#seems like an inefficient way to accomplish the second thing but what else are you doing here

[thedoubteriswise]

so many other places on the internet where you could go to be a whiny piss baby about body hair and get sympathy for it. if you're doing that here I assume you're either very lost or you get off on being ignored and maybe insulted by a few lesbians

[bellsofblueficlets]

Rebeginning

It was without question, the most amazing thing he'd ever seen. The room was cylindrical, vastly wide, at least a couple hundred yards, and several hundred yards high, with a single unbroken line of shelves that spiraled around and around the outer wall, all the way up. Several heavy tables were scattered through the room, all laden with thick tomes and stacked shears of paper, rolls of parchment, and a series of knives and lenses and paperweights throughout, as well as glowing weightless orbs of light that just seemed to drift about aimlessly.

They'd needed to enter through a trapdoor in the center of floor, perhaps placed there simply for the sake of this remarkable sight- Though Gyre wasn't sure how even a fraction of the books could be reached. Still, at least it looked impressive-

A heavy thud makes the nightmare bitty yelp, jumping, and tumbling from his perch, only to be caught by a deceptively quick pair of hands, and moved gently to the table. Embarrassed, Gyre straightens himself, trying not to look as sheepish as he feels. "Uh." He clears his throat, swivels his head to look around more, crosses his arms, and nods approvingly. That's what you were supposed to do in situations like this, right? It felt like what you were supposed to do. "I mean, that's- pretty amazing?" Yep, taking it in stride...

A snort from his new biggie is his answer, and a bemused shake of his head. "It's an inefficient pagentry," A general wave of his hand at the walls, "So much wasted space, an inconvenient entrance that requires a pointless detour- and for what? A show of informational wealth? Academic clout? It's a meaningless flexing if wealth and magic is what it is!"

Gyre is a bit taken back by all this, and just looks sort of confused. "Oh. I, thought this was your library."

"Oh, it is," His human assures, "That doesn't mean I can't recognize how ridiculous it is. This entire thing is an egotistical display," A grunt, as he slumps into one of the empty chairs, still looking around, "Designed by a pompous fool, who took too much stock in appearing grand." A shake of his head, "What a waste of effort that could have been spent on such greater things..."

"I... guess?" It looked pretty damn impressive to him, and he's still craning his head back, trying to take it all in. "Do you know who designed it, then?"

"...I did, of course." He chuckles, rapping his knuckles lightly on the thick wood, "Who else? This is my keep after all," Another vague gesture around, "I designed all of it. Every corner, every nook, every grand, pointless display- It was all me."

A sigh, slumping back in his seat- Only to be followed by another chuckle at his bitty's incredulous look. "Come, come now," He chides gently, smoothing his beard absently, before extending his hand, palm up, to the tiny one, "Let an old man acknowledge his foolish youth. I'm the one stuck with it, I have every right to grumble."

"Well... Can't you change it, then?" Gyre points out, rather reasonably he thinks.

"Ah, I could, I could-" A sigh, turning a wistful eye around the room, a tired ice blue. "It really would be such a hassle though. I mean, just think of all the effort, the noise- Rearranging all the books-" A faint smile could be made out beneath his general facial hair, a soft fondness around the edges. For all his grousing, it was clear that he still loved the place. "No, no. I believe I shall leave it. A testimont to the hubris of my youth, if nothing more-"

As far as biggie's went, Rantrum was an odd one, that was for sure. In looks, he was a stocky older fellow, human of course, dressed in clothes that had once born bright colors, but long, long since faded through age, who bore a somewhat bulbous nose, and whose eyebrows seem to have accomplished a life's goal to be the dominating feature on his face, and were second in this only to his very generous beard, both a terrible wiry steel and black mess that were more steel these days than black.

In behavior? He was a good natured, huffy and grumbling enigma, who seemed to enjoy leaving his new nightmare bitty guessing, and always carried the sense of being in a better mood than he professed to being in.

There was something warm about him, tired and gentle, and maybe, if he didn't know Gyre was looking, there was a sadness around his eyes as well. He'd tried to hide it as best he could, in the nearly three days that Gyre had been living in the keep so far, but such a heavy weight was hard to banish completely. The nightmare bitty knew it was too soon to ask though, so he didn't. He'd wait, and maybe eventually Rantrum would tell him. In the meantime-

"Three days, it took you to show me this?" If there was a certain degree of incredulity to his voice, well- Three days. To show him this.

...Not that the rest of the keep was unimpressive, per se, but it was... humble? He supposed? For the most part, at least. Cluttered and lived in, warm, smelling of wood smoke and dried herbs and old books, and inviting a thousand questions, but- This? This was a whole other animal, as Rantrum seemed likely to say.

The mage chorfled, there was really no other way to say it, a sound somewhere between a chuckle, a chortle, a snort and a huff, that brought to mind someone trying very hard not to laugh, because it was undignified, and sounding all the more undignified for the attempt. "My Gyre is a bookworm, I see..."

He reached for what seemed to all appearances a thick, dull ended toothpick, roughly half the length of a pencil, clamped the end of the thing between his teeth. He would now proceed, judging by Gyre's experience with the man thus far, to chew at it absently, sometimes rolling it from one corner of his mouth to the other with his tongue, and altogether not acknowledge what a strange looking practice it was, or explain it.

Nor did he now, and Gyre didn't press it still. He had the feeling he'd find out in time, considering how many of the things he'd seen stashed through the keep so far.

Instead the nightmare bitty huffs, crossing his arms, and regards his new mage with a look of bafflement. He'd met with many mages while he was waiting to find his mage, and none had been like anything like this...

Not that that was exactly a bad thing. Just, unexpected. Then, most of the mages he'd met previously were also far younger.... The magic users didn't tend to wait until this later point in their life to choose to go looking for a familiar.

Of course if anyone asked Rantrum, he'd insist that he had in fact had one before, quite earnestly in fact, and had for the entire time he'd had the beast, but according to anyone and everyone else who had ever met the creature, it had been a housecat, and a rather unremarkable one at that. At least once now he'd heard it described as- At least going by it's usual vacant expression- Possessing all of three braincells, and using none of them.

Either way, despite his insistence otherwise, as far as the rest of the world was concerned? It had been a cat, and only a cat, nothing magical about it.

...Gyre didn't want to call his new mage a liar though, so he wasn't so sure. Not yet, anyway.

"Do you know why I chose you?" Rantrum asked him suddenly, pausing at the paperwork he'd begun rifling through without further note- Until now, anyway.

The nightmare bitty paused. Was this a trick question? It felt like it might be a trick question. As much as anything because he didn't know the answer himself, beyond, "To... be your familiar?" He prompts, waiting dutifully for an answer.

...He hadn't meant to sound so much like he was guessing, dammit. Especially not when it was something that had been made clear every step of the way.

"Ah, ah." The mage held up a pencil- Yes, just an ordinary pencil- Swinging the end of it in slow circle, like he was using the gesture to correct the other, "To be my familiar, and my apprentice."

Gyre stops from where he'd been peeling back a sheaf of paper, curious at the title of the book beneath it, and looks up in disbelief- And, maybe not a small amount of alarm. "I- I don't think that's allowed," He points out, his mouth suddenly dry. Oh, he more than 'didn't think that was allowed,' he knew full well it wasn't, and knew too that it was a point that mage-kind as a whole had very strong feelings about.

Rantrum only grunts, shaking his head. "Yes, well, I'm far beyond the point where I'm able to care," He denies, pulling down one of the books from a nearby pile, and beginning to flip through it, "You have a good soul Gyre, a sharp mind, and after all, an innate connection to magic that I never had."

"...I think that's why it's not allowed." Monster magic was for monsters they would say, bitty magic was for bitties, and mage magic was for mages-

That was to say, for humans. And they tended to press that point rather... severely, at times.

The old mage just shrugs, leaning forward onto his elbows, and largely ignoring the book he was currently looming over. "There are many things we're not supposed to do, regarding magic," He denies, with the blunt certainty of one who'd seen this proven true many times over the course of his lifetime, "I think you'll learn with time Gyre, that very few of them matter."

"...Oh." Oh. Yes, this was all he managed to say, just 'Oh.'

Fantastic, beautiful, well done... He ignored his internal self mockery, just thinking this through for several long seconds, before turning more fully to look up at the mage. "...This isn't a trick?"

Rantrum lifts his eyes, blinks, and notes with an unsettling seriousness, "It would be a poor trick, since I suspect you know where it would end, if it were."

The nightmare bitty can't help the small chill that this sends down his spine. Yeah, he knew. He swallows against the sudden, non existent lump he feels in his throat. This is ridiculous. He shouldn't even be considering this.

Gyre hesitates, swallows, and lifts his head, looking around the room. This was not what he'd signed on for. He... got to stay either way, right?

...Rantrum is watching him. And when he notices that he's noticed, watching, the mage sighs, sitting back in his chair, and getting that look again, that briefly weary, weighted one.

"You must understand, before you agree, what you're getting into," He begins slowly, in what seems to be a carefully rehearsed speech, "You agreed to be my familiar under... Not the most forthright of circumstance. I should have made certain that yiu knew from the beginning what sort of mage i am, but, well-" A shrug, half averting his gaze, "When I said I wanted you, you didn't wait for explanations, you just said yes. Looked aboit ready to bubble over from excitement..."

"...are nightmare bitty not chosen often, to be familiars?" He was definitely changing the subject, or at least delaying it. "I'd be a bit surprised to hear it, honestly. I'd have thought the preconceptions that once plagued discussions concerning your type were far less common these days."

"Eh," Gyre shrugged, climbing onto one of the books, and flopping down onto it. "It wasn't that nightmare bitties were seen as unfavorable familiar, just... not favorable ones." He looks up at his biggie- his mage. "Just about everyone who showed up had a specific bitty type in mind before they got there. Dreams, of course. Baby blues." He leans back, lacing his fingers behind his head to rest on. "Papyrus bitties too. You know, cute and cheerful sorts."

"Others wanted a type more known for 'smart,' like science sans, alphys, or swap undynes." He pauses, before admitting, "Water based mage types usually prefer undynes of one type or another, can't blame them there."

"...If someone did come looking for a nightmare," He sighs, closing his sockets briefly, "Let's just say I wasn't 'nightmare enough' for them."

"Ah. They were looking for a corrupted nightmare, I take it?" There's a curious, gentle sympathy to the way he asks this...

A quiet huff, still subdued. "That, or I wasn't intimidating enough. Wasn't spooky enough, or mischief enough. Which I guess amount to the same thing." A sigh. "One young mage even came looking for an ink bitty. They tried to tell her there weren't any ink familiars available- Technically there weren't, the only one there was on heavy probation after being returned three times, and getting caught painting-" A light clearing of his throat, "Questiobable art, concerning a few of the staff members."

"She found out there was an ink bitty, and decided to wait for him, and despite lots of griping, he was finally given another chance. Everyone was sure he'd be back within a week again- But they made it to their year evaluation, and had a bond strong enough that I think it set a few people back. She's gonna be a fucking awesome mage one day-"

And. Maybe he'd been a little jealous...

"Either way." A shrug. "No. Not really much demand for my type." Or maybe, just not much demand for him...

Then Rantrum had shown up. He was a much older mage than normally came looking to be paired, and one well established, with no previous history of having had a familiar of any kind. Well, again, he'd insisted he had a cat familiar, but the claim wasn't given much credit.

Despite this, and despite arriving without an appointment, he'd had enough clout, reputation, and connection, that the placement group really couldn't afford turning him away without it biting them in the ass, so his repeated insistence to meet the prospective bitties then, and not another day, was eventually accepted with a few resigned sighs.

Yet Rantrum had barely laid eyes on Gyre when he'd clapped his hands together lightly, beamed, and said those words that Gyre knew in his soul he would never forget. "Yes, you! You're just the one I'm looking for, I'm certain of it!"

The confusion he'd felt then, after so many rejections, looking across at this mop of a scruffy older mage who looked so absolutely delighted to see him...

When the staff had tried to protest, to insist on an interview, on protocol, and proper procedure, Gyre had just looked up at them, pointed to Rantrum, and said, without the smallest waver of doubt edging his tone, "Him. He's the one I want."

Maybe he'd imagined the brief surprise in his new mage's eyes, but the man had banished it quickly, beamed, and given them a look of 'well, are you still going to argue it?'

They had not.

That'd been five days ago, one day to gather hus meager things and sign paperwork, one to travel- And the last three? Here. In this... confusing place, with this confusing mage that he already very much thought of as 'his.'

Throughout this, Rantrum had been silent, watching his new familiar with a puckered brow, and a hard to read gaze. He tapped on the table, thoughtfully, rolled his chewing stick to the other side of his mouth, and leaned back in his chair, nodding slowly. And still, he watches Gyre. "I am a mage of binding, my little friend," He admits at last, a weighted significance to the way he said this, "Ours is the magic that can bind souls, or create seals, or barriers. Magic that can protects, heal... and imprison, and we can do all of these in equal measure."

Oh. That... That had probably been an important thing to know before he'd agreed to this, huh? Gyre sits up slowly, watching him. "Like the mages who sealed the monsters underground." Everyone knew the story, and knew in fact that the mages from their own timeline had been enlisted multiple times to do this for other universes as well, if rumors were true-

"Like those, yes," Rantrum agrees, more serious for now, "And if you agree to be my apprentice, that magic is all I can teach you. That which seals, which binds, and which-"

Gyre interrupts, shaking his head, and not letting him go any further. "I- I don't. Think I want to know magic like that." His non existent stomach currently felt like it was somewhere around his feet... Maybe even like he was currently standing on it.

Rantrum goes briefly quiet, pursing his lips around the thing clamped between them, then just nods, drawing it free, and dropping it into a cup. "That's fair," He assures, his voice lacking any of the expected irritation or disappointment, "I won't force you. It's a heavy role, I know that as much as anybody- And more than most, I would say."

Admittedly, the nightmare bitty was a little taken aback that his mage wasn't trying to press it more than this. He just? Said no? And Rantrum accepted it?

Not exactly what he would have expected of a mage of binding... But then, neither was Rantrum, was he?

Come to think of it, what had he expected? It's a question he's honestly never thought to ask before, and asking himself now, he realizes that he doesn't have an answer. It was easy to paint such mages as villains, whether motivated by money, power- fear-

He couldn't see Rantrum doing something like... That. So, maybe he was wrong?

Gyre looks down at his hands, frowning as he runs his thumb lightly across the back of his hand, lingering briefly on every bone. It didn't get much further from a human mage than a skeleton bitty. So why him? "So if I don't want to learn binding magic, you won't teach me any magic?" He wants to make sure he has this right...

Rantrum just shrugs. "That's all I can teach you. It's what I was taught, what I possess the knowledge for, and what I know well enough to one day pass on." A sigh, tapping the table with one finger again, as he adds with soft reluctance, "Even if it's not to you."

Again. Just. Why? There had to be young mages who would be eager to take the role, right? There had to be a catch. Something he wasn't seeing.

Gyre hesitated giving his answer again. Probably visibly. He looked around the room, at the walls of books, at the pretty, floating orbs... At Rantrum. He, wasn't bad? Right? Something this beautiful couldn't have been made by someone bad... could it?

He rubs the back of his neck, thinking this through. Rantrum wasn't bad. He'll... go with that idea anyway. So, that meant the magic wasn't bad either, right? Not innately. Maybe-

Could a mage of binding learn to break bindings too?

"...What do you use it for?" That should probably be his first question, right? That was the important one, after all.

"Ah," A sigh, combing his fingers absently through his beard. "For protections, mostly. Sealing cursed items, dangerous magics..."

"Not people?" Gyre presses, watching him. This was what he needed to know.

Rantrum takes the chew stick from his mouth, clicks his tongue, and turns his gaze up at the walls of books. "Sometimes people." He admits, turning the stick between his fingers. "There are more situations than you may realize, where binding magic is involved."

Gyre's soul sinks. "Oh." Quietly, leaning over his knees. That hadn't been what he wanted to hear.

The mage fixes him with a sympathetic look, sighs, and sets his chew stick aside, and his arms on the table, resting against them. "I know how it sounds," He assures, his tone once more patient, "But such magic is not nearly so straight forward. Let's take for example- I'm certain you're familiar with the concept of soul bonds?"

...What? Oh! Yes! Gyre perks up, looking back to his mage expectantly.

There's a satisfied sound from Rantrum, who nods, straightening again. "Well. There you go. That's not a place where you'd think binding magic could be useful, is it? Yet one of those things I'm able to do with my magic is help strengthen those soul bonds that have become badly damaged, before they can weaken to the point where one or both involved might die."

"Or alternately," He add, with soft significance, and a furrow of those massive brows, "To dissolve those which have become poison, often without harm to either."

Gyre's sockets widen, surprised and more than a bit horrified. "That can happen?" Soul bonds were- They were-!

There's a long, thoughtful look from his mage, and a certain sadness to his eyes, glimpsed briefly, though Rantrum mumbles only, "You're very young, aren't you, Gyre?" As if it's only now that he's realizing this.

The nightmare bitty frowns, straightening up to his full height- Well, the full height he can reach without standing, anyway- And huffs. "I'm two," He points out, looking annoyed, "Almost three. That's well past fully grown for a bitty."

A soft snort, as Rantrum echoes his words, looking bemused. "'Well past. Yes, I suppose. But you'll look back on those words very differently one day, you know. And I'm curious what you'll think then." He drums his fingers against the table, shaking his head. "But that isn't what I mean. Being grown doesn't mean you aren't young, my Gyre. Two years is all but an instant in the span of time you'll one day live."

The retort rising on his tongue dies with those words. 'My Gyre.'

'My Gyre.'

Suddenly he doesn't feel like arguing the point anymore. Those words feel like... Everything.

When has he ever been anyone's before? When had anyone ever made that claim? He was wild born, first generation, an existence shaped by those tidepools of magic that form in the worlds, coalescing until they become something new.

A brand new life, with no parents to welcome him.

A nightmare, brought to existence without his dream.

A familiar in training, waiting to be chosen. Waiting to be wanted. Waiting to finally, finally know where he belonged.

'...My Gyre.'

"Bitties don't always live long lives." It was all he could think to say, a quiet underlying his words that couldn't be put down to volume alone. In theory, since bitties didn't age any further once adult, they could live forever. But in practice? Their lives were often mercilessly brief.

Rantrum lifts his gaze, that unspoken significance not lost on him. "You will."

The certainty in Rantrum's words took Gyre aback. It sounded like a promise. Or maybe something else. He only knew that something in the way he said it offered no room for doubt, and something in the intensity of that clear blue gaze made Gyre realize he believed him.

...Still. "How do you know?"

And like that, the mask of certainty falls away. Or, maybe it wasn't the certainty that was the mask at all. Either way, Rantrum blinks, draws back with a thoughtful expression, as if to consider the question more carefully, then shrugs. "Does it matter?

Gyre just sort of... stares, in disbelief, at this answer. "Yeah," His tone is somehow both flat and exasperated at all once, like he can't believe he even has to answer that. "It does. It matters how you know. Fucking obviously."

A sigh, the mage reaching for his chewing stick again, and falling short, before just leaning back in the chair so far that it threatens to tip under his weight. "That's a shame, then. Because those aren't secrets I can tell just anyone." He gestures carelessly with one hand, "I mean, perhaps an apprentice, certainly. With time. Should they prove they're worthy."

"But that," He levels his gaze at Gyre, pointedly, "Is a great deal of commitment just for the sake of finding an answer you may not like.

Okay. He had a point. "I guess," He huffs, reluctantly.

Still, a long life. That wasn't an assurance many bitties got. Hell, it wasn't an assurance that many anyone got. He weighs this, finally pressing again. "You're, sure?"

"I am." Rantrum nods, looking quite solemn, sage like...

Then he reaches for his chewstick again, misjudges the distance, and knocks it to the ground with a small clatter as it rolls under the table. The mage stares for a moment at the spot where it disappeared, muttering, "Well. Fuck."

Oh, yes. Greatly sage like. Gyre can't quite suppress the sound of amusement, and his mage eyes him in a much put upon way, before sighing, and- simply drawing out another, ignoring the one now clearly lost forever.

Admittedly, it's hard to see him as some great terrifying freedom stealing soul binding mage when he seems so... him. Gyre wonders for the first time though, if that isn't kind of the point. The nightmare bitty climbs back off the book, grimacing at the sheer amount of dust he'd picked up, now covering his clothes and hands. How had he managed not to notice that?

...Right. Distractions.

Gyre tries absently to brush some of the dust off himself, as Rantrum pretends not to be waiting on his answer. Still though, he hesitates. "Do you know if I'll agree to being your apprentice?" He asks at last, determined to learn at least a little more before deciding.

"Eh, Perhaps." Rantrum hums, in that same deliberately evasive way that he'd asked Gyre if it mattered how he knew that he'd live a long life. "But it doesn't matter."

This time, Gyre just watches him flatly, waiting for the rest of it, and eventually the mage nods, sighing, but giving in to the nightmare bitty's demands. "Very well then, I'll explain what I can."

"You see, the nature of the magics I know are ones which are driven and shaped by two very powerful opposing forces- Fate, and choice. The first of course, often being nothing without the second."

"Uh huh." He's taking all of this with a grain of salt, definitely. "So... its only fate if i choose it?"

"Essentially, yes."

Gyre huffs, not bothering to hide his disappointment. "That's not fate then." He mutters. At least it gave him his answer, but... admittedly, he'd been hoping for a different one.

He should've known better.

"Hm. Isn't it." The mage muses aloud, as though weighing this possibility for the very first time. Somehow. For a moment, he just sort of stares at nothing, then shakes pushing himself to a feet with a grunt. "Very well, if you're certain. Come along then," He offers his hand, palm up, along with a small smile for his new bitty, "There's still more to see, and you still need proper quarters. I believe I know a place you'd like though."

That was it? Gyre hesitates, giving him a long, uncertain look, before finally nodding, wordlessly, and climbing onto his hand. The mage helps settle him onto his own rather wide shoulder, and the nightmare bitty settles himself, taking hold of the man's high collar, ready to move on as his mage once again approaches the curious trapdoor, tugs it open with a small grunt, and begins his descent down the odd, old ladder beneath. It was short, not much more than his own height, just enough to let him reach a stairwell that spiraled down, seeming to exist for no other purpose but this.

The whole keep thus far had been like this, if maybe not quite to this extreme. Winding, seemingly aimless, and almost impossible to navigate if you didn't already know where you were going... Which of course, was why it wasn't aimless at all.

Rantrum heads down the stairs, with torches blooming to life as the mage approachs, and just as quickly flickering out again once he'd passed.

Gyre already knew where the stairwell led, but still watched, taking note here and there of little things in his surroundings. Not that there was much to see, admittedly. It was honesgly a bit strange, how heavily ornamented and extravagant some rooms were, while others-

-like the kitchen they descend into, emerging from the pantry of all places, is almost overly dull, and had clearly gone unused for a very long time. Much of it had even fallen into disrepair...

He didn't know why he couldn't dismiss it, but the words echoed in his thoughts, refusing to be ignored. 'Isn't it.' He tightens his grip on the mage's collar, paying increasingly less attention to his surroundings, and more and more to that... absolute non answer.

"It can't be," Gyre denies, the words abruptly cutting through the silence. "Fate, I mean. Fate is something that people have no power to change. That's what makes it Fate." His frustration might be showing through in his tone, just a little.

If Rantrum is surprised by the outburst, he doesn't show it, though his answer does sound semi amused. "Said that way, you make fate sound a bit like a binding."

