#some art requests and will be posting the last batch of asks next week!

[comeandreadawhile]

Clone Social Media : Hobbies

The phenomenon starts with the intention to show the civilians of the Republic the men behind the armor, as well as an encouragement for the men to do the things they enjoy when they have the time to in lieu of sitting around cleaning weapons for a third time that day.

Scratch that—the phenomenon starts with High General Kenobi, on a rare day of leave, teaching his Marshal Commander how to bake. Said Commander’s men were happy to taste test the flurry of experimental confections that pervaded their leave days in the following months. News spread fast of Marshal Commander Cody having a knack for baking, and so followed the spread of troopers attempting to make their own treats and/or branching off into other things the civilians called “hobbies” whenever what they could get their hands on afforded them.

The phenomenon kicked off when Padawan Commander Tano began a social media account with the intention of using it as a public diary, her first post was a picture taken of some of the 501st—with permission, her caption says—as they went about retouching paint scuffed in their most recent battle. The men are relaxed, some with paint smeared on their hands and cheeks and seemingly reacting to some joke or story told outside the threshold of the camera, and it’s an almost startling difference from the image of rigid lines of men, faceless in their full kits of white plastoid, that the civilians are used to. Tano’s second post is a video clip of one Captain Rex, with one General Skywalker sitting on his back counting reps, doing push-ups; the video was captioned “Another day in the G.A.R., restless in hyperspace.”

The digital diary continues from there, videos and pictures of specific locations posted only after reaching a safe distance to do so, never sharing anything mission critical—past, current, or hypothetical future. Eventually she shows the men under her how to make their own accounts, and other Jedi and their own troops follow suit. The 212th then takes it upon themselves to post pictures of the little cakes their Marshal Commander has gotten so proficient at making, and, when General Kenobi creates a joint account titled “command_212”, convince Cody to post pictures of things he bakes before they are distributed—even in the process of baking, if the fancy strikes him.

So Marshal Commander Cody shares pictures of his experiments, of recipes he finds that turned out well, of recipes that didn’t because of some error or other that he’s determined to give another go, with the occasional cryptid picture of General Kenobi taking his tea in the barrack’s kitchen. As time goes on those pictures shift to Obi-Wan covered in flour, or a shot taken from several feet away of Cody sneaking batter captioned “caught red-handed in the red velvet”.

As Marshal Commander of the 212th has taken to baking to relieve stress, the Commander of the 104th has turned to needlecraft and yarnwork.

The 104th retaliate the populatrity of the 212th’s command account with the domesticity of their own, despite the vaguely threatening possibilities of knitting and sewing needles. Boost and Sinker run the majority of the account, although all OG members of the 104th have access to it; they post pictures of the things Wolffe makes them, of General Plo covered in the lengths of scarves he’s received, of Comet in the ever-growing swath the gifted blankets with the current tally in the caption (his toes were off the floor by blanket burrito 6). The holonet at large loves Plo almost as much as his men, and once a week they post him saying some piece of sage wisdom—or utter nonsense, as the mood strikes—as the war goes on. After months of asking for a face reveal and requests for the patterns people are sure Wolffe uses, they make the most Force-forsaken tutorial videos as an all-in-one series.

“HOLY **** HE’S CASTING ON 12 TO START—“ “WHAT A MAD MAN!”

“So when you get to this row here you’re going to knit 3, purl 3–“ “TRANSCENDENT!” “—yes, thank you, and then keep doing that until you reach the end of the row...”

“Oh, OH MAN HE’S GONNA DO IT!” “HE’S GONNA CHANGE COLORS!” “Holy **** man he’s gonNA YOOOOOOOOOO!”

Cody is then issued a challenge by the holonet to learn to knit. He learns to crochet. Because Obi-Wan knows how to crochet. The holonet loves video snippets of them progressing on projects together. They also love the videos Ahsoka posts of Cody attempting to teach Rex, and praise the absolutely completely unrelated hat she later posts a picture of; it covers her Montrals with enough room for a few years’ growth. Anakin gets yarn stuck in his mechanical hand because he forgot to put his glove on before attempting to craft.

The real throwdown happens when the account for the Coruscant Guard posts videos of Fox aggressively tatting while venting about the lack of funding for proper security and surveillance tech.

Each posts sees a comical increase in the surfaces covered in lace doilies and runners, as well as a new topic for Fox’s venting.

A picture of an pillow embroidered with “Kriff the Seppies” is briefly posted to the 104th’s account before being taken down and replaced with a censor bar. Rumors begin to circulate when Senator Chuchi posts a picture wearing a gifted lace shawl; Senator Amidala comments on her confusion being resolved as to why Riyo kept bringing little baskets of crochet thread with her before a senate meetings.

A competition for ship nose art starts up, many votes going to the 501st, and the holonet’s heart once again melting at “Plo’s Bros”. Personal art begins popping up soon after. Fives starts posting spray paint tutorials, Rex and Hardcase become popular for clean graphic art. Bly gets his hands on metallic paint and the crowds go wild. Kix has taken his clean haircut game to the next level.

And then Colt and Shaak Ti make an account to post art the Littles make, most of them representations of their older brothers with wishes of safety and good luck, and of the only Jedi they’ve ever known, sometimes creatures they studied in their preparation for worlds outside of Kamino. Of batches passing their final tests with a congratulatory post.

Suggestions and instructions are sent out for clones who want to take and sell commissions, allowing them to finally make some money; most Jedi are more than happy to help make sure the finished work mails out properly to the buyers.

Ships of the non-nose art kind surface on the holonet. It’s generally agreed upon that command_212 is run by husbands, and Aayla is the protector of the 327th and Bly’s heart, even if she’s a clumsy menace around his artwork (caf spilled over a drying watercolor can be interesting or terrible depending on the circumstance). No one can agree whether Skywalker is married to his captain or Senator Amidala, but everyone agrees that Ahsoka is their baby. The holonet declares Plo to have Big Dad Energy. Shaak Ti’s Big Mom Energy is a friendly rival. The Jedi council has made no official statement denying or denouncing these attachments.

Public interest begins to shift from producing more soldiers to making sure the ones the Republic has stay alive, when the realization hits that within a couple of years the children posting art and losing teeth would probably be losing blood and brothers on some far away planet. Of making sure the men are eating well instead of just surviving. Well certain account-holders don’t post for a while, grieving a loss, posting again to reassure their followers they’re alright, the public questions what’s being done to keep the men emotionally and mentally well outside of the hobbies the public knows them for. “Born to handle any stress” is very much the wrong answer.

Pressure is put on the Chancellor to let the Separatists sucede, no one quite sure anymore why allowing them to would be harmful when at worst new trade agreements would need to be brokered; if they want to leave so badly, let them. And let the men have their hobbies.

(Sad thoughts ahead)

Sometimes commissioners never receive their orders, simply a refund with a letter from that clone’s Jedi after the latest battle ends. Any money they’d made would be split however their closest brothers decide.

The channel that always posts pranks and spray paint tutorials makes a post saying they’d be away to look after their sick little brother. It’s the last post they make.

The Coruscant Guard’s account stops posting a few nights later.

After Order 66 goes out, a new account goes up posting any pictures and cute videos of Aayla. Reposting old ones that the public is sure they’d seen somewhere before, posting new ones of funny faces and ridiculous videos of silly dances. The last one is the only one captioned, “she wasn’t a traitor.”

The account is deleted the same night, and the one of the 327th’s adventures never posts again.

Wolfpack_104 does not post, but is still there.

Command_212 is deleted almost immediately the night of the order.

Years go by, almost sixteen, and only after Vader already knows she’s alive does Ahsoka post again. It’s a picture of her, and Rex and Wolffe onboard the Ghost in hyperspace captioned “Was never a traitor. Always the little sister even if I’m four years older. In case you’re wondering, Rex still draws and Wolffe still knits when we can nab the string and flimsi.”

[adorablekatsuki]

Bakugou and I welcome you, to the 800+ followers event! It is finally upon us!!

NOW! What does this event have in store for all you amazing people who like and reblog the content I upload every day? That is what the poll was for. I decided I would give you all a choice to vote on what you’d like me to do, in order for us all to have a good time and celebrate all of you! 

I had the poll open for a few days, and received 66 votes! While that might not seem like a lot compared to the follower count, it is certainly enough for me. ;v; And I thank each and every one of you who voted, and helped to decide! 

So, without further ado, this is what we’ll be doing for this round of followers celebration: 

22 ART REQUESTS CENTERED AROUND OUR HOMEBOY, BAKUGOU KATSUKI!! 

I will be writing numbers in my bio to help you all keep track of how many request spots are left. Why will I only do 22? Because only 22 people voted for it, of course! Which means that if you voted for this, and you’re reading this post, I hope you get a spot in the batch! As for the rest of you, feel free to request as well!

Before, however, PLEASE READ THESE RULES. 

Yes, there are going to be rules to this. There are sadly some things i need to address, both concerning what I will and will not draw. 

So first of all, I need to get this out of the way: This blog was created about 3 or so weeks ago, during a time I was physically sick. And it’s really terrible to say the least, but I’m currently rolling into my fourth week of sickness. It’s a combination of some nasty fever, coughing, and headaches. This means I will be slow as fuck, and I highly apologize in advance. Yes I am taking medicine, but has it worked? Eh... Not really? I am doing my best to recover though. I will do my best and pull through with each request!

The next thing I need to tell you, is that I am not very confident in my digital art skills, so what you’re seeing right now is me being brave enough to post the art above. I usually do things traditionally, with markers. And the requests will be done like so! whether they are just sketches, lined work, or fully colored, will be up to me. I’m sorry, but it’s just to make things easier for me. I hope you understand!

NOW, let’s get into what you can and cannot request. 

WHAT I WILL DRAW:

- the fantasy AU

- a standalone Bakugou (meaning nothing but him)

- Bakugou with another character (platonic or romantically. pls specify)

- outlaws AU/ the wild west AU (RDR 2 ppl where ya at?)

- Bakugou as an animal, or a furry/anthro 

- Kiribaku

- Bakugou WITH an animal 

- Bakugou with a pro hero (that isn’t mentioned in my NOPE list below)

WHAT I WILL NOT DRAW:

- something that isn’t Bakugou centric. (aka a request that doesn’t contain Bakugou in it)

- Bakugou as any type of nekomeme (like a human with cat ears and tail. I don’t do that stuff.)

- Any type of NSFW. this blog will be minor friendly!

- Kacchako and Katsudeku. (they make me highly uncomfortable. sorry.)

- Bakugou with an oc 

- fic fanart requests

- Anything involving Best Jeanist, Endeavor, Mineta, And anyone in the dekusquad. (This is mostly personal preference but I think most of you will understand.)

- anything involving alcohol, drugs, smoking, etc. While i am allowed to drink and smoke in my country, I am not comfortable with any of it. So please leave it out of your requests!

- Anything above 3 characters. you can request Bakugou, Bakugou and 1 other character, or Bakugou and 2 other characters. That’s it. 

ABOUT SHIPS:

I am only going to be accepting Kiribaku, if you wish to request a romantic ship. I have other Bakugou ships that I don’t mind, but I wouldn’t draw something unless I was 100% committed to it. And Kiribaku makes me happy. So I’m willing to draw that!

As for Kacchako and Katsudeku... I’m sorry. If you ship this, go ahead, do your thing. Each to their own, right? I only have 3 notps in the BNHA fandom, and this is just the two of them. (The last one is kirimina, but that’s not relevant) and so please please please do NOT put them in my inbox. If you want to know why i really don’t like these ships, you can always ask, and I’ll give you the most respectful answer I can. But just don’t request it. Thank you. 

DETALED REQUESTS:

Please don’t be afraid to request something like “Bakugou, in an emo outfit, drinking bubble tea, while looking at something that makes him angry” instead of “draw Bakugou in his hero uniform.” Please be specific! ALSO PLEASE BE POLITE!! That is the least you could do!

Uh... If there’s anything you want to request but isn’t mentioned here, ask! I’ll be tagging it under “follower celebration q&a” so block that tag if you so desire. Anything else, please ask too!

Thank you for your patience, And let’s get drawing!!

[bangtanficrecs]

Lost & Found Batch #18

The newest batch was long overdue ^^;; As always, if you happen to know the fic the ask is looking for, reply to this post or send us an ask with the request number and title/author. If you happen to know any fics from Past Batches, those are more than welcome as well. Thank you!! ~ Admin P

1) Hi! I think my ask got lost TT I was wondering if you guys know of a vmin fic on ao3 where they’re roommates and jimin likes tae and decided to seduce him by asking him to take nude pics of him, and tae ended up not reacting and then they admitted that they both liked each other? Or something along those lines. PLEASE HELP IT WAS SO AWESOME AND I LOVED IT :( thank you!!!

you're only brave in the moonlight by ameliabedelias

2) Hi!! so a while back i was reading a yoonseok fic on ao3, it was smut, and i wanted to read it again but i cant find it, i was wondering if you could help??? it was yoonseok and yoongi was a "beta" but soon found out he was an omega he called himself a "late bloomer"?? and hoseok walks in, they have sex, and i specifically remember yoongi feeling hoseoks dick in his stomach and "rubbing" it. i know its wierd but can you please help me find it???

A Test in What, Exactly, Is "Too Much" by Yooniefucks

3) Hello, I'm trying to find a fic that has taekook in it. I don't actually remember what the fic is about, but I remember that jungkook is a guard/knight and somewhere along the story, the Prince (?) finds out that jungkook is a werewolf since he was bitten as a child and he imprinted on taehyung, who's human if I'm not mistaken. The king took him in, and he used to be chained to a cage/cave (?) during full moon. It will be great if you can help me :) thank you! 💜

4) Hi, I'm trying to find this yoonjin fic were yoongi is walking home from an underground gig and it's late at night. He smells fresh baked goods and it leads him to a building he passes by all the time but never noticed before. He goes inside and jin fixes him a drink and gives him a muffin/cupcake. At the end jin reveals that he's magic and he cast a spell to find love. Thank you for your help!!

5) I'm looking for a yoongi/jimin fic where jimin is abused by his boyfriend (I think the author used a random idol) and yoongi catches on and tries to help but jimin is really damaged. The rest of the group lowkey knows jimin abused but don't know how to help. Sorry I can't remember lots of details but it was really angsty and good

6) hello, im looking for some kind of royalty fan fic where jimin was visiting yoongi’s palace/home? I can’t remember why but they weren’t close in the beginning. All I can remember was a scene where a bunch of boys were in a room smoking and playing poker (half naked?) and a young servant/slave who was able to play any piano piece after just listening to it once and in the end he left with a Russian man who made music.... thank youu

7) Ugh I seriously need help! I’ve been looking for this fic I lost for 3 days now, I really want to read it again! I’m going to be upset if it was deleted :( anyway, it was a fic where the boys were on their way to something and they got in a car crash but it was only Jin, Hoseok, Yoongi, Tae and Kook. Then Jin and Hoseok were kidnapped by a guy named Sung I think, and the fic focused on Yoongi and Tae and Kook traveling through the woods they crashed in looking for Jin and Hobi and then (pt.1) Jimin and Joon were at a hotel with their manager and they were convinced something was wrong and they wanted to go look for them. In the end they got rescued and they killed the Sung guy and Yoongi was shot and I just really want to find it again cause there was an unfinished sequel. I’m so upset. I hope this was enough to help you help me lookfor it!

8) YOOO what's poppin sis'. Can yall help me. I've been looking for this fic where the rap line is an underground rap line and like they perform cypher pt 3? Idfr the name but the main pairings were namjin and yoonmin. Thanks 🤪🤪🧡

9) Hi there! I was hoping you guys could help me find this fic - it's on AO3. It was multi-chaptered, completed, and was a collection of namjoon centric oneshots/drabbles. one of the chapters was inspired by the "princess princess" anime and featured joon wearing panties, bent over jin's lap, before yoongi came to rescue him from a bunch of onlookers. please help!!

10) Hi! I’m looking for a Yoongi/Jungkook fic. I’ve been searching nonstop for a few weeks and I think the author may have deleted it. The plot line is basically this: Jungkook is a medical student who falls in love with Yoongi and eventually loses his drive in the field. I know it has sexual content so it’s either M rated or E. One of the tags was ‘slow burn’ and ‘Jungkook cries a lot’. Thanks in advance!

11) Hello! In the lost chuchu batch 16, #13 is "I Can't Even" by handintheshot in Ao3. But I can't find a link of it. Also, I'd like to ask whether you know about the fic where jimin suddenly has a vagenay and then proceeds to have a hot threesome with jk and tae? If possible, can you please recommend me more like those? Thank you so much 💜

12) Hello! Do u guys know of a vmin pwp oneshot where taehyung has ADHD? They sit in a chair for most of it, and the premise has a slight focus on how Jimin makes it easier for Tae to sit still. It was really sweet, and I can't find it :c

13) I am looking for a 6+1 fic where Namjoon is homeless and in each iteration a different member takes him into their home and life. A recurring element is a cake decorating book that Namjoon borrows from the library - a page falls out detailing how to make a flower with icing, and he keeps it in his pocket. I have used my search-fu but I cannot find it. It was on AO3. I hope you can help, even if it's just with a possible name I can run via the Wayback machine! Thanks!

14) Hello! I would like to ask your help into searching for a story that I can't, for the life of me, find. It's a Yoonmin story but what I remember the most is that Jungkook works as a janitor in an office and he quits because his boss is horrible. However, Taehyung, whom his boss is interested in working with, will only sign the proposal if they rehire Jungkook, so the boss sends Jimin to do it, since Jimin is friends with the both of them. In the end, they all end up working at the same place. TY

15) Hello. I'm looking for a fic where the group had six members but Suga time travels/dimension travels and becomes part of the group as a secret member. I remember that Jin is doing a vlive and is squirted with a water gun but everyone thinks it's Jimin. And when it's reveled to be Suga he's in his dorm room and pulls a big super soaker from under his blankets. I hope that's enough. It's super specific but I can't seem to find it. I hope you can help me :)

16) hey i was looking for this soul reaper or angel?? au where jungkook dies and is taken to the shinigami/reaper realm by the reaper (i think it was yoongi) and i cant find it anywhere :(( i think he dies bc of his new friends and the fic opens with a scene where the reaper sends one of his murderers souls to hell? The reader finds out later i guess. Id really appreciate it if u could find that :(( thank you!

