#text reader software windows

[world-of-aus]

Exposure

Pairing: Hockey Player!Bucky x Sports Photographer!Reader

Warning: A whole tall glass of angst my friends.

Author's Note: I try not to get in my head during the editing phase since it's been so long, but alas nothing different.. Anyway here's part II. Part III based off the schedule i've decided to go with will be out Tuesday! Enjoy my little puck bunnies!

The following day you arrived at the arena before sunrise. You soaked in the moment; the city still wore its quiet. Streets hushed, the skies heavy and gray, you liked it this way, before the buzz started, before the lights turned on and the world expected you to smile or answer questions that right now you weren’t sure you had the answers too. 

You slipped inside through the side entrance, badge clipped to the collar of your work polo, your camera bag slung high over one shoulder. Your footsteps echoed in the empty corridor, familiar and grounding. Your sanctuary. Game days were always louder. Busier. But the morning after? Just a few trainers and early risers. Equipment staff. And a few rookies running drills in the distance. 

And You. 

You made a beeline for the media room, needing the hum of your monitors and the soft click of your editing software like a balm to soothe the invisible ache beneath your skin. Shutting the door behind you, you flicked on the desk lamp, pulling out your chair as you took a seat opening the folder from last night’s game. 

You tried to maintain your focus as you sorted through the gallery, but your eyes kept drifting to that one photo. 

The one you shouldn’t have saved. 

Bucky, turning mid-play. Looking right at you. Looking for you. 

Your jaw clenched as you minimized the window, pulling up a different set; group shots, sponsor promos, post-game press conference angles. You worked through them all methodically, flagging and exporting, labeling for the Bruins’ socials and web team to go through when they had a chance. 

“Hey you, good morning.” You startle in your chair hand clasped to your chest as you turn your head to find the voice.

Dolores, one of the media team assistants, leans up against the doorway, smile pulling at her bubble gum pink lips as she holds two steaming cups of coffee in her hands. “Didn’t think anyone beat me in today, but i shouldn't be surprised, you were on fire last night."

You exhale a breath forcing a smile onto your lips. “Thank you. I - I couldn’t sleep.” 

“Ah. Game high?” she questions stepping into your office.

“Something like that.” You nod, “figured I could get a head start today sorting through last night’s gallery.” 

Dolores nods subtly as she hands you a coffee perching herself on the edge of your desk. “So,” she hums around a sip, “any thoughts on the new guy?” 

You keep your face neutral at the mention of him, “He played well, I think he’s going to be great for the team.” you answer holding back all you really want to say

“Well? Did we watch the same game last night?" she laughs. "He was an absolute machine out there y/n! Three assists, two goals, and that overtime steal? The team is obsessed already. Not gonna lie, I didn’t think someone with that kind of name recognition would be nice, but he said thank you to everyone last night. Even the janitor.” 

You stirred your coffee slowly taking in her words, everything you already knew, “That’s good.” you offer. 

Dolores eyed you, brow raised. “You feeling okay y/n?” 

You nod, offering up a smile, “I’m fine, just a lot on my mind with deadlines." Lie. 

“Cool, cool” Dolores trails off, perking up when she feels her phone vibrate. You watch the brunette pull her phone from her pocket, eyes lighting up, “Oh, group text from Theo. They want to set up the media shoot for Barnes. Headshots, player profile, some PR content. Probably later this week.” 

Your stomach dropped. Of course. 

“That shouldn’t be a problem, right?” You choke on your coffee. 

Dolores blinks brown raised in concern. “Okay, seriously you good?” 

You clear your throat, nodding your head, “Yeah, fine, fine.” Another lie. “Just went down the wrong pipe.” you smile. 

She gives you another wary look her finger hovering over her phone, “Actually you want me to cover the shoot when it’s scheduled? You’ve had the past few days stacked, I'm sure you could use a break.” 

You hesitated. A normal person would say yes. A sane one. But the photographer in you, the one who never backed away from a challenge, never let her personal life interfere with her work—sat up straighter. 

“No,” you said. “I’ve got it, Thursday, right?” 

“Thursday.” she confirms smiles kissing her lips as she gets to her feet. “Should be fun. Plus, he's easy on the eyes.” 

The smile doesn’t reach your eyes this time. “Yeah.” Dolores leaves without another word much less another glance back your way as she exits, your office door shutting softly behind her. Your eyes slip shut, forehead falling to rest on your hand. 

What am I doing. 

Four years ago, you had let yourself believe you’d have a life with Bucky Barnes. A future. He promised he wouldn’t forget you, and maybe he didn’t. But remembering wasn’t the same as staying. 

Now he was back. On your turf. Wearing the same jersey, part of the same team. A dream you once had.

But you’d wanted space. Needed time to collect yourself. after the splash of cold reality.

Instead; you were being handed time alone with him, a camera lens, and nowhere to hide. 

God how were you going to get through this? 

After the bomb was dropped on you your morning seemingly dragged. 

You buried yourself in editing, tagging, uploading and when your screen began to blur, you switched to shooting some behind-the-scenes content for the social team; quick snaps of the locker room being restocked, jerseys being hung, trainers prepping gear. Easy, harmless, no emotional landmines. 

Until the sound of skates on concrete echoed through the hallway just outside the tunnel you were walking through

You didn't have to look to know who it was. The low cadence of Bucky’s voice carried with it that distinct scrape of memory, warm nights and colder mornings, whispers in the dark, promises traded under streetlights and winter skies. You backed up, ducking into the supply room, waiting for the sound to fade. Your chest felt tight, like it had forgotten how to expand all the way. 

Coward, you thought, gripping the camera around your neck. This isn’t you. 

But your feet wouldn’t move letting the seconds tick by until silence reclaimed the hall. 

When you finally stepped back out, the air felt heavier, like it remembered him too. 

— 

Across the ice, Bucky had just wrapped drills with the second line and was toweling off when Sam skated up beside him. 

“You good tinman?” Sam asked swiping his own towel across his skin. “You’ve missed the net twice.” 

Bucky blew out a breath, shaking his head as if that would clear his mind. “It’s my first week Wilson, just settling in, getting used to the team.” 

Sam raises a brow at his friend. “That look like settling to you? I've seen you do better with worse.” 

Bucky doesn’t answer. Truth was, his head wasn’t in the drills this morning. Not with you somewhere nearby, probably avoiding every corridor he stepped foot into. 

He hadn’t expected you to be here. Had hoped upon, maybe. But seeing you last night? 

That had knocked the air right from his lungs. 

You hadn’t changed much, still had that quiet fire in you, still moved like you didn’t want to be seen and couldn’t help but draw every eye anyway. 

But your walls, they were taller now. Sharper. Like maybe he was the reason you had built them. He was.

Sam nudged him with his stick. “C’mon man. Don’t make me look better than you. It’ll mess with my image and you know how i feel about my image - i'll be downright insufferable."

Bucky managed a smirk, “yeah Wilson we all know how you are about your image.” 

“Damn straight you do, now get your ass in line and show them why they made that trade, let them know who you are."

— 

Later that afternoon as you checked the team calendar. The photoshoot had been scheduled for Thursday morning. You stared at the block of time like it might disappear if you willed it hard enough. Thirty minutes alone. In the white-wall studio. With him. 