This takes the nightmare bitty back a bit, and Gyre pauses, frowning as he reflects on them. A binding. That actually sort of made sense. Sort of. "So is that what fate is, then? A binding?"

The mage starts to answer, then pauses, seeming to think better of it. At last, answering only with a quiet, "Perhaps," still continuing on through more corridors. He's in no apparent hurry, despite seeming to have a clear destination in mind.

"And the magic you know is one of bindings." Gyre clarifies, this time pressing the point.

"Yes. Yes, It is." The mage agrees, "There are many aspects to such magics of course, but that is what it comes down to, in the end. Binding."

"Making them... and breaking them?"

Rantrum seems to have reached his destination. Or at least a door. Either way, he stops to retrieve a key ring from his belt, flipping through them absently until he finds the right one. Only then does he answer. "Yes. And yes." He fits the key, turning it with a solid click, "After all, only a fool practices magic they're unable to undo. Can you imagine the utter catastrophe that would be? If every seal, bond, or barrier, cast however poorly or frivolously, were simply permanent?"

A huff, and a mutter, more under his breath, as he swings the door open. "Even more people would be after our heads than there already are."

Definitely taking note of that last bit, then...

Once they've stepped through the doorway, Gyre is caught off guard to find himself not in a room, but on a balcony. A surprisingly high balcony, in fact, considering he'd assumed they were at least close to ground level. The past few days, and the keep's various twists and turns, must have thrown him off even more than he'd realized.

He wondered absently how long it would take before he started being able to find his way around on his own...

The balcony is rather small, leaving not much room. Aside from a railing- and some wax drippings left here and there on said railing, despite the noteable lack of candles- there was really only room for the mage himself, and not much else.

Like the balcony itself, the view was... lacking. Lacking is the word he'd use. Of course the haze didn't help much, obscuring all but the outlines of... Whatever was down there.

But. It was down there all right. Waaaay down there.

He scoots back as Rantrum leans against the balcony, despite it seeming solid. If the mage notices, he doesn't say anything. For a long time, both are silent, watching as the sky slowly lightens to a hazy gold, and slowly begins to burn away some of the mist below, revealing... swamp, mostly. Boggy, wet, and weedy.

He's not sure if he's disappointed, but it's not exactly the reveal he was expecting.

...Actually, he's not sure he even knows what he's expecting anymore.

He watches the sun continue to rise for a while, until all but that very last of the fog is burned away, until every bit of the dreary, swampy bog that stretched out both below and before was more or less revealed, before noting with a faintly wry humor, "That's a lousy view."

A soft snort, humor maybe. "Yes. Yes it is." A hrumph follows this, his oversized brows knitting slightly as he mulls over his next words.

"You don't need to be my apprentice," He says at last, his words decided, "You needn't even be my familiar if you've changed your mind. You are welcome to stay, but remarkable as it may seem, I will not bind you to it, or any fate you do not chose."

"Someone like me knows the cost of binding a soul," He adds with a sigh, an unspoken weight to the words as he gazes out at the lackluster view before them, "Believe me."

Gyre too, turns this over in his mind. It could easily be assumed that he didn't see the warning signs, directly in front of him, the way he didn't immediately dismiss the suggestion of 'apprenticeship.' But no, he saw. Rantrum carried a weight that his initial manner has disguised, and it was at least suggested to Gyre that this was a risk of the magic he weilded- The magic he was offering to teach. At the same time, what Rantrum seemed to be suggesting...

"Does, that mean you can change Fate?" The nightmare asks slowly, still carefully gauging the mage's responses.

"Perhaps," The mage grunts softly, combing his fingers slowly through his wiry beard. Clarifying, after a moment more, "Sometimes."

Right. "Okay," Gyre presses again, "When?"

If he could have seen the mage's expression, he might have seen a twitch of amusement at the corner of Rantrum's smile. "When it's choice that decides it, of course."

Gyre looks out over the swamp, turning this over in his mind. What was choice? What was the illusion of choice?

"What will I choose?" He asks finally.

Rantrum grunts, as ever all but impossible to read. "You haven't decided yet."

Right. Of course. Maybe he'd understand it better going forward? Maybe he wouldn't. But he has a lot to think about. "Do I have time to decide?" ...a lot, to think about.

Rantrum slowly straightens from where he leans against the railing, regarding the bitty on his shoulder with a raised brow. "It's not as though I intend to revoke the offer- Not without very good reason, at least." He takes the chewing stick from his teeth, and flicks it into empty space with a grunt. "This is your home now."

It seems to fall forever, before vanishing from sight, and Gyre spends a few seconds watching it. "Even if I refuse?" He asks, quietly.

"Yes," There's a softness to Rantrum's words now, as he offers soft pets, stroking Gyre's cheek with one crooked finger, "Of course. You are welcome here. Whether as my friend, my familiar, or my apprentice, that much remains true."

As Gyre leans into the pets, closing his eyes as he enjoys the simple pleasure, he misses the small sadness, touching his mage's gaze. "This is my home, my little nightmare. And I promise you, in my home, wherever it may be? You will always be welcome."

----

His head hurt. He couldn't remember why, but the world was filled with the sounds of things breaking, shouts, and what might just be explosions. What's more, he seemed caught, his small body pressed beneath a leathery something, slick and strange sticky, which somehow cushioned his body beneath as well.

Despite the fact that the weight made it harder to breathe, Gyre made no attempt yet to free himself. It was a small place after all, a hiding place, and that was a good place for such a small creature to be when the world was falling down around them.

Them. He blinks, his thoughts suddenly on his mage. Rantrum could take care of this, right? He could-

Gyre wasn't sure. The mage was strong, but his wasn't combat magic, and he wasn't young. Time had taken its toll on the human, as it always did.

Realizing he can't wait to find out, he begins trying to squirm loose of whatever it is that's pinned him, determined to find his mage. His friend. Squirming, twisting, despite the stabbing pain in his head, he manages to twist onto his back, curl his knees to his chest.

With every ounce of strength he has, he uses his legs to lift the strange, soft weight off him...

He's certain he feels something splinter, as the pain in his head suddenly grows sharper, the world tilting and spinnung madly for an instant. It tries to go black again, but thoughts of his friend out there, sonewhere-

There's shouting, he realizes belatedly. Has been this whole time. Is it help? Attackers?

He doesn't know, but he remains silent as he works his way free, slowly but surely. Just in case.

Finally he squirms free of what had held him, and as he tries to push to his feet, his world tilts again, dangerously, sending him toppling. He's horribly aware of his head impacting something and that horrible splintering again, this time accompanied by the feel of something giving way, and the taste of dust on his tongue.

The world goes dark. Maybe for a minute, maybe for ten. It's hard to say. It's long enough for the shouts to move away. Even as he struggles back to consciousness, he listens. Or tries. The world is strange, distant. Echoed.

It's a herculean effort to open just one socket, but for the life of him, he can't open the other. How he manages to push himself to his feet he wouldn't later be able to say, but he does, standing there, wobbling unsteadily. He tries to take a step forward-

Somewhat predictably, he falls, but this time manages to catch himself, if painfully. His head hurts. His body hurts. And something inside him, something inside him feels like it's been clawed away, leaving a raw, aching wound. He pushes himself to his feet again, somehow, and even manages a small few steps before finding something in his path to lean against.

Coughing. How long has he been coughing? He can't tell where he is. What is he leaning against... A book? Is he in the library?

His only intention, as he turns again, is to try and see where he was. To get his bearings, so he has a better idea what to do next. So he can find his way to his mage, to Rantrum-

He doesn't need to. The nightmare bitty stares in horrified recognition at the mass that had pinned him, only moments before. Bits of cloth. Bristly eyesbrows. So much blood. Rantrum...

Still. Unmoving.

Rantrum had looked so tired today. So tired. Managing a small, sad smile now and then, but nothing more. He'd been so quiet, too. He got that way sometimes, rarely, but he did. Petting Gyre had always helped, before, so the nightmare bitty made certain to make himself available for this.

Today, if anything, it had only seemed to make the pain in his eyes run deeper, though he'd reached out each time, accepting his apprentice's wordless requests.

The last few instants, before the noise, before the chaos, suddenly reply through his mind with horrible clarity. There'd been a sound from outside. Visitors were unusual, so Gyre had turned in surprise to listen. He'd started to turn back, to ask Rantrum if he was expecting anyone, when the world had exploded in violence against sound.

Gyre remembered his mage's hands, closing about him without a word. Remembered a sense of falling, and impact...

And now Rantrum was dead, a piece of one of his shelves lying atop his still form. His wonderful, beautiful shelves that reached so high, had broken, and crushed him.

He'd scooped Gyre up as it started to fall, and protected him with his own body. It had been the last thing he'd done.

Gyre stares, that ache in his chest growing steadily worse, until it was pure agony. There was a bond, between mage and familiar, that ran deeper than magic, that ran soul deep in truth...

Nothing, nothing he'd ever known could have prepared him for the pain of that bond being broken. He would later vaguely remember stumbling forward, falling against his mage, and sobbing. He would remember the pain in his head growing worse, but in a way that felt like something that didn't matter anymore.

The world fell apart around him, and smoke grew slowly thicker in the air, and it didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

His mage was dead...

Just. Let him die with him...

----

[project-sour-grapes]

My Precious Entitled Career

Despite my “success,” I've come to the realization that how I approach everything is wrong.

I am a professional in tech and an artist. My friends call me patient and hardworking beyond what is expected. In high school, I was one of those never-crack-a-book honors students with a fancy scholarship. However, when I look inward, all of these good fruits seem like an accident.

I was recently let go from a tech company that your average zoomer would know the name of. There was a conflict around compensation that played out over a week or two that escalated into my being terminated. While the decisions I made were kosher with my contract and were built upon advice from other professionals who had been in my shoes, I now consider my approach to be a failure. It's important to note that I don't regret standing up for myself, as that lesson was overdue for separate reasons. However, my mindset throughout the conflict did not serve me any good and I've now seen the severity of my entitlement and self importance through a magnifying glass.

I could detail you the statistics on median pay for my job, my old company, my state, etc. I could state why the situation seemed unjust and why I felt underappreciated and fooled. Maybe it was unfair on paper, and maybe I had the right to be angry, depending on who you ask. But I don't care anymore.

Time has been plentiful for my unemployed self. I have spent it ruminating, walking, and listening to audiobooks, one of which is Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. In one chapter, Holiday details Jackie Robinson's struggles as a black man trying to play professional baseball. If anything was fair on paper, it would have been Jackie Robinson fighting back against the racists (which he did and was arrested for when he was younger). But as a professional, he was encouraged by others to ignore racism and just beat them in games. And he did. He didn’t fight anybody anymore, even though he would have been right to and those idiots would have deserved it. Being a famous baseball player and fully grown adult yet being treated like a non-human or a child is the peak of unfair. But Holiday’s book’s point is that looking past unfairness towards the mission is sometimes necessary to accomplish it.

I'm not saying my life struggle compares to Jackie Robinson's. In fact, that is exactly what I'm not saying. My "unfair" situations pale in comparison to his. He climbed Everest and I'm over here upset about an ant hill. And in some sense, I made that ant hill myself. I mean that if he can experience literal crimes and keep his head up, then I need to shut my damn mouth.

What is the correct approach to my work then? Let's rewind a bit. Full disclosure, my old approach to my life's work was this:

I am going to work myself to death for you, and if you don't give me the world in return, that is a moral failure.

Isn't that a biting statement? There is the entitlement out in the open. I'm not proud to have thought this way at all, and I'm sorry to all of you have had to put up with this mindset from me. But there it is.

Now. Where do we go from here? Well, during my unemployed ruminations over the past few weeks, I came across Dr. Alok Kanojia's (AKA HealthyGamerGG on Youtube) video on motivation, fairness, and how we're not entitled to anything. He talked about how, since life is unfair and unpredictable, we are not entitled to the results of our actions. We don't automatically have the right to the outcome of an action. We only have the actions themselves. Studying doesn’t entitle us to an A+. We are only entitled to the studying itself. That’s the way of the universe. In my old job, I prioritized work above all else. I forewent classes that I ended up failing or dropping. I begged to work overtime. I was, in the words of multiple others, "kicking ass." Then I decided I was entitled to something because of it. And I got angry when that was not satisfied. That is where I went wrong. It is true that I was promised a few things that did not come to fruition. Maybe it was morally acceptable to be angry about unfulfilled promises. But like I said, I’m done caring about that. That's not what it is about anymore.

What is it about is action. All we have in life is our actions. The more I think about what I value, the more I see the emphasis on action.

When we say to live in the present instead of the past or future, we're talking about action, since the present is the only time action can happen

When we roll our eyes at the person who says "I'm the idea guy," we're valuing action

The concept "Show, don't tell" works, because it is about action

Giving your soul to a job/person/thing who didn't even ask for it, then holding out your hand and saying "Gimme" is not about action. It is focused on outcome. Maybe it’s not fair that we can’t expect equal rewards in return for our work all the time. And on paper, it really is. Give X, get X. Seems fair and logical. But for me, for that to be the starting place and the motivation for my work no longer serves me. I’m not saying fairness isn’t a worthy goal or that it is bad. Fairness can be the outcome of a good mission. But it is not required to complete the mission. And it’s not going to be the sole motivator for my decisions, because life is grey and humans can’t always deliver on promises, through no fault of their own. What I'm not going to do anymore is throw my hands up and say, "Sorry, this is unfair so I quit.”

Where this leaves me is that I'm reconsidering my career--not only how I approach the work but the field I chose entirely. In the past, I tried to do biomedical research, but I failed. I have also enrolled and unenrolled in many an EMT class and have taken and failed Biology, Chemistry, and Physics classes repeatedly. This was all because of a hazy dream of being a doctor that has sat in the back of my mind every day. 

I kept trying out this doctor dream, but I would always hit a tiny snag, exaggerate it, and give up. I have gone through about 10 multi-month cycles of this for years. And guess what the snags were:

That professor gave me a B+ instead of an A on a single exam. Pre-med education is inherently unfair, and I'm not putting up with this.

I have to study this bio concept that I probably won't even use if I become a real doctor. That's a waste of my time, so I'd rather fail/drop than learn it.

Doctors have to get up at 5am? That goes against science on sleep schedules, so I'm not going to do it.

How pissy and entitled? Who thinks like that? Me, apparently--or who I hope to be "old me."

How did I get so caught up in what is fair or unfair that I lost sight of the forest for the trees? News flash, self... everything is unfair! Gym is always packed? Unfair. Fighting cancer? Unfair. Some idiot who cares less than you do got picked for the job? Unfair. Hell, the unfairness of life is half the reason why we even get up in the morning. Name a career that isn’t about taking an unfair situation and turning it into a better one. (If you can, maybe don’t do that career.) We do stuff as humans, because it’s unfair. Or the alternative, not doing it, would be unfair. If doctors threw up their hands because disease is unfair, we’d still be fighting polio. I wouldn’t make it one second in caveman times with my old attitude. The hungry lions staring at my caveman camp don’t care what I think is fair.

So here's the mission. We are going to look unfair things in the face and still do them. Despite their unfairness. Despite the fear that something will take more than it gives. Despite the brain saying, "This is inefficient, so let's not do it at all." In fact, it's because of their unfairness that we will do them. Then we can leave them better off for someone else. Or do them better the next time. I am calling this Project Sour Grapes. It starts right now.

[lady-divine-writes]

Criss Cross Cranberry Sauce (Rated T)

Summary:

Aziraphale spends so much time focused on making Christmas dinner for their friends perfect, and doing everything the human way, he forgets one tiny little detail. (1393 words)

Notes: Written for @drawlight’s ‘31 Days of Ineffables’ prompt 'cranberry’.

Read on AO3.

“Angel? Hey, angel? How’s it going in here? You’ve been working all morn … ing. Wow!” Crowley stops, mouth agape, at the southern end of a long table that could have come straight from the pages of an Elle Décor magazine, barely an inch of the white granite to be seen beneath an infantry of serving bowls and platters laden with camera-ready food. “That’s quite the spread. You really went all out!”

Aziraphale puffs his chest, grinning with pride. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

“And you didn’t miracle anything?”

“Not a thing,” Aziraphale beams, lighting an equally impressive army of candles using a long, wood match; each gold taper rising from the wells of elegant, crystal candlesticks. Crowley watches Aziraphale bounce the yellow flame from wick to wick, pausing to let it catch and then moving on to the next. It seemed a rather inefficient way for an angel, of all beings, to light this many candles when he could simply snap his fingers and have them all done at once. But Aziraphale had been determined. They were throwing this dinner for their mortal friends, so he’d wanted to do everything the human way. Besides, food prepared by hand tasted better than miracled food in Aziraphale’s opinion.

How true that is, Crowley can’t attest. He thought miracled food tasted fine. Of course, he didn’t miracle food out of thin air. He can’t create with his magic the way Aziraphale can. Crowley manifested food and drink from elsewhere, like The Ritz. Aziraphale would probably object to feeding their closest friends a meal of stolen food.

Crowley, on the other hand, thinks it would be hilarious.

If no one else appreciated the humor, Warlock definitely would. And possibly Adam. And Adam’s battalion of friends.

Crowley seriously considers miracling up one tiny thing, like a tart or a casserole, so the lot of them can share in the private joke. But Aziraphale would feel the signature of his demonic magic all over the dish.

And he would be grumpy.

Crowley strolls down the length of the table towards his angel, perusing the gourmet fare, whistling low when he comes across eight ceramic bowls of a nearly identical dish, bookended by Waterford vases overflowing with tulips and roses. “Got enough cranberry sauce there?”

“Yes, well, I learned my lesson after last year’s cranberry sauce debacle.” Aziraphale shakes his hand, extinguishing the match. “I made one type of sauce for everyone. We have whole berry cranberry sauce …”

“The classic …” Crowley says with an approving nod since that one is his favorite.

“Cranberry relish for Anathema, cranberry chutney for Newt, cranberry compote for Madame Tracy and Mr. Shadwell …”

“What even is the difference?”

“Vinegar. And some nuts.”

“Ah. Kind of like the difference between Madame Tracy and Mr. Shadwell.”

Aziraphale raises a scathing eyebrow at his husband. “Shush, you.”

Crowley waves him off. “What else ya got?”

“Cranberry gelatin for Wensleydale, though I’m struggling over whether or not I should move that to the dessert section; cranberry ambrosia for Pepper …”

“See, now, I bet she made that one up … ooo, it has marshmallows …”

“… cranberry marmalade for Brian, I even got jellied cranberry sauce for Warlock.” Aziraphale gestures distastefully in the general direction of said abomination and sneers. “You know, that stuff that keeps the shape of the can?”

“Nnngh …” Crowley leans closer to examine it, but not too close. “Bloody American.”

“Quite,” Aziraphale agrees.

“I honestly think you should have made everyone bring their own cranberry concoctions if they’re going to make such a fuss about it,” Crowley says, reaching out a cautious hand and giving the cylindrical-shaped cranberry mass a jiggle.

“Nonsense! I volunteered to host! It’s my responsibility to take care of my guests!”

“I’m guessing that explains the seven cakes, three huge tubs of potatoes, four puddings, and … how many different kinds of salad?”

“Fourteen,” Aziraphale says smugly, “but who’s counting?”

“Not me.” Crowley steps behind his husband and wraps his arms around Aziraphale’s waist. “Everything looks spectacular. You’ve outdone yourself.”

“Thank you.” Aziraphale leans back into his husband’s embrace, inviting a squeeze.

“So, what do you have for a main?”

Aziraphale melts into the warmth of Crowley’s body, that demonic heat that simmers constantly beneath the surface of his skin like a well-fed furnace, and for a moment, his mind goes blank. “Hmm?”

“Your main course. What did you pick this year? Ham? Turkey?” He gives his husband a little wiggle. “Duck?”

Aziraphale opens his eyes, staring unblinkingly into the void ahead of him, that gorgeous warmth enveloping his body plummeting sourly to his feet. “I’m sorry. C-come again?”

Crowley chuckles, in on the wicked joke he’s sure they’re sharing. “I get it. I get it. Keeping it under wraps, I see. Big surprise. All right, then, all right. I’m willing to wait. It must be good if you won’t even tell me.”

“Yes.” Aziraphale tries to mirror his husband’s mischievous laugh, but comes off sounding more like a sick porpoise instead. “Yes, it is. It is … good.”

“Well, I commend you all your hard work.” Crowley kisses the crown of Aziraphale’s head, unaware of how cold it has become. “I’m very proud of you.”

“Thank you, my dear. A-always nice to hear.”

“I’m going to go finish getting ready.” Crowley gives Aziraphale a final squeeze, then heads off to the bedroom, leaving behind an angelic corpse since Aziraphale’s soul has left his body. Aziraphale waits until he hears his husband’s footsteps enter the bedroom and the door shut behind him before his soul reconnects with his brain …

… and he freaks out.

“No!” he screams hoarsely into his hands plastered over his face. “No no no no no! How could I be this stupid!?” His face snaps up, and he stares at the ceiling above him. “Don’t any of you answer that!”

He’d been so wrapped up in accommodating everyone - and in his own inflated ego at how well he’d been accomplishing it if he’s being completely honest - that a main course had completely slipped his mind. Seven cakes, three tubs of potatoes, four puddings, fourteen salads, more stuffings and vegetables than they’ll ever be able to pack away, even eight bloody dishes of cranberry sauce! He spent more time on the gosh-darned cranberry sauce than he had a single other dish on the table, but somehow he’d thoroughly forgotten a main dish! No turkey, no ham, no fish - not even a Cornish game hen!

And the first of their guests is scheduled to arrive …

Ding-ding-dong! Ding-ding-dong! Ding-dong ding, ding dong!

Their festive doorbell, cheerfully chiming out the chorus of Jingle Bells, sounds throughout the flat, it’s sense of dramatic timing so perfectly unparalleled, Aziraphale could almost believe that the Almighty had rung it to mess with him.

But no. His luck isn’t that good.

“That’s gotta be the Dowlings!” Crowley sings, hurrying back through the dining room to answer the front door. He pauses to give his husband an affectionate kiss on the cheek and a congratulatory smack on the rear. “Again – wonderful work, love. Truly top notch.” Then he continues on.

And Aziraphale listens, paralyzed to uselessness by his own humongous faux pas.

“Warlock! Mr. and Mrs. Dowling! What a pleasant surprise!” Crowley greets the arrivers. “And right on time! Wait till you see the meal Aziraphale has thrown together! It’s taken him all day …”

Aziraphale tunes out the rest after he hears Crowley usher them inside, take their coats, and threaten to lead them straight to the dining room.

Aziraphale has no time to fix this. He’s officially run out. He’s got eight frickin’ dishes of cranberry sauce but not a single second to spare! In the end, he’ll have to miracle up something! They can’t eat a dinner entirely of side-dishes. But for the moment, with the Dowlings headed his way, he hasn’t a clue what to do, doesn’t know what to say. So before they walk down the hall and meet him, before he’ll have to acknowledge their presence with a bright, uncomplicated smile, handshakes and small talk, he spits out the only word he can think of that properly expresses the emotions spiraling through his head like a migratory goose caught in a wind turbine, flailing fruitlessly in an attempt to escape.

“Fuck!”

[phoenotopia]

2020 March Update

Happy New Year! Well, I guess it's a bit late for that...

Much of what transpired in the past few months will fall under polish and bug-fixing. Will and I have a mutual friend who got married, so I had the occasion to visit Will to attend the wedding as well as have Will playtest the game in its most complete form yet. He logged 24 hours of playtime and just reached the entrance of the final dungeon. Then we had to call in for the night since it was 5 AM, and I had a flight to catch in the morning.

