added to the raw feel of the book.

Jake especially surprised me. That man felt alive. The way he portrayed himself, as well as his rather dark struggles, it all seemed like a real person’s life, a real person’s story. This may have been because his motivations did not merely make logical sense, but psychological sense as well. You could tell why he acted the way he did, why he made the choices he did, even if some of them weren’t exactly optimal, and that definitely added to the realism of his character.

Brandon had a similar charm as well, even if I didn’t feel the same connection to him. He was also a person in his own right. Just maybe not quite as interesting as Jake, in my opinion. Either way, both MCs were extremely likable.

The side characters, though, could have used a bit more work. Don’t get me wrong, the story was by no means set in a vacuum, and I was actually rather impressed by how the teacher’s jobs didn’t take a complete back seat as their romance came to the forefront. But there was definitely a lack of important side cast. Though Jake’s friends were cool and the limited characterization they got was enough to make me feel at least a smidgen of connection with them (nice job to the authors on that one), one character in particular stood out as not only a complete cliche, but an unnecessary headache as well. She was only there to build cheap tension the book really didn’t need and I would have honestly preferred the book without her. It’s quite ironic, actually. She seemed to be written in as the biggest nuisance in the story and ended up the biggest nuisance to my enjoyment of the book.

Another qualm I have with the writing, especially prominent and rather distracting in the beginning, were the POV shifts. They were constant and had no warning whatsoever. This made some parts rather confusing and required me to reread paragraphs just to understand who was talking more than once. I wish the author had done a better job signaling these, as that would have made the book flow 100x smoother. That being said, beyond the first couple chapters, where you still don’t know the characters or their situation, and that one absolutely incomprehensible scene where the MCs are each talking to a different set of extras across the room from each other (why, authors, why did you do this), the book flows fine later on. It’s just a matter of getting used to it, and though it can be hard to slog through the first fifth because of it, trust me, it’s worth it.

Before we move on to talking about the romance and the smutty smutty times in the second part of the book, I want to quickly address something else that could turn away some readers, and that is the baseball talk. A lot of this book is centered on highschool baseball. Now, I have never played baseball and know nothing about the game, so if I enjoyed this book, anyone can. That being said, if you’re a newbie like myself, you’ll either have to do a lot of googling, or just accept that you won’t be able to understand some parts in full. The story does still make sense and you can understand a lot from context cues, but do be aware of this.

Okay, now we can move on to something more exciting: the ROMANCE.

Brandon and Jake were super freaking sweet. You could really feel their connection build organically from the very first page and the way it shifted from colleagues to friends and finally to something more was just an absolute dream to read. One of my favorite things about their relationship was how clear it was why they liked each other. This wasn’t a case of Twilight-esque instalove. No, these men were both amazing in their own right, and only when they saw each other for just how amazing they were did they start having feelings. And that was simply perfection. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have the reason people fall in love be because they see something great in one another that others cannot. I love that. It’s almost like an acknowledgement, a validation of their character, and it creates an extremely deep bond. You can really feel that they were special and different to each other because the reason they fell in love was due to understanding, knowing, and appreciating the other more than anyone else could. It’s honestly beautiful.

Furthermore, the way they approached each other felt more real than I had ever experienced in a book (or fanfic) before. It was so real. So, so real. I cannot explain to you just how raw and realistic the romance in this book appeared, so I will just leave you with this: they didn’t act like toddlers and they didn’t act like robots. They acted like real people with real worries, jobs, responsibilities, and absolutely irresistible feelings they just had to act on, even if cautiously, even if they had to feel each other out beforehand, and oh man it was a fantastic read.

And there was definitely some sexual tension there as well, which turned electric in the later chapters, and that brings me to a part we’ve all been waiting for: the SMUT

OH BOY THE SMUT

OH MAN

OH JESUS

The smut was glorious.

There wasn’t a lot of kink or anything like that, and for my taste it was all pretty vanilla, but the sheer amount of tension and emotion built up slowly throughout the whole first half of the book (yes, this baby’s a slow one) definitely paid off in spades. It was shiver-inducing. And there was a lot of it. Like, a lot. If you feel like the book isn’t sexy enough in the first half, do not fret. The second half is smut after smut after smut, and oh boy do we love to see it. Those men are smexy and lovely and Jake was so seductive and passionate and fiery and ajksdhgkjshdka and Brandon was also cute and took initiative and imma stop talking but just know it’s really good.

So yeah *clears throat* final thoughts.

Go read this book.

Fan of MM? Go read this book.

Fan of sweeter than life romance? Go read this book.

Fan of compelling characters? Go read this book

Fan of fun and passionate smut? Go  read  this  book.

And if you have read this book, or perhaps want it spoiled for you for some God-forsaken reason, here are my thoughts including spoilers.

Spoiler-filled thoughts:

Jake’s pill problem was resolved a bit cheaply. I do think it was handled well in the beginning of its resolution, but they kind of dropped the ball later on, or should I say they dropped the storyline. I did find the way Brandon helped him handle it quite sweet and not too far-fetched. But the fact that it was never really addressed again shows either a lack of importance that is inappropriate for something so serious, or implies the issue was solved just like that, which is plain unrealistic.

Furthermore, the resolution with Misty was just kind of sad. No, scratch that, Misty’s whole storyline was sad. I thought she was going to be a genuine problem at the start. I thought she would find out and expose them at a terrible time or something, and I was waiting for her to actually become an effective villain, but she just... never did. I have no idea why they put her in the story.

Finally, the ending was too smol. I wanted more. I really, truly wanted so much more than one friend of Jack’s finding out about them. I mean, homophobia was a bit of a theme in this book, so to have the whole resolution be that was just unsatisfying. Paired with the supremely easy and kinda stupid plot with Misty that went nowhere, as well as the weak resolution with the pills, the story almost feels like it was cut off abruptly in the middle. Nothing really got resolved outside the romantic and sexual tension. And don’t get me wrong, it could have been much worse, but it’s just a little annoying is all.

Personal thoughts (ft spoilers):

I am a HUGE sucker for the “we knew each other in childhood, didn’t meet for years, and then rediscovered one another and fell in love” trope. And while this story wasn’t exactly that, considering Brandon and Jake weren’t that familiar with each other back then, it still brought some delicious reminiscence and slight, almost rueful angst into the mix. Loved it.

Loved the descriptions of how Jake saw Brandon from his POV and the way Jake moved in Brandon’s POV (eg. stalked, prowled...). Made him seem super ultra passionate and instantly brought a vibrant image to my mind. Brandon calling him “Thundercat” was also great. It was freaking cute and worked for the characters.