An anon believes it’s Naught Readings For Naughty Readers by supermans_crib, however that has been on AO3

17) Hi! I had recently lost one of the greatest ffs ever, it was a jikook au where they were in the military (?) and jimin had went into a stage sort of like heat and jungkook had to fuck him, he got hekka scared afterwords but they ended up liking eachother

as if it's your last by fatal (cumrich)

18) Hi! I'm trying to find a NamJin fic. I searched the fics here and my bookmarks on AO3 (since I swear I bookmarked it) but I can't seem to find it. It starts out where Yoongi is accusing Namjoon of not moving on. We find out that Namjoon and Seokjin are friends and Namjoon confessed to Seokjin and was rejected. Things get complicated when Seokjin keeps coming around and even interfering with someone Namjoon starts dating. Memorable scene, Seokjin chasing Namjoon in the dark screeching his name.

everything moves on by fruitily

19) Hello. I am looking for a namgi fic where yoongi works in an old bookshop and likes wearing feminine clothing , and namjoon works at a cafe but visits the bookshop often. Namjoon likes art and philosophy but is scared of his parent's reactions so yoongi tells him to fuck society and to "wake up from your sad life and figure out who you are", they eventually kiss as well. I read it on AO3. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

20) Hi! I was wondering if y’all could help out with a fic I remember reading? jimin pining for yoongi and for some weird reason I remember a specific scene where jimin (whose brought food for yoongi) waits for yoongi outside of (a studio?) falls asleep waiting and wakes up when yoongi and someone else walk out. Jimin had wanted to eat with him I think but yoongi either says that he’s already ate or is headed to eat with the person. It’s unrequited feelings for a bit of the story.

21) There was a fix where yoongi was a prince and he went out and on the way met all the members who were disney princesses, it was a parody kind of, min yoonji was sleeping beauty and she went back to sleep again and from her castle members got a cat and kittens, can you please find it

22) Hello! I read this fiction a loonnggggg time ago where vminkook were in high school detention I think and kook could read minds and read tae's mind once and hes thinking about potatoes so he calls him potato boy but then the next time tae's thinking about fucking jimin and like yeah LOL I think they all end up in a threesome at the end but yeah I dont remember the title or author ))):

23) what’s that fanfic when it’s an au one of them is overweight and they join their school gym or something? and fall in love with the person who trains them. and there’s this beach scene and a car wash scene near the end. been looking for it for a while, hope you can help!

24) hi! i’m looking for a fic i read a while back, i think it was vmin and one of them had been hurt so the other got them off and they ended up in a relationship i think? pretty sure it was cannon compliant too! thanks!

25) so tae is a student and jk is a professor. jk is engaged to this woman (mina?). basically they are both straight but end up falling for each other so before jk gets married he plans to break up with the girl but she blackmails him with pics of him and his student and turns crazy. i don’t rlly remember what happens after that but later they eventually end up together. i think it’s ab 10 chapters. i’m pretty sure i read it on ao3!

26) Hello! I was reading this taekook fic on ao3 but I forgot what it was called ☹️ basically jungkook travels back in time and kidnaps his last self to tell him how in the future Tae kills himself, so jungkook tries to get his past self to be nicer to Tae and stop him. Past jungkook thinks that Tae cheated on him but he was actually forced to have sex with his “boss” but jungkook doesn’t give him a chance to explain and starts cheating on Tae and is being really nasty to him. Ah help plz if you can

27) I’m searching for a fic and i really can’t find it ... i remember it’s jikook (but not really) and it’s about jungkook (who thinks he’s straight) who downloads a porn (by mistake i think) of minjoon and like he ends up liking it, it’s so vague i’m sorry kfhskcj

care to stay for the ride? by voseok

Want to ask us something? We’d love to help, but please be sure to read the FAQ and check our Tags List before or your question may go unanswered.  

[deancaspinefest]

Regarding Claims

If you’ve ever taken part in a big-bang style challenge before, either as an author or as an artist, you probably know that claims day results in more nail-biting than any other.

It’s basically a fact of fannish life. Authors are anxious to share their work with someone who’s been inspired by the summary; artists are anxious to know if they were fast enough to get that fic that they just have to create art for.

Essentially, everyone is a bundle of nerves. 

Some people thrive on that nervous energy and spend the entire time in excited anticipation. Others absolutely loathe it, and dread claims day for weeks before it’s even arrived.

Because of the huge differences in how people approach claims, it’s difficult for challenge organizers to find a good middle ground that will please everyone. That doesn’t mean we’re not trying. 

Since the first year that we ran this challenge, we’ve been looking at feedback and considering different ways to make claims less stressful.

After the first Pinefest round, feedback showed that the claims process we used—the same one used by most fic challenges at the time—was stressful for the majority of authors.

During/after the second Pinefest round, feedback showed that our updated claims process was less stressful for many authors, but more stressful for some authors and many artists.

Based on all the feedback we’ve had since the start, along with some subsequent discussion, we’ve come up with a new model for the 2019 round which--we hope--will reduce stress across the board. 

This is going to be a rather long post, so here are the basics of the new process for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read the whole thing:

Authors and artists will be informed immediately after a successful claim, on the condition that neither party publicly discusses the fact that they’ve been paired up until all other participants have been assigned partners.

Though artists will be informed which of their shortlisted fics they have been successful in claiming, neither artist nor author will learn the identity of their partner until all fics have been claimed.

This adjustment should hopefully eliminate the shortcomings of both previous processes. In the meantime, as always, we welcome any feedback that participants may have--just shoot us an ask or email, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

We will gladly consider any serviceable idea if it will have a positive impact on the participants of this challenge :)

Keep reading under the cut for a more detailed outline of the entire claims process, along with an explanation of previous processes, and the specific reasoning behind the changes we’ll likely be implementing this Pinefest claims season.

...and a less dry post will follow ;D

First things first: the original claims process

Back when the Pinefest was just a tiny little bud, our claims process was more or less the same as the one used by every other challenge.

Artists would submit a shortlist of three fics, and as soon as we could confirm that they had been successful, we would introduce them to their author via email.

During that first round, we received feedback from a lot of authors who told us that they found this process incredibly stressful.

They were afraid that if they weren’t matched with an artist within the first few hours, they didn’t measure up. They worried that if they were still waiting during the second round of claims, it meant that nobody liked their story. They told us that seeing other participants talking about having already been paired up made them even more anxious while they waited for their own fic to be chosen.

As this was something we’d seen people stressing over before in other challenges, we came up with an idea for round two of the Pinefest which we hoped would help. During an early check-in, we asked authors to take part in a poll to help decide whether or not to trial it.

The idea was this: instead of sending out introductions one by one as claims were made, we would wait until all fics had been assigned so that nobody would know who was chosen first, and so that the authors whose fics were the last in the batch would not start second guessing themselves over it.

These were the results of that poll:

Given that twice as many authors felt that they would find the process less stressful if everyone found out at once, and that close to half of all authors didn’t have strong feelings in either direction, it seemed as though the trial would be worth attempting while the challenge was still small enough to do so.

So we went ahead with the trial.

When the dust settled, about 30 hours after claims began, the final fic was claimed. Shortly after that (as soon as your humble mods were awake and functional) we sent out all the introductions.

A couple of authors mentioned in their feedback during later check-ins that they found this process profoundly worse.

A lot more authors mentioned that they found it infinitely less anxiety-inducing. 

The vast majority of people didn’t mention it at all, and we could only assume that these people were either a part of the original Wedge of Chill, or that they’d become so zen after having been paired up that they’d forgotten about claims day completely.

More recently, some artists let us know that not knowing which fic they’d successfully claimed made them reluctant to claim a second fic though they’d wanted to, due to being unsure about the length/thematics of the fic they’d already been assigned. This wasn’t something that we’d accounted for, but once it was pointed out, it was something that obviously needed an adjustment.

Obviously, given that some participants found it more stressful, the new process was lacking. But the old process was equally lacking. 

Which brings us to now.

The new claims process explained

A lot of the process will remain the same, with some adjustments here and there to eliminate the most stressful aspects. Here’s a day-by-day breakdown:

December 7

While submitting their rough drafts, authors will be required to supply the following additional information:

- A rating, current word count, estimated final word count, and summary - A list of any applicable side pairings, archive warnings, or trigger warnings - A list of tags/tropes/visuals/thematic elements that may interest an artist - Authors do not need to supply a title at this point in the challenge, as fics will be assigned an ID number for claims.

Over the next couple of days, mods will format all of this information and use it to create a preview list for registered artists.

December 10

Registered artists will receive an email with two links and an access password. The first link will take them to a password-protected list of available fics, and the second will lead to the claims form, which will not be open at this stage.

Fic summaries will look something like the sample below. 

Artists will have just over two days to peruse them and make their shortlists.

December 13

At 4pm PST, the claims form will open. At this point, artists will be able to submit a shortlist of up to five fics, in order of preference.

Claims operate on a first come, first served basis. If an artist’s first choice is unavailable, they will be given their second choice, and so on. If all fics on their shortlist are already claimed and there are still fics available, they will have the opportunity to submit their next five preferences.

Any artist who is unable to access a computer when claims go live may elect a friend to submit a claim on their behalf–if you fall into this category, you should give this friend your full shortlist & the link to the claims form ahead of time. 

Please keep in mind that the challenge mods are not able to perform this task for you.

The claims form will remain open until all fics have been assigned to an artist, and will be opened up to artists who missed the November 30 registration cutoff if any unclaimed fics remain after December 14.

This is where the changes come in: when an artist successfully claims a fic, they will be notified which of the requested fics they have been assigned immediately**, and that fic will be removed from the summaries list. The artist will not learn the identity of their author at this stage.

The author will also be notified that their fic has been claimed, but will not learn the identity of their artist at this stage.

Neither author nor artist may publicly discuss their paired status until teams the end of the claims process, when all teams have been formed and announced. 

**by immediately, we mean as fast as we possibly can. Claims need to be manually checked for things like accidental double-submissions, age restrictions, and so on. Additionally, time zones are wily beasts, and even with a mod in each hemisphere, there are a few hours of the day when neither of us can easily get to a computer. We endeavor to get to every claim as fast as we can, but ask that participants are patient with us as we work through them.

December 15 

All teams will be formally introduced on this day, or sooner if artists are unusually fast with claims. A team announcement post will be published on the Pinefest blog. 

At this stage, authors and artists may publicly discuss who their partner is, and may also talk in general terms about which fic is theirs. (For the sake of clarity, “general terms” means you can say things like “I’m writing the one where Cas is turned into a sentient couch” or “I’m making art for Author McGee’s cowboy/mermaid fic”, but don’t go sharing chunks of dialogue or prose or your art ideas in a public forum.

That’s it!

While it’s impossible to make absolutely everyone happy—and believe us, we’ve tried—we hope that these changes will minimise stress for as many people as possible. 

The two main things we’re trying to put an end to:

Authors—particularly those who are new to writing fic, or new to fic challenges—second guessing their ability if they see other authors being paired up before them. By asking all participants to remain quiet on their status of claimed/not claimed, we hope that authors will be less inclined to compare themselves to one another, as they will have no way of knowing who or how many others are still waiting for a claim.

Artists being reluctant to request a second fic due to uncertainty about which of their first choices they were successful in claiming.

Obviously, it’s impossible to completely eliminate the potential for anxiety around claims, but we hope that these changes will help at least a little.

Lastly, to all the authors participating, but especially to the new ones...

We know that waiting for your fic to be chosen can be a nightmare. 

Both mods who work on this challenge have taken part in our fair share of big bangs, and we understand the agony of waiting. We know how easy it is to convince yourself that it’s a reflection on the quality of your work, but let us tell you some secrets from the other side of the curtain.

There are countless reasons why your fic might not get claimed right away, and most of them have nothing to do with your skills or your style. 

These are the most common reasons we see:

The artists who have put through claims so far have a style that they don’t think would mesh well with the subject matter of your fic. If you’ve written a canon universe casefic that’s heavy on violence and horror, it’s unlikely that someone whose art style leans more toward the cute chibi end of the spectrum is going to put their hand up for it, even if it’s something that they’re dying to read from start to finish in one sitting. This happens every year.

Your fic was the second or third pick for multiple artists who happened to get their first choice, but who are so eager to create art for it that they’re now waiting impatiently for second round claims to open so they can pounce on it. This happens EVERY YEAR.

The artists who read your summary and said HOLY DAMN THIS IS THE ONE is have slept through their alarm on the opposite side of the planet/are dealing with a very ill-timed computer malfunction/forgot what day it was and three of them will submit a claim with only your fic listed several hours after claims opened. This happens EVERY YEAR.

Whether you’re participating in this year’s challenge, or in another similar challenge, just remember that you’re going to be matched up with someone by the time claims close. You will not be left in the lurch. Sometimes, you’ve just gotta wait for something good... and that’s what pining is all about ;)

[auspicixus]

I hate to do this

but im suddenly going to be facing a lot of financial difficulty

I know. you dont want to hear it, i dont want to say it, but I’m seriously going to struggle this week and the next.

I need help.

The situation:

I’m a mentally & chronically ill disabled trans/nb 18 year old person, who has no job, no benefits, and no external help.

I was hoping to get a summer job but ive had a lot of epileptic fits and dissociative periods recently which i think is due to my BC pills (theyve been having a lot of negative effects on my body which also happened last time i was on this specific pill, but i ignored them since i was also going through a horrible patch in my life).

those two problems alone mean I’m unsuitable for a job - lest we ignore the fact that: I cant drive/ride a bike, I wouldnt get a job in time to help with my current financial issues, the rest of my mental & physical health is suffering as of late and its a mess, and there are no jobs which i am qualified or suitable for in my area anyway. if only i wanted to be a beauty therapist. since i cant drive, i cant even do a ‘choose-your-hours’ job like Uber/Ubereats/Deliveroo/Yodel/etc.

I dont qualify for disability since my regular doctor refuses to listen to me since im “just a hysterical girl*”. More than half of my health concerns have been “noticed but not diagnosed”. I am not medicated for most of my issues. my only prescription is for inhalers for asthma. thats it.

(*I’m not a girl.)

The problem:

During the next 7 days, I have the following coming out of my bank:

£15 for my packer* - 22-23th june

£5 for a monthly donation i make - 25th june

£5 for travel to a medical centre to have my BC pills assessed and changed. i might even have to pay for new medication if i have to go to a pharmacy to get them and they cant verify my NHS exemption, id need to pay +£8.80 or whatever NHS prescription is currently. additionally, if this medicine doesnt work, or something else arises, i may need to go back on thursday (so an extra £5 plus the chance of even more med costs). - 25th june

£5 for travel to college - 27th june

plus £??? for food the days i’ll be out (about £5 a day)

why is this a problem? because i get £30 weekly on mondays from my parents (and I cannot ask for more as they are hardpressed for cash anyway), i currently only have £5.45 in my account, and my account is an U19 account, meaning I cant have credit. i have no overdraft. i have no parachute. this is non-negotiable.

these costs (*my partner offered to give me £15 to cover the packer - but it might not make it to my account in time) will take me to no money in my account, and i havent even factored in the cost of getting food to generally eat while at home (upwards of £5), or any other bus rides i might need (£3 locally, £5 elsewhere).

This is how you can help me:

Promote me & my shops: If you can’t buy or donate, please reblog and share this post!

Help me clear out my Etsy: I’m officially going to be closing my Etsy shop as soon as my handmade items & unused stock are sold. Their fees are just too much, and my handmade items are not getting the traction they need.

Visit my RedBubble store: This is where I aim to make money from now. I would like some suggestions on what I could design for it, if you can help with that.

Donate to, or share, my GoFundMe: Donations given here will act as a temporary cushion for if I struggle to make ends meet. I would rather have other donation methods for the time being, but if you wish to fund my transition directly, please do not hesitate to donate here or bookmark it for later.

Request custom art from me: I’m currently open for custom sigil designs. I’m also working on my general art, which will allow me to open some other customs.. Examples can be found on RedBubble.

If you are LGBT+ and are interested in unique sigils, please fill out this survey! It’s a little long, but its really all I need to know to plan my next batch of sigils!

I also accept donations through Paypal (please ignore the fact that it has my deadname on there).

It might be very short notice, but any money raised now will help me through this week and the next.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[wordsablaze]

(6) At Least The Fatigue Is Real

Stubbornly In Love Magnus and Alec are two beautiful souls that both happen to be in love, heartbroken, and painfully stubborn. An angsty malec fic prompted by this lovely soul, chapter 6-10 done as part of the Malec Big Bang! Enjoy!

A/N: Help out? Posting week is here so I’m back! Mostly thanks to my astonishingly wonderful beta @zeejade88 as she went above and beyond with tolerating me and making everything better <333 Check out the incredible art that @dmsilvisart made, I am honoured to have worked with her for this fic and to have received such magical artwork! <3

It’s a good thing Alec’s tears aren’t the source of rain because otherwise the entire world would be flooding at an alarming rate.

He can’t think past Magnus and how he’d left. Of course, he knows Magnus had only left because Alec had asked, but that doesn’t make it any easier for his heart. There’s a part of him that wishes he could just go back, back to when he didn’t know Magnus and when becoming the head of the Institute was his biggest concern, but he knows that’s impossible no matter how much he wants it not to be.

But, on the other hand, he doesn’t want to think about Magnus right now because he’s having dinner with Maryse in less than a quarter of an hour and the last thing he wants is for her to find out they’ve broken up, which is why he finds himself standing in front of the bathroom mirror and breathing heavily, trying to persuade himself that he’s okay.

“You can do this. No big deal. All you have to do is pretend everything’s fine. You’ve done it before and you can do it again. You can do this.”

His reflection seems unconvinced; he’s tempted to punch the helplessly truthful mirror.

Glaring at himself doesn’t seem to have the same effect as when he glares at others so he gives up on it after another minute, just sighing and running a hand through his hair instead. Almost immediately, he groans, opens the tap, wets his hands, and tries to make himself look like he hadn’t only changed clothes because of this family dinner. Somehow, the whole thing takes ten minutes so he’s only just satisfied with his appearance when Izzy bursts in, radiating concern.

“What if I’d been naked, Izzy?” Alec asks, rolling his eyes at her fearless behaviour.

Izzy scoffs. “I’ve seen much worse than you, get over yourself. Now, if you’re done preening, we have a mother to entertain.”

“I was not preening!” Alec argues as she tugs on his arm, then all but drags him to the front entrance.

Oh no.