His completion rate where we stopped was 42% of Heart Pieces, 33% of Energy Gems, and 44% of Moonstones. So... I think we have a pretty lengthy game!

This will take a while to playtest & polish... Will's daytime profession is QA Engineer so he's pretty great at catching bugs. From his playtest, we jotted down 200+ items to fix/adjust. Some as small as a simple misspelling, and some more significant (like Gail being unable to jump when standing at the edge of a steep slope). I'm about half-way through fixing that list...

(Will’s living room where much playtesting was done)

Here are some other things we've accomplished in the past few months. A lot of it falls under polish and bug-fixing, which won't sound outwardly impressive, so I'll dive in a bit under the hood.

-------------------------- Item Balancing --------------------------

There are over 200 items in the game. Of which, 90+ are healing items. While much of their flavor text was already written, their stats weren't yet finally decided. So a large effort was spent to balance them as well as possible. Initially, I balanced items by observation (ex: "The player is relying on this item a lot, so I will nerf it...") Now, I've moved to a more systematic way of doing things. I made an equation that takes in all of an item's parameters, and spits out a score. The higher an item heals, the higher the score. The longer an item takes to consume, the lower the score. And so forth.

As usual, I used google spreadsheets, since they support equations. I could tweak the values of a healing item, and immediately see how its final score was affected. I also made use of automatic color formatting, so a field becomes highlighted red, if it's particularly bad, or green, if it's particularly good. Of course, the sheet is just a guideline. The aim wasn't to make all items have the same final score, but that they made sense for what they were and when you could get them. Late-game items tend to have higher overall scores versus early-game items. Some items, like doggy biscuits, have notoriously low scores across the board - as a joke!

-------------------------- Cooking Systems --------------------------

Another thing that had to be done with the healing items was finally determine their cooking sequences. 38 healing items could be cooked and will transform into something else. The way I specified that an item could be cooked was to add a a little snippet to an item's "meta data". An example would look something like, "COOK,57,62,ABXY,10,1.5,1".

In order, this specified the item_ID that would result on success (57), the item_ID that would result on failure (62), the button sequence (ABXY), the time you had to complete the sequence (10 seconds), how quickly the cursor should move (1.5x speed), and if the item multiplied on success (1). The system appears simple enough - but it was actually extremely inefficient!

For one, this system didn't allow random button sequences - all "berry fruits", when cooked would have the same button prompts and in the same order every time (ABXY). Initially, I thought having set button sequences would be a feature, but in practice, it was less fun. 

Two, this system wasn't human-readable at all. I'd see a sequence of numbers, forget what they were, and have to look them up over and over.

But the biggest problem was that you couldn't evaluate an item's cooking difficulty from these numbers without manual testing. At 1.5 cursor speed, how many times does the cursor pass the center panel in 10 seconds? Maybe that's 15 times... for a 4 button sequence, the player has 11 opportunities to miss - that's too wide a berth for failure. The system also had variable penalties - if you misspressed a button prompt you loss time on the cooking meter. If you didn't press anything, you missed the opportunity, but not the time - but the clock was still ticking, so you did lose time, just not as much. In the end, the difficulty of cooking each item was all over the place. It was also possible to create "unwinnable" scenarios if I made the button sequence too long, the time too short, or the cursor speed too slow. Testing each item manually to ensure doability was too tedious and unreliable - it was a mess!

Which is why, the underlying cooking system was revamped. The new meta data looks like : "COOK,57,62,seq_length,5,spd,1.5,ease_add,2". This is a lot more readable. Beyond the first 3 entries, the arguments could be specified in any order. And their meanings were easy to understand.

"seq_length,5" means a random button sequence of 5 will be generated (no need for me to personally generate it)

"spd,1.5" means the cursor moves at 1.5x speed. I could also leave this field out to get a default value of 1x cursor speed.

"ease_add,2" - the biggest improvement to the system is how we now approach difficulty. We streamlined a miss-press and a missed opportunity as the same level of "mistake", and difficulty is framed as, "how many mistakes is the player allowed to make and still have a successful result?" By default, the player is afforded the ability to make 2 mistakes, and "ease_add,2" bumps the number of allowable mistakes to 4. We then automatically calculate how much "time" the player should have to cook something based on its cursor speed, how long the button sequence is, and how many mistakes the player is allowed to make. This was a more sensible and efficient system that let me knock out all 38 healing item cook sequences in one sitting!

-------------------------- Badges Nearly Done --------------------------

As you may recall from the last update, I was working on implementing the badges.

Thinking up the badge and having its graphic drawn is just the first half. Underneath, the code also needs to be made to track all the relevant player stats - how many times the player fished, ate, got money, used a certain move, etc. Some badges require extra guards, because they can be spoofed. For instance, the "Treasure Hunter" badge is obtained when the player has collected XXXX RIN through the course of your journey. However, there is something like a "gold exchange" in the game, where you could circularly trade gold and RIN to boost this number artificially. It's important to guard against cases like those.

So far, 30 of 33 badges are implemented. The last three have to do with late-game things that have inter-dependencies that we're still figuring out. The Speed running badge for instance is still dependent on two things. One, I need to speed run the game a few times to see how fast it's possible to beat the game and decide finally what's a reasonable time-limit. Two, there's actually a time-keeping bug which can inflate the game time if the system is left in sleep mode. I don't expect either things will be too hard to figure out - just gotta find the time for it.

-------------------------- Script Extra Polished --------------------------

We continued to polish the script, which I thought was basically done before. We added some extra NPCs here and there, and fleshed out the world with lore text where it seemed appropriate. In the end, the game's script ballooned to over 100,000 words! Hah... It's definitely DONE now however!

Some interesting things I noted as I was polishing old text - there were quite a few instances where Gail talks. I began the game's development with the idea that Gail should definitely talk since I wanted her to be a more active participant in what she chose to do. But I discovered later that if Gail talks, but only talked a little, she comes off as a very reticent person. There's no middle lane here - you're either all in or all out.

If Gail was a silent protagonist, she still talked symbolically. She is understood to be talking based on how people react to her - kinda like Link. So that's the direction I went with in the end (again). When Gail has occasion to talk, it comes in the form of a player dialogue choice. She also has an inner voice when she needs to remind the player to do something.

Another reason I went with this direction, is for brevity. Take this exchange for instance: QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : Maybe. I can't make any promises...

If Gail is silent, I can reduce those 2 lines to 1. QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : ...

-------------------------- Business Taxes --------------------------

Not too exciting, but new year means I gotta do taxes for the business. They're a lot more complicated than personal taxes, and more expensive! Since the game hasn't sold anything, you would think there'd be nothing to file. Hah! If only... The business is there so we can act as a legal entity and record expenses for when we do start selling. I really want to focus on making games, but there’s a small percentage of it that is sometimes boring and dreadful (-_-) ... still it needs to be done.

------------- Why no Public Beta Testing? -------------

As you may have noticed, I haven't put out any public calls for testing help despite being at that stage. Some have offered to help, which I appreciate! But sadly, I cannot accept. Here's the story for that.

Two and a half years ago, I got my hands on a console dev kit - that's very exciting, so I hurriedly took the steps to convert my dev station to be console-capable. After about two weeks, I had the console version working and integrated into my workflow, so all appeared good...

4 Months later, an artist needed an updated PC build to test some new art assets, so I went to build a new PC version. We use Unity, so generally you just need to click your desired build target, and hit "build". However, I now discovered that by attaching the console "hooks" into my work environment, I could no longer build to PC... It was possible, from my end, to test the game from the dev station in dev mode, which was why it went undiscovered for so long.

I did try to excise the hooks, but proved unsuccessful after a day of work. I decided to take this as an opportunity to focus exclusively on the console version first, which afforded me some niceties. Knowing that there's a standardized control scheme meant I could make full use of the control stick for the fishing mini-game. I also didn't need to create a rebindable keys menu - which is a MUST for PC versions... Most importantly, it lets me focus on making the one version as good as possible before moving onto the next. I have NO idea how those other guys release on all platforms at once...

Chalk it up to inexperience. In my defense, this will be my first commercial release, so bear with me. Don't worry, I still plan to make the PC version! It's a bit unconventional, but we're just going to go in the reverse direction of the usual. Console first, then PC, then other consoles. Wherever it makes financial sense, there we will be. (Sorry Ouya!)

Back to the original question - that's why I haven't sent out any public calls for playtesting. Current playable builds of the game are locked to my console dev kit. So actual playtesting unfolds in a very closed setting. Like what I did with Will, I literally sit behind the playtester, breathe down their neck, and watch them play, taking notes all the while.

But since I'm observing the player directly, even just one playthrough nets me a TON of bugs and adjustment tasks. So it evens out I think.

-------------------------- Trailers, Release Dates, etc. --------------------------

Alright, get your frowns ready...

We finished two trailers, and they're raring to go. BUT! We can't show them yet... We're sort of at an awkward spot where we're waiting on some conversational threads to conclude. Say we win a slot in a show - that'd be a HUGE plus for us - but that may also be contingent on us having NOT shown anything substantial yet. The game in its unrevealed state is a negotiating chip. So we're trying to leverage that... and you can only do the reveal once...

We also want to have some "actionable" items in the trailer - a launch date you could mark on your calendar, a wishlist, a website you can visit, etc. So since those things aren't entirely lined up yet, we can't let the trailers rip just yet...

Right now, I can only say we're *aiming* for a late Q2/early Q3 launch. But I can't commit to anything concrete yet. As soon as we know, we'll happily sing it from the rooftops. I hope I can update this blog sooner with good news, but if things move slowly again, I'll send out the next "we're alive" update 2 months from now (end of April).

I know it's frustrating to have nothing major after so long still, so I captured some gameplay footage... May it sate your hungers!

-------------------------- Footage 1 : Fishing --------------------------

You've seen pictures of the fishing, but never video of it in action. Well, here it is!

(And right after I uploaded the video, I noticed there actually was a video of fishing before. D’oh)

The idea is simple. First, get the lure in front of a fish, and assuming the fish isn't scared, it will soon bite. Then begins a fight sequence, where your energy meter is pitted against the fish's energy meter. Whoever's energy outlasts the other's wins.

The fish's resistance is represented by a red moving circular subsection. You fight the fish by pushing the control stick and keeping it on the subsection, which will dart around and try to escape you. Bigger and tougher variants of fish will do a "shake" which will reverse the wheel. When the wheel is reversed, so too are the controls, so it gets extra tricky!

While fishing, your energy meter doesn't recover, so one of the ways you level up your fishing ability is by finding energy gems to increase your max energy. There's another way - but we'll keep that a secret.

-------------- Footage 2 : Kobold Boss Fight --------------

You can actually skip the next section if you'd prefer to be surprised and you find your hunger for info sated. That's how I prefer to consume the games that I know I'm going to get. If you're still hungering for info, and you don't mind the slight spoilers, then feel free to proceed!

The next video shows the new Kobold Boss fight. Let's take a moment to reflect on the old game's visuals and how far it's come...

(we've come a long way since the time of the flash game)

You'll notice the Kobold boss has a name now - Katash! He's a significant enough character that he's earned it. The second thing you'll notice is that he looks better!

Some people have humorously pointed out that the old boss looks like Wolf O'Donnel from Star Fox. There's a funny story behind that. Basically I asked an artist to draw me a space wolf. And the artist, whom I'm assuming wasn't familiar with Wolf O'Donnel, drew that - all of it - all the animations and everything. The first time I laid eyes on it, it was already done, so it was too late to ask for edits. So I just ran with it.

That was seven years ago. Nowadays, I know to involve myself more in the process. I ask for just the design first, and we don't move forward with animations until we're happy with the design. Life lessons!

By the way, if you like Katash’s personal boss theme, give it a lesson on Will's Sound cloud (LINK)

-------------------------- Fan Arts -------------------------- Lots of fan art came in over the past 3 months!

This one is a pixel animation made by Pimez, and shows Gail singing a Christmas carol in various parts of the game. So cute! Years ago, I too was making little animated gifs for my favorite games, so it really brings me back!

This one was made by cARTographer (twitter link) after a request by Deli_mage, so thank you both. Gail rocking stylish boots with a pose that shows confidence in her batting skills. Very anime - Love it!

Another submission of laptekosz of the Last Song of Earth area. Whereas the last picture depicted the night sky, now the orange trees are lit by a rising sun. Artfully done! Kinda makes me want to eat eggs. I hope you'll like the new Last Song of Earth area just as much :D

A new artist to the scene, Not_Quin, submitted two pictures, one of Gail and one of the Sand Drake re-imagined as a centipede. I'm always a fan of these re-imaginings! I like how it's spiky all over and appears to be wearing a skull mask. The Sand Drake is often pointed out to be too similar to Zelda's Dodongos, so maybe a long slithery body would have indeed served better. Fun fact, long ago, when we were working on Phoenotopia 2 in earnest, we actually had a giant man-eating worm planned - WIP animation depicted below. One day... one day...

Negativus Core made two cool new arts! I'm really impressed by their use of unique perspective! Having characters run towards the screen or reaching close to the screen from afar is tricky since the proportions get all distorted - but not an issue for Negativus Core! Love the blur on Gail to show speed, with 66 in focus - really skillfully done! And the cube. Amazing!

--------------------------

I'm really honored by the huge fan art community. Thank you all! 

[chwesolai]

Cafe Girl, Grocery Boy | CH.4

[masterlist]

A/N: Don’t hate me but your antagonists for this story are Jeonghan, Jun and Seokmin. We all need a little bad boy!svt in our lives but I love those boys so don’t paint me as a villain, ok, let’s continue.

-You- After my little venture with Seungcheol, my shift ended and I swapped out with Joshua leaving him with the newbies, “Don’t scare them again, Shua.”

“You say that as if I always scare them,” he scoffs at me as we switch aprons, “need anything before you head out?” “Eh, not right now but I’ll head back over here before my date.” “You got it, wait, a date??!” “Bye Joshua! Bye V! Bye Chan!” I wave bye and rush out before being bombarded with Joshua’s questions.

I fast walk to my car, yet having about an hour before my exam. So I sat there, just thinking. I’m really going on a date for the first time in forever today. College hasn’t been too kind to me when it comes to dating. I’ve either been too busy or just too in my head when a guy would ask me out. Joshua even tried asking me out the first year we met. It didn’t work out in our favor. We found it better to be best friends instead of romantic friends, ya know? And I’m not the out-going type. I live in shadows, I’m never the girl in the spotlight.

But Seungcheol makes me feel a different way. He’s different.

Why is he so different?

-Seungcheol- “What are you smiling for?” Jihoon finally finishes his exam and walks out of the lecture hall.

“Took you long enough and it’s nothing, just thinking about something.”

“Thinking about her?”

“How’d you know?” I sarcastically answer while handing Jihoon the bagel I got him from y/n.

“Lucky guess, and thank you, I’m STARVING!” Jihoon practically inhales the bagel and repeats again that he’s still hungry, “Come on, I’ll treat you, lover boy, let’s get ramen.”

“I’m just going to ignore the lover boy comment, I’ll drive.” We walk off campus into the parking lot and continue to talk about how easy the exam was since we actually studied for once until we’re stopped by a voice.

The unknown voice parks his motorcycle and reveals himself as he removes his helmet, “AY COUPS WOOZ!”

Oh dear god.

“Hey Jeonghan, what’s up?” Jihoon reacts coldly.

“Come on, Wooz, don’t be so cold. It’s really cool, seeing you guys again! Really! And by the way, the place is looking really great now since you guys left, I appreciate your decision.”

Our silence gives Jeonghan his answer to his insensitive comments, “Any who, I’m going to my econ exam now,” he scoffs, “and have fun at your crummy place, losers. Don’t miss you for a second.”

We don’t either, asshole. Jihoon and I left that disgusting frat house about a year ago and haven’t seen any of those vile guys in a long time. They were easily the smartest, richest and the worst guys on campus. Their frat consists of scaring freshman to death, having strict rules on what your grades and GPA should be, and molding guys into what they thought was a good looking guy. Jihoon and I came from upper-class families too, but we were like them. They were a different breed. They put me and Jihoon in their frat as a joke. They ridiculed us daily for our looks, they constantly played pranks on us and last year, Jihoon snapped, like full on hulked out on them. He trashed the whole house, ruined half of their rooms, with my help, of course, and we were out of there.

Those guys did do one good thing for me, they led me to get a job. I didn’t want to depend on my parent’s money like they did. They led me to provide for myself and Jihoon and we got our own apartment. They may be evil but they helped me grow.

ANYWAYS.

Jihoon and I drove off, rolling the windows down, blasting the new 88rising album and just relieved.

“I can’t wait for this break, oh my god.” Jihoon sighs as he rests his head on the edge of the car window. “Couldn’t agree more.” I turned up the music as we continued to talk about our exam and our mid term break plans. I hope she passes all her tests. She deserves it.

“So, any idea where you’re taking her tonight?” “Not sure just yet. There’s this new chicken place that opened up downtown and I’ve been meaning to go there. But I’m not sure if that’s even romantic.” “Well, if you make it romantic, it’ll be romantic, promise.” “Ok Mr. love-expert,” I laugh as Jihoon begins on and on about how I should go about the night, “I think I just go with the flow and see what happens, ya know?” “She’s a business major, Coups. She lives and breathes plans. You can’t just go with the flow!” “You never know? Your major never really defines who you are.” “But it gives a good insight though. Only the top percent even get to be business majors.” “Whatever, so how does this sound, I pick her up from her apartment, we go to the chicken place, talk for a bit, I bring her to my favorite dessert place and we walk around the park?” “Straight out of a drama, I love it,” Jihoon places his hand on my shoulder, “You’re turning into a man,” he sniffles. “Shut up,” I punched his arm as I parked the car in front of the ramen place.

-You-

[time: 4:30pm]

I finished a little bit earlier than a majority of my class and I handed in my paper and walked out of the hall, feeling accomplished. Then someone calls out, “y/l/n!”

“Yoon!”

“Hey lovely.” He wraps his arm around my shoulder and begins to walk out with me. “Hey loser,” I removed him off of me, “how’d you feel about that test?” “Exams are exams, y/n. They’re a piece of cake. How’d you feel?” “It was really easy, it was like she was trying to give us answers,” we both laugh as we kept talking about how inefficient our econ professor is, “She literally made the study guide verbatim for the test!” “I mean do we expect anything else out of her?” He chuckles as I stop in front of the vending machine, “that shit is full of sugars, y/n. That’s no good for you.” I put some coins in and type in the number for powerade, “And? What about it?” I say as I open the bottle, taking a big sip out.

He shakes his head at me and we continue to walk out. The rest of the walk was silent, minus the sound of clocks ticking, doors slamming, and little bits of conversations from the break rooms. I just looked ahead while I felt Jeonghan’s eyes burning through the side of my face. - “So, you doing anything tonight?” Jeonghan asks as we make it out of the lecture hall. “For once, yeah, I am. Why? What’s the main event tonight?” “Just a couple of us were planning on going for drinks and then going to the karaoke rooms. What are you doing?” “I got a date,” I looked at him all smug, we continued to walk to the parking lot. “Who is the lucky guy?” He said with resentment, regretting asking me where I was going. “I don’t think you know him.” “Trust me, I know everyone,” He rolls his eyes at him, “who is it?” “Seungcheol. The grocery boy I talk about,” I cross my arms at him, as he scoffs, “what now, Jeonghan?” “Nothing. You have fun tonight, y/n,” Jeonghan smirks and walks to his motorcycle, “tell Coups I say hi.” “Bye weirdo!” “Bye lovely!” He laughs as he puts his helmet on and drives off. Lovely. 

A nickname that’s only ever been said by him. Jeonghan’s been a friend for who knows how long at this point, and trust me, he’s asked me out numerous times throughout our schooling years. He’s attractive, just too much of an asshole for me. Our dads work together, both dominating South Korea’s economic industry. And we are the next in line for their spots, meaning we have nearly every class together. It’s annoying. But Jeonghan is a genius yet a meathead, it still boggles my mind. And he knows Seungcheol and calls him Coups?

Anyways, I find my car, and just sit in silence for 10 minutes. Then, I finally turn on my phone and check to see if I got any new notifications. * From 2hrs ago: (2) snap from shua* *From 5 mins ago: (4) iMessage from gyu*

Oh god, what did they do now?

I unlock my phone and decide to check my snaps from Joshua first. Just stupid picstures of them at work, making me smile a bit.

Then I scroll over to Mingyu’s text.

EMERGENCY! I KNOW UR PROBABLY TAKING AN EXAM BUT CALL ME ONCE U READ THIS! YOUR PARENTS STOPPED BY THE CAFE AND DIDN’T LOOK TOO HAPPY AND ARE LOOKING FOR U Y/N PLS CALL ME

“Oh shit,” I fumble with my seatbelt, buckle myself in and call Mingyu. “Y/N!!!!” “Jesus, Gyu calm down. Tell me what happened, I’m driving to the cafe right now.” “Ok! So! Your dad walked into the cafe, not making a scene and walked into the back and started calling out your name. But it was mine and Joshua’s shift so we were trying to explain to him you were in class, BUT THEN your mom comes in SCREAMING,” Mingyu begins to explain, nearly yelling as well. Telling me how my mom was furious at me for some reason, and kept on saying “where’s that boy? And how does she know him?” And my dad calmly got her out into their car and began to explain to him and Joshua why my mother was furious, “Your parents know about Seungcheol.” “Oh my god.” “I’m not even sure how they know Seungcheol, or how they know your relation with him. But they seemed really upset and good thing we covered for you because they think you have exams all day and shouldn’t disrupt your day,” Mingyu’s voice got quiet as I hear Joshua’s voice in the background, almost arguing with Mingyu, “Shut up, she’s on the phone right now.” “Why did you tell her! The two of them have a date tonight!” “I can hear you two.” I sigh over the phone, “I’m outside the cafe, I’ll be right in.”

I swear to god if Seungcheol’s parents are who I think they are, I’m going to end this. I really can’t have anything nice here.

[staliasjeronica]

Veronica Lodge Personality Profile

According to my knowledge, Veronica Lodge would be an ENTJ. Note: These are from a website, and therefore is what the website says for this type. I went through every single one to figure out the right fit for Veronica and this one was the closest and fit her best according to how she is in the show.

Commanders are natural-born leaders. People with this personality type embody the gifts of charisma and confidence, and project authority in a way that draws crowds together behind a common goal. However, Commanders are also characterized by an often ruthless level of rationality, using their drive, determination, and sharp minds to achieve whatever end they’ve set for themselves.

If there’s anything Commanders love, it’s a good challenge, big or small, and they firmly believe that given enough time and resources, they can achieve any goal. This quality makes people with the Commander personality type brilliant entrepreneurs, and their ability to think strategically and hold a long-term focus while executing each step of their plans with determination and precision makes them powerful business leaders. This determination is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Commanders push their goals through with sheer willpower where others might give up and move on, and their Extraverted nature means they are likely to push everyone else right along with them, achieving spectacular results in the process.

Commanders are dominant, relentless, and unforgiving. This isn’t because they are coldhearted or vicious per se – it’s more that Commander personalities genuinely enjoy the challenge, the battle of wits, the repartee that comes from this environment, and if the other side can’t keep up, that’s no reason for Commanders to fold on their own core tenet of ultimate victory.

If there’s anyone Commanders respect, it’s someone who is able to stand up to them intellectually, who is able to act with a precision and quality equal to their own. Commander personalities have a particular skill in recognizing the talents of others, and this helps in both their team-building efforts (since no one, no matter how brilliant, can do everything alone), and to keep Commanders from displaying too much arrogance and condescension. However, they also have a particular skill in calling out others’ failures with a chilling degree of insensitivity, and this is where Commanders really start to run into trouble.