Liked that there wasn’t a too obvious fem/masc dynamic. Made the boys feel real and unique.

Loved Jake far too much and Brandon was adorable. This whole book was just fantastic and they carried it on their broad shoulders with ease.

Do I recommend: YES

Score: 8.5/10

Verdict: Great book with fantastic characters, a sweet and realistic romance, smexy smut, and some not insignificant, but not insurmountable issues specifically to do with side characters and certain plots. Worthy of a READ IT ASAP

[hailqiqi]

End of Year Fic Meme

I wasn’t tagged, unless you count those ‘and anybody who wants to do it!’ tags. But I saw this and wanted to do it and I want to see what the people I tag reply with so god-damn-it I am doing it.

Under the cut ‘cause it’s long as heck.

Stats:

List of Fics Posted:

Smile

Shallura Drabble

The Good Type of Snitch

The Choices We Make, The Lives We Lead

Quiet Shimmers in the Snow

The Future in Snippets

 Total number: 6 Total word count: 17,114

Ship/character breakdown: Smile – Kataang - Katara POV

Shallura – Allura POV

Snitch – Pidgance – Pidge POV

Choices – Pidgance – Lance POV

Shimmers – Pidgance – Lance/Pidge/Lance POV

Snippets – Pidgance – Pidge POV

Characters that had the main focus:

I think Pidge edges Lance out for POVs, but not by much.

Specifics:

Best/worst title? Best title:  The Good Type of Snitch. Worst title:  The Future in Snippets (by far. What was I thinking.)

Best/worst first line?

Best: “The market was beside one of the most spectacular ice rinks Lance had ever seen.”

Worst:  Oooh, a toss up between “The ruckus of a hundred students finding and settling into seats reverberates throughout the hall and hits Katara like a shockwave, making her stop just inside the door.” (wordy much?) and “Pidge grumbled under her breath as she shuffled down the hall to her hanger.” (omg how did I miss a misspelling in the first line)

Best/worst last line?

Best:  “The warmth in her chest had nothing to do with the jacket.”  But I feel like “And the Ambassador certainly won’t notice they’re missing - at least not while he’s passed out underneath the canape table.” should come in second here.

Worst: So 4/6 fics end with some version of ‘he/she said ‘Okay’.’  Worst line goes to “C’mon then. Let’s go on a date!” which was written in purely to avoid him saying ‘Okay’.

General questions:

Looking back, did you write more fics than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted? Well, I intended to do 6 for Kataang Week and I did …only 1… but 5 others. So hmm.  I definitely wasn’t expecting to write for anything else, I haven’t written fic for fun in about 15 years so it was a nice change!!!  Big thanks to Morie @octaviainthewasteland for getting me back into this.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year? Pairing: Pidgance Genre: NSFW Fandom: Voltron, I suppose? What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest. The Choices We Make, The Lives We Lead. Which is ironically my least popular pidgance story by miles.

Okay, NOW your most popular story.

By Comments: The Future in Snippets By kudos: The Good Type of Snitch By hits: Quiet Shimmers in the Snow

(See? Choices gets no love!) Story most underappreciated by the universe? Choices! I dunno why, I really like the atmosphere of it. It draws me in every time I read it. Story that could have been better? Smile, definitely. That was the first thing I wrote this year after a year of writing nothing (I participated a bit in Kataang Week last year just because there needs to be more people in it) and you can definitely tell my writing needed polishing.

Quiet Shimmers in the Snow annoys me, tbh. When I sat down to write it I thought ‘fuck logic, let’s just have fun and be happy’ and created this big romantic world but the thought that ‘there isn’t really a story here to tell’ always niggles at me. It’s probably what makes it so hard to write. Sexiest story? Snippets. Though there’s really not enough sex considering it was meant to be NSFW practice. Saddest story? I don’t really do sad. Choices, maybe? Most fun? Shimmers.  It’s a first date with alien ice skating, fairies and Christmas markets. C’mon. Story with single sweetest moment? Smile

“That means the pretty girl must be looking at him again.

He looks around, a grin already forming on his lips, expecting her to jump and duck her head like she always does. But this time bright blue eyes meet his gaze head-on and he feels the breath leave his lungs in a sudden woosh. Her hair tumbles over her shoulders and a deep red blush spreads over her dark complexion. How did he ever look away from her before?

He feels light-headed. The pretty girl isn’t pretty. She’s beautiful.

She lifts a hand and waves, a small smile spreading shyly across her lips. He smiles back, warmth filling his chest, and then the lecturer calls for everyone to pay attention and the moment is gone.”

Writing about The Sweeties means sweetness is always coming. I love it.

 Hardest story to write? Both Smile and the Shallura drabble, I think. I was doing both more out of obligation than a real inspiration to write (unfortunately I only seem to obsess about one thing at a time). Quiet Shimmers in the Snow has been giving me a heap of trouble past the first chapter, too (really it was meant to be a one-shot, but Misty insisted that I needed to have them actually ice-skate so I thought I’d shoe-horn a few other tumblr prompts into it).

What I’m getting from this question is that anything I’m not writing specifically and solely because I want to write it is hard to write.

Easiest/most fun story to write? The Good Type of Snitch. That was a hell of a lot of fun.

Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters? Nah, none of my writing’s that deep, fam.  It’s all fluff and funsies.

Most overdue story? Uh, probably Quiet Shimmers in the Snow since it’s made up of tumblr prompts from like… 3 months ago??

Smile is also part 1 of 5? 6?.  Part 2 is sitting finished, Part 3 is like half-way done. Kataang Week was back in July!  ( @chel-burr do you still wanna tackle the rest of them?)

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them? Starting writing again, just in general! Snitch was a huge risk because it was my first foray into writing again and also written as a birthday surprise for someone who’s writing I admire immensely ( @octaviainthewasteland , looking at you here!). I was actually a little nervous about that because Morie’s stuff is always so well-thought-out with expansive settings and twists and emotions and mine is like...fluff with two people talking.  I suppose I learnt that I enjoy writing, people enjoy reading my rubbish, and that people always enjoy surprise birthday fics?