Maryse is armed with a bottle of wine and a giddy smile, which can’t be good. The last time she’d turned up in this kind of state, Magnus had been the only one who could keep up with her and coax her away from drinks and towards mindless chatter and rest instead.

“Izzy…” Alec murmurs, his tone saying everything he’d rather not. That and the fact that Izzy seems to have an inbuilt Alec-translator means she perfectly understands what he’s thinking in a heartbeat.

Izzy swallows but blinks away her frown. “We can do this. Come on, where’s that stupid determination of yours? I bet you Clary’s next brownie batch that she’ll hug you first.”

Alec makes a face but then they’re too close to Maryse for him to say anything without being overheard so he plasters a smile onto his face and takes the bottle from her hands. “Hey, Mom.”

“My children!” Maryse smiles brightly before hugging them both in turn, Alec first just as Izzy had predicted, the scent of coconut flooding through the door as she walks through.

“We made stew!” Izzy tells Maryse as they walk towards the room they’d turned into a dining room a couple of weeks back since nobody ever used it for anything else and family time had suddenly become much more common, to everyone’s pleasant surprise.

Not wanting Maryse to reply with something borderline insulting and spark yet another nostalgic debate, Alec adds: “Don’t worry, it’s the new and upgraded version.”

“Oh, thank the angel,” Maryse breathes in relief.

Izzy makes an indignant sound. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad!”

She gets only a hum in reply but, thankfully, they reach the dining room before they can start another argument over the quality of their childhood attempts at cooking. Alec opens the door and lets the other two in before following them, shutting the door behind him to keep away prying eyes or nosy ears.

The first round of stew is accompanied by flickering conversation topics that Alec mostly tunes out. It’s only when they refill their ridiculously small bowls – the size of which is the only reason that they’re having more than one serving in the first place – that things go slightly south.

“So, Alec, how’s Magnus? Busy with a client, I presume?” Maryse asks, a smile on her face that Alec really doesn’t want to sabotage.

Naturally, he does one of the things he’s best at: he keeps pretending. “Yeah, it was an urgent request. In fact, I forgot to tell you, he sends his apologies for not being able to make it.”

Izzy gives him an odd look but doesn’t contradict him, going with it. “Good thing too, he’d probably have stolen bigger bowls with the excuse of being fabulous and gotten us in trouble again.”

“Again?” Maryse echoes, raising an eyebrow and sipping her drink.

It’s not a secret that Alec himself occasionally indulges in and appreciates alcohol but, right now, he couldn’t hate it more. He just really wants to stop talking about Magnus and pretend that this is just another casual dinner rather than the only reason Alec is talking to anybody else in the first place.

“Well, there was that time we had a stray cat problem and, instead of helping relocate them, all Magnus did was magic us some bowls and cat litters,” Izzy says, rolling her eyes and effectively covering for Alec’s internal distress.

Maryse just laughs, throwing her head back as she imagines the scene. Alec offers a small chuckle as Izzy takes the lead in their conversation, the two siblings fully shocked when Maryse starts to tell them her own stories about Magnus. Alec listens with a troubled interest, not sure whether he should listen to the tales of his boyfriend- no, his ex-boyfriend’s adventures after jeopardising their relationship’s ability to fix itself.

Regardless of his ever-growing guilt, he listens and finds himself smiling at the crazy things Magnus has done. It makes him want to go and see Magnus’ mannerisms for himself, to go and build his own stories with Magnus, but, mostly, to just go, go away from this situation and cry in his room again.

“Alec, are you alright?” Maryse asks, apparently finally seeing through his pretence.

He smiles as brightly as he can, not wanting to worry her. “I’m fine, Mom. Just a little tired, it was a long day.” And he’s not exactly lying. It was a long day and he is utterly tired, just not for the reasons Maryse is probably thinking.

“You can say that again,” Izzy says under her breath, smirking a little.

Maryse smiles at him, then waves a hand. “You can go and rest if you need to. It’s been a while since Isabelle and I have had some quality girl talk anyway…”

Izzy genuinely snorts, then covers it up with a cough, but nobody could miss the shine in her eyes at those words. It’s been halfway to forever since they’ve had anything close to girl talk and Alec really wants to be happy for her, he does, but he can’t pull his mind out of the time he’s spent with Magnus. He still smiles, though, yawning to authenticate his fatigue and just about managing a decent wave before he leaves, walking faster than he’d thought he could.

By the time he gets to his room, he’s too tired to change his clothes so he just pulls his socks off – a habit he’d picked up from seeing Magnus remove his socks before bed so many times – and flicks the light he’d left on earlier, off. His happiness, patience, and concentration might have been fabricated but his lack of energy is genuine and even he knows he can’t fake his way out of that one.

“Nnnggghhhhh,” he groans after taking two more steps, promptly flopping onto the mattress face-down; pretending is way more tiring than people can ever know. And if he falls asleep cuddling his pillow as if it’s a certain warlock, well, nobody will ever know that either.

like/reblog but don’t respot, thanks!

[icecubelotr44]

To Every Thing a Season (2/16)

Summary:   After witnessing the tragic murder of his brother Liam, Killian Jones is more determined than ever to discover the secrets of time travel. Fast-tracking his education at Storybrooke University, Killian is assigned a lab assistant, one Emma Swan. Together, they find a way to break through the veil of time so Killian can set things right. But what will be the price for changing the past, and is it one they’re willing to pay?

Rated:  T, for violence, some dark themes, angst, and whump

Art credit/link: The totally awesome @optomisticgirl made imagesets for all the chapters and @ab-normality made a video and a gifset for this fic.  You can find the imageset for this chapter above and here on her blog.  The video is linked here and on her blog here and the gifset will be posted later in the story!

Beta readers: The as-always wonderful @nothingimpossibleonlyimprobable, thanks so much for all of your help and cajoling and reassuring!  And a huge thank you to the spectacular @spartanguard who stepped in to help beta read as well!

A/N:  Written as part of the 2017 Captain Swan Big Bang Challenge.  You can catch up with all the other fics that are complete by following @captainswanbigbang and/or subscribing to the Group Collection on AO3 and/or the C2 on FFN. This is complete in 16 parts and will be posted every Thursday from now until its completion. And yes, there is a happy ending after all this… just so you know.

Word count:  ~ 5,100 (80K+ Total in 16 chapters)

From the beginning: ao3 | ffn   

Current Chapter: AO3 | FFN

Chapter 2: To Plant and to Pluck

“Professor, no!  I don’t need an assistant.  And certainly not some freshman who probably doesn’t know the difference between and photon and a… a proton!”  Killian balked, his hands curling into fists automatically.  “Please, Dr. Hopper, she’s just going to slow me down.”

“That might not be a bad thing, my boy.  And I’ve asked you before to call me Archie when we’re not in the classroom.”  Archie looked over the rims of his glasses and Killian met his gaze with a glare of his own.

“Yes, sir,” he muttered sullenly.

“The fact of the matter is, Killian, that you need to slow down.  Consider it a favor to me, taking her on.  She’s a criminal justice major and she’s already enrolled in Physics 102.  If you can help her understand any of this better, then it will make my life easier.”  The professor paused.  “And I don’t think I have to remind you that you are only allowed five hours a week in the labs to work on your project unless I allow you more.”

Killian’s shoulders slumped.  The bags under his eyes from his latest batch of nightmares weren’t going to do anything to help convince Hopper that he didn’t need the help.  And really, how bad could it be?  She wasn’t a pure science major.  Surely this lass would be no more interested in helping him than he was in her help.

“She needs the job to stay in school, Killian.  You understand how much this school can mean to some people, don’t you?”

He could feel the muscle in his jaw twitching at that low blow.  “Fine.  But if she breaks anything or gets in my way…”

“I will be the first to find her someplace else to occupy her time.  I don’t want to impede your work.  I want to improve it.”

Killian closed his eyes and tried not to imagine the horror he was about to agree to.  “And you’ll approve the extra hours I requested?”

“Yes.  And if you make it through the semester with her working with you, I will also approve the practical materials you need to start building your project next year.”

Just the mention of the possibility of starting construction on the capsule he would need in order to get back to Liam had him nodding his acquiescence.  He could handle a freshman sitting pretty in the corner of the lab if it meant he could start some physical work within the year - on top of the theoretical work he spent every free moment on.  Bloody hell, Killian thought, he’d have volunteered to host Hopper’s entire 102 class if it meant he could finally get to practical work.

Regardless of the incentives, he knew how trying this was going to be.  Killian pinched the bridge of his nose under his glasses.  “When does she start?” he breathed out, already feeling the headache building.

He missed the beginning of Archie’s satisfied grin as he shut his eyes as if he could block out the inevitable answer.

“Right after finals are over.”  Dr. Hopper was laughing under his breath.  Killian resisted the urge to groan out loud.  “Turns out that Miss Swan isn’t going home for break either.  You’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other with all the hours you’ve requested over Christmas.”

Killian’s eyes opened wide and he was finally graced with the beaming look his professor had adopted.

He couldn’t help it; he rolled his eyes.

“Here’s your approval for the lab hours over break.  You’ll have to share with Miss Blanchard’s AP Physics field trips once a week when the high school is in session while we’re out.  And Killian?”  Killian squeezed his eyes shut, dreading what else Dr. Hopper was going to demand of him.

Archie waited until he looked up and met his gaze.  “Try to do something fun over break, all right?  Something outside of the lab?  Something… I don’t know, something exciting.”

“Yes, sir,” Killian muttered, resolutely ignoring the defiant part of him that already planned to refuse that request.

“Very well, my boy.  I’ll see you tomorrow for your final, then.  Try to get some sleep; you still look tired.”

Killian took off before Hopper could come up with something else that he would end up ignoring.  On his way out the door, a blonde woman - he thought she might be the same one who had knocked him off his feet during the snowstorm - looked up from where she sat opposite the classroom.  Her green eyes flashed with recognition and then she rose to her feet.  She never broke eye contact, and Killian gulped as his hand rose to scratch behind his ear.

“I… I suppose I owe you a better apology for the other day, lass.  Right poor form on my part to rush off like I did after I knocked you down.  My brother would have my…” The words choked Killian as he realized what he had said.  Where his memories were traipsing off to.  The muscles in his jaw twitched as he clenched his teeth against the onslaught.

Killian hadn’t realized his eyes were closed until the touch of a hand on his arm startled him.

“Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

His gaze was locked on her hand, amazed at how quickly the gentle touch had brought him back from the streets of Ireland to their campus in Maine.

She seemed to realize what she was doing and snatched back her arm with a mumbled apology of her own.

Killian felt the loss immediately, but shook his head as she seemed to shrink in on herself with arms crossed and defense written across her face.

He knew the feeling.

“I… erm… I’m fine.  And you?  After the other day?”

She nodded, and looked like she was about to say something when Archie called out from inside the room.

“Mr. Jones?  Are you still out there?”

Killian’s eyes widened.  “You never saw me!” he hissed before sprinting down the hallway.

And that should have been the end of it.  He had never allowed himself to ponder the idea of fate or kismet or whatever people told themselves to make sense of how the world worked.  If Killian thought like that, he’d never be able to go back in time to save Liam - the ethics and morals of it were already shady enough without believing that there was a plan already in place for all of them.

So what if he’d seen her twice and been drawn to her both times?  So what if she was the first girl… woman that he’d ever looked twice at.  He didn’t even know her name, so what did it matter if her golden hair and her emerald eyes were seared into his brain, even hours later?

Right?

Killian rolled over on his bunk so his back was to the room, pounding at the pillow until it conformed to his liking, and let the numbers fly around his head.  There was something off with the newest part of his equations, something that was making the earlier numbers look yellow as they flitted about.  He took a deep breath and tried to focus, but the problem stayed just out of sight.

“Jones!”  Scarlet yelled as he barreled into the room, and Killian sighed as the numbers faded away.  All that was left were the chicken scratches in his notebook.

“What?!”  He rolled over again, glaring down at Will until he saw the girl hanging off his arm.  “Apologies, lass, I shouldn’t have shouted.”

Killian looked over to where Will was grinning like a maniac and rolled his eyes.  “At you, anyway.  What do you want, Scarlet?”

“Ana and I are going down to the student center to see Robin and John play.  Fancy comin’ along?”  Will didn’t even wait for an answer before he turned to bury his nose in Ana’s neck, the resulting giggles that came from her grating on Killian’s ears.

“I don’t think so, mate,” Killian said when Will finally looked up.  “I’ve got a lot of studying to do, still.  Thanks, though.”

His roommate shrugged.  “Your loss, mate.  Should be a good show.  Better than your impersonation of a hermit, anyway.”

Killian smirked at the dig, but then Archie’s words echoed in his ears.  Try to do something fun… something exciting.  He was a man of his word.  Liam had instilled that into Killian even if his father hadn’t.  If he went to Robin’s show, then at least he could honestly tell Dr. Hopper after break that he had done something outside of the physics lab.

“Hold up.  Give me five minutes to change and I’ll go with you.”

Scarlet grinned, and Ana smiled coquettishly.  “Good on ya, Jones.  We’ll meet you in the common room, then.”

Killian nodded and heaved himself out of his loft as the door shut behind them.  Some fresh deodorant, a clean shirt, and a brush over his face to make sure his scruff hadn’t turned into all-out beard in the last few days, and he was ready.

And already wishing he’d never said anything.

The walk across campus to the student center was frigid and a little bit eerie.  Holed up as often as he was in his room, Killian hadn’t been able to fully appreciate just how desolate the campus got when the underclassmen were cramming for exams.  There were a few others making their way towards the show or to the cafeteria for dinner, but the snow-covered quad was otherwise empty.  

Killian sighed as he trudged along behind Will and Ana, idly wondering how the two managed to walk while wrapped up in one another like they were.  Surely their altered combined center of gravity would make it nearly impossible to stay upright.

He had to bat away the numbers that began to dance in his vision, trying to pull him into a headspace that would likely leave Killian standing dumbfounded in the middle of the quad.

“Jones!” Will called out without even turning around.  “You comin’ or not?”

Killian smirked.  His roommate could be a bloody prat sometimes, but other times they were one hell of a pair.

The auditorium was dark already, the only illumination coming from the stage where Robin and the Merry Men were idly plucking at guitar strings or adjusting microphones.  The row that Ana chose was mostly full, leaving Killian with only a single seat to his right before the aisle. It was unlikely that anyone would sit next to him now, and his shoulders slumped a little in relief.  There were already more people than he was comfortable sharing space with and he’d take the reprieve where he could.

Will smacked him on the arm and grinned when Killian rolled his eyes.  “You’ll like it, mate.  I’m tellin’ ya.”

Killian nodded and settled further into the cushioned seat.  He let the numbers fly untended, half his awareness on his surroundings and the other on potential breakthroughs.  He had just perked up on a possibility when-

“Is this seat… you again?”

Killian startled badly before he locked gazes with the same emerald eyes that had haunted him all afternoon as he tried to work.

“Are you following me?” he blurted out, then cringed.

The blonde rolled her eyes and folded herself into the seat beside him.  Killian expected to feel uncomfortable.  He expected to feel confined and antsy.

It felt like she had been by his side for years.

“Hardly.  I don’t even know your name, Idiot,” she muttered, already lighting up her phone screen and ignoring him.

“Killian Jones, at your service, milady.”  Killian cringed again, mentally smacking himself upside the head even as he extended his hand in greeting.  What was he going to do next, kiss her knuckles and offer her his sword?

“I’m Emma,” she replied, reaching out to shake his hand.

“Emma.”  Her name rolled of his tongue smoothly, and he was caught by the urge to say it again.  Their fingers intertwined and the bolt of electricity that sparked up his arm took him by surprise.  Killian stared down at their hands, looking for the catalyst that had nearly made him jump.  There was nothing for him to find, however, and Emma pulled her hand back far too quickly for his liking.

Bloody hell, mate, he chastised himself, what is wrong with you?

Killian smiled politely to hide the unwelcome sting of rejection and reminded himself, again, that he barely knew the woman sitting next to him.  He turned back to the stage, tugging off his glasses to clean them as a distraction, determined to forget about her.

“Are they any good?” Emma asked, jutting her chin out towards Robin’s band.  “I’ve seen flyers for their shows before, but I really just needed a break from studying.”

Killian perked up at the chance to talk to her for longer.  Don’t muck this up, he begged himself.  “Aye, they’re pretty good.  I’ve been drag… err… coming to their shows for a few years now, since they got together freshman year.  Robin was my first roommate, before I got stuck with this prat.”

He nodded in Will’s general direction, ignoring the elbow to his ribs that caused the comment.

“Will Scarlet, love, pleasure to make your acquaintance.  I’d love to get to know you even better, though.”

Emma rolled her eyes, but shook his hand as well.  As Will leaned over to brush a kiss to her knuckles, Killian leaned in and hissed, “Aren’t you here with a woman already, mate?”

Will pulled back with a ‘cat that ate the canary’ grin and threw his arm around the scowling Ana’s shoulders.  “Just bein’ friendly, Jones.  Should try it some time.”

Killian was saved from trying to make a witty retort when Robin’s voice came over the speakers.  “Hey there, everyone.  Glad to see the books haven’t sucked out your souls just yet.”

The laughter that rippled through the small crowd seemed to break the hold Emma had over his thoughts, and Killian settled in for the show.

Emma adjusted the beanie that was dangerously high on her forehead, then checked that the straps of her backpack weren’t going to slip off her shoulders.  She fastened one more button on her shirt, then released it.

She ignored the smirk on Ruby’s face as she checked her reflection in the mirror one more time.

“Nervous for your first day on the job?” Ruby asked, the smirk morphing into a wolfish grin as Emma glared through the mirror.

She ripped the beanie off her head, checking inside of it to see what was making her so uncomfortable.  Emma expected to see a pin or a loose thread.

There was nothing there.

“Not nervous.  Just…” Emma thought hard about how to phrase what she was feeling.  “Concerned.  I need this to work, and if this junior doesn’t fall for it, I’m out of a job and out of a college experience.”

Emma looked up, then repeated, “I need this to work.”

Ruby sidled up to her, hip-checking Emma to the side until they shared the mirror.  “Emma, he’s going to be falling all over himself for you.  You know that, right?  Unless he’s blind.  Or gay.  And then you may have your work cut out for you.”

Emma glared again.  “This isn’t… he’s an upperclassman.  I’m just a freshman.  He’s not going to care what I look like.”

“And yet, you’re going to be late because you’re still standing in front of the mirror.”