It wasn’t enough time to prepare. 

It was too much time to survive. It was - 

A knock at the door jolted you your head peeking over your shoulder.

Wanda peeked her head in, holding a paper bag in one hand and a concerned look in the other. “I brought food. And if needed, unsolicited best friend wisdom.” 

You let out a tired laugh, lips turning up in a genuine smile as you took in your best friend. “You always know.” 

“Damn right I do.” Wanda grinned stepping in the door falling shut behind her, you watched as she plopped into the chair opposite your desk. “You didn’t answer my texts last night. Or this morning. Got worried, I assumed you either died or ran off to join a convent after New's broke." 

“I thought about it,” you said, voice flat. “The convent thing.” 

Wanda arched a brow and handed over a wrapped sandwich. “So, how bad was it?” 

You didn’t answer right away staring at the sandwich in your hands like it might crack open and reveal a solution to you. 

Wanda leaned forward, her voice gentle. “Hey, talk to me y/n.” 

You let out a shaky breath meeting your friends' eyes. “It’s like, he walked in and every part of me remembered. My body, my brain, my camera, my heart, they all remembered. And I’ve spent four years trying to forget. Four year’s Wands. "

Wanda’s expression softened. “Oh y/n..” 

“I thought I was past it I really thought I was. I thought I made peace with what happened. But seeing him? Looking at me like I’d never left his memory?” You blinked hard, shaking you head. “It was like time didn’t care about all the healing I’d done.” 

Wanda was quiet, letting you get it out. 

You set your food down, untouched, suddenly not feeling very hungry as the next words came. “He came up to me after the game. Said one thing. One thing that once upon a time i longed to hear."

“What did he say?” 

You swallowed hard, voice barely above a whisper. “I didn’t forget you.” 

Wanda’s eyes widened. “He said that?” 

You nodded tears pressing at the backs of her eyes, but you didn’t let them fall. “It’s not fair Wanda, why did he have to say that, I was okay, I healed – I healed.” 

Wanda reaches across your desk gently covering your hand with hers. “That’s not nothing, that means something.” 

Your watery gaze found hers. “It used to mean something. But he still left. And I stayed behind, picking up pieces of myself I didn’t know I’d dropped. I had to rebuild my life without him in it. I rebuilt it."

“I know,” Wanda said softly fingers squeezing. “But you don’t have to pretend you’re unaffected now.” 

“I’m not unaffected. I’m - unmoored.” 

The two of you sat in silence for a beat, the kind that wrapped around you with weight and warmth all at once. Pulling in a breath you wiped beneath your eyes with the tips of your fingers. “His media shoot is Thursday.” 

Wanda blinked. “As in you and him, alone in a room with your camera Thursday?” 

You nodded slowly. 

Wanda winced. “Do you want me to pull strings? Get someone else assigned?” 

“No.” You shook her head. “It’s my job. And it’s just thirty minutes. I can handle thirty minutes.” 

Wanda gave you a long, steady look. “It’s okay to break a little, you know. You don’t always have to hold the frame.” 

You offered a ghost of a smile. “Someone has to.” 

Thursday. 10:02 AM.  You adjusted the lighting rig with trembling fingers. The white backdrop behind you swayed slightly in the draft from the ventilation above. Everything was too bright, too clean. Too still. The silence felt artificial. Even your camera rested quietly on the stool beside you, waiting for you to break first. 

You kept checking the time. 

The media shoot was scheduled for 10 a.m. sharp. 

At 10:04, the door creaked open. 

You didn’t have to look up to know it was him, but you did anyway. 

Bucky stepped in, a little breathless, in full gear minus the helmet. His hair was damp from morning practice, pushed back in a way that should’ve looked unkempt but didn’t. His cheeks were flushed, and there was a half-smile on his lips, the kind that came instinctively when he didn’t know what else to do. 

It was like a body check to the ribs. 

He stopped just inside the doorway. “Hey.” 

You nodded attempting to tilt your lips up in a smile. “Hi.” Silence stretched between the two of you, taut and fragile. 

He moved a little closer. “You still shoot on a Nikon?” 

You blinked, he remembered. “Yeah, I do.” 

He gave a soft chuckle. “Thought so.” 

You swallowed. “Still wear the same brand of cologne.” 

That made him grin, unexpected, a flash of something that belonged to another life. “You remembered?” You shrugged softly, focusing your eyes on the camera instead of him. “It’s hard to forget something that used to be everywhere.” 

His smile faltered, faded. “Right.” 

You picked up your camera as youadjusted the settings. Your fingers didn’t shake this time. Not because you weren’t affected, but because the camera gave you purpose. And purpose, at least, gave you armor. 

“Let’s get started,” you said setting yourself up. 

He nodded wordlessly stepping onto the white tape mark on the floor. 

You raised the camera and suddenly everything slowed. The viewfinder filled with his face, older now, sharper, but familiar in a way that made your throat tighten. You forced yourself to remain focused; you adjusted, snapped. Click. 

He didn’t smile at first. Just watched you with quiet eyes, letting you work. Letting you look at him without looking directly. 

“Smile,” you said softly. 

He gave you a crooked one. 

Click. 

“Eyes up.” 

He tilted his chin slightly, gaze catching yours through the lens. The way he looked at you, steady, careful, made something in your pulse quicken.  

Click. 

A pause. You lowered the camera. 

“Can I ask you something?” Bucky said. 

You stiffened shaking your head softly, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea Bucky we should really just focus on what we’re here for.” 

“Too late,” he said gently. “Because I really want to.” 

You hesitated. Then: “Go ahead.” 

His voice was low as he asked the one question that had been ringing in his mind. “Why didn’t you write back?” 

Your breath caught in your throat, eyes widening slightly at his words. 

He stepped forward then just a fraction. “I sent letters y/n. A few actually. I left you messages. I didn’t just vanish.” 

You looked away, jaw clenched. “I know you didn’t vanish Bucky, trust me I know. You just became unreachable.” 

“I tried, y/n. I know I was busy; I know things moved fast, but I didn’t forget -” 

“Don’t,” you cut in, sharper than intended. “Don’t say that like it fixes anything.” 

He went still. 

You took a breath, tried again, quieter this time. “I didn’t write back because I didn’t know how to say I wasn’t okay. Not without sounding like I wanted to hold you back.” 

“You wouldn’t have,” he said with a shake of his head. “You never could have.” 

“But I didn’t know that then.” your voice cracked. “We were younger than Buck, and watching you become everything you dreamed of I wouldn’t be the one to hold you back from that - I needed to figure out who I was without you.” 

The room pulsed with silence. 

He stepped forward again, slower this time. “I never wanted to be someone you had to live without, I wanted your dreams.” I wanted you. 

You blinked hard, eyes burning. You would not cry. 

“I missed you,” he said, quiet and sure. “Even when I was surrounded by everything, I thought I wanted.” 

You looked up at him, camera still clutched in your hands. “I missed you too Bucky. But missing someone doesn’t always mean you get them back.” 

The two of you stared at each other, grief and longing suspended between the two of you like dust in a shaft of light. Then you lifted the camera again, as if to say: This is who I am now; without you.  