Commanders’ distance from their emotions is especially public, especially in a professional environment. Commanders will simply crush the sensitivities of those they view as inefficient, incompetent, or lazy. To people with the Commander personality type, emotional displays are displays of weakness, and it’s easy to make enemies with this approach – Commanders will do well to remember that they absolutely depend on having a functioning team, not just to achieve their goals, but for their validation and feedback as well, something Commanders are, curiously, very sensitive to.

Commanders are true powerhouses, and they cultivate an image of being larger than life – and often enough they are. They need to remember though, that their stature comes not just from their own actions, but from the actions of the team that props them up, and that it’s important to recognize the contributions, talents, and needs, especially from an emotional perspective, of their support network. Even if they have to adopt a "fake it ‘til you make it" mentality, if Commanders are able to combine an emotionally healthy focus alongside their many strengths, they will be rewarded with deep, satisfying relationships and all the challenging victories they can handle.

STRENGTHS

Efficient – Commanders see inefficiency not just as a problem in its own right, but as something that pulls time and energy away from all their future goals, an elaborate sabotage consisting of irrationality and laziness. People with the Commander personality type will root out such behavior wherever they go.

Energetic – Rather than finding this process taxing Commanders are energized by it, genuinely enjoying leading their teams forward as they implement their plans and goals.

Self-Confident – Commanders couldn’t do this if they were plagued by self-doubt – they trust their abilities, make known their opinions, and believe in their capacities as leaders.

Strong-Willed – Nor do they give up when the going gets tough – Commander personalities strive to achieve their goals, but really nothing is quite as satisfying to them as rising to the challenge of each obstacle in their run to the finish line.

Strategic Thinkers – Commanders exemplify the difference between moment-to-moment crisis management and navigating the challenges and steps of a bigger plan, and are known for examining every angle of a problem and not just resolving momentary issues, but moving the whole project forward with their solutions.

Charismatic and Inspiring – These qualities combine to create individuals who are able to inspire and invigorate others, who people actually want to be their leaders, and this in turn helps Commanders to accomplish their often ambitious goals that could never be finished alone.

WEAKNESSES

Stubborn and Dominant – Sometimes all this confidence and willpower can go too far, and Commanders are all too capable of digging in their heels, trying to win every single debate and pushing their vision, and theirs alone.

Intolerant – “It’s my way or the highway” – People with the Commander personality type are notoriously unsupportive of any idea that distracts from their primary goals, and even more so of ideas based on emotional considerations. Commanders won’t hesitate a second to make that fact clear to those around them.

Impatient – Some people need more time to think than others, an intolerable delay to quick-thinking Commanders. They may misinterpret contemplation as stupidity or disinterest in their haste, a terrible mistake for a leader to make.

Arrogant – Commander personalities respect quick thoughts and firm convictions, their own qualities, and look down on those who don’t match up. This relationship is a challenge for most other personality types who are perhaps not timid in their own right, but will seem so beside overbearing Commanders.

Poor Handling of Emotions – All this bluster, alongside the assumed supremacy of rationalism, makes Commanders distant from their own emotional expression and sometimes downright scornful of others’. People with this personality type often trample others’ feelings, inadvertently hurting their partners and friends, especially in emotionally charged situations.

Cold and Ruthless – Their obsession with efficiency and unwavering belief in the merits of rationalism, especially professionally, makes Commanders incredibly insensitive in pursuing their goals, dismissing personal circumstances, sensitivities, and preferences as irrational and irrelevant.

RELATIONSHIPS

(ATM Archie Andrews, Reggie Mantle, Chuck Clayton)

As in other areas of their lives, Commanders approach dating and relationships with a set of goals and a plan to achieve them, and proceed to do so with impressive energy and enthusiasm. People with the Commander personality type are in it to win, and will gladly take leading roles in relationships from the start, assuming personal responsibility for how smoothly things go and working actively to ensure a mutually rewarding experience. Romantic relationships are a serious business, and Commanders are in it for the long haul.

This sense of personal responsibility means that Commanders put a lot of energy into their relationships, and they show their creativity by always having something new on the agenda to keep things interesting, especially in the dating phase. At the same time though, Commander personalities keep their eyes on the long term, and if they determine that a relationship is heading towards a dead end, they will cut their losses and move on in what will seem to their partner an abrupt end to the attention they had been receiving.

This occasional ruthlessness with personal relationships is Commanders’ primary weakness, and if they aren’t careful they can develop quite the reputation. Sensing others’ feelings and emotions will never be a comfortable skill for Commanders, but it is critical that they work consciously to develop it, both for their partners’ sake and for their own healthy emotional expression. If they don’t, they risk dominating and overruling their partners, and this insensitivity can easily break a relationship, especially early on.

But as all goes well in the dating phase and a future is deemed viable, people with the Commander personality type continue to impress with their creativity and energy. Their authentic confidence makes Commanders’ sex life dynamic to say the least, and they often push to explore new ways to express their affection with imaginative enthusiasm. Yet Commanders tend to have these innovations planned in advance, with some structure and predictability to their sex lives, leaving the true spontaneity to those less organized personality types.

Commanders are extremely growth-oriented, and will seize any opportunity to improve themselves, listening to and acting on criticisms, so long as they are logical ones, and always striving to improve their knowledge. At the same time, Commanders expect this of their partners, and it is surprising to them that others don’t always share this attitude. Still more surprising to Commander personalities is others’ active efforts to avoid these tense situations.

While Commanders may view criticism as the most efficient route (and they’re often right), they should bear in mind that their partners may be more interested in emotional support and growth, an area of self-improvement that Commanders themselves too often avoid. As with most things, balance is key, and Commanders should strive to meet their partners half-way, whatever their needs, be it through honest criticisms or steady emotional support and praise.

Commanders’ best matches are with other Intuitive (N) types, with one or two opposing traits to create more balance in the relationship. Mature Commanders are able to recognize and adapt to the needs of their partners, and know that even the most rational individuals have emotional needs that must be met. Fortunately the same logic that dismisses emotions is also able to recognize that a conciliatory attitude can be the best tool to get the job done. With their strong senses of responsibility and dedication, people with the Commander personality type are sure to make this effort, resulting in long-lasting, satisfying relationships.

FRIENDSHIPS

(ATM Betty, Kevin, Jughead, Archie, Reggie, and Cheryl)

As in most aspects of their lives, in friendship Commanders seek personal growth and inspiration, and they often have a plan for how to accomplish it. Friendships of circumstance, built on things like shared routines, are not Commanders’ preferred method – rather, they pursue their friends, seek out individuals who share their passion for deep, meaningful discussions, and who enjoy learning and development as much as they do. It is not always easy to be Commanders’ friends – they demand a lot from these relationships – but they pay a great deal of attention to their friendships, and it is unlikely that it will ever feel stagnant.

People with the Commander personality type are very smart and highly critical, and they won’t back down if they are put on the defensive – in fact, there’s no better way to earn their respect. It’s not easy to stand up to a personality as big and blustery as Commanders’, and they too often find that others crumple under the force they apply when they really start to enjoy themselves.

Only the most hardened rationalists are able to hold their ground against strongly expressed Commander personalities, who neither need emotional support, nor understand others’ need for it. This lack of sensitivity is Commanders’ chiefest weakness. Either a point is supported by logic and reason, or it is erroneous.

More enlightened Commanders recognize that if ever there was an area where they could learn from others and improve themselves, it is in the realm of emotional sensitivity – to dismiss any aspect of personal growth borders on hypocrisy.

Still, the bulk of Commanders’ friends will likely fall into the Analyst category, as all of these types share the same passion for logical, far-reaching ideas and critical debate. Anyone who can match Commanders’ ability to brainstorm and theorize will find an honest and dedicated friend. Anyone who can’t or won’t, as with many more down-to-earth types who often question the point of such discussions, will find themselves ignored – perhaps a situation that is best for everyone.

CONCLUSION

Armed with a powerful intellect and strategic thinking, Commanders can overcome or outmaneuver obstacles that seem unbeatable to most. At the same time, their many quirks, such as often unconstrained rationalism, lead to many misunderstandings.

[cromwxll]

               “𝐖𝐇𝐎 𝐀𝐌 𝐈?....

                                        𝒀 𝑶 𝑼   𝑲 𝑵 𝑶 𝑾   𝑾 𝑯 𝑶  𝑰   𝑨 𝑴.”

                                    -- 𝐑𝐇𝐘𝐒𝐀𝐍𝐃  ●  𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐕𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐄  ●  𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐖𝐄𝐋𝐋 --

    ENTJ - THE COMMANDER \ TYPE 8 - THE PROTECTIVE CHALLENGER 

𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐒 are natural-born leaders. People with this personality type embody the gifts of charisma and confidence, and project authority in a way that draws crowds together behind a common goal. However, 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐒 are also characterized by an often ruthless level of rationality, using their drive, determination and sharp minds to achieve whatever end they’ve set for themselves. Perhaps it is best that they make up only three percent of the population, lest they overwhelm the more timid and sensitive personality types that make up much of the rest of the world – but we have 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐒 to thank for many of the businesses and institutions we take for granted every day.

                                                 --- 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘 ---

If there’s anything Commanders love, it’s a good challenge, big or small, and they firmly believe that given enough time and resources, they can achieve any goal. This quality makes people with the Commander personality type brilliant entrepreneurs, and their ability to think strategically and hold a long-term focus while executing each step of their plans with determination and precision makes them powerful business leaders. This determination is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Commanders push their goals through with sheer willpower where others might give up and move on, and their Extraverted (E) nature means they are likely to push everyone else right along with them, achieving spectacular results in the process.

At the negotiating table, be it in a corporate environment or buying a car, Commanders are dominant, relentless, and unforgiving. This isn’t because they are coldhearted or vicious per se – it’s more that Commander personalities genuinely enjoy the challenge, the battle of wits, the repartee that comes from this environment, and if the other side can’t keep up, that’s no reason for Commanders to fold on their own core tenet of ultimate victory.

If there’s anyone Commanders respect, it’s someone who is able to stand up to them intellectually, who is able to act with a precision and quality equal to their own. Commander personalities have a particular skill in recognizing the talents of others, and this helps in both their team-building efforts (since no one, no matter how brilliant, can do everything alone), and to keep Commanders from displaying too much arrogance and condescension. However, they also have a particular skill in calling out others’ failures with a chilling degree of insensitivity, and this is where Commanders really start to run into trouble.

Emotional expression isn’t the strong suit of any Analyst type, but Commanders’ distance from their emotions is especially public, and felt directly by a much broader swath of people. Especially in a professional environment, Commanders will simply crush the sensitivities of those they view as inefficient, incompetent or lazy. To people with the Commander personality type, emotional displays are displays of weakness, and it’s easy to make enemies with this approach – Commanders will do well to remember that they absolutely depend on having a functioning team, not just to achieve their goals, but for their validation and feedback as well, something Commanders are, curiously, very sensitive to.

Commanders are true powerhouses, and they cultivate an image of being larger than life – and often enough they are. They need to remember though, that their stature comes not just from their own actions, but from the actions of the team that props them up, and that it’s important to recognize the contributions, talents and needs, especially from an emotional perspective, of their support network. Even if they have to adopt a "fake it ‘til you make it" mentality, if Commanders are able to combine an emotionally healthy focus alongside their many strengths, they will be rewarded with deep, satisfying relationships and all the challenging victories they can handle.

- STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES

EFFICIENT – Commanders see inefficiency not just as a problem in its own right, but as something that pulls time and energy away from all their future goals, an elaborate sabotage consisting of irrationality and laziness. People with the Commander personality type will root out such behavior wherever they go.

ENERGETIC – Rather than finding this process taxing Commanders are energized by it, genuinely enjoying leading their teams forward as they implement their plans and goals.

SELF-CONFIDENT – Commanders couldn’t do this if they were plagued by self-doubt – they trust their abilities, make known their opinions, and believe in their capacities as leaders.

STRONG-WILLED – Nor do they give up when the going gets tough – Commander personalities strive to achieve their goals, but really nothing is quite as satisfying to them as rising to the challenge of each obstacle in their run to the finish line.

STRATEGIC THINKER – Commanders exemplify the difference between moment-to-moment crisis management and navigating the challenges and steps of a bigger plan, and are known for examining every angle of a problem and not just resolving momentary issues, but moving the whole project forward with their solutions.

CHARISMATIC AND INSPIRING – These qualities combine to create individuals who are able to inspire and invigorate others, who people actually want to be their leaders, and this in turn helps Commanders to accomplish their often ambitious goals that could never be finished alone.

STUBBORN AND DOMINANT – Sometimes all this confidence and willpower can go too far, and Commanders are all too capable of digging in their heels, trying to win every single debate and pushing their vision, and theirs alone.

INTOLERANT – “It’s my way or the highway” – People with the Commander personality type are notoriously unsupportive of any idea that distracts from their primary goals, and even more so of ideas based on emotional considerations. Commanders won’t hesitate a second to make that fact clear to those around them.

IMPATIENT – Some people need more time to think than others, an intolerable delay to quick-thinking Commanders. They may misinterpret contemplation as stupidity or disinterest in their haste, a terrible mistake for a leader to make.

ARROGANT – Commander personalities respect quick thoughts and firm convictions, their own qualities, and look down on those who don’t match up. This relationship is a challenge for most other personality types who are perhaps not timid in their own right, but will seem so beside overbearing Commanders.

POOR HANDLING OF EMOTIONS – All this bluster, alongside the assumed supremacy of rationalism, makes Commanders distant from their own emotional expression and sometimes downright scornful of others’. People with this personality type often trample others’ feelings, inadvertently hurting their partners and friends, especially in emotionally charged situations.

COLD AND RUTHLESS – Their obsession with efficiency and unwavering belief in the merits of rationalism, especially professionally, makes Commanders incredibly insensitive in pursuing their goals, dismissing personal circumstances, sensitivities, and preferences as irrational and irrelevant. 

     --- 𝐄𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐀𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐌 𝐓𝐘𝐏𝐄 𝐄𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 : 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐑 ---

            𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 | 𝐒𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭 | 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 | 𝐁𝐢𝐠-𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 | 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥

Of all the Enneagram Types, 8s stand out for their decisiveness, strength, take charge nature, and confidant reliance upon themselves. They often have strong leadership skills, influence and the ability to empower others and make a strong impact on the world. When their values for truth and justice, are combined with their intelligence, courage, and stamina to protect and defend others, they reflect the power and protection of God.

CORE FEAR - Being weak, powerless, harmed, controlled, vulnerable, manipulated, and left at the mercy of injustice

CORE DESIRE - Protecting yourself and those in your inner circle

CORE WEAKNESS - Lust/Excess—constantly desiring intensity, control, and power; pushing yourself willfully on life and people in order to get what you desire.

CORE LONGING - "You will not be betrayed."

KEY MOTIVATIONS - Type Eights seek to have an impact on the world and to stay in control. They want to be self-reliant, to assert themselves, to prevail over others, and to be invincible.

KEY OBJECTIONS - Type Eights avoid feeling out of control, unsupported, vulnerable or weak. They don’t want their decisions or authority questioned, to be humiliated, or to be surprised by others’ unexpected actions.

- OVERVIEW OF A TYPE 8 AT THEIR BEST AND THEIR WORST

Type Eights engage life with a confident intensity, strength and a determination to make things happen. Their decisive and assertive leadership style causes them to be powerful change agents in the world, especially when seeking justice and protection for others.

However, in our world of sin and injustice where people are taken advantage of, they feel an intense need to protect themselves against betrayal and powerlessness by always having an invincible exterior and minimizing any personal vulnerability.

Their fear of weakness and vulnerability, joined with their thirst for control, power and justice, apart from Christ, can lead them to be too blunt, confrontational, insensitive, domineering, cynical, and even vengeful. Their attempt to provide protection for themselves by living with a thick steel over their hearts because of the tenderness in their heart. Underneath their outward strength is a major fear of betrayal. While other Types fear people and become passive, Eights fear people and become aggressive. Their personality says, "I’ll control them before they can control me."

Inevitably, this self-protection ends up doing more harm than good. To protect themselves they will live in denial, suppressing any emotions that cause them to feel vulnerable, out of control or exposed, living as though they never existed.

In relationship with others, Type Eights can end up sacrificing intimacy so that their weaknesses can’t be discovered and used against them. Denying themselves closeness and tenderness with others as well as the giving or receiving of forgiveness leaves them feeling incomplete, missing out on the intimacy and support for which they were created.

When Type Eights’ hearts surrender their fear of betrayal, and rely on Christ, they can relinquish their need for control and allow people to see an endearing vulnerability and compassionate strength. From that place they can better protect the innocent from injustice, empower others, and put their strength of leadership to use for the greater good.

                                            --- 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐔𝐀𝐆𝐄 ---

WORDS OF AFFIRMATION ( 9 )

Actions don’t always speak louder than words. If this is your love language, unsolicited compliments mean the world to you. Hearing the words, “I love you,” are important— hearing the reasons behind that love sends your spirits skyward. Insults can leave you shattered and are not easily forgotten. You thrive on hearing kind and encouraging words that build you up.

QUALITY TIME ( 7 )

In Quality Time, nothing says “I love you” like full, undivided attention. Being there for this type of person is critical, but really being there—with the TV off, fork and knife down, and all chores and tasks on standby—makes you feel truly special and loved. Distractions, postponed activities, or the failure to listen can be especially hurtful. Whether itʼs spending uninterrupted time talking with someone else or doing activities together, you deepen your connection with others through sharing time.

ACTS OF SERVICE ( 6 )

Can helping with homework really be an expression of love? Absolutely! Anything you do to ease the burden of responsibilities weighing on an “Acts of Service” person will speak volumes. The words he or she most wants to hear: “Let me do that for you.” Laziness, broken commitments, and making more work for them tell speakers of this language their feelings don’t matter. When others serve you out of love (and not obligation), you feel truly valued and loved.

PHYSICAL TOUCH ( 5 )

A person whose primary language is Physical Touch is, not surprisingly, very touchy. Hugs, pats on the back, and thoughtful touches on the arm—they can all be ways to show excitement, concern, care, and love. Physical presence and accessibility are crucial, while neglect or abuse can be unforgivable and destructive. Appropriate and timely touches communicate warmth, safety, and love to you.

RECEIVING GIFTS ( 3 )

Don’t mistake this love language for materialism; the receiver of gifts thrives on the love, thoughtfulness, and effort behind the gift. If you speak this language, the perfect gift or gesture shows that you are known, you are cared for, and you are prized above whatever was sacrificed to bring the gift to you. A missed birthday or a hasty, thoughtless gift would be disastrous—so would the absence of everyday gestures. Gifts are heartfelt symbols to you of someone else's love and affection for you.

-- @gallaghermissions --

GIF CREDIT XXX

[josh-washington-wants-pizza]

Imagine Connor Romance

BEEP-BEEP You shuffled a bit on the grey sofa where you were sleeping, a brown leather jacket lay aslant on your torso. The silent television played, casting an array of colours around the room. Its light would burst, filling the space with a sudden brightness. Blues and greens across the surface of a glass coffee table, shimmering off the small number of picture frames that lined a solid, lonely wall. Then the dark resumed once more.

BEEP-BEEP Another deep, slumberous breath impelled a slouching arm awake. Your hand crept along the soft piece of furniture that, as of lately, had so grievously become your new bed.

BEEP-BEEP "Yeah, okay." You groaned, fatigue in your voice. Fingers colliding with the tabletop, there was a slight sting of fleeting pain but nothing to wince at. You grabbed the riotous cellphone nearby, seemingly louder than usual as it broke precious quietude. Your other hand slipped over your face, almost fully awake now and rubbing the lack of rest from your eyes as you brought the cell to your ear.

"Yes?" You answered rough and forceful but your eyes flitted open and adjusted to tenebrous shapes. A neon clock pulsed yellow, reading four in the morning.

"It's Connor, we have somewhat of an emergency. I'm going to need a ride if you don't mind. Detective." "What about Hank?" You sat, fully attended, scrambling for your pants somewhere on the floor. A new flash of light from the television flooded the room again, illuminating the entirety of the seating room. "I can't seem to get a hold of him. Didn't have time to check the usual spots." "I'll be there in ten. Keep trying him, okay?" Putting your pants on and securing your holster and badge, you took but a moment to fix yourself up and presentable and out the door, you went.

The chilly air hit you hard but there was no time for that. You left your gloves and zipped your jacket to the neck.

You yawned on arrival to the station, waiting but a few seconds before the car door opened and a surge of cold shivered you alert. "Thanks." The gentle voice announced and a tall individual climbed in. His hair was neatly made, save for a distinctive few strays, smartly fallen to one side. You faintly huffed under your breath at his readiness. Jacket, shirt, tie. Well put together, as usual. Yourself on the other hand. Messy but still surprisingly elegant hair. You smelled like last nights nightmare and your stomach cried out in an embarrassment of dinner-skipping revenge. At least the smudgy eyeliner hid your sleepiness and became a look you didn’t know you could work. 

"Long night?" Connor teased. Of course, he could tell. Why would you even forget that? "No luck reaching Hank?" "No, unfortunately. I did leave him four messages." You chortled lightly. "He's not going to like that. Where are we going and what are we looking at?" "An old building on the North side of town." He relayed the address. "At approximately 3:15, cleaning services assigned to the complex found a deceased man on the second floor. There doesn't seem to have been a break in and nothing appears stolen." "Okay, let's see what's been going on over there."

Red and blue and yellow car lights painted the sidewalk and warehouse facility at it's South wall. A police team had already sectioned off the streets and secured the industrial cleaners. "Hank?" You closed the car door, spotting the grey-haired man. A beer gut that's starting to finally shed. A tired expression that left one guessing if it was due to sleep deprivation or exasperation from his fellow coworkers. Connor closed the passenger's door and shrugged his shoulders with a quizzical visage.

The two of you approached the scene, Hank was in one of his moods. Arguing with a uniformed man at the gate. "That's a complete fuck-up, and you let it happen!" He gestured a harsh pointed finger toward the complex before crossing his arms. "Like I said. The new guy stepped all over the place before we got back from talking to the cleaning crew. Should have kept a closer eye on him but it's been a busy night. What else do you want me to say about it?" "How about you move aside and let us do our thing now?" You said, fixing your badge to your belt and sending Hank a glance of disbelief while you walked past the yellow tape. "We didn't know if you received the call." Connor stood next to him and Hank fixed his eyes in sarcasm. "I got your messages. ALL of them." They made their way in and followed the trail of hustling police. "Do your thing, Connor. I'll check in with the coroner on standby. [ Y/N ], talk to the cleaning crew and get a detailed statement." You drew your attention to Connor as he was about to proceed with investigating the area. Something you wanted to say. It was on the tip of your tongue but the situation weighed on your mind. It would probably sound strange to everyone else in the room that would hear you say it. Definitely inappropriate, considering what Connor was. Still, you latched onto your words long enough for Hank to notice. He raised a brow, ready to tell you to move your butt along but it was decided. You opened your mouth and said, "Be careful, Connor." He looked up at you from the scene with a baffled tilt to his head. "Last time you got shot in the arm. Don't make it a habit and get yourself too damaged." Without looking back you left for the decaying lobby to start your work, primarily to hide your burning cheeks. But, what were you more embarrassed about? Would anyone find it absolutely ludicrous to care about a fixable Android? Would Connor think it was trivial of you? No time to think about that!

The sunlight rose into the sky, the birds and the city woke to their daily routines. The entire investigation of the complex took a gruelling while. Gavin Reed and his team arrived to finalize the scene. You could almost cut the tension his presence caused. There were whispers that Gavin had a thing for you. Such as the noticeable way he watched you walk by. It's been said that he truly fell head-over-boot when he watched you perform the Detroit Police training course that came around every six years.