Emma’s eyes widened, and she looked down at her watch.  Ruby was right; she was going to be late.  She took off out of the bathroom, jamming her hat back over her ears and brushing the wayward strands of hair out of her face.

“Knock his socks off, Em!” Ruby’s voice echoed down the hall and was answered by the slam of the hallway door.

It wasn’t like Emma hadn’t been thinking about just that.  It had been on her mind constantly since she’d rushed into Dr. Hopper’s classroom to agree to take the job before one of the advanced classes started their final.  She remembered the way the professor had flushed that first day when she’d insinuated he wanted her to seduce this science geek, but how else did he expect her to get the guy out of the lab without telling him what was up?

Emma Swan didn’t do people.  

She practically flew across campus to the science building, searching the room numbers in the physics hallway for the one she’d hastily scribbled down on a scrap of paper and jammed in her pocket the night before.  Dr. Hopper had assured her that he would meet her there to make the introductions, but that he had to run right afterwards for a meeting at the local high school.

Emma hoped he’d still be there.

Finally coming across the correct room, Emma tried the door handle and was surprised to find it unlocked.  She would freely admit that she didn’t pay much attention in science, but she thought that with equipment as expensive as what was housed here, the labs would all be locked when not in use.  Hesitantly, she poked her head inside, wondering if she should wait for Dr. Hopper before entering the lab.  She had thought she was late, but maybe she wrote the time down wrong, or maybe she got the room number wrong, or maybe…

Killian Jones, the guy she kept running into all over campus, was hunched over one of the lab benches.  His hair was all in disarray, a pencil tucked behind one ear even as he held another one over the notebook he was scribbling in.  He didn’t even look up as she walked in and shut the door behind her.  But Emma did notice something curious.  His left hand was twitching at the corner of his scribblings; it almost looked as if he was flicking through pages of a book, but the pads of his fingers never touched the paper he was writing on.

“Are you working for Dr. Hopper, too?” Emma asked, grimacing a little when Killian jumped in his seat.

His startled gaze locked on hers quickly, and she smiled sheepishly.  Killian continued to stare at her for just a moment too long, and Emma started to squirm under the scrutiny.

And then, as if a switch were flipped in his head, he smiled back at her.  “Well, now I know you’re following me, lass.  Should I be concerned?”

“Oh yeah,” she returned.  “You should start yelling for campus security any moment now.”

Killian’s laugh was deep and sent a shiver through her.  He seemed like someone she could genuinely get used to hanging around.  But, she reasoned, he was probably waiting for Dr. Hopper, too, and would be heading off to his own upperclassman to herd out of the lab.

He sobered up a minute later, but there was still a sparkle in his eyes and a twitch at the corner of his mouth.  “So what can I help you with, Emma?”

“Oh, nothing, I suppose.  I’m waiting for Dr. Hopper.  I guess you are, too?” she asked, looking towards the door.  “I thought I was late.”

Emma turned back to Killian just in time to see a strange look come across his features.  He had just opened his mouth to speak when the door opened behind her and Dr. Hopper came rushing in.

“Emma, I’m so sorry I’m late.  I had a few last minute projects show up in my inbox and I had to… oh, I see you’ve met already.  Good, good.”  He smiled happily, and turned to go.  At the last second he turned back.  “If you don’t mind, I’ll just leave you both to get started and figure out your schedules for the next few weeks?”

Emma stood, transfixed and facing the door, long after the professor had left.  She finally was broken out of her shock by Killian clearing his throat behind her.

“Erm, well, yes.  I suppose I should introduce myself properly, lass.  Killian Jones, physics major in… err… reluctant need of a lab assistant.”  Killian stood up and stuck out his hand for her to shake.

Emma stared at his hand like it would reach out and bite her.  “I think there’s been some mistake.  Dr. Hopper assigned me to a junior.”

“Aye,” he nodded, still holding his hand out.  He shook it a little, and Emma rolled her eyes before reaching out to shake it.  To her surprise, Killian tugged her towards him a little bit, and then laid a light kiss on her knuckles.

She snatched her hand away, avoiding the impulse to wipe it on her jeans.  “Who does things like that?” Emma snarked.

“My brother,” Killian replied, and it sounded sad.

Her features softened, and she tried to make him smile again.  “So you thought playing the gentleman now would be a good start?”

“Oh lass,” he smirked, and Emma tried not to think too deeply about the flutter in her belly that came from it.  “I’m always a gentleman.”

“Right,” Emma drew out the word as she looked around the lab.  “Gentleman or not, I’m looking for an upperclassman to… umm… assist.  You can’t be that much older than me, if you aren’t younger!”

Killian laughed derisively.  

“Our ages aside, lass, a junior I am.  And one who needs to get to work.  So if you don’t mind?”  He gestured towards the other side of the lab table.  “If you’re serious about helping, then I need you to log into the computer.  If not, then there’s a desk over there that you can sit at and be out of my way.”

Emma bristled, then dropped her bookbag under the table and booted up the computer.  “Just tell me what to do.”

Emma was a quick study, Killian decided as he looked over the output from his latest equation.  He couldn’t deny that the work went much faster with her there to type in the numbers and monitor the simulations in the computer program for him.  Her work left his hands free to scribble in the margins of his notebook or to fiddle with the prototype machine he was starting to craft out of scrap materials.  That work would have to be farmed out to engineers once Archie approved him to build a full-scale model, but having Emma working with him was moving the timeline to completion along nicely.

He might even be able to get a set of blueprints to Archie before the end of this semester rather than in the fall.  Killian was quietly pleased with how the arrangement had worked out - if only Emma didn’t insist on distracting him every few hours.

Throughout the entirety of the winter break, Killian had to deal with Emma’s penchant to lag in efficiency whenever she started to get hungry.  He found, reluctantly, that the quickest way to get her back up to his level of productivity was to follow her to the cafeteria - since she refused to go by herself - and try to hurry her along through her meal.

And yet, they had the same argument every time Emma started to get hungry.

“Lass, why don’t you run to the cafeteria and grab something to eat?” He asked that afternoon when Emma started gnawing on her pen cap and typing in the codes with one finger.

She shrugged, her point-and-stab typing pausing while she swung around to look at him.  “I’ve got another hour in here with you.  It will still be open when we’re done.”

“Really, Emma, I’ve got this under control,” he cajoled, trying - just once - to get her to go on her own.

But, as he expected, she just shook her head and turned back to the computer screen.  “Don’t worry about it, Killian.  If I go now, I’ll have to eat by myself and everyone will stare.  Let’s just get back to work.”

A moment later, Emma’s stomach growled and Killian clenched his eyes shut.  His chin dropped to his chest and he gave in to the inevitable.

“If I go with you, will you please get something to eat?” Even to Killian’s ears, he sounded like he was being led to the gallows.

But, just like every other time, Emma beamed at him and jumped from the stool to grab her coat.  “Let’s go, Jones!  There’s a grilled cheese with my name on it.”

The smells from the cafeteria hit his nose before they were fully inside and Killian realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast… almost eight hours ago.  He may as well make use of his meal card while he was here - then he could stick around the lab for a few extra hours without having to worry about dinner.  They swiped their meal cards at the turnstile and then separated to find their meals.

Killian eyed Emma to make sure that she was in line for food before he headed over to the sandwich bar to see if something caught his eye.  He chose a tuna-and-something panini that looked the most appetizing and moved to the salad bar before he met up with Emma at a bar-style table in the corner of the eating area.

Emma hopped up onto one of the stools and shoved a plate of fries in his direction.  “Eat these, they gave me both and I don’t want them,” she said around a mouthful of onion ring.  

The next thing he knew, Emma’s eyes were watering and she was slurping down her drink. “Hot,” she breathed out with a pained look.  He couldn’t keep from huffing out a laugh under his breath.

Killian eyed the french fries and could almost picture the amount of time he was going to waste shoving them in his mouth, but he knew they’d be eaten before they left.

What seemed to be an eternity later, Killian followed Emma back to their shared lab and the computer results that awaited them.  He watched as her hips swayed from side to side.  Will, he knew, would be salivating all over Emma at the way she moved, but Killian was more cautiously intrigued.  She was stunning - he’d have to be blind not to see that - but that wasn’t what was foremost in his mind when Killian thought of her.

No, it was the way she seemed intent to learn so that she could actually help him, rather than just putting in her hours.  It was the way she asked questions - only once - and remembered the answers.  It was the way she seemed to care that he should succeed.

And Killian hadn’t even told her the real reason he was trying to manipulate time.  He hadn’t told her anything about Liam.

He was starting to think that he should.

But not today.  Just the thought of Liam’s death made the food in Killian’s belly threaten a reappearance.  He had to swallow hard to make sure that visions of blood and pale skin didn’t stop his footsteps and leave him lost in the past, still standing in the middle of the science building’s hallway.  He couldn’t-

“Killian?  Are you coming?”  Emma looked back from where she was unlocking the lab’s door.

“Aye, lass, sorry.  I’m with you.”

No, he wouldn’t tell Emma about Liam today.

But soon, he promised when she smiled over the desktop at him.  Soon.  She deserved to know what she was getting herself into.

What he was getting them both into.

Killian returned her smile, wondering if it looked as forced as it felt, but unable to shake the whispering voice in his head - I’m waiting, little brother.  Why haven’t you saved me yet?

He had no answer for Liam.

Or for himself.

Killian sighed, then stepped into the lab with the grim reason for creating his machine nipping at his heels.

Once upon a time, he had worked on this project for fun.  He could still remember the first time he heard of string theory, the way it had taken hold in his head and wouldn’t let go.  He could still remember his eighth birthday when Liam had gotten him a huge whiteboard and a whole tub of dry erase markers.  He could still remember how Brennan had sneered at the gift, but Killian had been ecstatic.  One of his happiest days was that birthday - he and Liam had spent the afternoon putting the easel together, then writing out “KILLIAN’S THEORY” in big block letters at the top.

That whiteboard had seen him through most of his awkward teenage years.  It had seen him through the bullies who couldn’t stand him showing them up in class and the girls who wouldn’t give him the time of day.  It had been a sense of stability when Liam was working and Brennan was downstairs, drunk as usual.

It had been the only source of comfort when he was mourning his brother.

He’d had to leave the whiteboard behind, of course, but there was another in the corner of this lab.  The penmanship hadn’t gotten much better with time, but the big block letters at the top spelled out the same - even if they weren’t permanently etched into the board like the one back in England.  It was here that Killian moved now, the familiar ritual of scrubbing out numbers that had become warped with new aspects of his theory and listening to the squeak of the marker as new ones took their place.

“This result came back negative.  What do you want me to change?” Emma asked, her voice breaking him free of the numbers’ dance.

“Try increasing the intensity while decreasing the frequency.  See what that does,” he replied, still distracted.

Behind him, Killian heard the clack of keys as Emma input the new parameters.  With the numbers taken care of, he turned his attention to the model he was working on.  He theorized that a round exoskeleton would be more conducive to time-flight, or at least to the cessation of flight when he got back in time.  He would need to use strong materials - a combination of carbon fiber and titanium for the actual chassis, carbide and silicon for the computer parts, polycarbonate-

“Killian?” Emma was standing next to him, her hand on his shoulder.  “I’ve been calling you.”

He cleared his throat awkwardly, the feel of her this close to him stealing the very words from his lips.  “Err… umm… right.  What?”

Emma smiled; it was a little thing, just barely quirking up the corners of her mouth, but it brightened his day regardless.

“It’s after nine, Jones.  Time to go.”

He nodded with a put-out sigh.  For all he was trying to mold it to his will, it seemed that Killian never had enough time.

tagging @gusenitsaa, @kiwistreetswan, @lenfazreads, @xhookswenchx, @killian-whump, @eala-captian

[theartofbeinganerd]

You Fund-Raise Me Up

Aka my teachers AU, which was the winner of my ‘what multi-chapter fic should I post next’ contest. Here it is, as promised (with a pun for a title that makes me laugh - sorry)!

Just a note: Typically, I'm going to try and focus on both Fitzsimmons and Mackelena in each chapter, but I'll admit that it'll likely skew more towards FS more often than not, just something to keep in mind.

(Ao3)

-

“Hey, Fitz, can I – is that more chocolate?”

Guiltily, Fitz paused in his frenzied effort to hide a small pile of chocolate bars in the top desk of his drawer. “Oh, hey Simmons…um…something you needed?”

Heaving an exasperated sigh and shaking her head, Jemma crossed her arms over her chest and stepped further into the classroom. Once she was standing in front of Fitz’s desk, she peered disappointedly down at him, the same look that she used on her students when they tried to form some kind of excuse as to why they didn’t have their homework. “Oh Fitz. It’s not a fundraiser if you’re buying up all of the product.”

“I only have so much willpower!” Fitz cried defensively. “How am I supposed to say no to candy bars?”

Jemma pressed her lips together to hide her amused smile as she shook her head again. “Maybe we should have gone with Daisy’s calendar idea – at least that way you wouldn’t be in danger of solely funding us.”

Fitz pulled a horrified face, and it caused Jemma to finally break, laughter slipping past her lips and revealing her ruse. “Very funny, Simmons. But I’m not joking when I say that no one would buy a calendar of ‘sexy teachers’ if I was in there with my shirt off.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Jemma replied with a placating pat to his shoulder, though she figured that the laughter still lingering in her voice made the sentiment less believable, from the telling scowl that Fitz threw in her direction.

“Anyway,” he started pointedly, “what was it that you wanted before?”

For a moment, Jemma had forgotten that she’d had a purpose in dropping by Fitz’s classroom, but at his not-so-subtle reminder, she said, “Oh! Yes, I was wondering if I could borrow a couple of your microscopes. I’m starting the cell unit tomorrow and I don’t have enough for the class, even putting them in pairs.”

“Sure thing,” he replied easily, getting up from his desk and crossing the classroom to the back counter, where a small amount of microscopes were set up in a row. “How many do you need?” he called over his shoulder.

“Two should do it, thank you,” Jemma answered a bit distractedly, taking the chance to check his desk drawer. Once it had been pulled all the way out, her eyebrows rose high on her forehead as she caught sight of the chocolate bars practically lining it. “Ugh Fitz!”

“What?!” When she raised her head to glare at him, she noticed him balancing the two requested microscopes in his arms, struggling a bit under the weight of them, and his cheeks slowly growing redder and redder as he figured out what she’d seen. “Hey, I’ve never claimed to have an ounce of self-control when it comes to chocolate.” Clearly trying to save face, he added, “’Sides, it’s not exactly surprising. You know this happens every year.”

With a sigh, Jemma perched lightly on the edge of Fitz’s desk and reminded him sadly, “This isn’t every other year though, Fitz. We’re not raising money for field trips or extra lab equipment, not without that tax money.”

Fitz grimaced, partly at her words, but also partly, it appeared, due to his continued juggling of the microscopes. Rolling her eyes fondly, Jemma stood from his desk and (only after trying to take one of the microscopes from Fitz and receiving a childish shake of the head in response) wordlessly gestured for him to follow her on the short walk from his classroom in the seventh grade hallway to hers in the eighth. As he trailed behind her, he grumbled, “If it wasn’t for that bastard Governor Ward and his filthy, lying bastard face… I still have no bloody clue how he even got elected.”

“Some people don’t care to look past the clearly false promises,” Jemma sighed, pushing open the door to her classroom and stepping back to allow Fitz to enter. “You can put them over there,” she told him, pointing toward a relatively empty table. Watching absently as Fitz did as she asked, Jemma felt a rush of sadness at the thought that this time next year, she might not be in this classroom setting up slides of plant cells or discussing recent scientific discoveries over tea with Fitz in the afternoons as they put off grading just a little bit longer.

“Hey.” At Fitz’s soft voice beside her, Jemma glanced up in surprise, a small smile flitting involuntarily across her lips when he nudged her shoulder with his. “Ward’s not shutting us down. We’re gonna prove to him that we’re prepared to fight for our school.”

As her smile became more genuine, Jemma’s mind flashed back almost a decade, to when she and Fitz had just been fresh-faced almost-college-graduates, interning at the tiny Margaret Carter Middle School in some tiny little town, entirely unaware that it was where they’d meet the person that would become their best friend in the world. The school meant so much to both of them, and Jemma couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else or with anyone else.

Gently dropping her head to rest on Fitz’s shoulder, she murmured in agreement, “We’ll show him.”

--

“Where d’you want this one?” Daisy asked with a low grunt, hefting a cardboard box into her arms.

Jemma glanced up from her clipboard, frowning in disapproval. “Didn’t you check the label first? Daisy, Fitz and I spent every night for a week sorting the donations and labeling those boxes.”

With an overly dramatic sigh, Daisy craned her neck to check the side of the box, reading out loud, “‘House ware’.”

“Alright, good, the house ware section is over there.” Jemma pointed across the moderately-sized front lawn of the school to the proper table.

Barely a moment after Daisy had left to drop the box off, Mack stepped up to her, a pile of posters beneath his arm. “I’ve got that last batch of signs. Want me to go put ‘em up?”  

Jemma dropped her gaze to the posters tucked against his side, a little smile tugging at her lips as she saw the brightly painted letters spelling out ‘yard sale’ and the copious amount of glitter glue. “I’m sure art class was a blast this week.”

Mack chuckled in amusement as he nodded. “Oh yeah. The kids love when I tell them I’m only grading on creativity. May, however? Not so much. Do me a favor and keep it between us?”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Jemma assured him with a faux-serious nod and a salute. “Go ahead and hang them up, but try to be quick; it’ll be ten before we know it.”

“You got it, Simmons,” Mack replied with an understanding smile, then he headed off in the direction of the street.

In the short amount of time that it took him to staple the first sign onto a telephone pole, someone had come up beside him, and a little grin appeared on his face as he heard, “At this rate, you won’t be finished until sundown, Turtle Man.”

Chuckling to himself, Mack dropped his gaze from the poster to Elena, standing just to his right with her arms crossed over her chest and a smirk playing on her lips. “You always call me that, but you never give a straight answer on why.”

If possible, Elena’s smirk seemed to become even more mischievous as she playfully hummed and tipped her head back and forth in consideration. “Oh? Is it not obvious?”