He nodded, understanding. And despite your treacherous mind and heart telling you to take back your words, to talk to him, you pulled your focus back in on the task and finished the shoot. 

Bucky didn’t leave the studio right away; even though you had turned away quickly after the last shot, pretending to check your gear, giving him an easy out his feet stayed planted on the white tape line watching you. You hadn’t forgiven him that much was clear, but you hadn’t shut him down either. You’d let him in, reminding him what it used to feel like to be seen by you; fully, quietly, completely. He wanted to know where to go from here, but his mind had no idea what the next step looked like. 

It wrecked him. 

“Barnes,” someone called from the hallway. Trainer’s voice. Break time. 

He hesitated for a moment wanting to say more but not wanting to push when you had just barely let him in. With one last longing look at your back he turned, leaving the same way he came. 

You waited until the door clicked shut behind him before sitting down hard on the edge of the backdrop stand. Your camera dangled from your hands, heavy and warm, like it had soaked up all the heat in the room. You felt hollowed out. You had held it together, and now you wanted nothing more than to fall apart. But there wasn’t time for that now, there was never time. 

Running a hand over your face, you catch the edge of moisture at your lash line. You wouldn’t cry. Not now. Not here. The shoot had gone fine. Technically perfect. But emotionally? 

A disaster. 

He still looked at you like you were the only person who mattered most in any room he walked into. You’d hated it how all you wanted to do was soak it up. You didn’t know which instinct scared you more. 

A soft knock on the door startles you. 

You stand quickly, wiping your palms on the back of your jeans as you watch the door creak open a head popping through. 

It wasn’t Bucky, It was Logan, the team’s media assistant. “Hey, you good? Coach wants selects from the player shoots by the weekend.” 

You nodded, “I’ll have them ready before then, no worries.” 

“You, okay?” 

You smiled. Too polished, too quick. “Yeah. Just been a long week, just about ready to get out of here."” 

He didn’t push. “Cool. Let me know if you need help sorting.” 

“Thanks.” 

When he left, you finally let yourself sit back down. And this time, you let your eyes close. 

Just for a moment. 

Just until the feeling passed. 

— 

Later that day, Bucky found himself wandering into the empty arena. It was quiet, ice freshly zambonied, light streaming through the upper windows in long, soft angles. He sat on the bench, helmet cradled in his hands, thinking about what you had said early that morning. 

“I needed to figure out who I was without you.” 

He’d never considered that you might’ve been drowning while he was flying. He’d thought you were the strongest person he knew. And you were, without a doubt in his mind, but strength didn’t mean pain didn’t touch you. He’d convinced himself the two of you were just growing apart. That the silence had meant acceptance. But now? 

Now he saw it for what it was: self-preservation. 

You hadn’t known how to be with him while he became someone else. And maybe, deep down, he hadn’t made enough space for you to stay. 

He leaned back, letting his head tip against the glass behind the bench. It was cold. Grounding. 

He didn’t know how to fix it. 

But he wanted to. 

For the first time in a long time, he wanted something more than goals, more than glory. 

He wanted to be someone you could look at without flinching. 

— 

That night, as you sat curled up on your couch, laptop open, Bucky’s photos pulled up on the screen you paused. Each shot was good. Clean. Professional. But sterile, in a way you hadn’t noticed while shooting. 

Until the last few. 

Those were different. 

Something had shifted between frame twelve and fifteen, his eyes had stopped performing and started speaking to you. 

The final image? 

It hit you like a sucker punch. He was looking straight into the lens. Not smiling. Not guarded. Just open. And somehow, impossibly, waiting. 

You stared at it for a long time, you should have deleted it, but you didn’t. 

You closed your laptop instead, falling to your side as you curled up further on the couch, your arms wrapping around a cushion like it might hold you together. 

You see, the worst part wasn’t that he was back. 

The worst part was that he still felt like home. 

And you didn’t know if you could survive losing him a second time. 

[saffusthings]

second chances

mob boss! lando norris x reader

part seventeen: dream a little dream of me

word count: 1.6k

warnings: tooth-rotting fluff

sixteen | seventeen | eighteen

The second date should’ve felt more awkward. It didn’t.

Alex had picked a science museum of all places—not exactly romantic on paper, but the look on his face when he pointed out the replica Mars rover was too earnest to judge. He had this habit where his whole face would light up like a lightbulb the moment before he got excited about something, and Y/N had already learned to clock it like a warning siren.

“So, technically,” he was saying, hands jammed in his jacket pockets as they strolled past a massive display on deep-sea robotics, “the algorithms used for this submersible’s sensor mapping were adapted from AI software developed for self-driving cars.”

“Technically,” she echoed, teasing, “you should probably just work here.”

He looked sideways at her with a crooked grin. “I applied when I was sixteen. They didn’t take me.”

“They’re clearly still recovering from that mistake.”

He tried to play it off cool, but she caught the slight flush of his ears.

She liked him more than she expected to. Not in the way you decide to like someone—more like how you step outside one day and realize the air smells like rain and suddenly, you’re soft and open and all the windows are down. He was like that: unexpected and quiet and warm around the edges.

They made their way through the rest of the exhibits in no particular order, weaving between dwindling crowds of families and groups of students on field trips, neither of them in a hurry. He let her take her time at the forensic anthropology section, where she ran her fingers along the raised edges of a reconstructed skull, and she let him lose himself in the physics wing, where he explained, with ridiculous enthusiasm, why the double pendulum was so cool. It was there that the nickname Professor Albon was born.

At some point, he took her hand. It wasn’t a big deal. He just did it naturally, without hesitation, like it had already been a habit, and for a moment, that simple touch made her feel warm all over.

They ended the night sitting cross-legged on the floor of the museum café, long after it closed, surrounded by vending machine snacks and a half-solved crossword puzzle she’d found in her bag. The overhead lights buzzed faintly, casting a dim glow over the abandoned chairs and tables, but neither of them seemed eager to move. They laughed about everything and nothing, the kind of laughing that came from being tired but happy, the kind that made her lean into his shoulder without thinking.

"Okay," Alex said, tapping the eraser end of his pencil against the page. "Eight-letter word for ‘illuminates or clarifies’?"

As she took a moment to think it over, Alex watched in his periphery as she counted off the letters of her word on her fingers. "’Explains’ fits," she mused, popping a purple skittle into her mouth.

"Hmm." He scribbled it in. "Not bad. Maybe I should keep you around."

"Yeah, yeah," she nudged his knee with hers, grinning. "You just like me for my crossword skills."

"Wrong. I like you for your crossword skills and your terrible puns."

“My puns are great, thank you very much.” She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

He liked her brain. She liked how funny he was. They made a good pair—two academically overworked people who laughed at obscure engineering memes and played footsie under café tables without meaning to. When they said goodbye that night, he kissed her like he was trying not to smile through it. Like maybe this could really be something.

It felt easy.

And in the days that followed, it stayed easy. He texted her every night.

alex: Made the Mars rover jealous. Can’t stop thinking about you.

Y/N: did you just say that unironically. because I might have to stop seeing you on principle.

alex: Too late, I’ve already added you to my will. You get the Lego Technic collection.