"You kids going to that celebratory crap tomorrow night?" Hank searched his pockets for his car keys. "For the Captain? That's tomorrow night?" You groaned, desperate for a shower and some sleep. A little food if you could squeeze that in without falling face first into it. "Yeah, I hear ya." Hank unlocked his car door. "See you there." You smiled, knowing how those words might have gotten under his skin. Hank hated Jeffrey Fowler but he also respected the man to a significant degree. He could show up for the spite of it or because he actually cared to see his old pal rewarded for his duties.

Connor got into your car and flagged Hank down through the window. "Fowler was very pleased when I told him we would all be there. Said it would be like old times again." "Ah-huh, stop promising shit for me, would you?" He rolled his window back up before Connor could apologize. "Niiiice." You put a pair of shades on and laughed a little. "Can I ask you a personal question?" Connor leaned back in the seat and rubbed the coin he picked up from within your cupholder between his index finger and thumb. "Always" you made for the end of the street. "Did you mean what you said, back at the crime scene?" Fantastic. You wanted to play it cool but your arms became stiff and your gaze was stone-forward. "I did." You managed, trying to keep your face from turning red. At this point, it's become something of a practice. When did your feelings for Connor become a thing of second-guessing and making sure no one else notices them? No- wait. That's perfectly natural. Eventually, you get close to everyone you work with and you care about what happens to them in this dangerous field of work. Gavin Reed popped into your mind. Eh, almost everyone. 

"Am I unaware of any negligence in my decision making or inefficiencies in accomplishing my objectives?" Connor was sure that that wasn't the case but he asked anyway, to ease you out of further humiliation. "Don't do that." "Do what?" A small smile crept onto his face and he raised a brow in lightheartedness. "That thing that you do. Where someone says something, and you respond after processing the best conversational exchange route that will get them to spill what you want to know." You checked the calendar on your cell out of nervousness. "It's-" "If you say 'it's part of my programming' I'm gonna kick you out. We know damn well it's not." Connor swiftly laughed, his smile widened and now he raised both brows in defenselessness. 

You reached the station and Connor stepped out of the vehicle. He turned around and leaned on the door, angling his head to the window, levelling himself. "I would never want anything to happen to you, either." He said, tossing the coin back into the cupholder. "Get some rest detective." He tapped on the roof of the car in a polite gesture of: take care.

Your composure was failing you and somehow, you felt defeated. The Detroit Police Department liked its share of gossip. You thought you overheard whispers about the way you looked at him. Sometimes it sounded like bits of jealousy for rising in the ranks and getting to work with "Team Hank". That was four years ago though. Were they still sour about it? Perhaps the gossip was true then. Did you? Look at Connor differently? In any case, he was factually different. 

You had the secret nickname of "Iron Heart" behind your back. You've been asked out more than once and you always said no. The people you worked with began to assume there was something abnormal about that. The ladies still learning drill and protocol loved Gavin Reed for his confidence but when they caught on to his mysterious infatuation. "Iron Heart" became "Bitch of Stone." Yet-

You stood under the shower upon reaching home-sweet-this-is-what-I-can-afford. The water rolled onto your skin like a magical spring of rejuvenation. The eyeliner streamed down your face in a black weep, collecting in a mess on your hands and extended down. Until it washed away.

And yet, he's still on your mind. You swept the condensation from the bathroom mirror. Hair soaked, droplets of water sparkling in the light. The hot steam, coiling off your shoulders.

Staggering toward your best days comfort, your most humble slice of happiness, your high-resiliency foam cushions wrapped in thick poly fibre; old friend. Down you went. Face first into the sofa and it seemed like your heavy heart dragged you down harder. Faster. Sweet dreams.

On the day of the party, you picked out your best dress. You haven't seen this curvy number since your sister got married. It brought back some fond memories that made you smile and you thought it looked good on you for once. Your earrings dangled and your hair was in a rare mood to your liking. Most importantly, you wanted to see Hank and Fowler embrace in forgetful bygones and share a toast. Those two deserve the good times they used to share together.

Getting there was a trip of nerves. You wouldn't have guessed the occasion would be this luxurious but the ballroom was filled with the finest. Golds and greys and grand staircases. You scanned the scenery and its magnificence. Moderately taking your breath away. You nodded a hello in return to those who nodded first, catching some of the attention from bystanders. This wasn't anything you were used to and you started to conceive how out of place you felt. It was then that you caught a glimpse of Hank between the cluster of people. As you made your way to him, the crowd dispersed in a loud chatter. It was revealed that he was standing at the bar, enjoying a martini. "Of course." You approached with a lively smile. "Who the hell is this?!" He stood back and took a spirited look at you. "No idea I knew a movie star." He took another sip. "Drunk already?" You joked "You look very handsome yourself. Clean up pretty well, actually." The two of you looked out at the floor. "Take a good look." Hank leaned on the bar and placed his drink on the granite top. "Room full of assholes." You couldn't help but burst out in laughter. "Come on, Hank. Somewhere in that old grumpy guise, there's a guy that cares deeply about a lot of things." Hank winsomely smirked at the way your painted lips curved along your face and made you glow. His expression grew soft and respectful of you and he quickly reflected on you as a precious jewel. A daughter that he would give anything to see safe in your years.

Connor tightened his tie in the elevator's silver reflection. When the doors opened he followed the sound of the gathering. There were a few people he recognized and worked with. Some shook his hand in welcome and others refused to acknowledge his presence. Only one stood with a mean gaze in his direction. Gavin Reed. His invitation must have been out of courtesy, he japed to himself. "Law or not, Androids don't deserve to intermingle in this kind of event. Trading class for shit with this tin-can walking around." Reed remarked aloud when Connor passed. He paid them no mind and continued on. In the main room, he noticed Hank raising his glass from across the noisy floor, trying to catch his attention. Connor dodged the bobbing mob and caught his hand in a handshake. "Well, you kids are making me feel old! Good to see you out of that stupid jacket of yours." "Thought I’d change it up a bit?" Connor looked around the room in observation. Hank placed an olive in his mouth and bit down. Taking a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and fixing it into Connor's. "[ Y/N ] is here already, better go say hello or something before someone else does." He put a toothpick between his teeth, eyes following Reed and his company making their entrance. "She went that way." He added and tossed his head in direction. Connor took a slim glass of champagne, to which Hank dropped a brow in bemusement. "What's that for?" He asked, Conner waved his hand "I'll catch you later."

You swept yourself inside a balcony that held two other souls. Their conversation faded when the stars met your eyes and the breeze gave you comfort. Essentially, you were just tired and doing your best to relax. Reed somehow noticed your figure between the swaying curtains. The way your back curved whilst resting your elbows on the stone slab, inclining somewhat forward and looking out below. Before he could finish his saunter, a slow animosity festered. First at the sight of Connor and secondly, his close familiarity with you.

"So, is this an evening or what?" The sweet and cordial voice broke your solitude. You turned to him with a tranquil delightment that caught him off guard. "That's the most inane thing someone has ever told me." Your eyes fell to the glass in his hand. "At least it will definitely be something you'll remember then? For you." He handed you the glass. You took a sip and looked back up at the sky. "What do you see?" Leaning on the stone rail, to catch the kindness of the swift gusts. "I see…" Connor relaxed himself, leaning over likewise. His inspection of the stars and the swaying trees and the sound of the water fountain below; brought a humble amusement to you. "Everything" he finally spoke, his tone was earnest and soft. His hair flowed in generous bearing, falling back into place. You thought how lovely he was in the moonlight and studied his features in an astonishing silence. Eyes, skimming over the smallest of detail. Connor bent his head to your quietude. He regarded your study of him. Tracing your quick admiration of him from his eyes, to his lips and he did the same without notice. "Would you like to dance?" He held out his hand, looking for anything you might like to engage in. Something within the space of each other. Something he hoped you would enjoy. "Mmm, okay." You hesitated briefly, stomach filling with an exciting fuss. "I haven't danced to this type of music in a while. Be nice." You took his hand and he led you to the floor.

Gavin threw his head to the side in annoyance. It seems that lately he had been losing all of his battles and expanding an inner loathing regarding Androids. Connor twisted his hand into a leading position and took you by the waist with the other. Holding on firmly, you placed your free hand onto his shoulder. Piano, harp and strings invited their guests into a dreamy motion. There was only a small select few that passed coarse glances. They were people that clung to a rudimentary view of Androids and the humans that sought them with courtship. The pace was a slow rhythm, a few twirls for the woman. Connor was attentive to the language of your body, your partnership was fluid and meaningful. Hank reflexed a double-take and almost choked on what would be his final drink of the night. "You gotta be shittin' me." He watched his two associates come together closely, the frivolity in the aura surrounding them, the deep and understanding passion in their focus.

"Not so bad after all." Connor beamed in an obvious nature. "I would say the same but nearly everything you do is to perfection anyway." "I wish there were other things I was good at." "Like what?" The curious quality in your voice made him think about his words. One could even assume he felt a quiet embarrassment. "Liiike.. Knowing how to say things that need to be said. Getting my timing right would probably be the first step." "I think a lot of us wish we were a little better at that kind of thing." The music slowed to an even sway and you found yourself in a comfort you hadn't known in a long time. You dropped your hand away from Connor's and clasped them neatly around his neck instead. He wrapped his arms around your frame, first putting his hands to your back and tracing your figure down, down until they settled around your waist. It gave you a chill you fought against, unsure of anything else but the moment now. You reposed your head against his chest, to keep from losing yourself in his view.

Gavin nearly bit down on his tongue at the sight but what upset him the most was that everyone else had seen it too. The whispers about the woman and the Android instead of [ Y/N ] and himself. Across the room, Hank was dumbfounded but proud. A wonderful feat was happening right in front of him, that bridged the idea of you both jointly and fondly. A kick to society, he thought and was happy about.

The lights dimmed to Fowler's admittance down the grand staircase but just before the beautiful melody came to a halt. Connor raised your head by the chin and touched his lips to yours in the dark. You held onto his shoulder with an arm draped around and slithered your other hand onto the back of his head. Taking his hair between your fingers. Connor parted your lips easily enough, your acceptance of him was benevolent and affectionate. He planted a hand at the curve of your lower back and the other just an inch from your posterior. The way you felt was enticing and it was utterly new to him. His tongue brushed with yours in an inquisitive probity and your breathing quickened to his enchantment of such a thing. Lungs. Air. Experiencing them through you. You were filled with his scent and the unexpected warmth of his mouth.

The lights flickered on before you both gently parted but the uproar of claps and cheers meant for the unnoticed speech of Jeffrey Fowler had everyone's engrossment. The moment seemed to belong to both of you alone. You took Conner's face into your hands and he looked down at you lovingly. Your hands were warm and a comfort to him, he took them into his and studied the lines on your palms. To this, Hank discovered while making his way up to Fowler. He paused for a short while and noticed you two had now laced your fingers together. Not tightly but in a loose and charming way. Your awareness was on Fowler now. Both, whispering to one another and smiling at the gathering that had collected around him to congratulate his honours. It seemed to have been the perfect picture in Hank's mind. Reminding him of earlier years, when his wife held him by the arm and this mere action made the world complete in a way. He shrugged these former pieces of memory from weighing too densely and continued on toward Fowler with a new elation.

Connor extended his arm for you to take. "We better give Hank some backup."

And Hank certainly did feel altered in a restored sense of the word. If Connor had felt like a son to him now, you were definitely the daughter-in-law to fulfil this new family of his.  

[vrepit-sals]

Title: When I’m not the only one Characters: Pidge, team Voltron, the Holt family Pairings: None Tags: space family, found family, trans girl pidge Word Count: 4055 This was my piece for @pidgevoltronzine, you can get a copy of the free zine here. This fic is available on a03 here

They're still standing in the middle of the hallway, when an indignant shout comes from far away, reverberating down the castle corridors at a much higher decibel than the late hour would warrant.

"Keith is your favourite brother? I bought you a video game!" ______

Pidge learns that blood is not a prerequisite for family.

She's sitting on the kitchen counter, sprinkling chocolate chips into a bowl while Matt stirs the mixture with a wooden spoon. They're almost done, and in half an hour she knows they'll have freshly baked peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies.

She feels grown up, being allowed to help in the kitchen with only her brother's supervision. She's wearing her brand new green dress, the one she'd spent half-an-hour spinning in that morning, trying to memorise the unfamiliar way the fabric swept across her legs.

Her mother had pulled her hair up into pigtails and smiled at her from behind a camera as she twirled, then bundled her up in her arms. She'd received a kiss on the cheek and revelled in hearing her name from her mother’s lips. She'd never felt safer.

Her favourite cookies are like the cherry on top of the cake, the celebration of something she's wanted for years and only just attained.

Her brother makes a dramatic reprimand when she eats a chocolate chip and opens his mouth wide, swooping for and missing the chip she throws.

She giggles as he bends down and pops it in his mouth anyway, citing the five second rule. She continues to watch, eagerly accepting when Matt offers her the chance to stir the bowl.

He smiles down at her as she works, and declares the cookies complete with a flourish.

It's as he's pulling out the baking paper that she realises their vital mistake.

"We forgot to add the pidge of love!" She says, ready to clamber off the counter in order to grab the mysterious ingredient that their mother adds to everything she cooks.

Matt stops and stares at her for a second before he starts to laugh.

"Yes, we definitely can't forget that!" he says, wiping away a tear before showing her how to do a sprinkling motion, adding their blessing to the mixture.

He hands her back the wooden spoon.

"Better make sure it's stirred in properly."

He grins at her and she smiles back, sweeping the spoon through the dough in the figure 8 motions their mother had taught her.

They scoop out the dough with their hands and roll it into balls between their palms. Matt hands her the spoon to lick as he leaves to ask their father to put the tray in the oven for them. He lifts her off the counter and lets her pick the TV show they watch while they wait for the cookies to be done.

It's the best birthday she's ever had.

"They look great, Pidge," Matt says when their father places the cookies on a heatproof mat, batting his children's hands away from the hot tray.

She looks at her brother and tries to raise one eyebrow the same way their mother does.

"Pidge?"

"Yeah," Matt says, ruffling her hair and laughing as she squeals, "because you're our own little 'pidge of love'. Our most important ingredient."

She smiles at him, and he grins back, a certain mischief in the quirk of his lips that she can't seem to place.

In eight years she'll be telling him she hates the nickname, a slightly embarrassing story of childhood ignorance and Matt's warped sense of humour. In ten years it'll be one of the few connections to her family and planet that she still has, and she'll hold it tight with no plan to ever let it go.

But for now her chest feels lighter than ever. A new nickname, her first dress and her favourite cookies.

Life couldn't possibly get better.

Coran looks tired.

He always does, at least to some degree. Pidge doesn’t think she's ever seen him without loss and exhaustion lingering behind his eyes.

All of them need a spa day. Sometimes it feels like the entire team is running on empty. But Coran and Allura have been fighting far longer than the paladins have. They don't have a home waiting for them when this is all over.

Sometimes Pidge can see Coran's uncertainty in the crack between his smile.

But he hides it well. He wanders over to her research as if he's been resting all day, without a care in the world. In actuality, Pidge knows he's been cleaning the castle, preparing training sessions, assisting Allura with recon and checking up on all of them and helping when he can.

She wants to tell him to go have a nap. She wants to give him something to ease the burden, even just a little.

"I found the next link in the chain," she says instead.

It's taken three days and feels like nothing. Coran still smiles like it's progress.

"Oh?" he asks. He leans forward to look at the screen over her shoulder.

"The ship Matt was on docked near the Vaekla system, and unloaded cargo before jumping into hyperspace," she says, "it's been stationed for combat ever since. The logs don't mention the prisoners, but they must have been moved around the same time as the cargo."

The one thing that seems crystal clear in all this is that the Galra value prisoners as less than worthless. They are shepherded from ship to ship in a seemingly endless chain until a more permanent prison happens to be on the ship's route.

They’re rarely listed in logs at all, and where they are there’s merely the number of prisoners and a date. She’s struggled to keep track of which group Matt is in, and the disquiet of her mind whispers that she might not even be on the right track.

"The Vaekla system, that sounds familiar," Coran says.

"It one of the biggest Galran cargo hubs on this side of the galaxy."

Coran nods and taps his finger against his chin.

"Do you know the ship they were transferred to?"

"The base has enough resources to hold prisoners for about a week at a time. I've just finished compiling a list of all the ships that went through there within a week of the prisoners arriving. I'm just about to start cross-referencing their cargo, logs and destination routes to come up with some likely candidates."

Just saying the sentence drops a weight on whatever small piece of optimism she still had going. She thinks of how little of the cross referencing can be done automatically, and the seemingly endless list of ships.

Coran just nods and pats her on the shoulder. His presence does make her feel a little better, for all that she knows he'll give her some words of encouragement before going back to his own duties.

"Well then, we'd better get started."

Coran plops down into the seat next to her and pulls up a monitor. Pidge looks at him in shock for a moment before distributing the list between them.

The time passes eons faster than it did that morning. Coran tells her a story about King Alfor and a rather forward Torian diplomat as they work, and Pidge's stomach hurts from all the laughing by the time they take a break for dinner.

The mind is such an inefficient memory storage system.

Pidge knows that she had an album of family pictures back at home. She had backups on external hard drives and CDs and physical copies stashed in just about every room.

When Matt and her Dad disappeared, she swore she would never forget them. She would never lose the family photos of them, no matter what natural disaster or piece of bad luck might strike. She knew one day she would use the photographs to find them.

She'd brought the picture of Matt with her to the Garrison and to space beyond. But she'd left the pictures of her father at home. She'd thought one photo she could pass off as coincidence, but any more would make her real identity obvious.

She'd been just paranoid enough, but in a completely unhelpful direction.

Some days she tries to picture her father's face, and she can feel her memory falter. It takes her brain minutes to construct something that resembles him, but when she tries to zoom in, to see the quirk of his cheesy grin, it blurs away to nothing.

She sees the uncanny valley whenever she tries to think hard about home.

She doesn't mean to bother Shiro on the bad days. It's not like it's a conscious thing, she'll just be getting some food goo and he'll be sitting at the table with a cup of what Coran swears sounds just like green tea. Or else she'll be training with the rest of the team, and he'll notice that the bags under her eyes have multiplied overnight.

She knows he sees what's happening, because always, without fail, he'll start talking about her family.

He never asks her about it directly, but the tales from the Kerberos mission remind her of things that have slipped her mind.

How Matt sang Lady Gaga at the top of his lungs when the world felt too heavy. Her father's habit of accidentally stealing other people's combs. The stories flesh out her family in her mind's eye, transforming them back from vague recollections into actual people.

People she can see again.

People she is going to.

Some days space seems intent to rip the past from her. To fog her memories and cloud her perspective, to block her from anything but the battles and missions and death.

But she knows that whenever she starts to forget what's important, Shiro will make sure she remembers.

Allura pulls her aside after a debriefing for another diplomatic mission. Pidge expects something to be wrong or there to be extra work to do.

Sometimes Pidge feels like she manages to accidently insult the princess every time they talk. Allura always accepts her apologies with grace, and although they've become closer over the past few months, Pidge still feels the need to hold herself back somewhat, before her tongue manages to undo all their progress.

Perhaps that's why missions and training still seem to dominate their conversations.

"What's up Allura?" she asks, already half calculating what she could accomplish for Allura before they land planetside.

"This new mission doesn't require us to wear our armour, but we will need something more formal than our regular attire. I was wondering if you'd like to borrow a dress for the occasion?"

Pidge stares at her for a moment. She's suddenly transported back to that day all those years ago. The hallway mirror, fabric whooshing around her legs and a feeling of peace she never expected to find.

Allura's face shifts with her silence.

"Of course, if you'd prefer I'm sure Coran can find you a suit-"

"No," Pidge cuts her off in her haste, "I'd love to borrow something. Thank you."

She can't keep a grin off her face. Allura returns it before leading her to her bedroom, where they spend the afternoon going through her princess-sized closet.

Allura seems to have stories about every item of clothing: tales of tall trees and impromptu play-fights that ripped holes in ball gowns; diplomatic missions to planets that may no longer exist; soft fabric for dresses worn around the castle, on days she could forgo her royal duties and just be a child.

Pidge feels a little foolish trying on dresses Allura wore when she was 10, but as soon as the fabric goes over her head she feels a sigh of relief spread through her.

The clothes she normally wears are one of the only connections to Earth she still has. But these dresses, alien as they are, remind her of another kind of home.

Allura retires to the edge of her bed and comments on each dress Pidge tries. For some she is loud and exuberant, quoting lines she's heard from the team like "walk walk fashion baby" or Altean slang that she assures is positive.

For others she can't help but laugh at the outdated buttons that apparently clash terribly by current standards and silhouettes that are unflattering in every way.

Together they create a shortlist. Then, one by one they eliminate options until a winner is found.

The dress is a deep emerald with a high neckline, finishing just below her knees. On Altea it would have been used for lunch events or as less formal day wear, but Pidge has never felt more like royalty.

The weight of the dress is comforting and familiar, and she could easily fit her bayard, along with any other useful gadgets in one of its almost-impossible-for-their-sheer-size pockets.

Allura looks at her in confusion when she discovers the pockets and promptly sticks her hands in them, twirling around with gleeful shouts of their existence.

"Of course it has pockets. What kind of dress doesn't?"

Pidge turns and stares at her with the kind of reverence that thus far has been reserved only for technology.

"Altea must have been a wonderful place."

She sees Allura smile with a far-away look in her eyes.

"Yes, it really was," she smiles at Pidge like that dress is helping keep the past alive.

Even when they're done choosing an outfit for the meeting, they continue going through the wardrobe. This time Allura joins her, pulling on gifts from diplomats of other planets and piling scarves around her neck.

Pidge laughs at the look it creates and Allura strikes a pose, prompting Pidge to do the same.

When they've finally expended every item in the closet, Allura picks up a large pile of dresses Pidge hadn't even noticed her making, and tells Pidge to lead the way back to her room.

Pidge looks at her in disbelief for a moment, but can't help the smile pulling at her lips.

"Are you sure you don't mind me wearing them?" she asks as she pushes aside the various electronics she'd stacked in the clothing-devoid closet.

"Of course, hand-me-downs are an important part of Earthen bonding," Allura grins at her, before looking slightly sheepish, "or is this like the time Lance told me that the middle finger was a sign of great admiration and respect?"

Pidge laughs at the memory, and all the healing pods Lance had to clean in punishment.

"No, that's right. Just, thank you."

Pidge isn't sure if she'll ever be able to express how much she means it. Allura just smiles at her and hefts all the dresses into her closet in one graceful motion Pidge could never hope to replicate.

Pidge is wearing one of her new dresses when she enters the lounge and gets comfy on one of the big couches. She has her laptop with her, but there's no pressing intel to translate or interpret. She fiddles with a few of her passion projects, but can't seem to focus.

Lance had greeted her when she walked in, and he's sitting on the next couch over, working on a jumper using sharpened sticks that were once part of some Altean extreme sport.

Pidge finds herself continually distracted by the soft clack of the needles.

It takes her back to when her mother would sit next to her father on the couch, knitting squares for their local charity group during family movie night. She'd always promised Pidge that she'd teach her one day.

But life was always too busy, and then Kerberos happened and family movie nights stopped. The clack of needles and any sense of life drained from their house.

She stares blankly at her laptop screen and imagines bringing her mother back a blanket, one knitted in space. She imagines knitting with her during future family movie nights. She imagines the warmth of yarn slipping through her fingers feeling like her mother's hugs.