“Not really,” Mack shot back, even though he was pretty sure where the teasing nickname had come from. Elena was known for being the fastest at just about anything she put her mind to – she was always the first to send in grades, the first at the coffee pot in the morning, and when she’d been challenged to a lighthearted battle of history trivia by Trip, she’d absolutely dominated her fellow social studies teacher by beating him to answering each and every question. To Elena, everyone was a turtle; he was just the unfortunate victim of the nickname, surely in retaliation for the one that he’d stuck her with some time ago. “Yo-Yo,” he tacked on, just to see her grimace.

Of course, he could tell that by now, her irritation with the name was all for show and if she was annoyed by anything, it was how much it had grown on her. “Well, there is always tomorrow,” Elena told him breezily, the glint in her eyes telling him that the day when she explained ‘Turtle Man’ was most likely never coming. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the front lawn of the school, where the others were still emptying the boxes that Jemma and Fitz had meticulously sorted. “Alright, give them to me,” she said suddenly, gesturing impatiently toward the posters held securely under his arm.

“What?” he asked, taken aback by the demand.

“It will go much faster if I do it,” she explained as though it was obvious, waving a spare stapler that he hadn’t noticed she’d been holding. Then, without waiting for a response, she swiped the posters from beneath his arm and wordlessly took off in the direction of the next telephone pole.

For a long moment, Mack was left staring after her in stunned disbelief. Then, he chuckled to himself, shaking his head, and headed back to help the others with the finishing touches on setting up.

He’d been carrying a particularly heavy box toward the ‘books’ table when he quite abruptly found himself stumbling, nearly losing his footing completely. “What the…”

“Oi! Watch where you’re going!”

Rolling his eyes heavenward, Mack prayed for patience before turning to face Hunter, sitting casually up against one of the tables, one hand buried in a bag of potato chips. “What are you doing, man?” he asked in exasperation.

“Hiding from Simmons, obviously,” Hunter replied, shaking his head as though Mack was the one not making sense. “If I get barked at for standing around one more time, I’m gonna snap that damn clipboard of hers in half. Who the hell put her in charge, anyway?”

“She volunteered,” Mack reminded him, “which both Coulson and May approved. I think if you should be hiding from anyone, it’s May, and believe me, she will find you.”

Hunter made a face at that, throwing a slightly worried glance around the edge of the table. “She’s not still pissed about my ‘how to spot a hell-beast’ lesson, is she? That was ages ago, and Coulson hired me on full-time anyway!”

Mack heaved a put-upon sigh, shifting to hold the box with one arm as he reached up with his free hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. It had only been the previous year that Coulson had finally offered the infamous substitute teacher Lance Hunter the position of full-time home ec-slash-health teacher when Lincoln had left. Personally, Mack sometimes wondered what their boss had been thinking, but rumor had it that he’d been impressed by the “perfect” mushroom soup that Hunter had taught Joey’s gym class to make once.

“Look,” he finally said, ignoring Hunter’s obvious worry about May, “if Bobbi finds out you skipped out on helping today, you won’t have to worry about Simmons or May.”

Hunter grimaced, but ultimately got to his feet. “Bloody hell-beast,” he grumbled under his breath as he headed toward where Jemma was directing the other teachers, “those kids are gonna thank me for that lesson someday, gonna save them a world of trouble, it is.”

Pointedly pretending that he hadn’t heard Hunter’s mutterings, Mack continued on toward the book table, surprised to find that Elena was perched on the edge of it. Though her attention was on a thick old tome with yellowing pages, there was a smirk playing on her lips. At his approach, she flipped the book shut and set it aside, leaning back on her hands as she directed her growing smirk up at him.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Mack cut in before she could start, grinning as he set his box down, “You beat me here, I’m so slow; I know exactly what you’re thinking, you don’t need to say a word.”

“Perhaps not exactly,” Elena replied playfully. She didn’t elaborate any further, and instead set to helping him empty the box and organize the final batch of books.

They were just finishing up when people started to arrive, and time began to pass quickly from there.

By that evening, when the sky was just beginning to darken, Mack was quite unsurprised to hear a teasing call of, “Oh, Turtle Man?”

Turning from where he’d been folding up a now-empty table, Mack found Elena standing next to an older woman, a cardboard box on the table behind them. Chuckling under his breath, Mack slid his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans and ambled over, asking curiously, “What is it, Yo-Yo?” as if he had no idea, as if she hadn’t been doing this all day.

“Loretta here needs a hand getting this box to her car,” Elena explained, reaching back to tap a hand against the box.

“Sure thing,” Mack agreed easily, and both women stepped back as he hefted the relatively heavy box into his arms. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Elena making absolutely no effort to hide the way she watched his biceps flex, a pleased little ‘hmm’ coming from her.

Pressing his lips together to hide his amused grin, Mack allowed the woman, Loretta, to lead him to her car. She thanked him, and embarrassed the hell out of him when she told him to “tell his girlfriend” thank you as well, but he didn’t bother to correct her.

When he’d returned to the middle of the front lawn, where Jemma was directing the clean-up procedure, he commented to her, “Seems like things went well today.”

“As well as they could, yes,” Jemma replied with a tired sigh, the whole situation they’d found themselves in seeming to weigh heavily upon her – much like it did with them all.

“Thanks to you, ‘course,” Fitz put in as he walked up to them, smiling warmly as he gently elbowed her in the ribs until a tiny smile tugged at her lips. “We’ll get it all sorted, don’t you worry.”

When Jemma released another soft sigh as her only response, Mack couldn’t help but add, “Fitz is right. It’s all gonna work out in the end, Simmons. You’ll see.”

“Let’s hope so,” Jemma murmured.

[glovenose82-blog]

Better Call Saul Rediscovers The Lost Art Of Letter Writing

In what appears to be early morning light, Jimmy -- in his good old University of American Samoa sweatshirt, with a hoodie over it -- reaches into the trunk of a car and pulls out a couple of gym bags, saying he thinks he has everything, but that if he forgot something, he'll "figure it out on the way." Kim, also dressed for leisure, stands next to the car, fiddling with her keys and not quite meeting Jimmy's eye as she checks, "You're back on Thursday." "Thursday, yeah," Jimmy confirms, seeming surprised and relieved that she's addressing him at all. "Unless we break down in Amarillo," he adds with a smile she does not return, instead making a Kimface and nodding. When he comes around to where she's standing, she quickly moves to close the trunk, but Jimmy proceeds nonetheless: "Kim, I want you to know, I don't take this for granted. It means a lot." Clearly, the answer Jimmy's hoping for -- if not expecting -- is something along the lines of "Don't mention it" or "You'd do the same for me" or "It's a small thing to ask of someone who loves you"...

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...but Kim just nods again, icy, and says, "I'll see you Thursday," not seeming to look forward to it very much. Jimmy sets his jaw and -- seeing that he's not going to be sent on this journey through Amarillo with so much as a handshake, never mind a kiss goodbye -- leaves her to whatever responsible adult activity she might get up to while he's not around. I'm barely either of those things so I can only guess what that might be. ...Oil change???

Kim has dropped Jimmy at the Albuquerque Transit Center, and when we see him next, he's on a bus bound for Houston, sitting in a window seat. Next to him, one of his gym bags is open and positively bristling with the spoils of Kim's "Something Stupid" shopping spree. I would have 100% understood had its purpose been to bring some artificial sense of order to her own messy life -- Ask Me About My Stack Of Coil-Bound Sketchbooks And Boxes Of Reserve Uniball Vision Pens -- but no: what Kim has in mind is evidently going to require Jimmy to write a LOT of personal correspondence. He writes postcards. He writes cards. He writes in different pens and pencils. He arranges his fingers around his various writing implements in awkward positions to disguise his handwriting. He licks envelope after envelope. He flexes his hand to try to relieve cramps. When the bus picks up more passengers at some unidentified southwest outpost, an older guy stops at Jimmy's aisle and asks if he may take the seat on which Jimmy has set up his mobile office; Jimmy says sure, and starts to gather up his stuff, but warns, "I had a pile of cheese chili fries back at Stuckey's -- with onions on top. The last guy who sat here didn't last five miles but, you know, you're welcome to it." Jimmy's fellow passenger decides to move on and minimize his methane exposure, though regardless of which seat he ends up in, he is still on a mobile interstate fart canister. We eventually see that Jimmy has switched to the opposite side of the bus for the Shreveport-bound leg, the lone passenger still awake after dark, licking envelopes under the faint light above his seat. He gulps down a 5-Hour Energy. And when a new day dawns, we see that Jimmy is just one of many bus passengers scratching away at their correspondence. What a wild coincidence that Jimmy's ended up on a conveyance with so many other practitioners of this old-fashioned pastime!!! Jynetta, a teen in messy twin buns and a butterfly necklace, comes up the aisle to hand Jimmy a pile of note cards, out of their envelopes for him to review; he compliments her choice to put hearts over all her "i"s, and pays her a sawbuck for the ten cards she wrote, offering her the chance to do some postcards for 50 cents apiece, which she cheerfully accepts. OHHHHH, it's NOT a coincidence AT ALL. Bubba pops up from behind Jimmy with a smaller stack and receives with equanimity Jimmy's fearless feedback about coming across too angry: "Make it that you're-- You're sad that you even have to write the letter. 'I couldn't believe people could be so heartless until I heard about you' -- 'kay?" Bubba's with it, taking both a Lincoln for the five notes he wrote, and another batch of blanks. Jimmy then taps Chastity, a young woman across the aisle; unfortunately, she ignored Jimmy's direction to be respectful and doesn't get paid for a card filled with swears, which he regretfully tears up in front of her. An editor's job is tough, you guys.

Finally, Jimmy disembarks the bus at his final destination and walks into the post office in Coushatta, Louisiana, 71019. He's back out less than a minute later, sitting on a bench outside, ignoring the sweet pooch who wants to be his friend, and waiting for whatever's next -- which, for us, is the opening credits, in which a tie changes from garish lavenders to garish blues while being inspected by a passing tarantula. Even the tarantula doesn't want it.

Over to El Michoacano. Having apparently exhausted his sick days, Nacho's back at work -- and, in fact, is sitting in for Hector and watching over Domingo's shoulder as he takes dealer payments. Domingo also has to take dealer excuses: this dude, Blingy, casually says he's a little short due to a "dumbass festival over at the fairground -- Indian shit," which was lousy with rent-a-cops: "We're going to make it right next time." "You're goddamn right you are," says Domingo, eyes hard. "Fo' sho'!" chirps Blingy. "Next week." Domingo snaps the elastic band around the bills, dismissing Blingy, but Nacho would still like a word, and calls Blingy back when he's halfway to the door. In a show of shocking impertinence, Blingy lightly tells Nacho he has to go, but Nacho repeats the non-request, and Blingy comes over to the side of the table, asking what's up. Nacho just stares at him for a while and then blinks pointedly, at which Blingy leans down...whereupon Nacho yanks the giant hoop earring out of his right ear -- doing him a favour, honestly, because while I gather, with such a name, he feels he has a reputation to live up to, that shit is gaudy as hell. Domingo steals a tiny peek behind him as Blingy groans as quietly as he can, and Nacho calmly pulls out a wad of napkins; when Nacho moves the dispenser over to him, Blingy respectfully pulls a bunch to clean up the mess he rudely made spilling all his blood on Nacho's table. "What you owe, you owe with interest," murmurs Nacho. Blingy nods and scurries out. Domingo's clearly fucked up about this, but since he doesn't want any of his body jewellery removed so abruptly, he manages to kiss a little ass anyway, turning around to tell Nacho, "You had to do that, man! Guy's not going to learn otherwise." "Mmhmm," Nacho agrees. "So why didn't you do it." Domingo, looking terrified, gives this performance review one quick nod and, fortunately, has another dealer coming in to distract him.

After a long day of intimidating human parasites, Nacho drives his hot rod home -- and WHAT a home! My man lives in a very stylish Brutalist bungalow. Before he enters, we see who's waiting for him: a blonde, lying on a love seat and scratching at a glass pipe; and a brunette, lounging on an adjacent couch, picking her big toenail with one hand and flipping through channels with the other. She's just landed on a home shopping channel when Nacho opens the door and they both sit up to greet him, which is when we see the enormous piece of automotive pop art over the brunette's head.

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I am not so much with the art and thought it could possibly be a real Roy Lichtenstein but, uh, no, it is clip art from Shutterstock. Anyway, both these women seem to be Nacho's girlfriend based on their greetings -- one calls him "babe" and is surprised he's home so early; the other offers to make him dinner -- but he has nothing to say to either of them, instead tossing them each a little sachet of drugs, to grateful grins. The brunette asks if he's going to smoke with them, but he doesn't answer that either, and we watch through the wall of glass as he goes through the house to his bedroom, past several other large-scale paintings. I don't recognize them and there isn't exactly a Shazam for art, so I can't tell you if these are actually significant pieces, but I think the point is that Nacho has chosen to spend his money on gracious living...and on red leather furniture for his drug-enthusiast lady friends. In the bedroom, Nacho locks the door, takes off his jacket, and sets his gun and an envelope of cash on his nightstand; when he strips off his shirt and his tank top rides up, we see the gunshot wound on his side has healed up nicely. Then, just to give you an idea of the kind of living well that should, on its own, be Nacho's best revenge, he crosses through his walk-in closet to ANOTHER CLOSET containing built-in shelves he is NOT EVEN USING; and a safe, which he opens. He's putting his things away when he knocks a clear plastic envelope onto the floor, and we see it contains a phony Manitoba driver's license with his picture on it. (I knew Michael Mando was Canadian so I thought this might be a cute nod to his birthplace, but no, he was born in Quebec City.) Pensively, Nacho picks up the sleeve and pulls out both "his" own ID and one behind it, for his dad, before clenching his jaw, flaring his nostrils, and locking them away again. I'll say this for making Manitoba part of your fake backstory: no one's going to fact-check the details you come up with because nooooooobody cares.

Then we're with Ziegler's crew as they get their promised R&R at, what else, a strip club. There, Kai (who else) is the first we see enjoying the attentions of one of its curvaceous performers. While the ladies work, Ziegler is sitting at a dark bar away from the action, looking very Lutheran, or possibly just bored; Mike stands with his back to some glass bricks, surveying the scene; apparently satisfied that the crew guys aren't embarrassing themselves or him, he comes over to Ziegler and exchanges some words we can't hear over the pounding music. Ziegler gets up, and after Mike stops at a bouncer and briefly confers with him as well, Mike leads the way to the door...

...and when we see them next, Mike and Ziegler have repaired to a much quieter pub and are chatting over beers. Ziegler volunteers that his father was also an engineer: "Learned the work by doing the work. Hands like knots of a tree." Mike smiles fondly. Ziegler points to something behind the bar and tells Mike his father built it. Surprised, Mike frowns: "The Sydney Opera House." "Those concrete arches -- impossible in 1957. Six years it took to solve the problem. Six. And years more to pour correctly. To that, my father gave ten years of life." The bartender comes by to take an order from a thirtysomething mop-haired dude, whose name we'll soon learn is Terry. The bartender remembers that his first drink was a stout and asks if he wants another one, but Terry says he wants to try the "hee fee wee sin." Ziegler can't stop himself from correcting Terry's pronunciation of "Hefeweizen" (more like "HAY-feh-VIE-zen," in case you don't want to be schooled by a real-ass German the next time you try to order one), and Terry amiably apologizes for mangling it, asking Ziegler to repeat it.

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Mike doesn't look thrilled that Ziegler's engaging in this potentially memorable exchange, but also can't exactly put a stop to it without making it even more memorable than it already could be for Terry, and when Ziegler pays for Terry's beer and Terry goes on his way, Mike evidently decides to let it go without comment, and Ziegler returns to the subject they were discussing before Terry interrupted: "The Opera. It's for the ages. For my father, it was his achievement: the creation that will endure." Ziegler taps the glass with his nails to put a button on the conversation and asks Mike what his "papa" did. Mike snorts, "My dad? Ohhhh, left behind a cold water flat and a stack of bills, that's about all." "Not true!" gasps Ziegler. "He also left behind you, Michael! You are his legacy." This old-man friendship is extremely endearing, which therefore also makes it extremely worrisome for me personally given the many ways it could yet go wrong. For now: Mike laughs ruefully at Ziegler's sentimental framing of the elder Ehrmantraut's legacy before asking whether Ziegler ever thought about having kids. Ziegler looks down at his hands: "Once, maybe. My Margarethe, she's enough for me. She's my heart. This is the longest I've ever been away from her. Twenty-six years, never this long away from home." "To home," says Mike, tilting his glass at Ziegler's for a clink of agreement. They both sip, and before Ziegler can ask about MIKE's fatherhood, if he was going to, the bouncer from the strip club is at the door calling for Mike, who checks to make sure Ziegler will be okay at the chill bar without him before going to investigate...

...and finding out that of course Kai could not be trusted to stay out of trouble, has been escorted outside for touching a performer during a private dance, and is belligerently trying to argue that they can't kick him out because he paid for the dance AND to stagger past the bouncers restraining him to get back inside. The lead bouncer threatens to call the cops, at which Mike steps out of the shadows, telling the bouncer he doesn't need to do that, already getting his cash out. The bouncer, reasonably, wants to know who Mike is; Mike calmly tells him, "I'm the guy who's telling you this one's had too much and I'm here to get him out of your hair." The lead bouncer asks about Kai's buddies, and after Mike gets him to admit that they're behaving themselves, he hands over a couple of bills to secure their right to continue hanging out while Mike takes "this idiot" home. Kai then starts arguing with Mike, because he may be sexy but he is not very wise. "You are done," Mike tells him firmly. Kai sort of wavers like he's considering lunging at Mike, but when Mike urges him to try it, Kai summons the last of his wits and decides against it. After one of the secondary bouncers has dragged Kai off toward Mike's car, Mike deeply sighs, apologizes to the lead bouncer, and asks after the dancer; the lead bouncer says she's fine. Mike peels off some more cash "for her trouble": "All good?" The lead bouncer says, "We're cool." HE will never be as cool as Mike, but I don't blame him for trying to put them in the same category.

At the chill bar, Ziegler evidently got bored and is now sitting with Terry and his buddy, sketching schematics on the back of a coaster as he explains -- minus salient details, naturally -- the engineering challenges inherent in his current project. When Mike returns to retrieve Ziegler, he can't quite believe the loose-lipped spectacle he became in Mike's absence, but keeps cool by merely putting a hand on Ziegler's shoulder, almost imperceptibly pocketing the coaster, and telling him, "Time to go." Ziegler -- toasty from the beer, and enjoying having an audience to lecture avuncularly -- wants Mike to join them. Mike pointedly replies, "Your wife's calling?," and Ziegler is too drunk to get it at first, marveling, "My WIFE???" "...Yeah," says Mike. Ziegler locks in then and gets up, thanking his new young friends for their "hospitility."