Snippets is another big risk – it wasn’t planned when I started, and I just kind of randomly decided that I needed to learn to write NSFW so…there we go. The plot came after the first chapter. I learnt that emotional context is what really makes a smut scene go, that people really like NSFW stuff and interact with it more (this is the only one of my fics that people interact with me on tumblr about), that I actually need to learn to write group dialogue, and that I really can’t stick to angst to save my fucking life because despite my careful planning my head keeps going YOU CAN MAKE THEM HAPPY NOW JUST DO THIS!!!! (I’m writing fanfictions of my own damn fanfiction in my mind because I want to them to just smile already jfc)

What are your fic writing goals for next year? So I’m in the Plance Zine and the Tiny Adventures Zine, the Pidge Big Bang and the Voltron Kink Bang …. So to complete all of those on time!!

I also want to work through that list of prompts from months ago, and my piece for the Voltron Kink Bang is going to be the first part to a gigantic soap opera epic that I’ve had planned in my head for months and never intended to write – I want to have at least half of that written and posted by December 2018. And hopefully that goal will stop me from chickening out of the Voltron Kink Bang because there’s still a part of me that wants to accidentally miss the check-in.

And, for funsies, I wanna have two completely new fics that aren’t planned at all right now done and dusted in these 12 months.  What will they be? Who knows! Finding out is half the fun!

Tagging everyone who’s writing I want to know more about... Okay there’s a lot of you.  @octaviainthewasteland @mistyhollowpro (pleeeeease tell me you’re actually writing that soulmates au) @sp4c3-0ddity @mindatworkk @dupreerose @purpleplatypusbear21 @s-n-arly @fanwright @fanart-rainbox （妳的同人文也算哦！） @bel-ina @polarishpd (I am still not over that last chapter of Robots and Love) @thisiswhereifall @amillionsmiles @radiantcerulean and I know there’s more but I’m meant to actually be working so...

[sophia-helix]

Rec 5 Favorite Fics of Your Own

Tagged by @lodessa again

I am cheating extremely here, because I wanted to rec 5 favorite explicit one-shot fics but was having a hard time deciding whether I wanted to do more romantic ones or more hardcore/kinky ones. So have five of each.

5 favorite romantic explicit stories

When the Sky is Full of Zeroes and Ones (Sherlock, John/Sherlock, 5446 words)

I sort of stumbled sideways into writing this series; the first one was just a fleeting idea, but I switched to Sherlock’s POV for this story and suddenly a concept for them finding their way slowly together came to me. I liked writing Sherlock’s unusual take on sex.

Days are changing with the weather (Baseball RPF, Tim Lincecum/Buster Posey, 7692 words)

There’s a theme here, because this is also a follow-up story where a quick idea sparked into a much longer series/concept. With this fic, I tried really hard to convey what Tim’s feeling to the reader through his actions, even though the POV character, Buster, isn’t really aware of it.

Fire (Yuri On Ice, Victor/Yuuri, 4356 words)

This whole series will always be close to my heart; like with the Sherlock one, I wanted to write about the very beginnings of a physical relationship, and especially to explore how these specific characters would experience it. The fourth story is probably my actual favorite but I think the physicality in this one is the best.

The Same Sun On the Rise (Figure Skating RPF, Javier Fernandez/Yuzuru Hanyu, 3187 words)

My first foray into a new fandom, because of that damn picture of Yuzu putting his gold medal around Javi’s neck at this year’s Worlds. I ship them so much, you guys (and getting into real figure skating is so fun! The season is just starting…)

Someone Else’s Heart (Hockey RPF, Ben Smith/Jonathan Towws, 4888 words)

This started as me making up a rare pair out of two players I like, who used to play on the same team before one guy was traded, but I ended up really shipping this new pairing hard. I also wanted to write a m/m scene that didn’t fall into cliches or the usual dynamics of rigid top/bottom roles, and I really like the feeling of this story.

5 favorite hardcore/kinky stories

Wind at our backs and hell at our fronts (Baseball RPF, Tim Lincecum/Jake Peavy, 3651 words)

The theme continues – a surprise second story in a surprise series, where the stakes are raised and the sex is much more intense. I’m also incapable of writing about Jake Peavy except super down and dirty. EDIT: my friend Anna also did a scorching podfic of this, linked at the end.

Contradiction (Hockey RPF, Connor McDavid/Jack Eichel, 2304 words)

Sub/Dom AU. The summary pretty much explains it all: “How about,” Connor says, real low and warm, dangerous and tempting. Jack’s stomach drops straight through the floor. “I’ll let you blow me, and we’ll worry about labels later.”

Let’s Sway (Baseball RPF, Buster Posey/Tim Lincecum/Jake Peavy, 7638 words)

College/frat AU, threesome, boys in eyeliner?

Lucky Charm (Hockey RPF, Ben Smith/San Jose Sharks, 5456 words)

Haha this started as a kinkmeme prompt I just filled myself, when Smitty got traded to my team from the fandom-popular Blackhawks. Probably the world’s first team primer via gangbang/team orgy.

Show Me Off to the World (Hockey RPF, Patrick Kane/Jonathan Toews, 17,189 words)

I don’t like reccing a fic in this pairing, but…this is definitely one of the top three hottest stories I’ve written. One guy figures out the other has an exhibition/public sex kink, and arranges for a trip to somewhere they can explore that at length.

Tagging @telesilla @kaqueershi @pearlo @cafecliche and anyone else who wants to

[eddiejpoplar]

The 2019 BMW 3 Series Is a Proper 3 Series Again

FARO, Portugal — Look for the squiggliest line on the navigation screen, and then go there. It’s a great system for finding a road worthy of testing a new sports car—a road where you can prod and poke a vehicle into revealing its strengths and weaknesses. The car on this day is the seventh generation of BMW’s most important sedan, the 3 Series.

Considering this car’s historical pertinence, the road itself is doubly important. The nav-system squiggle reveals itself in real life as a single lane of asphalt gouged into a mountainside. It is open to two-way traffic but offers few pullouts and zero guardrails; a poorly placed tire will drop you into the abyss.

The four-cylinder 330i sails up the switchbacks and quickly demonstrates that worries about misplaced wheels are unnecessary. The chassis is surpassingly easy to aim, even in tight spaces. There’s lightness to it, something the previous generation lacked. Not that the footprint is smaller, as the car has grown slightly in all proportions except weight. But it’s easy to find a satisfying rhythm through undulating turns.

More than a few pundits and purists have found the traditional joys of the 3 Series less present in recent years. The sports-sedan recipe BMW perfected and which every other automaker benchmarked—call it the E30 spirit—became muddled with conflicting demands: more tech, more comfort, and more performance. Call it mission creep. Or BMW bloat.