Y/N: wait nvm i’m back in

They made time. Even when they both shouldn’t have.

He’d bring her coffee before her class–something with cinnamon and oat milk in it. He’d scrawl dumb physics jokes on the lid just to make her roll her eyes. She started keeping his schedule in her head without meaning to. She knew which nights he had his advanced systems class and which ones he spent buried in the lab. He’d text her when his simulations crashed at 3AM. She’d send him memes about courtroom drama tropes in return.

He had an engineer’s sense of humor—dry, sneaky, often deeply specific. It took a while to catch on, but once she did, it felt like discovering hidden easter eggs in his sentences.

“You know,” he’d murmur as they lay back in the grass near campus, watching clouds roll over like they weren’t chilly out here in the autumn breeze, “you statistically reduce your lifespan by two minutes every time you eat instant ramen.”

“Cool. So I’ll be dying a noble, sodium-rich death then.”

He turned his head toward her, smiling with closed eyes. “Hmm, a martyr.”

“A hero.”

“Buried with your books and MSG packets.”

She shoved his shoulder. He let her.

On Thursdays, she’d sit outside his lab, cross-legged on the cold tile floor with flashcards in her lap, quizzing him on his presentation slides about failure analysis and impact resistance.

“Okay, explain to me like I’m five—what is a stress-strain curve and why should I care?”

“Because,” he’d say, crouching in front of her with a smirk, “it tells you how close something is to breaking.”

“And that’s relevant to your research…?”

He gave her a confused look, until it turned sheepish as he scratched the back of his neck. “I’m… not entirely sure about that bit, actually.”

She started looking forward to the moments in between—the walks across campus, the shared bag of chips while sitting on the hood of her car, the ridiculous voice memos he sent when he was overtired and delirious.

They kissed in stairwells and library corners and once,perhaps ill-advisedly, on a park bench in the middle of a thunderstorm. The rain had soaked through their clothes, cold and unrelenting, but he had just looked at her and said, "I think we should be stupid about this," right before he leaned in. It was impulsive and dramatic and made her laugh until she had to cover her mouth, their faces inches apart. Her hair was soaked, his glasses fogged up, and they almost dropped his backpack in a puddle, but the moment stuck—sharp and golden and untouchable.

They talked about future dates like there’d be dozens of them—bookstores they wanted to browse together, a tiny Thai place he swore by, a stargazing night he promised would be “scientifically optimized for romance” depending on the cloud cover. She rolled her eyes at that one, but her heart still fluttered.

They were still in the sweet spot—the space between maybe and more, where everything felt bright and possible. 

It wasn’t perfect – but it was promising.

The third date was dinner—some hole-in-the-wall Thai place with flickering neon signage and laminated menus stained with old curry thumbprints. He’d gotten lost on the way and sent a flurry of frantic texts.

alex :) : I passed the restaurant. Twice. There’s a cat staring at me through a laundromat window. I think it’s judging me.

Y/N: be strong. you can beat the cat.

alex :) : Negative, Sargeant. It’s very confident.

He’d arrived breathless, slightly damp from a drizzle, and holding a single packet of Skittles “for your efforts,” he’d said solemnly. She called him an idiot. He looked delighted.

That night, they talked about things that didn’t matter—TV shows neither of them had finished, foods they pretended to like for the aesthetic, the sheer horror of Alex’s undergraduate group project from hell (“We had a guy who thought duct tape was a structural solution”). 

And then, slowly, they talked about the things that did matter.

Like how she used to want to be a journalist when she was little, because she thought it meant you got to ask as many questions as you wanted and never had to apologize.

Or how he still wasn’t sure what kind of engineer he wanted to be—just that he wanted to make things that didn’t break when people needed them most.

“You know,” he said, nudging his glass in slow circles across the table, “you’re not what I expected.”

Y/N looked up. “Is that a good thing or, like, a 'you’re secretly a serial killer' kind of a thing?”

He smiled. “It’s a good thing. Really, really good.”

By the fourth week, they had a rhythm. It wasn’t just dates anymore—it was Hey, want to walk home together? and I saved you the last chocolate chip muffin, but only because I like you more than I like muffins. But barely.

It was him reaching for her hand without thinking, her resting her head against his shoulder on the bus when she was too tired to hold it up.

It was a shared Spotify playlist for when studying is ur 13th reason.

It was early Saturday morning sun filtering into her apartment while they quietly read their own books, his socked foot nudging hers on the side of the couch almost every ten minutes.

It was good.

But between the sleepy smiles and the shared muffins and the texts that kept getting longer instead of shorter, the truth was that they both had dreams. Big ones. All-consuming ones.

And no matter how much you wanted something—or someone—there were only so many hours in the day.

a/n: one of my more favorite chapters! an unfortunate lack of lando though :/ what did you think of it?

[unboundprompts]

Hello!!! I hope you don't mind doing this one,

Can you help me write a traumatized person who's having trouble talking because of past trauma? (They can still interact with people, but only with signs and movements, not voice) and also a little anxious

Tell me if you need more details =)

How to Write a Mute / Non-Speaking Character

-> healthline.com

-> verywellhealth.com

-> descriptionary.wordpress.com

Types of Mutism:

selective mutism: having the ability to speak but feeling unable to.

organic mutism: mutism caused by brain injury, such as with drug use or after a stroke.

cerebellar mutism: mutism caused by the removal of a brain tumor from a part of the skull surrounding the cerebellum, which controls coordination and balance.

aphasia: when people find it difficult to speak because of stroke, brain tumor, or head injury.

What Causes Selective Mutism in Adults?

having another anxiety condition, like separation anxiety or social anxiety

experiencing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse

having a family history of selective mutism or social anxiety

having fewer opportunities for social contact

having an extremely shy personality

having a speech or language disorder, learning disability, or sensory processing disorder

parent-child enmeshment, or lack of clear boundaries in the relationship

traumatic experiences

Traumatic Mutism vs Trauma-Induced Selective Mutism

if you have traumatic mutism, you may be unable to talk in all situations following a trauma.

with trauma-induced selective mutism, you may find it impossible to talk only in certain situations-- for example, in front of the person who hurt you or in a setting that resembles the circumstances of your trauma.

Different Ways Individuals with Mutism May Choose to Communicate:

Nonverbal Communication: they may rely on facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, and body language to convey their thoughts, emotions, and intentions.

Writing or Typing: they may use a pen and paper, digital devices, or communication apps to write messages, notes, or responses.

Sign Language: they can convey meaning, emotions, and engage in complex conversations through hand signs, facial expressions, and body movements.

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Devices: these devices provide individuals with a range of tools and technologies to support their communication needs. They can include speech-generating devices, picture boards, apps, or software that allows users to select words, phrases, or symbols to generate spoken or written output.

Communication Boards and Visual Aids: Communication boards or charts with pictures, symbols, or words can assist individuals in conveying their messages.

Assistive Technology: various assistive technologies, such as speech-to-text apps, text-to-speech programs, or eye-tracking devices that aid individuals with communication.

Tips on Writing a Mute / Non-Speaking Character:

Explore the vast array of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, body language, gestures, and eye contact. Use descriptions to convey their intentions and reactions.