Outside, Mike backs out of his parking space while Ziegler and Kai sit silently, careful not to do anything to make Dad more mad at them.

As Stereolab's extremely apropos "Tempter" plays on her headphones ("Midway between happiness and sadness boiling but not overflowing / fails to only make a better come back, more powerful and poignant and falls again / Destructive lust for life erected, on the verge pricked up like a picket / fearing to respond to the tempting but malevolent call of the other side"), Kim works intensely on Huell's file; the music's up so high that she doesn't hear Jimmy until he's leaning in to her face to get her attention. When she pulls off her headphones, he tells her he's going to the nail salon to "finish setting up"; she tells him that's a good idea and that she'll see him later, trying to forestall further conversation by putting her headphones back on immediately. Jimmy makes it almost to the door before turning back to see if she wants him to bring dinner home, but Kim is pretty clearly making a point to need as little as possible from him right now, saying she'll just "scrounge" but that he should do what he wants. He hesitantly lets her dismiss him.

At the shop, Mrs. Nguyen is on her way out for the night when she hears Jimmy sighing in his office and goes in to see what's up. Jimmy's surrounded by dozens of phones, all plugged into chargers, as he says he has to be there a bit longer but that he'll lock up when he leaves, if that's okay. "Wife mad at you?" she guesses. "She's not my wife," says Jimmy hoarsely, halfway between a haughty chuckle and a sob, but then admits, "I don't know." "Yeah, she's mad at you," says Mrs. Nguyen knowingly. She sidles back out into the hall and returns with a bottle of vodka, pouring him a generous belt: "Go on." Jimmy has just taken a bracing sip when Mrs. Nguyen delivers her happy not-wife, happy life advice: "You take her to dinner. Nice place, with a waiter. Cloth napkin. You bring flowers. You say 'sorry.' Then, say 'sorry' again. Whatever she says, you say 'sorry.'" It's a sexist cliché, but like...it also probably works about 90% of the time. Straight men should be more sorry in general, in my opinion, and white men? PLEASE. "I think we might be past that," murmurs Jimmy. Mrs. Nguyen doesn't bother telling him to say "sorry" even more, instead saying, "I'll leave the bottle." I feel like you can either be sorry or drunk, so this might be a high-level sabotage on Mrs. Nguyen's part. When she's gone, Jimmy carefully sticks a label on a phone and sets it on his desk. How many dang phones does one disbarred lawyer need?!

The next day, Kim is ponytailed for battle as she stalks through the courthouse halls, trailed by three young associates, and heads straight to Suzanne's office. Opening the door just a little, Kim pokes her head in to see if Suzanne's ready for her, since she's early; Suzanne checks her watch and waves her in, which is when Kim throws the door open and reveals her whole squad: Gary, Stef, and Pat. After a sidelong glare at Kim, Suzanne rises from her seat to shake everyone's hands, and then plops down to find out what form of baloney Kim's about to serve her. First, Kim responds to Suzanne's proffer: time served, three to six months' probation, and a plea to simple battery -- a misdemeanor, as Suzanne notes, before recapping that Kim's trying to go from eighteen months of jail time for Huell to zero: "Sorry, I can't do that." Kim accepts that, and turns to Gary for Act II: a motion for continuance, since they need more time to prepare their defense. The officer didn't canvass for additional witnesses, but businesses around the site of the incident have security cameras, and Huell's legal team will need to subpoena the tapes. Instead of addressing Gary, Suzanne rudely turns to Kim to ask if she doesn't think that's "a little much." Kim coolly says they doubt a judge will. Stef takes over to say they just want the most information they can get -- to wit, they're filing a motion for the cop's personnel file. "Good luck with that," sniffs Suzanne, once again to Kim...

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...who is not rattled by Suzanne's attitude, like, at all. Pat adds that if the cop has a history of run-ins with anyone Huell ever knew, basically, they want to know. "You're thinking of pursuing civil litigation," Suzanne snits at Kim. "We are in conversation with the ACLU, assessing the possibility that Mr. Babineaux's civil rights may have been violated."

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Suzanne looks like she almost respects it as she curtly says, "Okay. Is that all?" Kim gives her a brief Kimface before saying, with some portent, "For now." Suzanne gathers up all the motions, saying she'll deal with these issues and then set a trial date. And since she feels that's all they have to talk about, Kim and her crew pack up and prepare to leave -- but, of course, Suzanne would like a private word with Kim first. "You're throwing three $400-an-hour associates at a pro bono case?" "I never said this was pro bono," says Kim. Suzanne is completely gobsmacked and literally throws up her hands as she asks Kim what the plan is, here: "Because shock and awe isn't going to cut it. Bring every fancy associate you got, file all the motions you want, and at the end of all this, your client is still going away." "Okay," says Kim serenely. "I guess we'll see." Kim strides out with her usual perfect posture, betraying nothing...right up until she gets to the outer door of Suzanne's office; as she crosses the camera, we barely hear her take one slightly unsteady breath. Look, USPS. You've let us ALL down at one point or another in our lives. Do not fuck over Kim right now.

"Morning" "dawns" for Ziegler and his crew, who stagger through the warehouse to the truck seeming a bit more sluggish than usual but, generally, in good spirits. Ziegler's bringing up the rear as Mike stands between him and the truck for A Bit Of A Chat, which Ziegler doesn't seem to see coming, cheerfully telling Mike that "everyone seems much improved." Mike just stands there regarding Ziegler, who finally asks whether something's wrong. Respectfully waiting until the last of Ziegler's guys has boarded the truck, Mike reaches into his pocket and hands Ziegler the coaster he'd sketched on the night before. "This?" sputters Ziegler. "Don't be concerned. I said nothing! Men at a bar, talking to make talk, and look -- no details, no scale at all. Could be a skyscraper. Could be box for shoes." Not sure how many shoe boxes need load-bearing walls, but then I never bought any by McQueen. Ziegler smiles, endearingly but also naïvely, and when Mike just stands there continuing to gaze at him, Ziegler's face falls a little and he insists, "I said nothing about the construction that would not be true for thousands of others. By now they have forgotten me entirely." "They forgot," Mike repeats. "The German national in the middle of Albuquerque, talking about pouring hundreds of tons of concrete in a secret underground location." Well, sure, anything sounds bad if you describe it accurately. Ziegler, chastened, admits, "Yeah, you're right." He apologizes, saying he had too much to drink and "may have said" more than he should have. Mike takes a step into Ziegler's personal space to make his point emphatically and clearly: "The man we're working for is very serious. Think about the precautions we take to keep everything that goes on here quiet. Think about how much money you're making. Think about what happens if something goes wrong. Do you understand what I am saying to you." Ziegler gives Mike a long look and gravely replies, "I do understand. And I'm sorry to cause any problem." Instead of adding, "Please don't tell the man I'm working for that he should kill me," Ziegler holds up the coaster and promises, "You have my word, nothing like this will happen again." Keeping his eyes locked on Ziegler's, Mike snatches the coaster away and puts it back in his pocket, taking a long beat before telling Ziegler, "Okay. Let's get you to work." They might need to grab Ziegler some coveralls that haven't been very recently pissed in first.

Judge Munsinger's already at a 10 when he yanks open the door to his chambers and demands of Suzanne, standing there with Kim, "Are you prosecuting Santa Claus?" Suzanne has no idea what he's talking about, and follows him inside as he yelps, "It looks like Miracle On 34th Street in here." Indeed, his desk is covered with four plastic bags and two USPS bins filled with multi-coloured envelopes -- and, per Munsinger, this is just today's haul: "All addressed to me, all from some backwater in Louisiana?!" He pulls one from the top of the pile: "'Get your hands off our hero,' they say. 'Mercy for Huell Babineaux,' they say. What, like I'm sending him to the electric chair?" He asks whether Kim "started this particular ball rolling"; aghast, she says she certainly did not instruct residents of Coushatta, Louisiana to start writing letters to him. Technically correct, the best kind of correct! "That being said," Kim adds, "it's clear Mr. Babineaux has touched the lives of many people in his hometown." Since she is not an idiot, Suzanne can smell the bullshit, and furiously works her jaw as Kim goes on to say she knows that Coushattans are planning to send a contingent "to show their support during the trial." "You're talking about a bunch of yahoos packing my court?!" sputters Munsinger. Suzanne tries to suggest that they can just ignore all this and proceed with whatever trial strategy she had before she found out about the mail bombs, to which Kim says Suzanne shouldn't be surprised by the outpouring given that she knows Huell's history as well as she does. Munsinger announces that he doesn't want to get one more letter from "some swamp-dwelling do-gooder." (Jealous of wetlands much, New Mexico?) Suzanne thanks the judge for bringing the matter to her attention, and asks if she may take some of the mail. Munsinger presses a bag on her in addition to the bin she already had her eye on, and sends counsel off with a final warning: "I have looked at this case. It does not merit a circus. Now, you two WORK IT OUT." Kim primly says they've tried. "Try. Again," orders Munsinger.

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Suzanne stares daggers at Kim, and though we don't see Kim's face in reaction, we may reasonably assume she DGAF.

Then we're in Suzanne's outer office as she starts yelling instructions to everyone around; she basically wants every available piece of data on Huell that exists in police and court records: "I want to figure out why a pickpocket has people this overheated." She opens a card on the top of the file and reads: "'Huell Babineaux is wrongfully accused. He's a good man. He'd never do nothing like the things you say he's done. He's a kind man and a good friend to everyone.' Jesus, they do make him sound like Santa Claus." One of her office underlings, Ben, hands her a card with a phone number on it, which she dials on speakerphone. It goes through to the voicemail of a rumbly Cajun gentleman who ends with "Have a blessed day," and she leaves a brief message. Various hands continue opening mail, and when Suzanne comes up with another phone number, she dials it and gets through to an Eloise Lockhard, who says everyone in Coushatta knows Huell, a pillar of Eloise's church. Suzanne asks which church that is, and when Eloise says it's Free Will Baptist on Bogan Lane, Ben quickly Googles, and as Suzanne's asking whether there's a particular reason Huell is so beloved by the congregation, Ben brings his laptop over to show her the church's homepage, which has been taken over by a fundraising call to action on Huell's behalf. When Eloise asks Suzanne to repeat who she is...

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...we see that Jimmy's assembled his whole film crew for this project, and that Make-Up Girl is posing as Eloise, asking Suzanne to explain exactly what her role is in Huell's trial. Suzanne reluctantly admits that she's prosecuting him. "You're the one persecuting our Huell?" gasps "Eloise." "How could you? To go after someone so sweet and kind, with all those lies? Well, I'd tell you what I really think of you--" Cut to Jimmy, who directs her by silently folding his hands in prayer. "Eloise" resumes: "But Jesus is listening, so I'll just say, SHAME ON YOU!" She hangs up before Suzanne can defend herself, which gives Jimmy a chance to offer some feedback, calling Make-Up Girl's performance "not too shabby!" "I've been taking improv classes," she shyly replies. Oh, Make-Up Girl. If it's future income you have in mind, you'd be better off at beauty school.

Back at the office, Suzanne still has the church's homepage up, and decides to try to call its pastor, Blaise Hansford. This time Jimmy grabs the phone that's ringing and realizes it's the church; frantically, he motions for Sound Guy to cue up a CD labeled "Organ Music" before he picks up. Now, what happens next really cannot be properly conveyed in print, but both Jimmy and Bob Odenkirk are clearly enjoying the chance to bust out their Cajun accent in the service of bamboozling a prosecutor. Jimmy does some business with the organ music, claiming he's going to step out in the vestibule, and settles in for a nice chat. Suzanne tries again not to be too specific about her role in Huell's proceeding as she says she wants to know more about him. Jimmy says Huell is a lovely person, inside and out, and that while he might say the same about any of his parishioners, Huell is special, with "a heart as big as Lake Ponchartrain." Camera Guy shakes his head at this egregiously corny turn of phrase and indicates the whiteboard behind him, where Jimmy's high-level direction includes "Keep It Simple, Stupid," but Jimmy, of course, already knows all the rules well enough to break them and waves him off. Suzanne asks what Huell did to earn so much devotion from his brothers and sisters at Free Will Baptist, and "Pastor Hansford" takes the long way to tell her that Huell saved a bunch of elderly parishioners when a fire broke out during their Bible study by physically carrying each of them out of the building. When Suzanne asks what happened to the church, "Pastor Hansford" assures her that it's fine, and motions to Camera Guy, who does something on his laptop; Suzanne then hears a notification ding and turns to see the counter on Huell's fundraiser as more donations are added to the total. "Pastor Hansford" wraps it up: "Now, y'all sound like a real nice lady, and I know you're only doing your job, but I want you to understand something: I think you got the wrong end of the stick, here! Huell Babineaux is very important to us! Now, he-- He-- He would never hurt a police officer! I believe it's just a misunderstanding, and I-- I believe he might've been helping his friend, and that's the Huell that I know." "Pastor Blaise" then invents a distraction, telling Clarence the organist to put some robes away because they're for Communion...

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...which is, I guess, when Sound Guy realizes Jimmy hasn't spent enough time in services to learn what various churchy words mean. Suzanne and "Pastor Hansford" are about to end the call when he asks whether there's a date for Huell's trial. She says there isn't, so he asks her to contact him when there is: "We got a couple of charter buses. Gonna bring the whole congregation up to y'all in Albuquerque." Suzanne wilts in resignation. Jimmy hangs up. The crew is in awe. Suzanne realizes she's fucked.

Jimmy then takes a moment to regard the desk full of silent phones. "Is it over?" asks Make-Up Girl. Jimmy tells them he's going to take the church phone with him in case Suzanne calls back. If any others ring, they should pick up every third caller, and talk no longer than thirty seconds per call. Camera Guy tries to weasel out of staying, but Jimmy, already literally half out the door, says they're paid for the day, so they'll stay until he tells them to go.

Jimmy, peering through the glass in the door, finds Kim in a courtroom, conferring with opposing counsel. We can only see her from the back, but Suzanne's body language -- hands on hips; chest in high dudgeon -- is tense and angry, whereas Kim leans back casually against the judge's bench, arms spread wide. Suzanne then tents her fingers on her table and hangs her head in defeat.

Jimmy's down the hall tapping his sneaker when Kim emerges from the courtroom and looks both ways before spotting him. Without speaking, she strides purposefully past the bench he's sitting on and into the stairwell, Jimmy following close behind. When they're alone and Kim's basically slammed the door, Jimmy seems to think things must have taken a turn after he stopped watching and anxiously asks, "Well?"

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In response, Kim takes a breath, then chucks her briefcase onto the floor, shoves Jimmy against the wall, and kisses him voraciously. Let this be a lesson to us all: doing crimes makes you sexy.

Then the camera's panning up slowly from the foot of Kim and Jimmy's bed as we hear her suggest, "Do it one more time?" "Are you sure you can take it?" Jimmy flirts back. "I can if you can," she replies. "All right, you asked for it," Jimmy sing-songs...and then breaks into his Pastor Hansford character: "Hello dere! Look in your heart, chère, and find forgiveness! Let us take you on a trip down Naaaaaawlins way, where dey put a little extra roux in de gumbo!" Kim giggles that it's like she's in the bayou, to which "Pastor Hansford" replies that he's got crawdads in his pants. Kim cracks up, and then settles with her chin on Jimmy's chest, telling him the phones were genius. Jimmy says the phones were "a touch": "This was all you, start to finish. Bank shot off the judge. Four months probation, time served, is like watching Roy Hobbs smash out stadium lights." Kim modestly says that Suzanne overplayed her hand, then looks over Jimmy's shoulder at the clock radio and realizes she has to start getting ready for work. First, though, she asks what he's up to today; he tells her he's going to check out another office by the courthouse. Kim says she thought he'd found one, but he evasively says it was too big for him. Jimmy asks if she'll be working late, and she says she will, since she has work to catch up on post-Huell. Kim then decides she's dawdled enough and gets out of bed, turning on the shower. Jimmy remains in bed, looking thoughtfully at the space Kim's left next to him.

I really wish we'd gone from this scene back to the nail salon, Jimmy's camera crew having slept there after he forgot to release them because he was too busy fuckin', but no: we're in a conference room at Kim's office. Paige is droning on about boring bank shit while the camera stays on Kim and the quiet smile that plays across her lips as, obviously, she daydreams about the fun she had keeping Huell out of jail. When Paige gets to the end of her monologue, Kim blandly offers, "Sounds good," before resuming paying actual attention, saying they should talk about the Wyoming branch Mesa Verde wants to open in six months. Kevin passive-aggressively clears his throat, forcing Kim to ask if he has something else he'd like to discuss. He claims not to want to slow things down, particularly not with something he knows Paige doesn't want him to raise. Paige and Kim exchange a brief look before Kim's like, spit it out, so Kevin says that the Tucumcari branch is doing great, and it's probably because the design of the building is so distinctive, so even though Paige has already said it's impossible, wouldn't it be great if they could do something like that with the Lubbock branch? "I reminded Kevin that Tucumcari has a much larger footprint than the current Lubbock design, and that design is the one we've been hanging our estimates on," says Paige tightly, clearly afraid Kim is going to go back to her old ways of trying to impress Kevin by...working herself nearly to death. Kevin, of course, is hoping the opposite, and presses his point despite Paige's concerns. But no longer is Kim getting her adrenaline fix by doing anything in the financial sector, so she barely pauses before telling Kevin she's sorry, but that she agrees with Paige that starting over now would put them behind schedule. Kevin accepts Kim's judgment and admits that Paige was right this time. On to Wyoming! Kim is SUPER-PSYCHED jk she is about to slip into a coma.

Back in her office, Kim reaches into the top drawer of her desk, produces the souvenir Zafiro Añejo bottle topper, and contemplates it. Is she so pragmatic? Or would she rather do more sexy crimes???

Then we're under the laundry, where Mike is giving Gus a progress report, starting with the accident that happened in "Something Stupid" and how long it's going to delay the project -- less than a week, it sounds like. However, there's a gigantic rock where the elevator shaft is supposed to go, which will require blasting, adding another week on top of that. To summarize: "Best estimate, we're a little past the halfway point, way behind schedule. But the work is solid." Gus stares for a while, then asks about Ziegler. Mike takes a loud breath and says, "I gave him the come-to-Jesus. He screwed up, he knows it. Said it won't happen again." "And what do you say?" asks Gus. "I've got eyes on him," Mike replies, before adding the judgment that I am guessing he will be forced to regret and retract by the end of the season: "But yeah, he's good." "Good," Gus nods. ZIEGLER FOR GOD'S SAKE PLEASE DO NOT LET MIKE DOWN.