She turns her head towards Lance and he looks up from his knitting. He grins easily at her, one eyebrow raised in an unasked question.

"Can you teach me how to knit?" she asks.

Lance lets out a happy of bark of laughter, and all but throws his needles to the side as he exclaims.

"Of course I can! You know, I am an excellent teacher."

Pidge rolls her eyes at him, but the smile that overtakes Lance's face is contagious. He ruffles her hair as he leaves to grab another pair of needles and some yarn.

Pidge's first square looks more like a dilapidated rhombus. Her second isn't much better.

But Lance just has this proud look on his face as he examines them. He weaves her tales of all the holey scarves he gave his mother for Christmas when he was small.

Pidge smiles as she casts on her third attempt.

"Hey Pidge, can I get a hand with something?"

She looks up at where Hunk is smiling at her from the entrance of the room. She'd originally come in to the lounge room to knit. The blanket she's making is almost halfway done, and she preemptively misses it whenever she works late into the night without its warmth around her shoulders.

But her laptop had sat and stared at her. Taunting her with puzzles and uncracked codes that she's never been able to resist.

Hunk's voice snaps her out of what the other's affectionately call her 'technology haze', and the laptop all but whines at her as she puts it down to follow Hunk into the hallway.

They don't seem to be following the familiar path to their joint workshop, and Pidge frowns.

"What do you need help with?"

Hunk just turns to her with a secretive grin.

"Just a little something I've been working on," he says, pausing at the end of corridor for a moment before his eyes light up in recognition and he leads them left.

Secrecy isn't like Hunk. They share information on their projects as easily as breathing, exchanging ideas with barely a need to speak. She and Hunk are the only ones on the ship to truly appreciate the intricacies of what they do, and she holds her comrade in arms in high regard.

She manages to hold her tongue for almost a minute before the curiosity gets the better of her.

"Is it problems with the real-time Galra tracker?" she asks. Hunk lets out a laugh.

"No."

"Is it time to re-scramble the communication frequencies?"

"Not for another few days."

She hums and taps a finger against her chin.

"It's not modifications to Yellow?"

"Yes."

Pidge's eyes light up and Hunk looks at her with a grin.

"It's not," he says, and picks up the pace, laughing at her grumbling.

They continue winding down the castle corridors, watching them get smaller and darker. Hunk leads her to a part of the ship she's never been before, stretching hallways of doors leading to what she assumes are guest rooms their team of seven have no use for.

Hunk seems to stop at one of them at random, but when he flicks his wrist to open the door, it asks for a passcode. As if it were the armoury, or the keeper of a great secret.

When the door opens Pidge can see a faint glow emitting from the room. She takes in the mass of contraptions taking over half the floorspace, all leading up to a projection of a familiar start-up screen.

Killbot Phantasm 1 gazes back at her.

Her eyes are fixed on the game she's spent months trying and failing to play. A grin takes over her face and she swears she starts to tear up a little.

"I was thinking maybe later I could get some help carrying it up to one of the larger common rooms," Hunk says, as she stares at the screen in a daze, "but for now do you want to try multiplayer?"

Pidge takes the offered controller and asks herself how she ever got so lucky.

"Oh it's on," she says. Hunk cheers and presses start.

Pidge is seriously considering just snuggling down and sleeping in the cold, hard metal of her chair.

Her bed feels light-years away, an insurmountable distance. Her limbs ache at the thought and her mind lies, tells her that surely if she just lets her eyes drift shut, she'll be able to muster up the energy to make the journey. Just five minutes is all she'll need.

The part of her brain that's holding the fort together, that's somehow still functioning after 12 hours piloting her lion and running through Galra battlecruisers and three days before that working around the clock to decode the intel for this stealth mission, feels like this information is somehow sketchy. But she can't gather enough evidence to refute it.

She's just starting to sink into sweet, sweet rest when someone grabs her wrists and hoists them over their shoulders. After a jostle, she can feel hands under her legs securing her in place, pressed up against someone's back.

Then, despite any effort on her part, she's moving.

Pidge musters the last of her energy to pry open her eyes. Apparently the thing scratching her nose is actually long, black hair.

"Thanks Keith," she says, some part of her feeling their slow, lumbered movements and reminding her that Keith must be almost as tired as she is.

Or maybe not, the way he pulls his arms to boost her further up his back, and the smile she can hear when he says "No problem Pidge."

Her mind marks her current situation as ‘safe’ and resumes its descent into slumber. Just as she's about to slip away, Pavlovian conditioning pulls a final phrase from her lips.

"You're my favourite brother."

Keith pauses, and Pidge sluggishly realises that there was something unusual about that statement.

She's said it a thousand times, whenever Matt would give her the remote without a fight, or team up with her in Trivial Pursuit, or when the night got late and he'd piggyback her to her room, a million worlds away but exactly like this.

Every time Matt's response was exactly the same:

"I'll call it an achievement when I'm not the only one you've got."

It looks like he may have to start doing just that.

Or not, because apparently Keith has swept the title out from under him.

And part of Pidge wants to cry, because it feels like every day her Earth family drifts further and further away. And part of her wants to laugh as she tries to imagine the look on her mother's face when she introduces her to her new uncle and sister and four new brothers. Because she has to believe that one day she'll bring her families together.

Even if her team never consider her family back.

They're still standing in the middle of the hallway, when an indignant shout comes from far away, reverberating down the castle corridors at a much higher decibel than the late hour would warrant.

"Keith is your favourite brother? I bought you a video game!"

The voice is easily identifiable as Lance's, and Pidge can imagine him in his pyjamas, half a face mask applied, his features pulled into put-on disgust.

"Yeah, well I set it up!" comes a deep voice from even further in the ship. Hunk's deep tones betray far more humour than Lance's, and Lance squawks.

"I taught you how to knit!"

"I helped you decode 20 million lines of cargo logs!"

Pidge can almost see Hunk's teasing smile and Lance's over-exaggerated hand movements.

"The point is: your favourite brother is Keith?!" Lance yells in indignation.

A laugh is ripped from of Pidge's throat, and it mingles with laughter coming from Keith before drifting back down the hallway. It's answered by two over the top declarations of future retribution sent Keith's way.

When Keith drops her off at her door, she hugs him tight as she wishes him goodnight. His cheeks are red and wet, but a smile threatens to overtake his face as he returns the hug, his arms gentle but firm around her shoulders.

Then she's in her room, kicking off her shoes but otherwise letting nothing distract her from the sweet comfort of her bed. She pulls the blankets up to her neck and lets herself snuggle into the warmth which seems to be emanating from her heart.

And perhaps it's been building up over months, but it still hits her with surprising clarity.

For the first time, the Castleship truly feels like home.

[preyed-llama]

Math

Summary: Logan really likes math and his world is his and his intelligence isn’t something he should be ashamed of. 

Author’s note:  Surprisingly, this originally started as a fic about Logan really liking maths and it was only meant to be a few hundred words. Than i got carried away and it turned into something more powerful? i’m not sure how to describe it. 

Genre: Fluff? Hurt/comfort? inspirational? 

Ship: No pairing

Warnings: none

Logan had a book of math formulas constantly open on his desk. He didn’t need it, it was just so calming to have something that was objective, that emotions and biases didn’t affect. The formulas and questions calmed him, there was something so special about them. People would like subjective things, he knew very well that the other sides were interested in more... creative expressions. 

Right and wrong questions are what he loved. Something that no one could ever say was wrong, because he was painfully aware of the times people decided that something he was or made was wrong. Even some forms of science were subjective and biased, they painted the world in different shades for everyone. Science could be wrong, even if you followed the formula to the letter. Science could be biased and ruined by one person. 

Math was always right or wrong. You could find the error and correct it in a matter of seconds. You could find the error in your teammates work, that is if you even need to worry about the teammate at all. The shift of the numbers as the equations shifted into the poetry he so adored. The turns of the pen as he wrote out the numbers that swam around his head. The accomplishment he felt when he had solved a particularly challenging equation.  

It was relaxing. He didn’t need to worry about what the others thought, there was no worry that it was wrong. No worry that it wasn’t logical. People would say how awful math was, how it got under their skin. How it didn’t make sense and how it was too logical. But like painting a picture or writing a book would release the itch to express themselves, to free their mind and disappear into a world of their own imagination, Math freed his mind. 

The numbers and symbols filled up his mind as they set free the itch to do something. The numbers and symbols built the world, each equation bent his perception of reality as it gave him a deeper understanding of the objects around him. His page filled with equations, each one as complicated and powerful as the others, each varying in importance, most were useless but fun. 

Logan loved math. He loved the ability to understand and identify everything with various amounts of knowledge. He loved the fact that everything worked out in the end. The knowledge that no matter what his mistakes were, he could find them, he could fix them. Everything would make sense. 

Sometimes he lost himself to the calculations, sometimes when the world around him got too complicated. When the world around him became too incomprehensible, when there was a mistake he couldn’t fix. When his life became too messy he would escape to a world where there were only right answers and wrong answers, where there was no place for errors, and no place for emotions and biases. 

Logan was a mess, but with each algebraic equation he solved and each formula he used and piece of data he collected, he would sort himself out. His thoughts slowed to the speed of his hand as he tried to keep his writing intelligible. His mind focused on the letters and numbers on the page rather than the mistakes of the day. 

Math was always right. Numbers had never let him down, and any mistake or wrong answer was his own fault and something he could fix. Logan could correct his formula or equation. He couldn’t correct his emotions or feelings, he couldn’t correct how others saw him, and he couldn’t correct the mistakes he made that day. 

But none of that mattered. None of that mattered because his emotions and feelings weren’t wrong, because it didn’t matter how people saw him, and because his mistakes couldn’t be corrected and forgotten, but they could be fixed. Logan wasn’t perfect, there was a lot of things he didn’t know, but there was a lot of things he did know. 

In his life he always knew that someone else would see him as unintelligent in one form or another. An author would think his poems were bad, a mathematician would think that his math was slow and done in the most horribly cliche an inefficient way. Logan knew that, although he was always going to seem like an idiot next to the greats, people still thought he was intelligent. 

Virgil still looked impressed when Logan would start talking about mental illnesses and diseases. Virgil once made a comment about learning something new whenever he talked to Logan. Logan knew that it was an offhanded joke, but he still clung to that as his drive to keep learning, so he could see the way Virgil’s face lit up when he found out some interesting fact. 

Roman would ask Logan for tips about poetry. He would bite back his ego to make a comment on how skilled Logan was. Roman was always thrilled to hear about Logan’s newest poetry. Roman kept pushing Logan to study poems, to dive into his emotions and scribble each line on the page with enough emotion to bring the reader to tears, and keep them on their toes and expecting something better. Logan would study a million poems to keep Roman impressed. To keep Roman asking him for advice. 

Patton was by far the most supportive. He would ask about the smallest things like the growing conditions of flowers or the best skills each animals possessed. Patton would compliment Logan’s intelligent the moment he stopped explaining whatever tangent Patton sent him on. Logan would study twice as hard. His eagerness to impress and stay valuable pushed him to his limits to some days.

It might’ve seen narcissistic to say it like that, but he would regularly express his love for the others knowledge, even when it made him feel like he wasn’t needed. He absolutely adored it when Virgil would tell him some ghost facts, he loved to hear each little piece of information Virgil was willing to give him. Logan regularly found himself in awe as Virgil talked about a new supernatural being or he showed him his newest painting. Virgil was talented, more than Logan could ever dream to be. 

Roman could build worlds, his ideas spun and twisted until Logan couldn’t even begin to study it all. Logan loved Roman’s creativity, his thoughts and ideas. Roman was a genius when he wanted to be. The logical side knew it. He knew that Roman could create more than Logan could ever hope to. He knew that the creative side was amazing when it came to building things and doing things without instructions. Logan could do a puzzle, but Roman could make it, Roman could come up with a beautiful picture and bring life to it. Logan knew that he would never be like that. 

Patton understood emotions like no one else. Logan always felt like a robot when he talked about emotions with Patton. The fatherly side would know just what to say to cheer someone up. Logan knew the textbook idea of emotions, he knew how they appeared to the mass majority. Logan had spend a night finding out the physical and mental effects of love and the chemical reactions of the brain. But Patton could tell you all that information at a moments notice. Patton understood the world in all its complexities and flaws, and yet he still found the amazing uplifting things buried deep below. 

Logan couldn’t compare himself to them. They had their own strengths and weaknesses. It was unfair and counter productive to compare himself to people with skills so far different from his own. Why should he compare himself to the geniuses of the past when he was in the present with his own ideas and skills. Why should he compare himself to the people around him when they were so different. 

Times have changed and people are different. He didn’t need to be perfect. His strengths weren’t depicted by the people around him. He could spend the rest of his life looking up to people. He could wish for their intelligence or destroy himself for not being the same level. Or he could work hard to become like them, he could be inspired by them rather than discouraged by them. Logan wasn’t perfect, far from it, but he was Logan Sanders, he was intelligent and powerful in his own way. He didn’t need some old men who have studied their entire life to tell him that he was an idiot, because he was nowhere near that. 

Logan Sanders was nothing short than a genius in his own right. Sometimes that was difficult to see, sometimes he had a hard time doing that. But if he couldn’t be proud of his skills, then he was going to work until he could be. 

[talabib]

How To Improve Your Time Management Skills

Modern life is full of time thieves. Whether it’s your phone buzzing in your pocket with the latest tweet, a colleague interrupting you in the middle of an important task or the daily barrage of emails, your time is constantly being stolen from you, minute by minute, hour by hour. And once you’ve lost that time, you can never get it back again.

To remain focused and make sure these time thieves don’t get the upper hand, you need to keep a few tricks up your sleeve.

Here are a few ways to improve your time management skills

Do you ever wish you could have an extra hour in the day to read, exercise or hang out with the people you love? Well, you can and there’s no magic required! But first, you need to understand how precious time is.

That’s why the first secret of time management is learning that time is your most valuable asset and that, once it’s lost, you can never get it back. A good way to monitor this precious resource is by breaking it down. For instance, there are 1,440 minutes in a day, each of which should be invested wisely.

To remind yourself of this fact, you can tape a” 1,440” poster to your office door. It would remind you of the limited time in each day. But why use minutes? Why not think about the 86,400 seconds that every day offers?

Well, there are a bunch of daily tasks that you can actually do in a minute, like knocking out 30 sit-ups, reading a poem or watering a plant. This fact makes minutes key to monitoring your time.

Okay, now that you appreciate how valuable time is, it’s time to start prioritizing it. This is where the second secret comes in: determine and prioritize your most important task, or your MIT. This is the single task that will have the biggest impact on your life or work.

Just take Therese Macan, a professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis. She found that one of the most important productivity determinants is the ability to identify priorities. So pinpointing an MIT is central to time management.

For instance, if a senior executive sets a goal of developing a new app, her MIT might be to hire a new programmer. Or the MIT for a start-up CEO could be to prepare a great presentation to land a major investment. Research has shown that having a daily MIT, whatever it is, results in greater levels of happiness and improved focus.

Never-ending to-do lists weigh down lots of people. Take a look at yours. How many of the tasks have been lingering there for weeks, unnecessarily stressing you out?

You probably have at least a few such tasks, and the best way to deal with them is by pulling out a good old fashioned calendar. Here’s where the third secret comes into play: ditch your to-do list and pick up your calendar to de-stress your day.

Research has found that an average of 41 percent of items on to-do lists never actually get completed. One of the reasons for this shocking statistic is that a note stating how long it’ll take to complete them usually doesn’t accompany the tasks on such lists. As a result, tasks that are more difficult or less important generally get left undone.

That might not be such a problem, except for the fact that the unfinished items on your to-do list will inevitably produce a lot of stress that could just as easily be avoided. In fact, researchers from Florida State University discovered that you can avoid this stress by simply coming up with a plan to complete a task.

The Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller offers a good example. She succeeded at spending time with her family, completing her school obligations, training for the Olympics and even doing media interviews, all by scheduling time for important tasks.

This strategy is known as time blocking or time boxing and, incredibly, all it requires is maintaining a detailed calendar. By doing so, Miller forced herself to prioritize tasks that would bring her closer to achieving her goal and, to this day, she keeps an almost minute-by-minute schedule.

However, you’ll inevitably encounter tasks on your calendar that you can’t accomplish. When this happens, instead of letting them drift into the past, simply reschedule. For example, if you usually make it to the gym at noon, but have a flight to catch at the same time, simply move your workout to earlier in the day.

Everyone’s been there: an important deadline is creeping up and, instead of working on the project at hand, you’re planted in front of a screen – scrolling through Facebook, texting a friend or watching your favorite TV show. Procrastination is a tough one, but, luckily, there are strategies to break free from it and start getting things done.

This is where the fourth secret comes in: procrastination can be overcome by imagining your future self. After all, you don’t procrastinate because you're lazy, but because you don’t have sufficient motivation. Imagining yourself in the future can fix this problem and it’s as simple as asking yourself two questions: “What pleasure will I get by doing this thing?” and “What pain will I feel if I don’t do it?”

For instance, if your goal is to work out every single day, but you can’t get yourself to exercise, just imagine having a huge beer belly and feeling totally sluggish. Such a mental routine will get you off the couch and onto the treadmill.

At the same time, being honest about the actions your future self will take can also help you achieve your goals. For example, if you know you’ll be inclined to eat unhealthy snacks during a future break, you can protect yourself by throwing out all the junk food in your house. You could even go a step further by filling the house with healthy options like baby carrots and hummus.

From there, you can move on to the fifth secret: there will always be more to do; you can’t do everything. And, actually, that’s fine!

In fact, prioritizing and scheduling the tasks you want to do is much more valuable than crossing off as many items as possible. Just take President George W. Bush as an example. He knew there would always be more to do. So instead of trying to do everything, he made it his priority to read tons of books, since he found it therapeutic and educational. As a result, he read some 95 titles during his presidency!

Have you ever had an incredible idea while shopping for groceries or walking the dog? Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of straining to remember it later, you could just jot it down right then and there?

That’s why the sixth secret is to always have a notebook handy. After all, writing down your thoughts helps you hold onto them. Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson says he never would have built his business empire without his trusty notebook.

He was so committed to writing down his ideas that, one time when he had a business idea and no notebook, he wrote down the thought in his passport! For him, if an idea doesn’t get written down, it could be lost forever.

Taking notes by hand also helps your memory. For instance, the psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer found that students who hand wrote their notes during a TED talk were better able to recall the material than students who took notes on their laptops.

Writing down your thoughts is crucial – as is maintaining control over your schedule, which is where the seventh secret comes into play. It says that you should avoid checking your email too often, lest other people dictate how you spend your time.

In fact, contrary to popular belief, constantly checking emails is unproductive. That’s because the anticipation felt when checking your inbox is comparable to pulling the handle of a slot machine. Often, you check your messages, and there’s nothing new. But sometimes there is a new message. This unpredictability is addictive, and one begins to check more and more often, hoping for the hit of dopamine that a message affords. Obviously, this costs you time and interrupts your focus.

A good way to untether yourself from your email is by unsubscribing from newsletters by using a program like unroll.me. But you can also adopt the 321-Zero system. To do so, just limit yourself to three email checks per day, while trying to get your inbox to zero in just 21 minutes.

If you’ve ever had an office job, you know how incredibly boring meetings can be. But that’s not the only problem with meetings. The eighth secret is that most meetings are inefficient and you should only schedule them as a last resort.

In fact, a 2015 survey found that 35 percent of respondents considered weekly status meetings to be a waste of time, for these two primary reasons:

First, in accordance with Parkinson’s law of triviality, meeting participants tend to waste lots of time on insignificant issues. Second, extroverts usually dominate meetings, making others less likely to participate. As a result, valuable information might not be shared during such gatherings.

That being said, if you absolutely have to have a meeting, opt for a stand-up affair rather than a sit-down one. This might seem odd, but researchers at Washington University found that meetings during which participants stand result in better collaboration, less attachment to ideas, higher levels of engagement and more effective problem-solving.

The Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, offers another good tip: by scheduling meetings based on increments of five or ten minutes, she’s able to have up to 70 meetings a week. If she stuck with the standard 30-minute block she would never be able to accomplish this.

In other words, controlling the timing of meetings will prevent people from sucking up your time. This is key since other people will constantly ask you for things, a fact that dovetails nicely with the ninth secret: achieve your immediate goals faster by saying no to most things.

After all, every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. The Olympic rower Sara Hendershot is a good example. She’s a pro at saying no to social and other engagements. This hard-learned skill enabled her to keep her eyes on the prize in the lead up to the 2012 Olympics in Rio, where she qualified for the finals.

As a cherry on top, research has even found that people who tend to say no in response to requests for their time are happier and have more energy. 

By now you know that it’s essential to spend your limited time on tasks that will have the greatest impact. The tenth secret can help you do that. It says that by applying the Pareto Principle you can uncover shortcuts to success. Here’s what that means:

In the 1890s, the Italian philosopher and economist Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto found that 20 percent of the pea plants in his garden produced 80 percent of his healthy peapods. He extrapolated this 80/20 rule into the general principle that now bears his name. It can be applied to a number of areas.

For instance, by applying the 80/20 rule to your employees, you might decide that the majority of your salespeople should be let go since they’re your lowest performers. From there, you could focus your energy on the remaining 20 percent, who already generate 80 percent of your sales, by giving them rewards and greater levels of support. The end result will likely be an overall improvement in sales.

Or you could use the 80/20 rule in your personal life by analyzing the tasks you do on a weekly basis, then identifying which of them has the greatest impact.

That being said, you can also accomplish more by critically assessing the tasks in front of you. The eleventh secret is designed to help you do that. It says that leveraging your skills and delegating work will increase your productivity. Just take a 2013 experiment published in the Harvard Business Review by the professors Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen. It found that 43 percent of workers were unsatisfied with the tasks they do at work.

By simply training employees to slow down and ask themselves a few questions, the study’s authors were able to identify important tasks, freeing up an extra eight hours per week. The first question they had people ask themselves was, “How important is this task to the company?” Then, “Is there anyone else who can complete it?” And finally, “How could this task be accomplished if I had half as much time?”

On a normal day in the office, do you ever have difficulty focusing? Most people do and a little bit of advice here can go a long way. This is the twelfth secret, which says that grouping your work into recurring themes each week will make you more effective.

A great example comes from Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and founder of Square. He says that the secret to running both his companies was to have a theme for each day. For instance, on Mondays, he would focus on management; Wednesdays would be dedicated to marketing; and Sunday would be reserved for reflection, feedback and strategy for the next week.

Or take the entrepreneurial coach Dan Sullivan. He recommends theming each week based on three types of days to stay focused and remain invigorated. The first type is called a focus day, which is for vital activities like revenue-growing tasks. The second type is called a buffer day, which is for catching up on emails, returning calls, having meetings, delegating tasks and doing paperwork. And finally, a free day is one on which no work should be done. This last type is reserved for vacation, family time and charity work.

Another simple way to boost your efficiency has to do with tackling small tasks. This is the thirteenth secret, which says that you should immediately take action on tasks that’ll take fewer than five minutes to accomplish and avoid returning to the same task over and over.

Just consider the straight-A student Nihar Suthar. He completes five-minute assignments right away, avoiding a long list of tiny tasks.

Or take Jeff. His sister Debbie recently emailed him, but instead of writing her back, he called her to make sure they could talk. By scheduling a call in his calendar and thereby saving the mental energy he would otherwise spend trying to remember to get back to her, he decided to handle this task immediately. If he had instead put it on a to-do list or left it in his inbox, he probably would have never remembered to address it.