Utilize internal dialogue. Offer readers a window into their internal thought process, and turn their internal dialogue into a narrative that reveals their inner struggles, triumphs, and complexities so that reader can connect with the character.

Establish a communication system that is unique to your character (Sign language, written notes, telepathy in a fantasy setting, etc.). Having a communication system allows your character to interact with other characters and contribute to the narrative.

Surround them with Understanding Characters that can aid in communcation and fostering meaningful relationships.

Establish the Barriers/Conflicts They'll Experience. Don't forget to be realistic.

Your character is not defined by their inability to speak. Make sure you do not write stereotypes and cliches. Being mute is only one aspect of their identity rather than their defining trait.

Do your research! Seek out firsthand accounts, experiences, and perspectives. Check out online forums and resources to gain insights into their unique challenges, adaptations, and strengths.

If you like what I do and want to support me, please consider buying me a coffee! I also offer editing services and other writing advice on my Ko-fi! Become a member to receive exclusive content, early access, and prioritized writing prompt requests.

[lostbookmark]

MDNI 🔞

Main Masterlist here

Whispered Vows Masterlist here

Summary: You thought planning your wedding was going to be a magical memory. You didn't realize that it might make you second guess everything.

Pairing: Fiancée Yoongi x Insecure F. Reader

Genre: Romance, Angst, Smut, Hurt-Comfort

Warnings: Explicit Sex, Toxic Family Dynamics, Arguments, Sex Toys, Self Doubt, Over Thinking, Yoongi Overworking Himself, Reader Just Needs To Speak Up.

A/N: I know I just posted chapter 5, but I'm in a good mood. Here is chapter 6.

Chocolate cake is perfectly moist, raspberry filling a touch too tart. You write down your thoughts on the provided worksheet the bakery supplied you after you swallowed the chocolaty goodness. You have been looking forward to your cake tasting for weeks now. Now, as you sit at the table with ten beautiful cupcakes before you, it just feels empty. Your eyes turn to look out the window and see Yoongi pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the bakery while on the phone with Namjoon, running his hand through his hair. He promised that he would help you with this, but once again, here he is working. Your patience is almost nonexistent at this point. You just wanted this one day with him, and he couldn't even give you that.

Reaching out, you grab the next sweet confection, cut into it with your fork, and take a large bite. Vanilla cake is moist and sweet, lemon curd filling has a perfectly smooth texture, and vanilla buttercream is not too sweet. Favorite by far. You place your pen back down and sigh as you swallow that bite. You look at Yoongi through the window again and see him hang up the phone before entering the bakery. Sitting next to you, he opens his texts, and you see him message Hobi something. Your eyes drift back to your notes, and you think you might go with the vanilla.

“You can go,” you tell him softly while still focused on your paper but not really reading anything. You just wanted to make sure your handwriting was neat and legible. This would be a nice little keepsake.

“Hmmm,” he says, still looking at his phone as his fingers fly across the screen. His face is scrunched in pure concentration as he rereads what he just typed. “What? What did you say?”

“You can leave,” you say louder, looking at him, and his head finally snaps to you. “You clearly don't want to be here, and I don't want to force you to be here. You can go.”

“I took the day off to be here,” he tells you, furrowing his eyebrows. “Why would you say that? You know how hard it is for me to make time for anything right now. We should be lucky that I am even here right now.”

“You took the day off? Did you really?” You question him and sip on your water that was provided to you to cleanse your palate.

Yoongi hasn't touched his water nor his worksheet. He probably hasn't even looked at the cupcakes that the baker worked hard on. The beautifully piped buttercream and colorful fruits and chocolate pieces were probably not appreciated. You appreciated them.

“I'm right here,” he argues and touches his chest with both of his hands to prove the point that he is indeed there. "I'm sitting right next to you."

“No, you're not,” you whisper. His phone rings again, with Namjoons name popping up on the screen.

“There is something wrong with our software at the studio. We lost a bunch of files,” he explains, gripping his phone tightly when the ringing stops. “You just don't understand. This is really bad.”

“I understand,” you tell him, nodding your head. “I do, I get it, and I said you can go.”

“It's not like I wanted this to happen,” he argues a bit too loudly, causing the bakery staff to look over at your table out of curiosity. You want to shrink away from embarrassment at their stares, and he quickly changes his tone. “We just lost weeks if not months of work,” he said much more softly. “All this time that I had to be at the studio, working all those long hours. It was all for nothing.”

Your heart sinks into your stomach as he starts getting texts in rapid succession, his phone continuously chiming. It rings so loud in your ears. You're tired. You haven't felt this tired in a long time. Not since that night you thought he was cheating on you. You're tired of dealing with this wedding and making these damn choices. You're tired of worrying about him. You're tired of sleeping alone at night. You're tired of being patient. You're tired of being tired.

“Yoongi,” you say and take a deep breath. “Please leave.”

“That's not fair,” he said. “This isn't my fault that this happened.”

“I…I don't care. I want you to leave,” you tell him as you turn back to the baked goods and take the card in front of the next dessert. Chocolate cake, salted caramel filling, and chocolate buttercream. “This experience is ruined. I'm just going to choose a stupid cake that you don't give a shit about and be done with it.”

“Y/N,” he says your name softly.

You ignore him and take a bite of your next pastry. Picking up your pen, you get ready to make your notes. Yoongi’s phone rings in the background, and you can hear him swear. Cake is a little crumbly. The filling is delicious with the right amount of saltiness, and buttercream could be a little sweeter. You can hear him sigh loudly before he gets up from the table and walks out of the bakery. You breathe deeply through your nose and blink rapidly, trying to stop the tears that threaten to fall.

“Is everything okay over here?” The owner and head baker asks as she approaches the table quite cautiously.

“Yes,” you say, giving her a small smile. “I'm ready. I think I have decided.”

“Oh, perfect,” she says and claps her hands together lightly. “I'll go get my tablet. We will get you ordered and get you scheduled on the calendar.”

Your smile drops as she walks away. You are such a liar. You are not ready. Not even in the slightest.

“I'm calling the wedding off,” you say as soon as the door opens.

“I'm sorry….WHAT?” Jisoo says clearly in shock. You push past her and enter her apartment, making your way to her couch where you collapse face first into the cushions in exhaustion. “I think that I heard you wrong. Please say that again and maybe more slowly.”

“No,” you said, your voice muffled by the cushion. You don't even bother looking at her. You know she is looking at you like you are crazy. “You heard me right.”

Jisoo sits on the floor next to the couch and moves your hair out of your face. She gently continues to stroke your hair in a comforting manner. You close your eyes and relax into her touch. She smiles sadly as she looks at you.

“I don't think you really mean that,” she tells you softly as she pulls her delicate hand away. You huff out a breath of irritation and sit up on the couch, pulling your knees to your chest. “Tell me what's going on.”

“He's been so busy, and I don't see him that often unless I make the effort to go to his studio. Then, I just end up cleaning the studio for him. I finally got him to help me with the cake tasting, and work still came first. I don't know if I can live like this forever,” you tell her. “I don't know if I want to.”

“Have you talked to him about this?” Jisoo asks, moving from the floor to sit next to you on the much more comfortable couch.