Then the camera's behind a hole with irregular edges as something drips past on the other side. Presently, Jimmy's squatting down to inspect it and asking, "Is that water?" The bungalow in "Something Stupid" was no great shakes, but now he's in an even less charming space: a long rectangle with grubby tile, fallen drop ceiling panels, and glass walls on two sides, several panes of which seem to have been waiting a while to be replaced. But back to the water damage: the realtor showing the property claims, "The landlord will kick in for small repairs like that," adding, "They already took care of the rodent problem." I'm going to go ahead and say this guy's not counting on closing a deal today? Jimmy, of course, isn't thrilled to hear there ever was a rodent problem, but the realtor shrugs that Jimmy specified "small and near court," both of which requirements this dump satisfies: "And it's in your price range." As he urges Jimmy to "use [his] imagination," Kim appears outside and knocks on the door; Jimmy excuses himself.

AMC

Okay, don't think less of me but I kind of like it from the outside??? Obviously, it could use some cosmetic updates, but the '70s Space Age-iness of it is pleasing to me. Anyway, Kim's leaning against a piece of pressed wood in place of a glass pane and smoking when Jimmy comes out, and asks him, "Is this your new office?" Jimmy, embarrassed, says it's a contender, and asks what she's doing there. "I was driving, saw your Esteem in the parking lot," says Kim. Ah, Jimmy's esteem. Look somewhere dodgy and you're sure to find it! Jimmy removes the cigarette from Kim's mouth to take a drag himself, and asks her what's up. "Nothing," says Kim, surveying the landscape. "Just driving around, thinking about things." Jimmy guesses at what that means, and starts doing a version of what Mrs. Nguyen had recommended: "I know what's on your mind. The thing that we did, I mean, it was nuts. And I dumped it in your lap. Ex parte communication, contempt of court, we're talking about a couple hundred counts of mail fraud -- I could've wrecked you at Schweikart, I could've boned me too. I mean, I'm this close to being reinstated. I mean, come on!" Kim doesn't answer, nodding as she keeps her eyes on the horizon. Jimmy hands her back the cigarette, telling her, "Don't worry. No one's going to know about it. Be like it never happened. And also, I agree, we are totally done with all that. Over and out, no more." Kim blinks, exhales her latest drag, then fixes her eyes on Jimmy's to let him know he guessed wrong, telling him, "Let's do it again."

AMC

Jimmy is shocked, but Kim is steady. That's the last time Jimmy takes Huell's advice about lawyers. Or ladies. Or...lady lawyers.

As Nacho comes in to start his day at El Michoacano, he's surprised to hear loud music playing inside, and shoots a look at Domingo, already seated at his table...

AMC

...and looking like he shat his pants. Nacho takes a long time silently looking from Domingo to the kitchen, where the radio is blasting, before finally heading back there, sliding a hand back to his weapon just in case. The chef is absently singing along to the music, and Nacho stands in the doorway waiting for him to turn around and notice him -- which, soon, he does, greeting him with a huge smile: "You're here! Right on time." (Throughout the conversation, they switch from Spanish to English and back again, without any significance for either choice that I can discern.) The chef finishes preparing a plate for Nacho, promising he's going to love it: "I made this just for you! Never in your life have you tasted something so delicious, it's true. Wait, wait -- you're gonna die." Okay, on the page that looks bad, but other than, you know, where he is, there's no menace to this guy: he just seems really easygoing and friendly. Also, not for nothing, hot. Still, Nacho makes a pissface and declines the proffered plate. The chef leans his face in, takes a big sniff, and, grinning, encourages Nacho, "Smell it! You can't say no, are you crazy?" Nacho doesn't move or speak, so the chef backs off, pleasantly: "Very well. You're not hungry. That's your problem." He sets the plate down, telling Nacho it's a special recipe: "A family secret." Nacho, having come further into the kitchen by now, guesses, "The Salamanca family." The chef excitedly turns around to confirm it: "I am Eduardo, but you can call me Lalo. And you must be Varga, no? They told me you were smart. And look, here you are, and you are." He chuckles as he returns to his pans. Trying to sound unconcerned, Nacho asks what Lalo's doing there. Casually, Lalo replies, "I'm just here to lend a helping hand, you know, make sure the business is running in order. I got a good head for numbers."

AMC

I'd give him a good head for numbers, wait did I type that out loud. "Don't even worry," Lalo assures Nacho. "It's going to be like I'm not even here." With that, Lalo takes his plate out to the floor; as the day's first dealer enters, Lalo calls over his shoulder, "Come on, Varga, let's go!," before settling into the seat right next to Domingo, patting him warmly on the back and, presumably, giving him the delicious dish Nacho declined.

AMC

Maybe Nacho should go to Winnipeg. I guarantee no Salamanca would follow him there, nor would literally anybody else.

Also Available As Part Of The Epic Old-School Recaps Podcast

Source: http://previously.tv/better-call-saul/better-call-saul-rediscovers-the-lost-art-of-letter-writing/

[soupoctave1-blog]

Gruesome Human Candy Teeth +Tutorial For Making Silicon Molds!

Making delicious marzipan human teeth or molars for a quirky Halloween snack is a fun, rewarding project. In today's post I show you how to make your very own silicon mold to cast your own teeth so they are easy to shape. Then we paint and glaze them to look as realistic as possible!

A friend tagged me on some edible teeth on Instagram and ever since then I had them in my mind to make. But shaping teeth can be hard so I online to try and buy a mold. Unfortunately the tooth mold that I purchased was a giant tooth (I get confused easily with measurements it seems) with a smiling face on it and it was entirely unsuitable for my gruesome purposes. The woman at a cake decorating shop suggested that I try my hand at using Pinkysil, a DIY silicon mold making kit which is easy to use.

It's the time of the year when my parents get inundated with a range of weird requests eg. Could I store my voodoo dolls in your freezer? Or in the case this past week I asked my mother, could you ask your dentist for human molars?

My parents no longer flinch or ask questions-it has happened so much over the last 10 years and to my surprise within a couple of days they gave me a bag of sterilised human teeth. They were perfect. I bought the Pinkysil from Barnes in Newtown and the friendly lady at the store went through it with me. I needed to make a 2 parter silicon mold.

I'm not amazing at arts and crafts, in fact I'm pretty bad at them but I watched a lot of videos on how to cast silicon molds before I started it, so much so that I kept playing through how to make molds in my dreams and while working out. I was amazed at how easy it was (and now I have all sorts of plans to make other silicon molds!).

And then of course came my next request of my parents-a pair of pliers or dental equipment!

So tell me Dear Readers, are you good at arts and crafts? Have you ever tried making your own silicon molds? Would you snack on these little candy molars?

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

To make mold

1 set Pinkysil (you'll only need half of the bottles)

6 human molars

Small container to use as a larger mold

Small disposable shot glasses

Large clear disposable cups

Paddle pop sticks/tongue depressors

Vaseline

Small brushes

100g/3.5ozs. marzipan

Brown gel food colouring

Flesh tone edible powder

1 teaspoon glucose or corn syrup mixed with 1 teaspoon vodka

Step 1 - Pinkysil is not technically food safe but we are not cooking with it or heating it up or using hot food. I wouldn't recommend using it if you do need to heat it up.

Checking that the silicon is properly mixed

Step 2 - Pinkysil needs to be used in 1:1 quantities so using small, clear shot glasses helps to measure it. Separately measure around half the shot glass in both white and pink and then pour both into the larger cup. Stir well with the stick-make sure to check the corners and get all of the colour mixed up well (otherwise it won't set properly).

Step 3 - Pour into the mold (it's best to pour the Pinkysil in one place to make a thin base. Prick the air bubbles with a toothpick or sharp knife. After 10 minutes or so, place the teeth on the base and do not move them once they're in.

Placing the teeth on the base of silicone

Step 4 - Mix up some more Pinkysil, this time not quite half the shot glass. You will then be filling the mold halfway up the teeth to create the first half of your two part silicon mold. Pour around the teeth making sure to get any crevices until you have reached halfway up the tooth. Allow to set (around 20 minutes).

Pouring silicone halfway up teeth

Brushing with vaseline

Step 5 - Brush all silicon surfaces with Vaseline (silicon sticks to itself) making sure to get all the crevices and to the edge/corners but don't leave any blobs of Vaseline as the silicon will mold around that. Mix up a larger batch of Pinkysil (around the whole shot glass) and mix and then pour over the Vaseline layer. Allow to set completely. Remove it from the container and gently prise the mold apart. You may need to trim some of it with a knife or scissors. You now have your mold! Wash it well with warm, soapy water.

Prising mold apart

The mold!

Step 6 - Warm up a walnut sized ball of marzipan up in your hands. I'd recommend using a good rolling marzipan (I used a brand called Blackwood Lane and it was quite dry and not great for this). Pinch off a very small amount and press it into the mold. Use a sharp paring knife to cut off any excess. By the time you've done a few you will know how much to pinch off so you press in the right amount of marzipan.

Pressing the marzipan into the mold

Then trimming to make neater

Step 7 - Join the two halves together-if your marzipan is moist then they will stick together with gentle pressure. Otherwise you can stick them together with the glucose/vodka mixture above. Repeat until you have as many teeth as you need. Allow to dry for a few hours or overnight.

Step 8 - Using a fine paintbrush, brush in some of the brown food gel in the top of the molars to look like plaque. Then take another brush and shade in some of the roots of the teeth near where they would sit in the gums.

Painting tooth decay

Step 9 - Then for the final touch, brush with the glucose/vodka solution to make them shiny. You may need to do 2 coats of this to get it to become shiny!

Painting discoloration

Source: http://www.notquitenigella.com/2018/10/26/halloween-human-teeth-mold-marzipan/

[runfront3-blog]

Gruesome Human Candy Teeth +Tutorial For Making Silicon Molds!

Making delicious marzipan human teeth or molars for a quirky Halloween snack is a fun, rewarding project. In today's post I show you how to make your very own silicon mold to cast your own teeth so they are easy to shape. Then we paint and glaze them to look as realistic as possible!

A friend tagged me on some edible teeth on Instagram and ever since then I had them in my mind to make. But shaping teeth can be hard so I online to try and buy a mold. Unfortunately the tooth mold that I purchased was a giant tooth (I get confused easily with measurements it seems) with a smiling face on it and it was entirely unsuitable for my gruesome purposes. The woman at a cake decorating shop suggested that I try my hand at using Pinkysil, a DIY silicon mold making kit which is easy to use.

It's the time of the year when my parents get inundated with a range of weird requests eg. Could I store my voodoo dolls in your freezer? Or in the case this past week I asked my mother, could you ask your dentist for human molars?

My parents no longer flinch or ask questions-it has happened so much over the last 10 years and to my surprise within a couple of days they gave me a bag of sterilised human teeth. They were perfect. I bought the Pinkysil from Barnes in Newtown and the friendly lady at the store went through it with me. I needed to make a 2 parter silicon mold.

I'm not amazing at arts and crafts, in fact I'm pretty bad at them but I watched a lot of videos on how to cast silicon molds before I started it, so much so that I kept playing through how to make molds in my dreams and while working out. I was amazed at how easy it was (and now I have all sorts of plans to make other silicon molds!).

And then of course came my next request of my parents-a pair of pliers or dental equipment!

So tell me Dear Readers, are you good at arts and crafts? Have you ever tried making your own silicon molds? Would you snack on these little candy molars?

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

To make mold

1 set Pinkysil (you'll only need half of the bottles)

6 human molars

Small container to use as a larger mold

Small disposable shot glasses

Large clear disposable cups

Paddle pop sticks/tongue depressors

Vaseline

Small brushes

100g/3.5ozs. marzipan

Brown gel food colouring

Flesh tone edible powder

1 teaspoon glucose or corn syrup mixed with 1 teaspoon vodka

Step 1 - Pinkysil is not technically food safe but we are not cooking with it or heating it up or using hot food. I wouldn't recommend using it if you do need to heat it up.

Checking that the silicon is properly mixed

Step 2 - Pinkysil needs to be used in 1:1 quantities so using small, clear shot glasses helps to measure it. Separately measure around half the shot glass in both white and pink and then pour both into the larger cup. Stir well with the stick-make sure to check the corners and get all of the colour mixed up well (otherwise it won't set properly).

Step 3 - Pour into the mold (it's best to pour the Pinkysil in one place to make a thin base. Prick the air bubbles with a toothpick or sharp knife. After 10 minutes or so, place the teeth on the base and do not move them once they're in.

Placing the teeth on the base of silicone

Step 4 - Mix up some more Pinkysil, this time not quite half the shot glass. You will then be filling the mold halfway up the teeth to create the first half of your two part silicon mold. Pour around the teeth making sure to get any crevices until you have reached halfway up the tooth. Allow to set (around 20 minutes).

Pouring silicone halfway up teeth

Brushing with vaseline

Step 5 - Brush all silicon surfaces with Vaseline (silicon sticks to itself) making sure to get all the crevices and to the edge/corners but don't leave any blobs of Vaseline as the silicon will mold around that. Mix up a larger batch of Pinkysil (around the whole shot glass) and mix and then pour over the Vaseline layer. Allow to set completely. Remove it from the container and gently prise the mold apart. You may need to trim some of it with a knife or scissors. You now have your mold! Wash it well with warm, soapy water.

Prising mold apart

The mold!

Step 6 - Warm up a walnut sized ball of marzipan up in your hands. I'd recommend using a good rolling marzipan (I used a brand called Blackwood Lane and it was quite dry and not great for this). Pinch off a very small amount and press it into the mold. Use a sharp paring knife to cut off any excess. By the time you've done a few you will know how much to pinch off so you press in the right amount of marzipan.

Pressing the marzipan into the mold

Then trimming to make neater

Step 7 - Join the two halves together-if your marzipan is moist then they will stick together with gentle pressure. Otherwise you can stick them together with the glucose/vodka mixture above. Repeat until you have as many teeth as you need. Allow to dry for a few hours or overnight.

Step 8 - Using a fine paintbrush, brush in some of the brown food gel in the top of the molars to look like plaque. Then take another brush and shade in some of the roots of the teeth near where they would sit in the gums.

Painting tooth decay

Step 9 - Then for the final touch, brush with the glucose/vodka solution to make them shiny. You may need to do 2 coats of this to get it to become shiny!

Painting discoloration

Source: http://www.notquitenigella.com/2018/10/26/halloween-human-teeth-mold-marzipan/

[newstfionline]

Why It’s Easy—And Hard—To Get A Postcard All The Way From Timbuktu

Clair Macdougall, NPR, Sept. 22, 2018

These days, not many tourists go to the legendary city of Timbuktu.

Indeed, the U.S. State Department advises: “Do not travel to Mali due to crime and terrorism.”

But you can still send a postcard to a family member, a friend or even yourself, all the way from the fabled, mud-walled city.

Postcards from Timbuktu was established in 2016 by Phil Paoletta, an American hotel owner from Cleveland, and Ali Nialy, a 29-year-old guide from Timbuktu.

The goal was to make up for some of the income lost by tour guides after the devastation of the tourist industry, which once brought an estimated 200,000 people a year from all over the world to Mali. Many of them came to visit the city of Timbuktu, a World Heritage site known for its spectacular mud mosque and ancient Islamic manuscripts and annual music festival, the Festival Au Desert (the event has been suspended indefinitely).

The worst time for the city was the 10 months, starting in 2012, that jihadists took over. They brutalized the local population, smashed Sufi shrines and razed restaurants and bars. French and Malian forces pushed the jihadists out in 2013, but the tourism business has never recovered.

The idea for a postcard project came about after a friend sent Paoletta a card from United States, the first piece of mail he had received in his six years in Mali. That made him remember how nice it was to get mail--and got him thinking about the possibility of sending postcards from Timbuktu.

That same day he met Nialy, an unemployed tour guide and friend from Timbuktu. Nialy had run tours for Paoletta’s business partner, the co-owner of his hotel, the Sleeping Camel, and operator of a tour company.

Paoletta asked Nialy if the post office was functioning and wondered how long it would take to send a postcard to, say, the United States--and whether sending a postcard from a place that’s often referred to as the “end of the earth” could be a viable business. They did a test run and a card reached a U.S. address in a matter of weeks.

So Paoletta set up a website, Nialy gathered a team of guides to handle the logistics and they launched the venture.

Nialy and other guides accept that tourists likely won’t come back for a long time, given the ongoing insecurity. This year he has only worked with a handful of tourists, who must be escorted by heavily armed police and stay in hotels flanked by armed guards. He advises them against staying for longer than 24 hours, due to the threat of kidnapping. Nialy also acts as a fixer for journalists.

But like many of the other guides in Timbuktu, he is deeply attached to the city, his hometown, and doesn’t want to move. “I like it, and I don’t want to leave,” he says.

“We feel indebted to them because when tourism was thriving, we were all doing well,” says Paoletta of the guides. “Now we’re sort of doing okay [at his hotel] because we have these U.N. clients and NGO clients who are in Bamako.” But that isn’t any help to Timbuktu.

Paoletta lives in Bamako, the capital of Mali, some 600 miles from Timbuktu. He works with a local company to print a variety of postcards, which are displayed on the website. They range from images of turbaned members of the ethnic Tuareg group on camels to black-and-white frames of old camel caravans. Either Ali or one of his friends or family members transport the cards by road back to Timbuktu.

Paoletta publicized the initiative through Facebook and Twitter accounts and ads on Instagram. Customers vary, he says. They include postcard collectors, people who have traveled to Timbuktu or worked in Mali or people who have seen documentaries on the country and some who want to send a postcard as a joke.

The company pays local guides to write the message requested by the customer.

Since 2016, the company has sent out 1,958 postcards to countries in Europe, to the U.S., to a raft of Latin American countries, to Asian countries and to neighboring nations in Africa. They also sell the work of Mali’s last master calligrapher, who is training others in the art, and offer jewelry, handbags and salt from the Sahara desert.

The cost is $10 per card. The guides who write the messages and handle the mailing can make between $2 and $4.50 per card, depending on postage costs.