After two days driving around southern Portugal in the 330i and a brief racetrack foray in the M340i xDrive, we can say the 2019 BMW 3 Series has rounded a different type of corner. This is a sedan freed—mostly, anyhow. And this is fortunate timing: As demand for non-CUVs plummets, even longstanding sedans have to earn their keep, lest they go the way of Cadillac’s CTS/ATS and almost all of Ford’s four-door cars. The SUVs from BMW and every other maker are lurking, waiting for a slip-up so they can gobble more market share.

The 330i will be first out of the gate, coming to the U.S. as a 2019 model in March. Though it has more standard features, pricing remains the same: $40,250 for rear-wheel drive, and $42,250 for the xDrive. The $56,000 M340i xDrive will follow in the spring.

For this new generation 3 Series, dubbed G20 in BMW-speak, its maker reworked the 330i’s four-cylinder, gaining 7 horsepower for a new total of 258 and bumping torque by 37 lb-ft to 295. The M340i’s twin-scroll single-turbocharger straight-six got a similar tweaking, with 62 more hp and 39 more lb-ft of torque raising output to 374 hp and 369 lb-ft.

While BMW also redesigned the exterior and interior, and piled onto the list of digital and semi-autonomous features (we’ll come to that in a moment), company engineers say the most central tenets of the new 3 are the retuned suspension, and the calibrations between hardware and software systems. “Getting everything to work together more beautifully,” as one described.

Plying the 330i on Portugal’s open expressways and along backroads, those elements indeed come through brightly. The engine is plucky enough to make short, hard passes, but this is an automobile that likes momentum. It is tangibly lighter than the outgoing model, losing 121 pounds in some configurations; official curb weight is 3,583 pounds. Driving hard into corners, brushing the brakes, and then adding in light throttle around the apex is a treat and settles the car down nicely for the next turn.

The suspension, which includes hydraulic dampers on base models and stiffer bushings, results in greater fluidity but less of the bounce, chop, and harshness found with some of the outgoing 3 Series’s setups. Negotiating a roundabout is a telling exercise. In cases where you’re exiting straight across the other side, you can enter quickly, throw the car right to cut the half circle, and then flick the wheel sharply to the left to send it straight again. The BMW deftly handles these swift directional changes with no slough or front-end push. Zing! (The cars we drove rode on either Michelin Pilot Sport or Pilot Sport 4S rubber and thus had plenty of grip; the former are more comfortable.)

The revised turbo four never feels overly wound even when flogging it in low gears, and there’s little of the previous engine’s harsh vibrations. Torque is modest, but it’s a happy four-banger; even the sound from inside the cockpit is punchy, settling into a mid-range bass in Sport Plus mode.

And while there’s no way to bring to the present BMW’s magical steering feel from the days of hydraulic systems, this generation’s electrically assisted steering is neither overweighed nor rubbery. There’s a measure of feedback, and it allows you to position the car exactly where you want it. The narrow A-pillars help in this regard, too, while the greenhouse feels airy and the seating position is a pleasure.

All that makes a thin strip of mountain road far more fun than in any other present-day BMW other than the M2. Tires sing on the asphalt as my passenger looks out the side window down to the tops of trees far below. A manual gearbox might have made it better, but forget it: There are “no manual transmission plans at this time,” says a BMW rep. Happily we never meet an oncoming vehicle, which would have resulted in an uncomfortable and pucker-inducing reversing maneuver.

The path eventually tees into a wider, two-lane road. At the top of the mountain we come to a hard stop. A collection of milk cows and goats amble down the road, driven by a sour-faced herder. The goats split around the sedan, twisted horns just underneath our window sills. If they are impressed by the new exterior design, they give no indication.

They might not be the only ones who are a bit underwhelmed. The 3 Series’s head-on perspective is best, with a taut, creased hood that’s fronted by a double-kidney grille that actually folds back up along the roof. It’s three dimensional, but takes up less real estate than the average modern grille, lending it a focused appeal. The double headlights, available in standard LEDs or adaptive LEDs with a laser feature, are long and narrow and get a cool little kink in their bottom edge.

The 330i looks pleasant enough car in profile, but its shape is perhaps best described as benign. Inside, the interior is pleasantly reworked in philosophy and materials. Remember that BMW “luxury” plastic coating the dash in previous models? The stuff where all hope and delight went to die? Well, it’s still plastic, but in a far more pleasant and handsome treatment. And BMW generally reduced the level of superfluous design, resulting in cabin aesthetics that are far less busy and which flow more harmoniously.

Still, if you hoped for actual simplicity, and imagined German engineers could display forbearance and dump unnecessary tech, well, despair now. Many of the most annoying elements in BMW’s upmarket models are all still found here. The nonsensical shifter is one example; it makes you look down to figure out what gear you’re in. At one point, I watched my co-driver push the lever all the way up into reverse and prepare to exit the car.

Our test models also came with the gesture controls introduced on the 7 Series. This parlor trick allows you to turn on music or adjust volume by using Bollywood-dance-like hand motions in the space near the dash. The problem is that, if you’re a hand talker, unwanted music can suddenly—and very loudly—fill the cabin. When this was mentioned to an engineer, he shrugged and said in a very German Engineer Way, “You need to learn to control your body motions.” Conversely, our stance remains that a luxury vehicle should conform to its passengers’ desires, not vice versa.

BMW also proudly touts the new Intelligent Personal Assistant, its name for the advanced voice controls. You can adjust temperature and set locations on the navigation system. But the system will also answer questions for you. For instance, as per BMW press materials, one question you might ask is, “How does the High Beam Assistant work?” (We suspect nobody will ask that question, phrased that way, ever.) You start things off with, “Hey, BMW” or similar, and then hope for an Amazon Alexa–level of humanlike back-and-forth. What you will get instead is a stilted, robotic voice summoned from the cloud that will very occasionally respond in the way that you hoped. BMW promised it will be improved eventually via a remote software upgrade, but in the meantime you might find yourself most often suggesting, “Hey, BMW, can you contact me when your personal assistant isn’t super annoying?”

There is a spate of semi-autonomous features, including a nifty trick that will automatically reverse the car from a parking space the exact same way you drove in, and which also includes the ability to drive hands-off for long periods of time in highway situations. However, it didn’t work in Europe, so we weren’t able to test it.