“Not really,” you admit, shaking your head. “I just miss us. I miss how we used to be before he got all busy, and the studio became everything to him.”

“Relationships change,” Jisoo tells you. “You may have hit a small rough patch now, but is it worth throwing it all away? After everything that you have been through. Do you want to throw it away?”

“Sometimes, I look at you and Seungkwan or Lisa, and Jimin and I get so jealous. You get to go out on dates and sleep next to them every night. You get to have real conversations and homemade dinners,” you explain to her. “I get to go home to a frozen microwavable dinner and a television for a companion. Sometimes, it's like he doesn't even exist, and it feels like I'm back on my own again.”

The door to the apartment opens, and you see Seungkwan enter. You watch as he takes off his shoes and hangs both his coat and bag on a hook, protruding from the wall before entering the room. He spots you on the couch and gives you a contemplative look.

“Well, that explains it,” he says and walks away to the kitchen.

“What?” Jisoo asks her boyfriend. You can hear the refrigerator open and close before he walks back out with a bottle of water in his hand. “What explains what?”

“I needed something signed, and Yoongi…well…he was grumpier than normal when I went to his studio. He also, kind of…” he trailed off for a few seconds. “Looked like he had been crying. Maybe? Does he do illegal substances?”

“No,” you say, shaking your head at him.

“Then he was definitely crying,” Seungkwan confirms.

On one hand, your heart sank as the words Seungkwan just said sank in. Had he been crying? Maybe you were too hard on him. Maybe you shouldn't have kicked him out of the bakery. You guess you probably could have been nicer about it. On the other hand, it just made you even madder. You were suffering too, and you still don't think that he cares. If he cared, he would have turned his phone off and stayed with you today. However, he didn't. He left. He left you there alone to order one of the plainest wedding cakes there probably ever was. He left in his car, leaving you to take the bus to Jisoo's.

“Can you please give us a minute,” Jisoo asks her boyfriend. Without a word, he walks down the hall and into the back of the apartment to the bedroom. You don't speak until you hear the bedroom door shut.

“Do you think….” You trail off in a small voice. “Do you think I should be getting married?”

Jisoo wraps her arm around you and pulls you down into her lap. She once again moves her hand to your hair and gently smooths it away from your face. She doesn't answer your question right away. It probably takes her a full two minutes before she finally speaks.

“I can't answer that,” she tells you, and it makes you clench your teeth in frustration. “I won't tell you not to marry him. It's okay to be jealous of me and Lisa and our relationships. However, I get jealous of you, too. The way that Yoongi looks at you, Y/N. Jimin and Seungkwan don't look at us like that. Yoongi looks at you like he would hang the moon for you. He would burn the world down for you.”

“I know he would,” you say as a tear drips down your face.

“If you don't love him, then I say don't marry him. If you do love him, then I say fight for him. You tell him how you feel and you fight,” she says seriously.

“I already told her to talk to him weeks ago, but no one ever listens to me," Seungkwan called from the back of the apartment. You and Jisoo start giggling and sit up to look at her. Her nosy boyfriend clearly had been listening to your entire conversation. “I would also hang the moon for you too, Jisoo.”

“Please don't tell Lisa about this. I don't need her saying anything to anyone,” You look at her, hold your pinky finger out. “Jimin loves gossip just as much as she does.”

“I won't. I promise,” she said softly and wrapped her own pinky around yours. “I promise.”

You checked the apartment first but you were not surprised when you found that he wasn't there. Now, you stand outside of his studio door, not sure if you should ring his doorbell or enter the code and walk in. You look up and down the deserted hallway before you slowly raise your forefinger and push the doorbell. Standing up straight, you wiggle your fingers that hang loosely at your sides as you wait for him to open the door. Your heart feels like it's going to pound out of your chest. You take a deep breath through your nose and slowly release it out of your mouth. Again…again…again.

“Y/N?” Jungkook says as the door finally opens and loud rap music flows out of the darkened room from the speakers.

You look over Jungkook's shoulder and see Yoongi look at you from his chair in surprise. His hair was disheveled and sticking up in all sorts of directions. He had changed into black track pants and an oversized white hoodie. They were both wrinkled, and the hoodie might be a little stained. You'll have to try and wash it for him later. Hopefully, you will be able to get the stains out. Yoongi stands from his seat and stares at you but doesn't say anything.

“Umm, can he and I have a minute?” You ask Jungkook, who still stands in the doorway. “Unless you're too busy.”

“NO!” Yoongi exclaims as he takes a few steps away from his chair. “Kook was just leaving.”

“Yeah, I was just leaving,” Jungkook agreed and nodded his head. “Everything is all set now. Have a good talk, bye.”

Jungkook practically runs out of the studio and down the hallway, nearly tripping over his own feet. Yoongi catches the door with his hand before it closes and opens it for you again. As you walk in, you notice that it was pretty cluttered with several discarded white styrofoam carryout boxes on his table and couch. A small pile of dirty laundry sat on the floor in the corner of the room. You can't even begin to imagine how long they have been there for. You know that you haven't been by in a while to clean up for him, but this was ridiculous. It even smelled a little bit, and it made you scrunch your nose as the stench hit you. Yoongi dropped his head and rubbed the back of his neck as he caught your facial expression. Good, he should be embarrassed.

“Is everything…” you trail off and motion to his work space.

“Oh, yeah. We got the files back pretty quickly, thankfully. I hurried back to the bakery, but you were already gone.” he explains.

“Oh,” you say softly and continue to look at his mess.

“You weren't at home either,” he tells you, and your eyes went back to him. “I figured you probably went to Lisa's or Jisoo's.”

“Jisoo's,” you confirmed. “Seungkwan said he saw you today. He said it looked like you had been crying. Were you?”

“He's got a big mouth,” Yoongi snaps, turning away from you. He pushes his chair, and it goes rolling across the room before hitting the wall. It makes you jump just a tiny bit.

“Were you crying over me or the lost files?” You ask, crossing your arms.

“Are you seriously asking me that?” He asks, turning back to you. “You think I would cry over work. Baby, I hurt you. I hurt you, and I took you for granted. You take care of me, you have been planning this whole wedding by yourself and I can't even do one damn thing for you.”

“Yoongi,” you say with a sigh and drop your arms.

“No, it's true,” he argues. “I don't even know why you are still with me. I would have left me a long time if I were you. Jungkook is even surprised that you're still here. Jimin tells me all the time that Lisa is worried about you.”

“Do you want to marry me? Be honest with me,” you plead.

“Yes, of course I want to marry you. I want nothing more than to be yours…forever,” he assures you.

"It doesn't feel like it,” you say, kicking a stray chopstick that was on the floor. “It feels like you don't care about the wedding at all. You’re always so busy.”

“Do you want me to quit? Make Namjoon buy me out so I can work some crappy, dead-end 9 to 5 job? Have us both worried about making ends meet? Working paycheck to paycheck?” He asks, throwing his arms in the air out of exasperation.

“Now you're the one not being fair, Yoongi. If you can't figure out how to balance your life with me and work, then maybe…” you say, but he immediately cuts you off.

“Stop right there,” he growls at you and points his finger at you. “Don't you dare finish that sentence. I am trying my best.”