Imagine waking up at six in the morning, working out for 45 minutes and then whipping together a delicious, high-protein breakfast. It might sound difficult but the fourteenth secret shows why it’s essential. It says that dedicating the first hour of each day to a morning routine will enhance your health – mind, body and soul. In fact, starting the day with a workout is a great way to get your creative juices flowing.

Just consider the New York Times best-selling author Dan Miller, who starts off each day by meditating for half an hour, then working out for 45 minutes while listening to audio programs. He avoids checking the news or looking at his phone during this time, devoting his first hour to positive and inspirational experiences. He even claims that his most creative ideas come to him during this daily “me time.”

From there, you can further increase your energy and well-being by eating a healthy breakfast and drinking lots of water. This is huge for the best-selling author and podcast host Shawn Stevenson. He considers energy to be everything, and so he starts off each day with what he calls an inner bath. He simply drinks 30 ounces of purified water to jumpstart his metabolism by flushing out waste.

In fact, according to the fifteenth secret, energy is paramount. The secret is that productivity isn’t about time, but about maintaining focus and energy.

That’s why Francesco Cirillo came up with the Pomodoro Technique – a method designed to reduce distractions and boost productivity. His approach involves setting a timer for 25 minutes, devoting your full attention to a single task for the full 25 minutes and then taking a five-minute break before repeating the cycle.

Author Monica Leonelle found ample success with the Pomodoro Technique after realizing that she didn’t have a single spare hour in the day. By using the Pomodoro Technique, she recharged during her breaks, maintaining steady energy throughout the day and, with the help of other techniques, went from writing 600 words per hour to 3,500!

Highly successful people consider time to be their most valuable asset. By applying their most effective life hacks – which do everything from prioritizing tasks to boosting your energy and keeping you focused – you too can make the most of your time.

[tearlessrain]

okay, I have a spare afternoon and a freshly made batch of guacamole I need to hide from my roommate because I only had one avocado and that is not enough to share. time to ruin it by watching Maximum Ride.

aw sad bird child. okay she looks nothing like the description in the book but she is adorable. why does the old guy look so much like Sad Island Luke.

listen I’m gonna be honest and say I barely remember the plot of the books and have no idea who anyone is. I remember who Ari is and like three of the bird children

why would the nicknames they (if I remember right, see above) gave eachother be on their official forms

oh god down we go into Voiceover Exposition Hell

... that is not a tomboyish fourteen year old girl.

... that is NOT a fourteen year old boy

seriously she looks like liv from izombie

um. did his wings get cut off. why is his back like that. where are her wings. why are they acting like it’s a big secret nobody is watching this who didn’t read the books we’re just here to see mediocre cgi wings. you have one job, movie. don’t screw up your one redeeming quality.

omg small child is adorable. he’s also the best actor by far for some reason. not that the bar was high but like this kid can actually act

why are they like. going out if their way to make max as unlikable as possible. I dislike her almost as much as light turner.

description of iggy I recall reading: pale, light-haired, fine-boned, somewhat calm and serious

description of max I recall reading: dark-haired, relatively sturdy build for a bird child, blunt and outspoken

so why am I seeing literally the exact opposite????

I just really, really hate her she hasn’t displayed a single redeeming quality or resemblance to her book counterpart

fifteen minutes in and still no sign of wings aka the only thing that would make this movie even slightly watchable

“I know you think max doesn’t care, but she does” are you sure about that fang because we’re almost a fifth of the way into the movie of which she’s the titular character and she has yet to display even one single emotion

wait that’s iggy sorry they both have the generic white boy haircut and dress similar

why did they give iggy all of max AND fang’s distinctive/interesting traits

less than one minute later: “you’re wrong to think max doesn’t care, she does” okay so like... you know the part of editing where you go through and look for superfluous lines and remove them? I THINK THEY FORGOT TO DO THAT.

god it’s like listening to a bioware dialogue tree

the only plot this movie has had so far is “nobody can go outside and everyone has to keep quiet” and now you all come pouring out of the house and start yelling the instant something suspicious happens. okay.

WINGS. FINALLY.

it wasn’t even a dramatic reveal though it was literally just schwoop there she goes

oh that’s some hobbit-level cgi oh dear

you know if you don’t have the budget to make decent wings and show them more often you shouldn’t be making a maximum ride movie that’s the only reason anyone is even here. seriously, one job.

oh my god ari I’m dying what did they do to his character design holy shit that’s bad

wHY ARE THESE CHILDREN BETTER ACTORS THAN THEIR OLDER COUNTERPARTS

WHAT IS THIS 80S MUSIC VIDEO OVERLAY EDITING

lasto beth nin, tolo dan nan galad

her face is just slowly rotating closer please stop.

i don’t want it.

what did that accomplish

aaand max continues to be a passenger in her own movie while fang and iggy take all the initiative

such dramatic. very slo mo. wow.

I love how they were so confident in their writing ability that they thought they could made the wings an afterthought

paul ari you is a wirwulf

I’m sorry nobody is going to get that it’s a mystery science theater reference

okay know what we should just rename the movie “Iggy” because he’s literally the only one who’s done anything useful or interesting

omg ari did the Shan Yu Punch out of the ground amazing

okay those wings are in no way sufficient to lift a child. even a child with hollow bones and whatever other bullshit physiology. they aren’t much longer than arms, you don’t even need to worry about being cumbersome when folded because they apparently just vanish magically so why not go for it. seriously, you had ONE JOB.

“stop.” thank you fang that’s just what I was about to say to her. but I think you meant “stop being irrational about this particular thing” whereas I meant “stop talking forever please and thank you”

you do NOT have enough chemistry or nuance for this much dialogue-free face closeup content, movie. when I said stop talking I meant stop the WHOLE scene containing the talking.

you know that “lemon stealing whores” porn intro that became a meme? that’s the quality of acting I’m looking at here. I’m not exaggerating that’s the vibe I get from her.

ah the ol’ “convenient nearby sexual assault” trope, hallmark of a writing team who forgot to give their protagonist a personality or redeeming qualities and are desperately trying to make up for it too late.

here comes fang in all his music video quality cgi slo mo glory to once again render max utterly superfluous

the funny thing is in any other movie I would kind of hate him but the baseline is max so he seems all right

it’s been 40 minutes and like three things have happened

okay I know normally in these liveblogs I’m yelling “show don’t tell” but that only works if what you’re showing has any internal consistency or meaning, if I just wanted to watch a bunch of disjointed scenes sometimes in slow motion I’d watch Koyaanisqatsi because at least they did it well. movie, please stop showing me things.

speaking of internal consistency they keep going wildly off model on the wings, they keep changing size/shape, now they look like they’re made of bendy wire how hard is it to google bird anatomy. YOU HAD. ONE. JOB.

how is she this bad at acting. I’m just looking on in awe now.

oh fang you’re a saint for putting up with her but you should have just left her in the house and taken over the movie

THE DIALOGUE IS SO BAD. “how’s you’re shoulder?” “fine......................................................... seriously, that’s all you’re going to say?” HE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING

this is just such a bizarrely disjointed mess

no. no please don’t kiss I don’t want to see it and it definitely didn’t happen in the book

thank god

omg it was iggy, finding yet another way to save the movie

oh stop trying to make her out to be all heroic and shit now, you wasted half the movie making this bed now lie in it and make someone else the protagonist. how about iggy, who has a personality and does things and stopped the unnecessary romance subplot in its tracks. the boy’s a hero.

only 30 minutes to go I can do this

I’m not even mad about the bullshit science because every other component of the movie is somehow even worse

“you were his favorite” FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY SHE HAS NO REDEEMING QUALITIES

actually scratch that SHE HAS NO QUALITIES SHE’S JUST THERE

flashback to the comparatively talented child actors time again

what was the point of that flashback though, you’re just relaying the exact information fang just told everyone with no new contributions. I didn’t say show AND tell ffs.

I don’t even know what to say about ari he’s just generally hilarious

okay we get it the ringing is loud, you have established this into the ground now please stop

okay good nobody’s talking Imma just take my earbuds out until it’s over

finally

and they’re back in their weird, economically inefficient cage arrangement again. oh no.

seriously why are all the children better actors like where did they find these children. moreover where did they find such terrible adults.

here comes woverine’s obnoxious metalhead little brother again

OKAY, WE KNOW IT’S JEB, YOU CAN STOP BUILDING UP TO IT NOW

please stop talking I beg you this is painful

“I brought you to the house so you could develop physically and emotionally” and I assume they brought her back because that part of the experiment was a complete failure

okay listen the pacing and editing in this movie is awful. it’s so slow. they pause for at least three seconds between every single line of dialogue and it feels like they’re doing that because they’re trying to cover for the fact that they have absolutely nothing to say. this conversation could last half as long as it is. and the editing isn’t even interesting it’s just “headshot headshot fullbody distance shot from the side repeat” even if the actors were good this scene would be boring as all fuck.

[monotone exposition]

[more exposition]

[badly emoted emotional response]

there now imagine that repeated several times over and you’ve watched the entire, I shit you not, seven minute scene.

so she walked out of the room calmly and voluntarily right past ari and then we cut to ari aggressively wrestling her back in the economically inefficient cage room

why is he talking like batman

why are they all looking to her for leadership she’s shown zero leadership

MAKE IGGY THE LEADER MAKE IGGY THE LEADER DEPOSE MAX

bit late to establish a new villain with no precedent in your already disjointed movie isn’t it?

p l e a s e stop with these establishing shots

asdfkdgs she punched him in the chest and his head jerked to the side miscommunication

once again that went on longer than it needed to I think we’ve identified this movie’s fatal flaw

one of them

the other is max’s acting

and the ratio of wings to literally anything else

everything that’s occurred in this movie could have happened in thirty minutes tops

running running running

with no indication of how far apart they are or where they’re going of course so there’s absolutely no tension

wha

omg she’s still standing there fucks sake learn pacing

“so what now” “I dunno” LEADERSHIP

oh goodness oh no she has passed out I guess we’ll just have to make Iggy the leader such a shame

you know even in the book I remember liking Iggy a lot. he was a wildly different character from the little I recall but I do know I liked him.

they flashed back to the entire movie sped up and it took less than a minute which I think says a lot about how little happened in this movie

oh no enough romantic tension

S T O P

I was at least expecting a final dramatic group takeoff since they’re a bunch of BIRD PEOPLE standing on the edge of a CLIFF and all, but I guess the cgi budget ran out so we end with the bird children just standing on the ground in a group to dramatic music.

YOU

HAD

ONE

JOB

fuck this I feel cheated but at least it’s over.

[aneddoticamagazinestuff]

Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been

New Post has been published on https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/friend-of-a-friend-the-facebook-that-could-have-been/

Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been

I express my network in a FOAF file, and that is the start of the revolution. —Tim Berners-Lee (2007)

The FOAF standard, or Friend of a Friend standard, is a now largely defunct/ignored/superseded1 web standard dating from the early 2000s that hints at what social networking might have looked like had Facebook not conquered the world. Before we talk about FOAF though, I want to talk about the New York City Subway.

The New York City Subway is controlled by a single entity, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, better known as the MTA. The MTA has a monopoly on subway travel in New York City. There is no legal way to travel in New York City by subway without purchasing a ticket from the MTA. The MTA has no competitors, at least not in the “subway space.”

This wasn’t always true. Surprisingly, the subway system was once run by two corporations that competed with each other. The Inter-borough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) operated lines that ran mostly through Manhattan, while the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) operated lines in Brooklyn, some of which extended into Manhattan also. In 1932, the City opened its own service called the Independent Subway System to compete with the IRT and BMT, and so for a while there were three different organizations running subway lines in New York City.

One imagines that this was not an effective way to run a subway. It was not. Constructing interchanges between the various systems was challenging because the IRT and BMT used trains of different widths. Interchange stations also had to have at least two different fare-collection areas since passengers switching trains would have to pay multiple operators. The City eventually took over the IRT and BMT in 1940, bringing the whole system together under one operator, but some of the inefficiencies that the original division entailed are still problems today: Trains designed to run along lines inherited from the BMT (e.g. the A, C, or E) cannot run along lines inherited from the IRT (e.g. the 1, 2, or 3) because the IRT tunnels are too narrow. As a result, the MTA has to maintain two different fleets of mutually incompatible subway cars, presumably at significant additional expense relative to other subway systems in the world that only have to deal with a single tunnel width.

This legacy of the competition between the IRT and BMT suggests that subway systems naturally tend toward monopoly. It just makes more sense for there to be a single operator than for there to be competing operators. Average passengers are amply compensated for the loss of choice by never having to worry about whether they brought their IRT MetroCard today but forgot their BMT MetroCard at home.

Okay, so what does the Subway have to do with social networking? Well, I have wondered for a while now whether Facebook has, like the MTA, a natural monopoly. Facebook does seem to have a monopoly, whether natural or unnatural—not over social media per se (I spend much more time on Twitter), but over my internet social connections with real people I know. It has a monopoly over, as they call it, my digitized “social graph”; I would quit Facebook tomorrow if I didn’t worry that by doing so I might lose many of those connections. I get angry about this power that Facebook has over me. I get angry in a way that I do not get angry about the MTA, even though the Subway is, metaphorically and literally, a sprawling trash fire. And I suppose I get angry because at root I believe that Facebook’s monopoly, unlike the MTA’s, is not a natural one.

What this must mean is that I think Facebook owns all of our social data now because they happened to get there first and then dig a big moat around themselves, not because a world with competing Facebook-like platforms is inefficient or impossible. Is that true, though? There are some good reasons to think it isn’t: Did Facebook simply get there first, or did they instead just do social networking better than everyone else? Isn’t the fact that there is only one Facebook actually convenient if you are trying to figure out how to contact an old friend? In a world of competing Facebooks, what would it mean if you and your boyfriend are now Facebook official, but he still hasn’t gotten around to updating his relationship status on VisageBook, which still says he is in a relationship with his college ex? Which site will people trust? Also, if there were multiple sites, wouldn’t everyone spend a lot more time filling out web forms?

In the last few years, as the disadvantages of centralized social networks have dramatically made themselves apparent, many people have attempted to create decentralized alternatives. These alternatives are based on open standards that could potentially support an ecosystem of inter-operating social networks (see e.g. the Fediverse). But none of these alternatives has yet supplanted a dominant social network. One obvious explanation for why this hasn’t happened is the power of network effects: With everyone already on Facebook, any one person thinking of leaving faces a high cost for doing so. Some might say this proves that social networks are natural monopolies and stop there; I would say that Facebook, Twitter, et al. chose to be walled gardens, and given that people have envisioned and even built social networks that inter-operate, the network effects that closed platforms enjoy tell us little about the inherent nature of social networks.

So the real question, in my mind, is: Do platforms like Facebook continue to dominate merely because of their network effects, or is having a single dominant social network more efficient in the same way that having a single operator for a subway system is more efficient?

Which finally brings me back to FOAF. Much of the world seems to have forgotten about the FOAF standard, but FOAF was an attempt to build a decentralized and open social network before anyone had even heard of Facebook. If any decentralized social network ever had a chance of occupying the redoubt that Facebook now occupies before Facebook got there, it was FOAF. Given that a large fraction of humanity now has a Facebook account, and given that relatively few people know about FOAF, should we conclude that social networking, like subway travel, really does lend itself to centralization and natural monopoly? Or does the FOAF project demonstrate that decentralized social networking was a feasible alternative that never became popular for other reasons?

    The Future from the Early Aughts

  The FOAF project, begun in 2000, set out to create a universal standard for describing people and the relationships between them. That might strike you as a wildly ambitious goal today, but aspirations like that were par for the course in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The web (as people still called it then) had just trounced closed systems like America Online and Prodigy. It could only have been natural to assume that further innovation in computing would involve the open, standards-based approach embodied by the web.

Many people believed that the next big thing was for the web to evolve into something called the Semantic Web. I have written about what exactly the Semantic Web was supposed to be and how it was supposed to work before, so I won’t go into detail here. But I will sketch the basic vision motivating the people who worked on Semantic Web technologies, because the FOAF standard was an application of that vision to social networking.

There is an essay called “How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web” that captures the lofty dream of the Semantic Web well. It was written by Paul Ford in 2002. The essay imagines a future (as imminent as 2009) in which Google, by embracing the Semantic Web, has replaced Amazon and eBay as the dominant e-commerce platform. In this future, you can search for something you want to purchase—perhaps a second-hand Martin guitar—by entering buy:martin guitar into Google. Google then shows you all the people near your zipcode selling Martin guitars. Google knows about these people and their guitars because Google can read RDF, a markup language and core Semantic Web technology focused on expressing relationships. Regular people can embed RDF on their web pages to advertise (among many other things) the items they have to sell. Ford predicts that as the number of people searching for and advertising products this way grows, Amazon and eBay will lose their near-monopolies over, respectively, first-hand and second-hand e-commerce. Nobody will want to search a single centralized database for something to buy when they could instead search the whole web. Even Google, Ford writes, will eventually lose its advantage, because in theory anyone could crawl the web reading RDF and offer a search feature similar to Google’s. At the very least, if Google wanted to make money from its Semantic Web marketplace by charging a percentage of each transaction, that percentage would probably by forced down over time by competitors offering a more attractive deal.

Ford’s imagined future was an application of RDF, or the Resource Description Framework, to e-commerce, but the exciting thing about RDF was that hypothetically it could be used for anything. The RDF standard, along with a constellation of related standards, once widely adopted, was supposed to blow open database-backed software services on the internet the same way HTML had blown open document publishing on the internet.

One arena that RDF and other Semantic Web technologies seemed poised to takeover immediately was social networking. The FOAF project, known originally as “RDF Web Ring” before being renamed, was the Semantic Web effort offshoot that sought to accomplish this. FOAF was so promising in its infancy that some people thought it would inevitably make all other social networking sites obsolete. A 2004 Guardian article about the project introduced FOAF this way:

In the beginning, way back in 1996, it was SixDegrees. Last year, it was Friendster. Last week, it was Orkut. Next week, it could be Flickr. All these websites, and dozens more, are designed to build networks of friends, and they are currently at the forefront of the trendiest internet development: social networking. But unless they can start to offer more substantial benefits, it is hard to see them all surviving, once the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) standard becomes a normal part of life on the net.2

The article goes on to complain that the biggest problem with social networking is that there are too many social networking sites. Something is needed that can connect all of the different networks together. FOAF is the solution, and it will revolutionize social networking as a result.

FOAF, according to the article, would tie the different networks together by doing three key things:

It would establish a machine-readable format for social data that could be read by any social networking site, saving users from having to enter this information over and over again

It would allow “personal information management programs,” i.e. your “Contacts” application, to generate a file in this machine-readable format that you could feed to social networking sites

It would further allow this machine-readable format to be hosted on personal homepages and read remotely by social networking sites, meaning that you would be able to keep your various profiles up-to-date by just pushing changes to your own homepage

It is hard to believe today, but the problem in 2004, at least for savvy webizens and technology columnists aware of all the latest sites, was not the lack of alternative social networks but instead the proliferation of them. Given that problem—so alien to us now—one can see why it made sense to pursue a single standard that promised to make the proliferation of networks less of a burden.

    The FOAF Spec

  According to the description currently given on the FOAF project’s website, FOAF is “a computer language defining a dictionary of people-related terms that can be used in structured data.” Back in 2000, in a document they wrote to explain the project’s goals, Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF’s creators, offered a different description that suggests more about the technology’s ultimate purpose—they introduced FOAF as a tool that would allow computers to read the personal information you put on your homepage the same way that other humans do.3 FOAF would “help the web do the sorts of things that are currently the proprietary offering of centralised services.”4 By defining a standard vocabulary for people and the relationships between them, FOAF would allow you to ask the web questions such as, “Find me today’s web recommendations made by people who work for Medical organizations,” or “Find me recent publications by people I’ve co-authored documents with.”

Since FOAF is a standardized vocabulary, the most important output of the FOAF project was the FOAF specification. The FOAF specification defines a small collection of RDF classes and RDF properties. (I’m not going to explain RDF here, but again see my post about the Semantic Web if you want to know more.) The RDF classes defined by the FOAF specification represent subjects you might want to describe, such as people (the Person class) and organizations (the Organization class). The RDF properties defined by the FOAF specification represent logical statements you might make about the different subjects. A person could have, for example, a first name (the givenName property), a last name (the familyName property), perhaps even a personality type (the myersBriggs property), and be near another person or location (the based_near property). The idea was that these classes and properties would be sufficient to represent the kind of the things people say about themselves and their friends on their personal homepage.

The FOAF specification gives the following as an example of a well-formed FOAF document. This example uses XML, though an equivalent document could be written using JSON or a number of other formats:

<foaf:Person rdf:about="#danbri" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> <foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/" /> <foaf:openid rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/" /> <foaf:img rdf:resource="/images/me.jpg" /> </foaf:Person>

This FOAF document describes a person named “Dan Brickley” (one of the specification’s authors) that has a homepage at http://danbri.org, something called an “open ID,” and a picture available at /images/me.jpg, presumably relative to the base address of Brickley’s homepage. The FOAF-specific terms are prefixed by foaf:, indicating that they are part of the FOAF namespace, while the more general RDF terms are prefixed by rdf:.

Just to persuade you that FOAF isn’t tied to XML, here is a similar FOAF example from Wikipedia, expressed using a format called JSON-LD5:

"@context": "name": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name", "homepage": "@id": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/workplaceHomepage", "@type": "@id" , "Person": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person" , "@id": "https://me.example.com", "@type": "Person", "name": "John Smith", "homepage": "https://www.example.com/"

This FOAF document describes a person named John Smith with a homepage at www.example.com.

Perhaps the best way to get a feel for how FOAF works is to play around with FOAF-a-matic, a web tool for generating FOAF documents. It allows you to enter information about yourself using a web form, then uses that information to create the FOAF document (in XML) that represents you. FOAF-a-matic demonstrates how FOAF could have been used to save everyone from having to enter their social information into a web form ever again—if every social networking site could read FOAF, all you’d need to do to sign up for a new site is point the site to the FOAF document that FOAF-a-matic generated for you.

Here is a slightly more complicated FOAF example, representing me, that I created using FOAF-a-matic:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"> <foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about=""> <foaf:maker rdf:resource="#me"/> <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource="#me"/> <admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic"/> <admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:leigh@ldodds.com"/> </foaf:PersonalProfileDocument> <foaf:Person rdf:ID="me"> <foaf:name>Sinclair Target</foaf:name> <foaf:givenname>Sinclair</foaf:givenname> <foaf:family_name>Target</foaf:family_name> <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:sinclairtarget@example.com"/> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="sinclairtarget.com"/> <foaf:knows> <foaf:Person> <foaf:name>John Smith</foaf:name> <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:johnsmith@example.com"/> <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="www.example.com/foaf.rdf"/> </foaf:Person> </foaf:knows> </foaf:Person> </rdf:RDF>

This example has quite a lot of preamble setting up the various XML namespaces used by the document. There is also a section containing data about the tool that was used to generate the document, largely so that, it seems, people know whom to email with complaints. The foaf:Person element describing me tells you my name, email address, and homepage. There is also a nested foaf:knows element telling you that I am friends with John Smith.

This example illustrates another important feature of FOAF documents: They can link to each other. If you remember from the previous example, my friend John Smith has a homepage at www.example.com. In this example, where I list John Smith as a foaf:person with whom I have a foaf:knows relationship, I also provide a rdfs:seeAlso element that points to John Smith’s FOAF document hosted on his homepage. Because I have provided this link, any program reading my FOAF document could find out more about John Smith by following the link and reading his FOAF document. In the FOAF document we have for John Smith above, John did not provide any information about his friends (including me, meaning, tragically, that our friendship is unidirectional). But if he had, then the program reading my document could find out not only about me but also about John, his friends, their friends, and so on, until the program has crawled the whole social graph that John and I inhabit.