There was yet another bright spot on the horizon: laps at the Portimão racetrack in the M340i xDrive. The prototype cars were not road legal, and they were still in camouflage livery. Still, it gives us an idea of the driving dynamics when pushed with vigor. The M340i gets an M Sport suspension and electronically controlled M Sport rear differential. Our test cars had 19-inch Michelins. Following behind ex-Formula 1 and current BMW Motorsport driver Timo Glock with the car set to Sport Plus with traction controls loosened, the 340 shows great willingness to pivot, allowing just enough lateral play. The front-end grip is tenacious and still offers lots of feel despite also receiving power from the all-wheel-drive system, a neat accomplishment.

Coming into one of the track’s slowest turns, which leads to an uphill, we slow way down and turn in early, and then give a wallop of gas just past the apex. The rear swings around neatly, pointing the nose in the direction we want, and the front wheels pull us out of the slide. It never feels less than controlled, but it is thrilling.

One of our favorite bits of the track is a long, sweeping downhill that leads toward the front straight. It is off camber and unsettles cars with an uncomfortable combination of overworked front tires, higher speeds, and shifting weight. “This corner was built to drift!” Glock shouts over the radio, and then he does exactly that in his M2 Competition pace car, leaving a plume of smoke in his wake.

The M340i’s front end shows its willing to hang onto the correct driving line, but the nature of the car telegraphs something else. I’m no Timo Glock, but the BMW is willing to play. And so we whirl the wheel just a bit, add in a bit of gas, and hang on. Because the 3 Series really is a sedan that’s free once again.

2019 BMW 330i Specifications

ON SALE March PRICE $40,250 (base) ENGINE 2.0L DOHC 16-valve turbocharged I-4; 258 hp @ 6,500 rpm, 295 lb-ft @ 1,550 rpm TRANSMISSION 8-speed automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 4-passenger, front-engine RWD sedan EPA MILEAGE N/A L x W x H 185.3 x 71.9 x 56.7 in WHEELBASE 112.2 in WEIGHT 3,583 lb 0-60 MPH 5.6 sec (est) TOP SPEED 155 mph

IFTTT

[jesusvasser]

The 2019 BMW 3 Series Is a Proper 3 Series Again

FARO, Portugal — Look for the squiggliest line on the navigation screen, and then go there. It’s a great system for finding a road worthy of testing a new sports car—a road where you can prod and poke a vehicle into revealing its strengths and weaknesses. The car on this day is the seventh generation of BMW’s most important sedan, the 3 Series.

Considering this car’s historical pertinence, the road itself is doubly important. The nav-system squiggle reveals itself in real life as a single lane of asphalt gouged into a mountainside. It is open to two-way traffic but offers few pullouts and zero guardrails; a poorly placed tire will drop you into the abyss.

The four-cylinder 330i sails up the switchbacks and quickly demonstrates that worries about misplaced wheels are unnecessary. The chassis is surpassingly easy to aim, even in tight spaces. There’s lightness to it, something the previous generation lacked. Not that the footprint is smaller, as the car has grown slightly in all proportions except weight. But it’s easy to find a satisfying rhythm through undulating turns.

More than a few pundits and purists have found the traditional joys of the 3 Series less present in recent years. The sports-sedan recipe BMW perfected and which every other automaker benchmarked—call it the E30 spirit—became muddled with conflicting demands: more tech, more comfort, and more performance. Call it mission creep. Or BMW bloat.

After two days driving around southern Portugal in the 330i and a brief racetrack foray in the M340i xDrive, we can say the 2019 BMW 3 Series has rounded a different type of corner. This is a sedan freed—mostly, anyhow. And this is fortunate timing: As demand for non-CUVs plummets, even longstanding sedans have to earn their keep, lest they go the way of Cadillac’s CTS/ATS and almost all of Ford’s four-door cars. The SUVs from BMW and every other maker are lurking, waiting for a slip-up so they can gobble more market share.

The 330i will be first out of the gate, coming to the U.S. as a 2019 model in March. Though it has more standard features, pricing remains the same: $40,250 for rear-wheel drive, and $42,250 for the xDrive. The $56,000 M340i xDrive will follow in the spring.

For this new generation 3 Series, dubbed G20 in BMW-speak, its maker reworked the 330i’s four-cylinder, gaining 7 horsepower for a new total of 258 and bumping torque by 37 lb-ft to 295. The M340i’s twin-scroll single-turbocharger straight-six got a similar tweaking, with 62 more hp and 39 more lb-ft of torque raising output to 374 hp and 369 lb-ft.

While BMW also redesigned the exterior and interior, and piled onto the list of digital and semi-autonomous features (we’ll come to that in a moment), company engineers say the most central tenets of the new 3 are the retuned suspension, and the calibrations between hardware and software systems. “Getting everything to work together more beautifully,” as one described.

Plying the 330i on Portugal’s open expressways and along backroads, those elements indeed come through brightly. The engine is plucky enough to make short, hard passes, but this is an automobile that likes momentum. It is tangibly lighter than the outgoing model, losing 121 pounds in some configurations; official curb weight is 3,583 pounds. Driving hard into corners, brushing the brakes, and then adding in light throttle around the apex is a treat and settles the car down nicely for the next turn.

The suspension, which includes hydraulic dampers on base models and stiffer bushings, results in greater fluidity but less of the bounce, chop, and harshness found with some of the outgoing 3 Series’s setups. Negotiating a roundabout is a telling exercise. In cases where you’re exiting straight across the other side, you can enter quickly, throw the car right to cut the half circle, and then flick the wheel sharply to the left to send it straight again. The BMW deftly handles these swift directional changes with no slough or front-end push. Zing! (The cars we drove rode on either Michelin Pilot Sport or Pilot Sport 4S rubber and thus had plenty of grip; the former are more comfortable.)

The revised turbo four never feels overly wound even when flogging it in low gears, and there’s little of the previous engine’s harsh vibrations. Torque is modest, but it’s a happy four-banger; even the sound from inside the cockpit is punchy, settling into a mid-range bass in Sport Plus mode.

And while there’s no way to bring to the present BMW’s magical steering feel from the days of hydraulic systems, this generation’s electrically assisted steering is neither overweighed nor rubbery. There’s a measure of feedback, and it allows you to position the car exactly where you want it. The narrow A-pillars help in this regard, too, while the greenhouse feels airy and the seating position is a pleasure.

All that makes a thin strip of mountain road far more fun than in any other present-day BMW other than the M2. Tires sing on the asphalt as my passenger looks out the side window down to the tops of trees far below. A manual gearbox might have made it better, but forget it: There are “no manual transmission plans at this time,” says a BMW rep. Happily we never meet an oncoming vehicle, which would have resulted in an uncomfortable and pucker-inducing reversing maneuver.