“I don't know how much longer I can do this,” you tell him as you will yourself not to cry. You want to be strong. For once in your life, you just want to be strong and not run away to lean on someone else to help you. “If I knew how alone I would be all the time I….”

“Stop!” he says loudly. “Don't you think I get lonely too? Don't you think that I miss you? It's not easy to live like this. I get that!”

“THEN WHY CAN'T YOU JUST COME HOME!” You scream at him.

Immediately, you feel guilty for yelling. The two of you both stand there, glaring at each other, breathing hard. A large lump has formed in your throat, and your heart starts to race once again. The tension in the room is heavy and thick but not in a good way. It's never been this way between you two, and you don't know how to climb and claw your way out of it. The music in the studio changes over to something slower and almost melancholic. It feels fitting for this moment.

“Y/N,” he says quietly, breaking the silence.

“I’m sorry. I'll clean up,” you whisper as you turn toward the messy couch.

“No,” he says, grabbing your hand, pulling you to him, and you let him. You don't want to fight him anymore. It hurts too much. Your heart hurts so freaking much.

Yoongi guides your hands up and around the back of his neck, and he wraps his arms around your waist, pressing himself right up against you. Yoongi buries his face into your neck, and you rest your own on his shoulder. He gently starts rocking the two of you back and forth. Dancing? Dancing to that slow beat pouring out of his sound system in the middle of his dimly lit studio. His arms and hands cling onto you as if you are his lifeline. Like he would drown if he were to let go of you. You lift your face and kiss the side of his neck softly, lips barely touching him. Yoongi pulls his face back and rests his forehead against your own. Your bodies are still gently swaying side to side in your own little world.

“Please, don't leave me,” he gently begs, “I promise I'll do better.”

“Don't make promises that you can't keep,” you say, looking right into his eyes.

“I promise,” he says again, leaning toward your mouth. You close the gap and gently kiss him on the lips. “Tell me to quit, and I will. Tell me to run away with you, and I will. Do you want to move to Paris? Our own little island? I'll make it happen. I would do anything for you.”

Jisoo was right. He would probably burn the world down for you.

“I know you will,” you tell him and lay your head against his chest. Yoongi rests his head on the top of your head. Your bodies still sway with the music. Dancing. Dancing in your own little world in the middle of his studio. “I know you will.”

《Chapter Seven》

Tagged Readers:

@mggv97, @granataepfelchen, @kam9404, @svnbangtansworld, @futuristicenemychaos, @notarshia, @busanbby-jjk

[geneeste]

Creating a personal fanfic archive using Calibre, various Calibre plugins, Firefox Reader View, and an e-Reader / BookFusion / Calibre-Web

A few years ago I started getting serious about saving my favorite fic (or just any fic I enjoyed), since the Internet is sadly not actually always forever when it comes to fanfiction. Plus, I wanted a way to access fanfic offline when wifi wasn't available. Enter a personal fanfic archive!

There are lots of ways you can do this, but I thought I'd share my particular workflow in case it helps others get started. Often it's easier to build off someone else's workflow than to create your own!

Please note that this is for building an archive for private use -- always remember that it's bad form to publicly archive someone else's work without their explicit permission.

This is going to be long, so let's add a read more!

How to Build Your Own Personal Fanfic Archive

Step One: Install Calibre

Calibre is an incredibly powerful ebook management software that allows you to do a whole lot of stuff having to do with ebooks, such as convert almost any text-based file into an ebook and (often) vice-versa. It also allows you to easily side-load ebooks onto your personal e-reader of choice and manage the collection of ebooks on the device.

And because it's open source, developers have created a bunch of incredibly useful plugins to use with Calibre (including several we're going to talk about in the next step), which make saving and reading fanfiction super easy and fun.

But before we can do that, you need to download and install it. It's available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and in a portable version.

Step Two: Download These Plugins

This guide would be about 100 pages long if I went into all of the plugins I love and use with Calibre, so we're just going to focus on the ones I use for saving and reading fanfiction. And since I'm trying to keep this from becoming a novel (lolsob), I'll just link to the documentation for most of these plugins, but if you run into trouble using them, just tag me in the notes or a comment and I'll be happy to write up some steps for using them.

Anyway, now that you've downloaded and installed Calibre, it's time to get some plugins! To do that, go to Preferences > Get plugins to enhance Calibre.

You'll see a pop-up with a table of a huge number of plugins. You can use the Filter by name: field in the upper right to search for the plugins below, one at a time.

Click on each plugin, then click Install. You'll be asked which toolbars to add the plugins to; for these, I keep the suggested locations (in the main toolbar & when a device is connected).

FanFicFare (here's also a great tutorial for using this plugin) EpubMerge (for creating anthologies from fic series) EbubSplit (for if you ever need to break up fic anthologies) Generate Cover (for creating simple artwork for downloaded fic) Manage Series (for managing fic series)

You'll have to restart Calibre for the plugins to run, so I usually wait to restart until I've installed the last plugin I want.

Take some time here to configure these plugins, especially FanFicFare. In the next step, I'll demonstrate a few of its features, but you might be confused if you haven't set it up yet! (Again, highly recommend that linked tutorial!)

Step Three: Get to Know FanFicFare (and to a lesser extent, Generate Cover)

FanFicFare is a free Calibre plugin that allows you to download fic in bulk, including all stories in a series as one work, adding them directly to Calibre so that that you can convert them to other formats or transfer them to your e-reader.

As with Calibre, FanFicFare has a lot of really cool features, but we're just going to focus on a few, since the docs above will show you most of them.

The features I use most often are: Download from URLs, Get Story URLs from Email, and Get Story URLs from Web Page.

Download from URLs let's you add a running list of URLs that you'd like FanFicFare to download and turn into ebooks for you. So, say, you have a bunch of fic from fanfic.net that you want to download. You can do that!

Now, in this case, I've already downloaded these (which FanFicFare detected), so I didn't update my library with the fic.

But I do have some updates to do from email, so let's try getting story URLs from email!

Woohoo, new fic! Calibre will detect when cover art is included in the downloaded file and use that, but at least one of these fic doesn't have cover art (which is the case for most of the fic I download). This is where Generate Cover comes in.

With Generate Cover, I can set the art, font, dimensions, and info content of the covers so that when I'm looking at the fic on my Kindle, I know right away what fic it is, what fandom it's from, and whether or not it's part of a series.

Okay, last thing from FanFicFare -- say I want to download all of the fic on a page, like in an author's profile on fanfic.net or all of the stories in a series. I can do that too with Get Story URLs from Web Page:

The thing I want to call out here is that I can specify whether the fic at this link are individual works or all part of an anthology, meaning if they're all works in the same series, I can download all stories as a single ebook by choosing For Anthology Epub.

Step Four: Using FireFox Reader View to Download Fic Outside of Archives

This is less common now thanks to AO3, but the elders among us may want to save fanfic that exists outside of archives on personal websites that either still exist or that exist only on the Internet Wayback Machine. FanFicFare is awesome and powerful, but it's not able to download fic from these kinds of sources, so we have to get creative.