This functionality will seem familiar to anyone that has used Facebook, which is to say that this functionality will seem familiar to you. There is no foaf:wall property or foaf:poke property to replicate Facebook’s feature set exactly. Obviously, there is also no slick blue user interface that everyone can use to visualize their FOAF social network; FOAF is just a vocabulary. But Facebook’s core feature—the feature that I have argued is key to Facebook’s monopoly power over, at the very least, myself—is here provided in a distributed way. FOAF allows a group of friends to represent their real-life social graph digitally by hosting FOAF documents on their own homepages. It allows them to do this without surrendering control of their data to a centralized database in the sky run by a billionaire android-man who spends much of his time apologizing before congressional committees.

    FOAF on Ice

  If you visit the current FOAF project homepage, you will notice that, in the top right corner, there is an image of the character Fry from the TV series Futurama, stuck inside some sort of stasis chamber. This is a still from the pilot episode of Futurama, in which Fry gets frozen in a cryogenic tank in 1999 only to awake a millennium later in 2999. Brickley, whom I messaged briefly on Twitter, told me that he put that image there as a way communicating that the FOAF project is currently “in stasis,” though he hopes that there will be a future opportunity to resuscitate the project along with its early 2000s optimism about how the web should work.

FOAF never revolutionized social networking the way that the 2004 Guardian article about it expected it would. Some social networking sites decided to support the standard: LiveJournal and MyOpera are examples.6 FOAF even played a role in Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004—a group of bloggers and programmers got together to create a network of websites they called “DeanSpace” to promote the campaign, and these sites used FOAF to keep track of supporters and volunteers.7 But today FOAF is known primarily for being one of the more widely used vocabularies of RDF, itself a niche standard on the modern web. If FOAF is part of your experience of the web today at all, then it is as an ancestor to the technology that powers Google’s “knowledge panels” (the little sidebars that tell you the basics about a person or a thing if you searched for something simple). Google uses vocabularies published by the schema.org project—the modern heir to the Semantic Web effort—to populate its knowledge panels.8 The schema.org vocabulary for describing people seems to be somewhat inspired by FOAF and serves many of the same purposes.

So why didn’t FOAF succeed? Why do we all use Facebook now instead? Let’s ignore that FOAF is a simple standard with nowhere near as many features as Facebook—that’s true today, clearly, but if FOAF had enjoyed more momentum it’s possible that applications could have been built on top of it to deliver a Facebook-like experience. The interesting question is: Why didn’t this nascent form of distributed social networking catch fire when Facebook was not yet around to compete with it?

There probably is no single answer to that question, but if I had to pick one, I think the biggest issue is that FOAF only makes sense on a web where everyone has a personal website. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it might have been easy to assume the web would eventually look like this, especially since so many of the web’s early adopters were, as far as I can tell, prolific bloggers or politically engaged technologists excited to have a platform. But the reality is that regular people don’t want to have to learn how to host a website. FOAF allows you to control your own social information and broadcast it to social networks instead of filling out endless web forms, which sounds pretty great if you already have somewhere to host that information. But most people in practice found it easier to just fill out the web form and sign up for Facebook than to figure out how to buy a domain and host some XML.

What does this mean for my original question about whether or not Facebook’s monopoly is a natural one? I think I have to concede that the FOAF example is evidence that social networking does naturally lend itself to monopoly.

That people did not want to host their own data isn’t especially meaningful itself—modern distributed social networks like Mastodon have solved that problem by letting regular users host their profiles on nodes set up by more savvy users. It is a sign, however, of just how much people hate complexity. This is bad news for decentralized social networks, because they are inherently more complex under the hood than centralized networks in a way that is often impossible to hide from users.

Consider FOAF: If I were to write an application that read FOAF data from personal websites, what would I do if Sally’s FOAF document mentions a John Smith with a homepage at example.com, and Sue’s FOAF document mentions a John Smith with a homepage at example.net? Are we talking about a single John Smith with two websites or two entirely different John Smiths? What if the both FOAF documents list John Smith’s email as johnsmith@gmail.com? This issue of identity was an acute one for FOAF. In a 2003 email, Brickley wrote that because there does not exist and probably should not exist a “planet-wide system for identifying people,” the approach taken by FOAF is “pluralistic.”9 Some properties of FOAF people, such as email addresses and homepage addresses, are special in that their values are globally unique. So these different properties can be used to merge (or, as Libby Miller called it, “smoosh”) FOAF documents about people together. But none of these special properties are privileged above the others, so it’s not obvious how to handle our John Smith case. Do we trust the homepages and conclude we have two different people? Or do we trust the email addresses and conclude we have a single person? Could I really write an application capable of resolving this conflict without involving (and inconveniencing) the user?

Facebook, with its single database and lack of political qualms, could create a “planet-wide system for identifying people” and so just gave every person a unique Facebook ID. Problem solved.

Complexity alone might not doom distributed social networks if people cared about being able to own and control their data. But FOAF’s failure to take off demonstrates that people have never valued control very highly. As one blogger has put it, “‘Users want to own their own data’ is an ideology, not a use case.”10 If users do not value control enough to stomach additional complexity, and if centralized systems are more simple than distributed ones—and if, further, centralized systems tend to be closed and thus the successful ones enjoy powerful network effects—then social networks are indeed natural monopolies.

That said, I think there is still a distinction to be drawn between the subway system case and the social networking case. I am comfortable with the MTA’s monopoly on subway travel because I expect subway systems to be natural monopolies for a long time to come. If there is going to be only one operator of the New York City Subway, then it ought to be the government, which is at least nominally more accountable than a private company with no competitors. But I do not expect social networks to stay natural monopolies. The Subway is carved in granite; the digital world is writ in water. Distributed social networks may now be more complicated than centralized networks in the same way that carrying two MetroCards is more complicated than carrying one. In the future, though, the web, or even the internet, could change in fundamental ways that make distributed technology much easier to use.

If that happens, perhaps FOAF will be remembered as the first attempt to build the kind of social network that humanity, after a brief experiment with corporate mega-databases, does and always will prefer.

    Sinclair Target

from TwoBitHistory

  If you enjoyed this post, more like it come out every four weeks! Follow @TwoBitHistory on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you know when a new post is out.

Please note that I did not dare say “dead.” ↩

Jack Schofield, “Let’s be Friendsters,” The Guardian, February 19, 2004, accessed January 5, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/feb/19/newmedia.media. ↩

Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, “Introducing FOAF,” FOAF Project, 2008, accessed January 5, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20140331104046/http://www.foaf-project.org/original-intro. ↩

ibid. ↩

Wikipedia contributors, “JSON-LD,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, December 13, 2019, accessed January 5, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-LD. ↩

“Data Sources,” FOAF Project Wiki, December 11 2009, accessed January 5, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20100226072731/http://wiki.foaf-project.org/w/DataSources. ↩

Aldon Hynes, “What is Dean Space?”, Extreme Democracy, accessed January 5, 2020, http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter18-Hynes.pdf. ↩

“Understand how structured data works,” Google Developer Portal, accessed January 5, 2020, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data. ↩

tef, “Why your distributed network will not work,” Progamming is Terrible, January 2, 2013, https://programmingisterrible.com/post/39438834308/distributed-social-network. ↩

Dan Brickley, “Identifying things in FOAF,” rdfweb-dev Mailing List, July 10, 2003, accessed on January 5, 2020, http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-dev/2003-July/005463.html. ↩

[rowingchat]

Guest Blog: Winter Workouts: Why do Rowers Fear the Erg?

Friend. Not Foe. Courtesy: RowingRelated

I am really frustrated by our sport when it comes to the erg being viewed as a torture device rather than a helpful tool that people can enjoy. This negative mindset, which is extremely contagious, plagues the sport, preventing athletes from training to their potential and possibly serving as one of the reasons that careers in rowing, at every level, are often so short.

My main problem is that everywhere I turn in the rowing community, whether it’s high school guys and girls, college guys and girls, or even National Team hopefuls, I hear of people dreading the erg. I’ve never heard about a cross country runner ‘dreading’ a track workout. True, basketball and football players may dread running wind sprints or other such conditioning activities, but I can live with that because those are not endurance sports. In other words, when strength, power, endurance, mental toughness, and monotonous activity are the bread and butter of your sport, it seems wholly inappropriate to create a culture that disdains such fundamentally important and central activities.

When compared to other endurance sports like cycling, running, swimming, etc., I have not encountered an equal level of disdain for such fundamental mental and physical endurance training. A track runner might complain if he or she had to be on the treadmill all winter long, but the idea would not strike fear into his or her heart, as track athletes are forced to be accountable at all times. I don’t know why, every Winter, I have to go on Row2k and read Rowing News to find out about “How to get through winter training,” or, “How to find ways to spice up/find alternatives for the erg.” Why can’t people just say, “Time to erg? Okay great. What is the workout, what am I trying to accomplish and what is the best way to do that in this workout?”

Another issue: rowers complaining about mysterious injuries that only seem to affect performance on land. How common is it to have an injury that allows you to row on the water but not on the erg? I think that, in actuality, such injuries are exceedingly rare. I’ve had a number of athletes tell me about an injury they have, but somehow that injury only comes up on the erg. Rarely do I hear about an injury when coaching on the water. It is all too common for people to say, “but it doesn’t hurt in the boat.” Really? You mean that when you have to carry a heavy load, rowing by pairs, fours and sixes in an eight, have to twist out to one side with your torso and overload that side (all of this in a potentially unstable environment), that it doesn’t hurt, but that when you are on a stationary machine that is completely stable and balanced, with a resistance setting that you can control, then it hurts? It seems very unlikely. I have a hypothesis: either it doesn’t hurt on the water because you aren’t pulling very hard, or it’s because you aren’t really injured and don’t know the difference between pain and injury, or a combination of both. Again, track athletes are held accountable 100% of the time. The coach is standing there with a stop watch. When a rower is on the water, it’s up to him or her to “give full measure.”

I have a simple solution to this: you can’t erg, you can’t row. It’s amazing how many less injuries occur when this is the policy. Also, I don’t care how hard you work when running, cycling, swimming or doing whatever cross-training you might be doing — you aren’t going to be in very good rowing shape based on your potential without the sport-specific training development.

Another common phrase: “I’m just not good on the erg, but I’m good on the water.” Nonsense. Sure, you might be able to beat someone on the water with a better erg score, but that is because that person is not technically skilled, and thus isn’t able to utilize the extra power and fitness that they have. It’s not complicated. I don’t boat based on erg scores, but I give people with erg scores the presumption — they must lose a seat race to a weaker teammate in order to lose their seat in the boat. If that happens, it’s not a good thing. It just means the rower with the stronger erg score is not technically skilled. Show me any good Olympic boat and I will show you a boat with great erg scores. Hamish Bond and Eric Murray of New Zealand are excellent rowers with great boat feel and technical ability, but they also have tremendous power and fitness. What about Mahe Drysdale, or Olaf Tufte, or Xeno Muller? Tremendous erg scores. Sure ergs don’t float, but they don’t lie either. If you can’t pull an erg it means you have no engine. I don’t care how beautiful, sleek and aerodynamic your race car is, if it has V6 engine, then the only way it is going to win a race against a race car with a V12 engine is if that V12 is in an extremely inefficient car.

Now, I understand people might have a problem with the erg because it doesn’t perfectly simulate the rowing stroke, and can, undoubtedly, end up rewarding things that will hurt boat speed on the water (like rushing the slide). I don’t have a problem with those people, because that, to me, is a valid concern and viewpoint. These people are not afraid of the erg and it doesn’t cause them mental distress which affects their ability to perform and achieve their best. However, I think it’s time for the rowing community, beginning at the high school level, to be more willing to embrace the ergometer as a training tool, rather than coming up with millions of reasons to fear the machine and letting it play games with our minds. In my opinion, this attitude, which is perpetuated year after year in programs throughout the country, creates mental blocks and leads people away from the training intensity they need to achieve their best possible results.

This may be, in part, the result of coaches requiring athletes to go too hard on every workout on the machine. Sometimes, workouts should be easy. I suspect that if one went around to various rowing programs to find out how their ‘steady state’ speed on a 10k erg piece compared to their 2k or 5k time, and then went around to cross country and track coaches to find out what pace they had their runners run on a typical easy or steady state run, one would find that the rowers work much harder. For instance, let’s say a runner runs a 5k in 18:36. This works out to six minute pace per mile, and 1:51.6 per 500 meters. According to the McMillan Running Calculator, easy steady state runs should be done at 2:02.5 — 2:06 per 500 meters and easy/long runs should be done at 2:18-2:27 pace per 500 meters.

Take a rower who pulls an 18:36 for 5k, which is that same 1:51.6 pace per 500 meters. I bet many high school and college coaches would have that person doing their steady state erg workouts at 1:58-2:00, and would never have them go as slow as the running calculator recommends on the easy/long runs.

It’s possible that because rowing is so low impact as compared with running, rowers can handle a faster pace for all of their workouts than runners and still recover. But this is a difference of 8-18 seconds per mile, which would be 45 seconds to a minute and a half difference over 10k. Finishing a 10k a minute faster than someone else is a pretty significant difference, especially if done day after day and week after week. The cumulative effect on the body wearing down could potentially be significant, as the body’s physiological systems would be constantly over-taxed. Perhaps this is why so many people hate the erg and “burn out” in rowing — far more often and much earlier in their careers than the majority of runners. Many coaches seem to adopt the approach that Jack Daniels refers to as the “Eggs Against the Wall” theory of coaching, which he defines as the metaphysical act of throwing a basket of eggs against a wall and hoping one of them doesn’t break. When you train as hard as most coaches recommend, the few, stellar athletes that can handle the training will succeed, and some of them might even go on to compete in the Olympics. What about all the rest? They will burn out, get injured and leave the sport. The key is balance: your training program needs to be well thought-out, with enough days of easy, longer training to complement the extremely demanding sessions. If the erg is used purely for the most difficult of training sessions, it will not only solidify a negative mindset regarding the machine, but also, unintentionally, contribute reduced accountability on the water. If water training is looked at as ‘easier,’ you will undoubtedly underachieve when it comes time to race. Rowers should look at both kinds of training as equally as difficult. For this to happen, coaches must bring a balanced approach to both land and water training.

Finally, I think many rowing coaches fall victim to creating a crutch when it comes to an erg workout, rather than dealing the fundamental, underlying problem. Here is a common example of the kind of patchwork solution to a more serious problem: steady state erg workouts broken up into intervals like 4′ on, 1′ off when such rest is not needed to accomplish the physiological goals of the workout. In my mind, that type of rest should be used for speed intervals (in other words, when you actually need the rest to recover between intervals). I don’t think if you are trying to keep your heart rate at between 60-80% of your maximum, for example, that having a minute off every five minutes will help keep your heart rate down over the course of the workout. At that intensity, if you are in good aerobic shape, you will not notice much variation in your heart rate between an hour straight through and an hour of 4′ on, 1′ off if it is done at a consistent ‘steady state’ effort (steady state being heart rate between 60-80% of its maximum). To me, this is appears to be another way of perpetuating the problem of disliking the erg, as it is clearly a concession to the idea that the erg is difficult to deal with mentally.

This belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wonder how many running coaches would say to their athletes, “Today we are doing an easy steady state run of eight miles, I want you to run at your easy/steady state pace for four minutes and then stop, walk or jog for one minute before resuming your steady state run pace until you complete the eight miles.” I don’t believe many running coaches, anywhere in the world, at any level, would do this. I think they would say, “Today we are going to do a steady state run of 8 miles at your easy/steady-state pace to work on aerobic development. Stay within this zone by running X pace and I will see you when you get back.” Maybe running is in the dark ages and rowing is just ahead of the curve on this one, but somehow I think it might be the other way around.

-The RowingRelated Team

The post Guest Blog: Winter Workouts: Why do Rowers Fear the Erg? appeared first on Rowperfect UK.

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[jswdmb1]

The Scientist

“I was just guessing At numbers and figures Pulling the puzzles apart”

- Coldplay

I feel a need to give an unsolicited opinion on the tax bill so I’m ending my break early to weigh in on this topic while things are still pending.   Wait, you say, didn’t the bill pass the Senate ending the debate? While that is true, but the bill is a long way from becoming law and I do not think the debate is over.  The Senate version still must be reconciled with the House version and then the consolidated bill has to be passed by both houses.  Since the Republicans are doing this with no bipartisan support (they aren’t even giving Democrats a copy of the bill), they should be able to accomplish that task. But, you never know in this political environment as the Senate bill passed 51-49 and the House is much harder to control.  There could be last minute provisions that were put into the Senate bill that a caucus of House members will balk at.  There is also the minor technically of having the president sign the bill into the law.  While at this point, I question his ability to read anything beyond 140 characters, and I’m certain he would sign a blank piece of paper if put in front of him, he is a true wild card and his support should never be considered a given.

But, let’s assume what we have in front of us graduates from bill to law (cue the Schoolhouse Rocks music!) and our tax code is revamped.  I’ll start by saying that I’ve worked with governments in a finance and accounting capacity at many levels for a number of years; so, I at least think it is an informed opinion. I’ll also qualify my comments by saying I haven’t read the pending legislation cover to cover (it is unlikely few in Congress or the White House have either), but I have read enough about it to give a macroeconomic perspective. Finally, I’ll state, for the record, that while my social views would be defined by most as liberal, my stance on fiscal policy skews conservative. I do believe in a central government that provides basic services to its citizens, social safety nets to those that need it, and a federal system that aids in the conservation of our natural resources to ensure a future for our country. Those are good things for which to raise taxes. What I am against is waste, special interest spending that doesn’t contribute to the common good, and inefficiency.

With that background, I would be voting no against any current version of the tax bill. A simplified explanation for my stance would be that no thought has been put into this bill, but that is not true. Actually, quite a bit of design by Republicans has been taking place for a long time to get to this point. No credit for that should be given to the current president, who would sign any bill just to say he did it. But, seasoned Republicans have been working on this for years waiting for their moment and they have it with their patsy in the Oval Office. The problem is that there are a few Republican senators left who can’t stomach the fact that this bill does nothing to fix the real problem with the tax code or the bigger issue of the dysfunctional way governments in this country approach finance and accounting. If any of them had real courage, they would not just ask for simple rate rollback triggers or settle for the last-minute throw-ins they got to support getting something passed.  Instead, they should be leading the charge for true tax reform in these three areas:

Tax Rates - I agree that rates could be reduced. I also think that elimination of the estate tax should also occur (if you have a fair system in place to get people’s money when they are alive then there is no reason to tax them after they die). A flat tax is regressive and hurts those in poverty terribly, but rates should be simplified.   I would have personal rates at two levels: 0% and 20%. The first $100,000 you earn is on the house.  Everything after that gets taxed at a flat 20%.  That creates an effective flat tax without being regressive.  Corporations get three rates.  They still get the first $100K on the house. That helps really small business that are essentially passing through their income to the owner. Everything after that up to $1,000,000 is taxed at 10%.  That will really stimulate the economy for the mid-sized companies that are the oil in our economic engine.  Everything over a million goes to the 20% rate.  I am also in favor of elimination of capital gains taxes and the alternative minimum tax. The first penalizes growth and investment and is unnecessary if you properly tax the initial income earned that was used for the investment. The second is plain and simple just a stupid political mechanism.  The reason no one understands AMT is because it is non-sensical, and it is completely unnecessary if your tax code is logical in the first place.  The current plans I have seen seem to unfairly skew the cuts to big corporations, special interests and the wealthy that feed the politicians piggy banks. There is enough to spread it around to give everyone a taste, so why not do it (that is a rhetorical question – they won’t do it because politicians do not care about anyone that doesn’t write them a check). That’s why growth under current plans is independently projected to only be 0.8%. If more money went back into the hands of consumers and small businesses that are really the backbone of the American economy that number would be higher and the shocking deficits being projected would be much lower.

Deductions - I’ll give you an insider tip: deductions are stupid. Really stupid. Think Kohl’s. They give you all these coupons and deals with 50% off but it’s all a marketing ploy to get you to buy marked up crap that you could probably get cheaper on a net basis somewhere else without all the markdowns. Deductions work the same way. They are just vehicles for politicians in both parties to give breaks to special interests. I would eliminate all deductions except for two - charitable contributions and the use of pre-tax earnings to pay for health insurance and flexible spending accounts. I keep those two not because I’m altruistic (though I think both are good things to encourage with a tax break) but because both directly keep costs down at the federal level by reducing the need for social services.  That’s it - everything else is gone.  This is where you start screaming at me through the computer (I can’t hear you by the way), but remember the first $100,000 is on the house in my plan. Most of us won’t need a deduction because most of what we make isn’t getting taxed.  Tax code is complicated mostly because of deductions.  Get rid of them, and that problem is solved along with the unfair nature of their use.

Revenue Expansion & Expense Reduction - We all look at taxes through the narrow prism of what we have to fork over, but income tax code is one of many components in the federal accounting of things.  I’ve lost most of you already with this post, so I won’t lose the rest with a detailed explanation of the way governmental accounting works, but it comes down to revenues are pluses and expenses are negatives.  If you have more of the first, you have a surplus.  If the opposite is true, you have a deficit.  If you end up with a deficit, you finance that with debt.  The federal government’s primary mechanism for that is issuing treasury bills and notes.  The amount raised through income tax is a huge source of revenue, but the federal government is leaving a lot on the table due to xenophobia and mock piety. By that I mean, a thoughtful immigration plan and legalization of drugs and gambling could boost revenues immensely. With immigration, having undocumented workers that may or may not pay their fair share leaves a decent amount of untaxed income a lot of which gets repatriated to their native countries and thus out of our economy.  It’s dumb to not and try and make some of these folks legal and keep that money here and tax it accordingly.  With the “sin” taxes available to allowing drugs and gambling to occur legally at the federal level, even more money could be raised.  I hear the objections to both already, but they will be handled in separate posts for each that also take into account the social issues both bring.   But, for the purposes of this post, it is a fact that our deficits could be greatly reduced if these untapped sources were brought into play.  The other side of the equation is cutting expenses.  I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree that we have waste at all levels of government.  Obviously, getting at this reduces the need for revenue and can allow for potentially more tax relief or reduction of debt.  Again, there is a whole separate post coming on this topic that I think you will enjoy ignoring.

So, there you go – tax reform solved in one blog post.  Don’t be fooled into being told it is more complicated than this.  Remember, we didn’t have an income tax for a long time and it was never intended to be this complicated.  If there is political will to really get something done that is useful to us citizens, burning the code and starting from scratch with a scaled down version can be easily accomplished.  This will never happen in my lifetime, but don’t think I blame only the Republicans.  Most Democrats hate this idea because they love to do two things: raise taxes and pretend that they didn’t.  The current tax code gives them plenty of cover to do both.  If you are really agreeing with me here, the best advice I can offer you is start looking at third parties who would be more inclined to take this into their platform.  I think that is going to be true for almost every issue we talk about going forward as the two major parties sold themselves out a long time ago and they are never coming back.

I hope you enjoyed your first post after coming back from my break.  Nice and dry, huh?  I’d like to think dry like a fine white wine on a summer day, but I’m guessing it was more like the dry you feel when you eat a sleeve of Saltines (Yes, I have done that and don’t ask why.  If I really want to tell you it will be coming in a post).  Don’t worry, I’ll make sure there are posts that come after the dry ones that wash things down nicely.

Cheers,

Jim