The path eventually tees into a wider, two-lane road. At the top of the mountain we come to a hard stop. A collection of milk cows and goats amble down the road, driven by a sour-faced herder. The goats split around the sedan, twisted horns just underneath our window sills. If they are impressed by the new exterior design, they give no indication.

They might not be the only ones who are a bit underwhelmed. The 3 Series’s head-on perspective is best, with a taut, creased hood that’s fronted by a double-kidney grille that actually folds back up along the roof. It’s three dimensional, but takes up less real estate than the average modern grille, lending it a focused appeal. The double headlights, available in standard LEDs or adaptive LEDs with a laser feature, are long and narrow and get a cool little kink in their bottom edge.

The 330i looks pleasant enough car in profile, but its shape is perhaps best described as benign. Inside, the interior is pleasantly reworked in philosophy and materials. Remember that BMW “luxury” plastic coating the dash in previous models? The stuff where all hope and delight went to die? Well, it’s still plastic, but in a far more pleasant and handsome treatment. And BMW generally reduced the level of superfluous design, resulting in cabin aesthetics that are far less busy and which flow more harmoniously.

Still, if you hoped for actual simplicity, and imagined German engineers could display forbearance and dump unnecessary tech, well, despair now. Many of the most annoying elements in BMW’s upmarket models are all still found here. The nonsensical shifter is one example; it makes you look down to figure out what gear you’re in. At one point, I watched my co-driver push the lever all the way up into reverse and prepare to exit the car.

Our test models also came with the gesture controls introduced on the 7 Series. This parlor trick allows you to turn on music or adjust volume by using Bollywood-dance-like hand motions in the space near the dash. The problem is that, if you’re a hand talker, unwanted music can suddenly—and very loudly—fill the cabin. When this was mentioned to an engineer, he shrugged and said in a very German Engineer Way, “You need to learn to control your body motions.” Conversely, our stance remains that a luxury vehicle should conform to its passengers’ desires, not vice versa.

BMW also proudly touts the new Intelligent Personal Assistant, its name for the advanced voice controls. You can adjust temperature and set locations on the navigation system. But the system will also answer questions for you. For instance, as per BMW press materials, one question you might ask is, “How does the High Beam Assistant work?” (We suspect nobody will ask that question, phrased that way, ever.) You start things off with, “Hey, BMW” or similar, and then hope for an Amazon Alexa–level of humanlike back-and-forth. What you will get instead is a stilted, robotic voice summoned from the cloud that will very occasionally respond in the way that you hoped. BMW promised it will be improved eventually via a remote software upgrade, but in the meantime you might find yourself most often suggesting, “Hey, BMW, can you contact me when your personal assistant isn’t super annoying?”

There is a spate of semi-autonomous features, including a nifty trick that will automatically reverse the car from a parking space the exact same way you drove in, and which also includes the ability to drive hands-off for long periods of time in highway situations. However, it didn’t work in Europe, so we weren’t able to test it.

There was yet another bright spot on the horizon: laps at the Portimão racetrack in the M340i xDrive. The prototype cars were not road legal, and they were still in camouflage livery. Still, it gives us an idea of the driving dynamics when pushed with vigor. The M340i gets an M Sport suspension and electronically controlled M Sport rear differential. Our test cars had 19-inch Michelins. Following behind ex-Formula 1 and current BMW Motorsport driver Timo Glock with the car set to Sport Plus with traction controls loosened, the 340 shows great willingness to pivot, allowing just enough lateral play. The front-end grip is tenacious and still offers lots of feel despite also receiving power from the all-wheel-drive system, a neat accomplishment.

Coming into one of the track’s slowest turns, which leads to an uphill, we slow way down and turn in early, and then give a wallop of gas just past the apex. The rear swings around neatly, pointing the nose in the direction we want, and the front wheels pull us out of the slide. It never feels less than controlled, but it is thrilling.

One of our favorite bits of the track is a long, sweeping downhill that leads toward the front straight. It is off camber and unsettles cars with an uncomfortable combination of overworked front tires, higher speeds, and shifting weight. “This corner was built to drift!” Glock shouts over the radio, and then he does exactly that in his M2 Competition pace car, leaving a plume of smoke in his wake.

The M340i’s front end shows its willing to hang onto the correct driving line, but the nature of the car telegraphs something else. I’m no Timo Glock, but the BMW is willing to play. And so we whirl the wheel just a bit, add in a bit of gas, and hang on. Because the 3 Series really is a sedan that’s free once again.

2019 BMW 330i Specifications

ON SALE March PRICE $40,250 (base) ENGINE 2.0L DOHC 16-valve turbocharged I-4; 258 hp @ 6,500 rpm, 295 lb-ft @ 1,550 rpm TRANSMISSION 8-speed automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 4-passenger, front-engine RWD sedan EPA MILEAGE N/A L x W x H 185.3 x 71.9 x 56.7 in WHEELBASE 112.2 in WEIGHT 3,583 lb 0-60 MPH 5.6 sec (est) TOP SPEED 155 mph

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PlayStation Now has come a long way – from rather sketchy beginnings – to become one of the best gaming subscription services out there.

It was back in 2012 that Sony bought the then-barely-known cloud gaming service, GaiKai, to the tune of $380 million (£242 million, AU$518). The decision was met with tepid excitement and heaps of skepticism, most of it understandable.

How could the average user expect a stable, quick connection for an entire gaming session? And how could Sony price it so that both consumers and developers get a fair deal?

In the years since, PlayStation now has grown in quality and range, broadband speeds have risen and risen, and no one is doubting how good an idea PlayStation Now is any more.

PlayStation Now: what is it?

PlayStation Now is a digital game-streaming service from Sony. In simplest terms: you pay Sony some cash and they’ll let you borrow a game for a limited amount of time.

The system currently works in two ways: an a la carte, pay-for-what-you-want model where you pay only for the amount of time you want the game for; and a recurring subscription that’s similar, in some respects, to Netflix.

For a long time, PlayStation Now was exclusive to the PS4, but it’s since been extended to work on Windows PCs as well.

As far as which games you can play, we’d say the selection of games is getting better all the time – PS2 games are now included – but there’s still some room for improvement.

PlayStation Now’s subscription model adds up quick.

Most games are from the PS3 era, but you can find a handful of PlayStation Vita titles there in the mix, as well as PS4 and PS2 games.

Once you pick a game, the service will connect you to a remote server that will host your session. There’s a bit of a wait (while Sony strings it all together) before you’re thrown into the action, but there’s no need to download the game.