It turns out to be more complicated than you might think to get a postcard from Timbuktu to, say, Kentucky or Chile or South Korea.

Paoletta sends the orders to the guides in Timbuktu via WhatsApp. They then handwrite the messages requested by customers on the card (usually in English but in various other languages, including Russian, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Chinese, Thai and Spanish). People often request birthday messages, quirky notes, love letters. Sometimes customers ask the guides to write about their day in Timbuktu.

The guide will then take the postcard to the post office in Timbuktu, where one of the two workers will punch the card with an inky blue stamp reading “Toumbouctou: La Ville Mystérieuse,” place a stamp on the side and give it back to the guide. (That’s the French spelling for the city’s name, which means “the well of Buktu” in Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg people.)

“Our only customer is Ali,” says Nana Oumou Maïga, one of two postal workers. She may be exaggerating--but just a little.

Now comes the tough part: getting the cards to Bamako, where they can be mailed via airmail. Vehicles delivering mail on the bumpy stretches of road from Timbuktu to Bamako are often hijacked or robbed by bandits.

So the guide will give the cards to a friend of Ali, who regularly travels on the U.N. mission flight, the only regular flight in and out of the desert city.

Next, a staff member from the Sleeping Camel picks the cards up at the airstrip in Bamako and brings them to the post office to be mailed.

It takes anywhere from three to five weeks for a card to arrive at its final destination.

The initiative employs around six guides part-time and has employed up to 10 when demand has been higher. When there is an order of larger batches, say 100 cards, the guides can earn a decent income in a country where the average gross national income per capita income is US $770.

The guide is paid using mobile money, transferred via cellphone.

“Opportunities for work in Timbuktu and in the north in general are extremely limited right now. These guys were in the once-thriving tourism sector that has completely collapsed since 2012,” Paoletta says.

“I think it’s really a very good initiative,” says Mamadou Tapily, a spokesman for a network of Malian tour guides.

Customers are happy to send postcards from Timbuktu because they’re helping the locals and because of the novelty factor.

When Cheryl Cullick, a postcard collector from Bellevue, Kentucky, found out that she could order cards online from Timbuktu, she wondered: “Is this for real?”

Cullick didn’t know exactly where Timbuktu was and had only heard it referred to in “literature.”

Cullick has been collecting postcards since her college days in the 1980s. She rarely travels outside the U.S. and seeks postcards from places she’d like to go.

Cecilia Op de Beke, from Falls Creek, Virginia, lived with her aid worker husband in Bamako, between 2012 and 2015, but they couldn’t go to Timbuktu because of the threat of attack.

Now she sends birthday cards to friends and family members and hopes that the support to the guides makes a difference. For her, the project is quirky and fun.

And when an acquaintance gets a postcard, she says it sends the message: “This is how far I go for you--all the way to Timbuktu.”

[fcossel-blog]

Month 8 Completed

Water Loon Splash Prototype: Group Post-Mortem

Our team designed the prototype of our game called “Water ‘Loon Splash”, which is a 2D water balloon throwing game. Below is a breakdown of issues and solutions that occurred during the four weeks, split into categories of administrative, development and art. Due to the density of our post mortem, and in order to ensure each one of our members has a voice, our information has been organized and subsequently highlighted by using bullets.

Administrative

What went well:

There were no major arguments inside the team.

We successfully staved off feature creep by keeping the prototype as close to the core/original game as possible..

High motivation through the duration of the prototyping process..

What went wrong

Communication was an issue throughout the process and meetings were rarely attended by all classmates

Skype was not utilized by the entirety of the team on a regular basis and little effort was given to alleviate the issue.

Lack of communication and a lack of clarity on who was doing what and how

Lack of communication led to chasing some teammates for their contributions and explanations of the respective contributions.

Vague completion criteria for tasks and task assignment

We couldn’t use all of the contributions created

Some contributions done by one member were overwritten/redone by someone else due to organizational issues.

We didn’t practice the presentations

Slides were assigned on the day of presentations in one case

Information given during questions and answer phase was not always discussed or agreed upon by the group, or had suffered from the lack of communication/meetings with outdated/spontaneous answers.

Quality of presentation could have used more reviewers prior to day of presentation.

Development

What went right:

Physical prototype showed good potential

Steady growth throughout prototype progressions

The final prototype conveyed the core basis of the game

What went wrong

Use of a canvas caused issues throughout the development process.

The balloon’s throwing mechanic was very limited and lacked adaptability, which was a problem as it was one of the core mechanics we needed to test.

The particle effects for the balloon splash would not render natively/properly.

There was an issue with displaying the images/sprites at correct resolutions due to how the UI renders.

Lack of communication in how certain assets operated.

Very little commentation in scripts or pushed build descriptions.

Little to no communication as to when something was pushed, what it was, and why.

Bottlenecking ensued where dependencies existed.

Some work had to be redone

Lack of proper completion criteria or task assignment, as mentioned in the administrative section, led to this.

Lack of clarity in the process of working in a collaborative environment and integrating code

Documentation that was necessary was not created, leading to confusion

Art

What went right

Art was implemented early, allowing the feel of the game to show

Fast response from the art team to requests

No lasting issues with any assets

What went wrong

Initial batch of sounds were not used due to miscommunication about direction

Sprite cutting; no standard to do this and it had to be redone

Lack of a clear understanding of the overall art skills of the team

Lessons Learned

Limit access to project, give everyone access to the builds

Keep responsibilities and tasks to their assigned roles

Clearly define structure within the team

The use of a master task list or trello could help keep track of tasks

Use unity 2D where applicable, especially when projects are inherently 2D.

Directly contact the group, be aware of differing communication methods

Don't expect constant/consistent communication on our GDMS group chat. Message people directly as needed.

Have all details of a  task, including how it should be completed and what the completion criteria is,  before assigning/starting it.

We must develop greater flexibility in task completion and methodology

We must provide more precise details when requesting changes

Looking for a midpoint between a fast solution and a fully functional solution to show something working

Holding individuals accountable for the tasks assigned to them in a specific timeframe is important, so that we avoid inefficiency

Conclusion

In conclusion, we had several factors that were affecting the project. These factors were present throughout the class yet most of the problems that arose were resolved tactfully. In the future communication will be the focus of our improvements as it was the area that most negatively affected our design.

Water ‘Loon Splash Individual Post Mortem:

For this month in my path to mastery, we continued development on a previously worked project. Water ‘Loon Splash is a 2D physics game where a young child throws water balloons at adults that pass under his treehouse. The concept was developed four months ago and was intended to appeal to a younger demographic with simplicity and navigation kept in mind. For this month, we intended to finalize the design as a full experience for players. The following is a post mortem of a four week process over our development and interactions between the members of the team.

What went wrong: From the beginning, we had set ourselves up for failure by not establishing a process or pipeline. This month was intended to show us the importance of a pipeline and we learned about the importance of establishing clear guidelines and expectations (especially on completion testing). When I did the completion testing guidelines for the team, my lack of understanding for a need of objective measures was compounded by a lack of communication for the development team that resulted in an absolute meltdown. The remaining of the team seemed convinced that they were stuck in various catch 22’s, or when it is perceived that there is a equal dependency between two conditions. For example, one developer told me that he was waiting on another developer to finish up the weapons before the shop could be fully implemented. Later in that same day, the developer he mentioned specifically stated that the weapons had not been implemented in the shop because he was waiting for the shop to be completed. Instead of coming together as a team, there was a clear divide in the team that resulted in several different “cliques” between a total of nine people. There was also a team member of ours that deals with a debilitating condition in his daily life that some people have trouble overcoming when interacting with him. Due to these, a breakdown of communication occurred and compounded every issue we were having. This resulted in team members asking critical questions during our milestone presentations, in front of the instructor who served as the investor or director. This was embarrassing as a professional since the project we were working on was my design and I had served as the “lead” designer. Developers would keep features under wraps and add in features that were well outside of the design, only to mention them on presentation day. The builds for the features that were to be displayed were never tested prior to the morning of the presentation, and some builds were never tested at all. This occurred despite my genuine attempts at gathering feedback for processes or guiding the vision of the project. For example, the demographic that was clearly defined as ages 7-11 yet the developers implemented a crossbow and a bazooka into the young playable character’s armory. These features came shortly after struggling to get the game defining mechanic of throwing the water balloon working when we were three quarters of the way through the development. The core of our problems can be summarized as a failure in communication.

What went right:

When we first began the class, we had decided to continue development on the game as it was not functional in the current state that it was in from months prior. We quickly improved the state of the game to at least a functional state inside of the first few days and showed promise as the team moved forward. We hardly needed new assets as the ones that we had used in the previous months were still within scope and current. The sound was also found and implemented with little to no issues. The team attempted multiple different methods to distribute tasks but settled on a single member of the team to assign tasks and act as the producer for the team. This worked better than when everyone contributed, but there was still a majority of  complaints. Another element that we did right is when we began the collaborative efforts for development we as a team agreed upon a set of rules to follow, such as structure and organization. The agreement and abiding of these rules allowed the developers to avoid any foreseeable issues and turned out to be critical to their successes. Had the same finesse and structure been applied to other aspects the product as a whole would have been much better. The final product finally resembled in some aspects the intended vision for the game and displayed the features that were originally pitched.

What I learned:

The most obvious of my learning was the completion testing and setting requirements that are clear, concise and objective. For the completion testing I learned that the descriptions for each need a thorough breakdown of what each feature needs to function as intended. The next lesson I have learned is that as a team there needed to have been more responsibility accepted for both tasks and faults. I can admit when I am wrong but I was less than pleased when my faults were used as a scapegoat for other’s faults as well. This presented an opportunity to speak up and teach the team as a whole the value of being able to rely on each other rather than blame everyone else. Solutions can be found when the whole team is focused on finding one, but that cannot happen when everyone is focused on why it isn’t his or her fault.

[nicaurybenitezcortorreal-blog]

Machine Learning Platform meetup

Recap of the Oct 2017 ML Platform meetup at Netflix HQ

By Faisal Siddiqi

Machine Learning is making fast inroads into many areas of business and is being employed in an increasingly widening array of commercial applications. At Netflix, ML has been used for several years on our Recommendations and Personalization problems. Over the last couple of years, ML has expanded into a wide range of newer applications here, such as Content Promotion, Content Price Modeling, Programmatic Marketing, Efficient Content Delivery, Adaptive Streaming QoE, to name only a handful. Scaling and speeding up the application of ML is at the top of mind for the multitudes of researchers, engineers, and data scientists working on these salient problems. We are always looking to learn from academic research and industry application in large scale contexts and love to share what we have learnt as part of running the Netflix use cases at scale.

Last week we hosted a Machine Learning Platform meetup at Netflix HQ in Los Gatos. We had five talks from top practitioners in the industry and in this post we will provide a brief overview summarizing them. The talks from Google, Twitter, Uber, Facebook and Netflix largely fell into one or both of these themes:

Sparse Data in ML: Challenges and solutions

Scaling up Training: Distributed vs Single machine approaches

Google

Ed Chi kicked off the talks with a presentation on how to learn user and item representation for sparse data in recommender systems. His talk covered two major areas of emphasis — Focused Learning and Factorized Deep Retrieval.

In setting up the motivation for the first area, Ed talked of the Tyranny of the Majority in describing the outsized impact of dense sub-zones in otherwise sparse data sets. As as solution to this challenge, he talked about Focused Learning, a sort of divide-and-conquer approach, where you look for subsets of data to focus on and then figure out which models can learn on each subset with differing data density. As an example of this approach, he talked about how using focused and unfocused regularization factors in the cost function, allowed them to model the problem with more success. In the canonical example of movie recommendations, he demonstrated how this approach led to outsized improvements in model prediction quality for sparse data sets (e.g. where Documentaries is one of the most sparse categories).

The use case that Factorized Deep Retrieval addresses is about predicting good co-watch patterns of videos when the corpus of items to recommend is huge (YouTube). You want the recommendations to not ignore the fresh content while still ensuring relevance. He presented TensorFlow’s distributed implementation of WALS (weighted alternating least squares) Factorization as the solution they used for picking sparse but relevant candidates out of the huge candidate corpus. Online rankings for serving were staged into a tiered approach with a first pass nominator selecting a reasonably small set. Then subsequent rankers further refined the selection until a small set of highly relevant candidates were chosen and impressed to the user.

https://medium.com/media/dbe8bb59d3158712d0e20db20322689d/href

Ed also talked about several implementation challenges, in sharing, failures, versioning, and coordination, that the TensorFlow team encountered and addressed in the TFX (TensorFlow Extended) system internally in use at Google. They are looking to add some of these features to TF Serving open-source in the future.

Twitter

Next up was Joe Xie from Twitter who started off by setting the stage with the real time use cases of Twitter. He talked about their single/merged online training and prediction pipeline as a backdrop to the parameter server approach his team took to scaling training and serving. Joe talked about how they tackled one area to scale up at a time. He walked through three stages of their parameter server, starting with first decoupling the training and prediction requests, then focusing on scaling up the training traffic and finally scaling up the model size.

They were able to increase the prediction queries/sec by 10x by separating training and prediction requests in v1 and increase training set size by 20x in v2. They are working on accepting models 10x larger in size in v3, and looking to explore data-parallel optimizations and feature sharding across their v3 distributed architecture. When asked about whether trainers and predictors are also sharded, Joe mentioned that for now they have sharded the trainers but not the predictors.

https://medium.com/media/49012ba8b4951679ec21be9f8d17f9cc/href

Uber

Alex Sergeev from Uber introduced a new distributed training library they have recently open-sourced — Horovod, for making distributed TensorFlow workloads easier. Alex started off by setting the problem of scaling up model training. With ever increasing data sizes and the need for faster training, they explored distributed TensorFlow. Alex alluded to challenges in using the distributed TensorFlow package out of the box. At some level they felt lack of clarity around which knobs to use. As well, they weren’t quite able to do justice to their GPU utilization when training data at scale via TensorFlow.

They explored recent approaches to leveraging data-parallelism in the distributed training space. Motivated by some past work at Baidu and more recently at Facebook (see below), they took a different approach to their deep network training. Conceptually, the training set was split up in chunks of data each of which was processed in parallel by executors, computing gradients. In each pass the gradients are averaged and then fed back into the model.

Typically, in TensorFlow the workers compute the gradients and then send them to the Parameter Server(s) for averaging. Horovod utilizes a data-parallel “ring-allreduce” algorithm that obviates the need to have a parameter server. Each of the workers are involved in not only computing the gradients but also averaging them, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion. Horovod uses NVDIA’s NCCL2 library to optimize bandwidth of communication between workers.

Alex talked about how they were able to utilize this for both single GPU as well as multiple GPU cases. He also talked about Tensor Fusion, an approach to smart batching that gave them larger gains on less optimized networks.

https://medium.com/media/745233f5b8c850f58d7ee8eae2e3d5c1/href

When asked about distributing the data across GPUs, interestingly, Alex mentioned that in their benchmarks they have seen better scale performance with 8 machines with a single GPU versus a single machine with 8 GPUs.

Facebook

Continuing the thread of GPU optimization for large scale training, Aapo Kyrola from Facebook shared some insights on their experiences working on this problem. As a matter of fact, Aapo described in more detail the case study that was referenced by the Uber presentation on Horovod just prior to this talk.

Aapo started off by giving a quick overview of Caffe2, a lightweight ML framework, highlighting how training can be modeled as a directed graph problem. He compared synchronous SGD (stochastic gradient descent) with asynchronous SGD and then proceeded to describe how they pushed the boundaries on sync SGD on Caffe2 with GLOO. The latter is an open-sourced fast library for performing distributed reductions and leverages NVIDIA’s NCCL2 for inter-GPU reductions.

This all led to the case study of their recently published milestone achievement — they were able to train a ResNet-50 (a 50 layer residual convolutional net) on the ImageNet-1K dataset in less than 1 hour. Sync SGD was used with a data-parallel approach and the “all-reduce” algorithm from GLOO. The case study described how they were able to tweak the learning rate piece-wise with an 8K mini-batch size to get to near state-of-the-art on error rate metrics.

Aapo ended the talk on some lessons learned through this exercise, like how Sync SGD can be pushed quite far on modern GPUs, and how learning rate is an important hyper-parameter for mini-batch size.

https://medium.com/media/ba056537a370ac65965120aa239ceba9/href

Netflix

Netflix’s Benoit Rostykus talked about VectorFlow, a recently open-sourced library for handling sparse data. VectorFlow is designed to be a lightweight neural network library for not-so-deep networks and sparse data.

In many ways Benoit’s talk presented a bit of a counter narrative to the rest of the talks. He argued that while there are a lot of applications in ML which are better served by throwing more training data and more layers (eg, images in convolutional nets), there is a surprising number of applications on the other end of the spectrum too. Such applications, like real-time bidding, can be handled in a single machine context, often need simple feed-forward shallow nets, and performance on CPUs can be pushed hard enough to meet the training latency and cost budget.

VectorFlow was designed for these contexts and this philosophy informed several design decisions. For example the choice of the language, D, was one such decision. The modern system language was chosen to address the goal of a single language in adhoc as well as production contexts — providing the power of C++ and the simplicity/clarity of Python.

Another notable differentiator for VectorFlow is its focus on optimizing for latency instead of throughput. By avoiding large data transfers between RAM and CPU/GPU memory, and avoiding allocations during forward/back-prop, VectorFlow is able to speed things up considerably during training. Benoit was able to demonstrate that for a training set size of 33M rows with a data sparsity of 7%, VectorFlow was able to run each pass of SGD in 4.2 seconds on a single machine with 16 commodity CPU cores.

VectorFlow is used in real-time bidding, programmatic advertising, causal inference, and survival regression to name a few applications in Netflix.

https://medium.com/media/74b6f38ac25e9a62cad5cd393f04e4d0/href

Benoit scoped out some of the future work on VectorFlow’s roadmap which includes deeper sparsity support, more complex nodes, and more optimizers, without giving up the core mantra behind VectorFlow that Simple > Complex. VectorFlow is open-sourced and available on github.

This meetup featured high quality talks and active participation by the audience. It was followed by engaging informal conversations after the talks around the direction of ML in general and deep learning in particular. At Netflix, we are solving many such challenging problems in ML research, engineering and infrastructure at scale as we grow to meet the needs of the next 100 million Netflix members. Join us if you are interested in pushing the state of the art forward.

Machine Learning Platform meetup was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source

https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/machine-learning-platform-meetup-ddec090f3c17