Great expectations

There was a time that we hoped, perhaps somewhat naively, that PlayStation Now would be the Netflix of video game streaming. The hope was that we could shell out our cash and access any game on the service forever – so long as we didn’t let our subscription lapse.

PlayStation Now hasn’t quite unfolded that way. That’s not to say that the service is bad, mind you. It’s just… different.

All a streaming video service has to do is push content from a server to your PC. It needs to know when you pause, obviously, but other than a few small commands, the service doesn’t really take any input.

That need to always be listening for commands and interpreting them in real time is what makes a service like PlayStation Now a nightmare to code. For you, this point can mean the difference between lag-free gameplay and an unplayable experience.

Before I get into the performance, one of PlayStation Now’s greatest strengths is that it’s worth focusing on its vision for the future.

The service, in its current state, supports over 500 games with no signs of slowing down in the near future. In fact, it looks like the available library is going to keep growing for the foreseeable future.

The service could carry over from platform to platform, and become a – pardon my language – game-changing feature for the future of Sony game consoles. Of course, we can’t review the future before it happens nor the promises Sony has made so far. Instead, what follows is a review of the service as I see it today.

I’ll start at the beginning: the design and layout of the PlayStation Now app, specifically on PS4.

The interface is incredibly simplistic, maybe overly so. All you’ll see, after you get past the paywall are the games – the titles are separated into categories with featured titles, usually grouped by publisher or genre, at the top.

Scrolling down, you’ll find more discrete categories, like 2D fighting games or JRPGs, for example. There are about a dozen categories to pick from, with some titles appearing in multiple categories.

After you pick a game from the list and play it for the first time, the game will appear on the home screen so that you can easily pick it up again in the future.

Game library

At last count, PlayStation Now has more than 500 games available to stream. They range in value and prestige from some of the must-play games of the last generation, like the standalone DLC for The Last of Us or God of War: Ascension, to small indie darlings to some completely forgettable, bargain bin fodder.

But the decent titles are worth the price of entry. Games like Saints Row 3, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Darksiders and Catherine are all up for grabs, while Sony provides a few platform exclusives, like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and Ratchet and Clank, that are excellent as well.

Sadly, not every game is worthwhile: some of the hundreds of games are clearance pile fodder, and have been for the past few years.

I don’t know anyone lining up to play Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear or Jimmie Johnson’s Anything with Wheels, and I’m sure while someone out there really enjoys Wheel of Fortune and Frogger HD, it’s not me.

But the variety offered here should be enough to please a diverse set of tastes.

Pricing

PlayStation Now could offer the biggest and best games from the company’s 20-year foray into game consoles, but if the pricing is wrong, none of it will matter. Knowing full well that prices and dollar signs are what sinks ships, pricing is one area that Sony has given special attention to over the last year of PlayStation Now’s existence.

If you choose the subscription plan, pricing is relatively straightforward. One month of the service will run you $19.99/£12.99, with deals available on longer terms (usually a year) – check the Sony site for the details.

In the beginning, there was the option to rent games as needed from the PlayStation Now store, rather than pay a monthly subscription fee. That option has now been ditched, so it’s the subscription fee or nothing.

In the images below you can see how it used to work. A table of three games: one PS3 game, one PSN game, and one more recent PS4 game that display not only the difference in price over each time period, but the difference between games from different platforms as well.

Where I can see PlayStation Now finding some traction is with gamers supplementing their PS4 experience with rentals – or, crazier, users giving up their physical media collection completely.

This depends largely on how quickly publishers get on board with game-streaming as a way to play. But, in a perfect world in which games launch simultaneously on retail and PS Now, you could be playing the week’s biggest games without leaving your couch for your subscription fee.

There’s a lot of potential here, and obviously some room to improve, but that’s maybe why Sony switched to offer the subscription option exclusively.

Stream quality

Another area that could use some sprucing up is the streaming quality, although it’s slowly improving. Not only do games take 30 to 45 seconds to load up, but any hiccup in the connection completely derails gameplay.

While Sony is only recommending connection speeds of 5Mbps, it’s not until 10 to 15Mbps that you’ll truly reach the promised land of uninterrupted gameplay.

If you leave this review with one piece advice, have it be this: use an Ethernet cable instead of the system’s Wi-Fi. A lost connection to your router will boot you from the game whether you’ve saved 10 seconds ago or 10 minutes ago. I get booted from games multiple times due to a bad connection.

Throughout my tests, I never quite had a perfect connection, despite doing everything in my power to create one. The best I could get was gameplay with infrequent jitters that were fine for platforming games like Braid, but made playing Borderlands tough.

This is an area Sony can improve on in time by optimizing servers and opening more server farms closer to major metropolitan areas. But, until that time, it’s probably best if you take advantage of the seven-day free trial before committing yourself long term to Sony’s new streaming platform.

As it stands, what Sony has created with PlayStation Now is pretty amazing. It’s entered an arena in which so many have failed (remember OnLive?) and has emerged with a viable platform for the future of Sony’s gaming division.

That said, there are still some serious kinks to work out. Unless you’re rocking an pretty fast connection, you’ll always run up against lag, and the pricing remains on the expensive side (though to be fair the streaming quality has improved over time).

Like I said before, if you’re unsure about the service, try out the seven-day free trial to see how you like it. The worst that will happen is one night of aggravatingly slow, jarring gameplay and a few minutes on Sony’s website unsubscribing.

The best case scenario, and the more likely one, is that PlayStation Now will genuinely impress you as a proof of concept and a cheap way to binge-play some older games you might’ve missed on older consoles.

We liked

As promised, Sony delivered a slew of games. Picking which one of the 500-plus games to download first is a difficult decision, and the library continues to grow. But don’t treat this like the end-all, be-all choice – because rentals don’t take up any space on your hard drive and there’s zero download time, you can jump from one game to the next to your heart’s content.

Ideally, that means taking advantage of the reasonably priced subscription program, even if it’s only for the seven-day trial period. It’s not that I’m opposed to shelling out for content a la carte, I’m not, but you need to use caution and good judgement before you rent games that you could’ve bought outright for less.

We disliked

It would’ve been great to escape the slog of buying games and returning them for half their value, but that doesn’t seem possible with PlayStation Now in its current state. Publishers haven’t taken to the idea of putting their latest wares on the service, instead opting to put up classics of varying quality.

The other major problem is that, every once in awhile, streaming can take a huge dip and derail your perfect stream in a first-person shooter or send you careening into a wall in a driving game. Worst of all, if you get booted from your game, you can say goodbye to all the progress you made since your last save.

Final verdict

As a platform, PlayStation Now has vastly improved since launch (there were just 80 games on it in the beginning). The complete switch to a subscription option makes joining an easier decision too.

As PlayStation Now continues to evolve and develop, there’s a lot to be excited about for the future.

Whether you should subscribe to PlayStation Now comes down to two questions: do you mind games that are a few years old and, more importantly, can you put up with small periods of imprecise controls in exchange for a massive, 500-plus game library?

If your answer is no to either of those, then you might want to press pause on your subscription until more third-party game makers get on-board or Sony at least fronts more recent first-party games on the subscription side of the service.

It’s clear that there’s a future in PlayStation Now not just for Sony, but for how we purchase games on the whole. However, as the service stands today, more needs to be done before it can be recommended outright.

Go to Source Author: PlayStation Now PlayStation Now has come a long way – from rather sketchy beginnings – to become one of the best gaming subscription services out there.

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YouTube TV Goes Live in Googles Biggest Swipe at Comcast Yet

YouTube TV has arrived, and with it the potential to change how television works. Google-owned YouTube’s first foray into true cable-like television takes to the internet equivalent of the airwaves in select cities today: 40-plus channels of entertainment, news and sports for $35 per month, the so-called skinny bundle. So far, the service is still a little wonky. But the possibilities are there to inspire a whole new generation of viewers to actually pay for TV, and advertisers seem eager to give it a shot.

In particular, YouTube believes it can persuadea whole new audience that otherwise never considered paying for TV at all. “There are a lot of ‘cord-nevers’—millennials who never sign on for cable,” says Kelly Merryman, YouTubes vice-president of content partnerships. “They love TV programming. They just dont love the distribution.” That means TV, on any device, on demand. (Cable companies may offer similar-seeming options, but so far cable still remains tied to the cable box.)

YouTube brings built-in cachet as it jumps into the fraynot just in name recognition but as a platform and service used by more than one billion people. Reaching even a fraction of that audience could be a boon to marketers. But YouTube TV still has some kinks it needs to work out before it qualifies as a full-blown TV substitute.

The name YouTube alone carries weight as a signifier of people’s viewing habits migratingonline. And for networks taking part in YouTube TV’s launch, that couldmake coming aboardthe service seem like asmartermove than saying no. ���YouTube brings thebrand in online video (to live internet TV), says Glenn Hower, a senior digital media analyst with research firm Parks Associates.If any platform is likely to cannibalize (more) viewers, it’s YouTube. To not participate as more and more viewers look to the internet for video could mean dealing yourself into irrelevance.

At least, if and when YouTube TV fulfills its seeming potential. The service so far is fun, because television is fun. When you take a closer look, you see some glaring gaps in content compared to regular TV. The experience is not smooth or intuitive in the vein of Netflix, with its single, comprehensive catalog of shows and movies.

I gave the service a spin on a YouTube-supplied Pixel smartphone, and overall I thought it was enjoyable, though mildly frustrating. I added some of my favorite shows to YouTube TV’s (unlimited) cloud DVR, and I noticed that tapping into these individually gave me different results. I could watch every episode to date from the current seasons of Saturday Night Live and Empire, for instance. But I could only watch five not-all-consecutive episodes of Shark Tank, presumably due to licensing issues.

Those same issues also plague YouTube TV’s sports offerings. You can’t watch the NFL on your phone, for instance, because Verizon owns those rights exclusively. But you can stream games on the web or via Chromecast on your TV. Depending on how YouTube worked out its individual deals with local affiliates among the initial markets where it’s available, you may or may not be able to watch your home team.

Which brings up another issue: fragmentation. You can get YouTube TV today in New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Philadelphia with other cities “coming soon,” according to YouTube. But for now, it’s impossibleto generalize about how many channels you’ll get for your $35 each month, because local availability varies per market. On top of that, YouTube TV has the networks ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and ESPN, among others, on board. But some are still missing. For me, personally, no CNN or HGTV are big minuses.

In short, watching YouTube TV does not yet work as complete cable substitute. For people who like to dip into TV passively to find something to watch, the service does not disappoint, from movies to recent TV to original YouTube Red content (which is actually really funny!—especially CollegeHumor’s “Bad Internet”). You’ll probably find something to like on YouTube TV. What’s less clear is whether you’ll like it enough to pay $35 per month on top of all your other monthly subscriptions.

A New TV Business

That said, YouTube TV is way cheaper than your typical $100 cable bill. YouTube has never revealed subscriber numbers for its $10-per-month YouTube Red service, the ad-free version of the platform launched nearly two years ago. That’s likely because it never gained traction. “It’s hard to get people to pay for stuff they’d already been able to get for free,” Verna says. YouTube TV, on the other hand, comes with sports, news, and entertainment they would otherwise have to pay a cable company to access.

YouTube has not talked publicly about how it can afford to offer such an attractive price, nor how revenue sharing works between networks and content providers. But it’s easy to imagine how a sprawling, hugely profitable company like Google could afford to subsidize the service to get it off the ground as it hatches a longer-term money-making strategy.

YouTube TV has the potential to do both micro-targeting and macro-targeting.

In the beginning, ads on YouTube TV will be the same as the ones shown on regular TV. But over time, the company says it will look towards innovating on the ad model. It’s plausible Google could take all the personal data it has already gathered on its users across search, Gmail, Maps, and Android, and use it to micro-target ads to suit a particular YouTube TV viewer. “The application of data to traditional broadcast would make a much more sophisticated advertising product,” says Tom Denford, chief strategy officer for the marketing consulting firm ID Comms.

But perhaps even more intriguing, YouTube is now acting more like a broadcaster, as opposed to a platform where it can target an audience narrowly. “One of the barriers to building brands through precision marketing is you dont have shared media moments,” says Denford. “You have peer media moments.”

YouTube TV, however, has the potential to create those very mass-media momentsthink the Super Bowl or the Oscarsthat brands and advertisers love. The key is that YouTube TV, unlike regular YouTube or any other video streaming service, offers TV in real time, the way cable does. No big internet company has yet been able to crack this barrier, though not for lack of trying. But compared to all the rest, YouTube has the advantage of being primarily a placepeople come to watch.

In other words, YouTube TV has the potential to do both micro-targeting and macro-targeting. Being able to do both could create the kind of virtuous cycle that feeds back into YouTube’s own success. YouTube TV may be wonky now, but that’s not the point. YouTube is playing a longer game, one that’s only just getting started.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2o1wmMF

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