I've done this in a couple of ways, none of which are entirely perfect, but the easiest way I've found thus far is by using Firefox's Reader View. Also, I don't think I discovered this -- I think I read about this on Tumblr, actually, although I can longer find the source (if you know it, please tell me so I can credit them!).

At any rate, open the fic in Firefox and then toggle on Reader View:

Toggling on Reader View strips all the HTML formatting from the page and presents the fic in the clean way you see in the preview below, which is more ideal for ebook formats.

To save this, go to the hamburger menu in the upper right of the browser and select Print, then switch to Print to PDF. You'll see the URL and some other stuff at the top and bottom of the pages; to remove that, scroll down until you see something like More settings... and uncheck Print headers and footers.

Click Save to download the resulting PDF, which you can then add to Calibre and convert to whichever format works best for your e-reader or archive method.

Step Five: Archiving (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Here's the really fun part: now that you know how to download your fave fanfics in bulk and hopefully have a nice little cache going, it's time to choose how you want to (privately) archive them!

I'm going to go through each option I've used in order of how easy it is to implement (and whether it costs additional money to use). I won't go too in depth about any of them, but I'm happy to do so in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Option 1: On Your Computer

If you're using Calibre to convert fanfic, then you're basically using your computer as your primary archive. This is a great option, because it carries no additional costs outside the original cost of acquiring your computer. It's also the simplest option, as it really doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge, just a willingness to tinker with Calibre and its plugins or to read how-to docs.

Calibre comes with a built-in e-book viewer that you can use to read the saved fic on your computer (just double-click on the fic in Calibre). You can also import it into your ebook app of choice (in most cases; this can get a little complicated just depending on how many fic you're working with and what OS you're on/app you're using).

If you choose this option, you may want to consider backing the fic up to a secondary location like an external hard drive or cloud storage. This may incur additional expense, but is likely still one of the more affordable options, since storage space is cheap and only getting cheaper, and text files tend to not be that big to begin with, even when there are a lot of them.

Option 2: On Your e-Reader

This is another great option, since this is what Calibre was built for! There are some really great, afforable e-readers out there nowadays, and Calibre supports most of them. Of course, this is a more expensive option because you have to acquire an e-reader in addition to a computer to run Calibre on, but if you already have an e-reader and haven't considered using it to read fanfic, boy are you in for a treat!

Option 3: In BookFusion

This is a really cool option that I discovered while tinkering with Calibre and used for about a year before I moved to a self-hosted option (see Option 4).

BookFusion is a web platform and an app (available on iOS and Android) that allows you to build your own ebook library and access it from anywhere, even when you're offline (it's the offline bit that really sold me). It has a Calibre plugin through which you can manage your ebook library very easily, including sorting your fanfic into easy-to-access bookshelves. You may or may not be able to share ebooks depending on your subscription, but only with family members.

Here's what the iOS app looks like:

The downside to BookFusion is that you'll need a subscription if you want to upload more than 10 ebooks. It's affordable(ish), ranging from $1.99 per month for a decent 5GB storage all the way to $9.99 for 100GB for power users. Yearly subs range from $18.99 to $95.99. (They say this is temporary, early bird pricing, but subscribing now locks you into this pricing forever.)

I would recommend this option if you have some cash to spare and you're really comfortable using Calibre or you're a nerd for making apps like BookFusion work. It works really well and is incredibly convenient once you get it set up (especially when you want to read on your phone or tablet offline), but even I, someone who works in tech support for a living, had some trouble with the initial sync and ended up duplicating every ebook in my BookFusion library, making for a very tedious cleanup session.

Option 4: On a Self-Hosted Server Using Calibre-Web

Do you enjoy unending confusion and frustration? Are you okay with throwing fistfuls of money down a well? Do you like putting in an incredible amount of work for something only you and maybe a few other people will ever actually use? If so, self-hosting Calibre-Web on your own personal server might be a good fit for you!

To be fair, this is likely an experience unique to me, because I am just technical enough to be a danger to myself. I can give a brief summary of how I did this, but I don't know nearly enough to explain to you how to do it.

Calibre-Web is a web app that works on top of Calibre, offering "a clean and intuitive interface for browsing, reading, and downloading eBooks."

I have a network-attached storage (NAS) server on which I run an instance of Calibre and Calibre-Web (through the miracle that is Docker). After the initial work of downloading all the fic I wanted to save and transferring it to the server, I'm now able to download all new fic pretty much via email thanks to FanFicFare, so updating my fic archive is mostly automated at this point.

If you're curious, this is what it looks like:

Pros: The interface is clean and intuitive, the ebook reader is fantastic. The Discover feature, in which you are given random books / fic to read, has turned out to be one feature worth all the irritation of setting up Calibre-Web. I can access, read, and download ebooks on any device, and I can even convert ebooks into another format using this interface. As I mentioned above, updating it with fic (and keeping the Docker container itself up to date) is relatively automated and easy now.

Cons: The server, in whichever form you choose, costs money. It is not cheap. If you're not extremely careful (and sometimes even if you are, like me) and a hard drive goes bad, you could lose data (and then you have to spend more money to replace said hard drive and time replacing said data). It is not easy to set up. You may, at various points in this journey, wish you could launch the server into the sun, Calibre-Web into the sun, or yourself into the sun.

Step Six: Profit!

That's it! I hope this was enough to get you moving towards archiving your favorite fanfic. Again, if there's anything here you'd like me to expand on, let me know! Obviously I'm a huge nerd about this stuff, and love talking about it.

[witchygagirlwrites]

Back to You-Pt. 1/3

Greg "Mouse" Gerwitz X Reader

When Hank tells you he's hiring a new Tech expert the same week Mouse is due back stateside you never think to make the connection until he's standing in front of you and you're faced with every emotion you tried to bury for two years.

Warnings: I think maybe just some cursing?!

When your alarm went off you reached blindly for the button on top that would get you relief from the shrill noise. When you finally smacked it you pushed yourself into a seated position in the bed and reached for your phone that had an alert flashing on it and groaned to see it was a text from Jay that read He's coming home this week. He wants to see you. You shook your head and threw the phone behind you onto the bed. You couldn't deal with that. It'd been almost two years and the subject still hurt.

You glanced up at the dog tags hanging from the mirror on top of your dresser. The light streaming in the window reflected off the metal surface as if the entire world was meaning to drag your heart through the dirt. You brushed off the dreary feeling and kicked the blankets off your leg. A nice hot shower and some coffee was all you needed to feel human again.

When you walked into the precinct Trudy smiled at you from behind the desk, that smile growing when you held out one of the cups of coffee to her "Morning Trudy" "Morning sweetheart" She said with a nod as you headed up the steps towards intelligence. The fog you'd felt that morning was slowly beginning to lift. If you could dive head first into a case well that would be all the better.

---------

"What? No coffee for us?" Adam asked with a mock expression of hurt when you sat a cup down on Kim's then Erin's desk and stuck your tongue out at him "You see Ruz us ladies have to stick together." Hank shook his head with a laugh from where he stood talking to Jay and Al. "When you're through passing out coffee and busting Ruzek's balls I need to speak with you for a minute"

"Yes sir" you replied trying to remember if you'd done anything worth being yelled at for. He tilted his head towards his office so you followed him curious as to just what was going on.

----

"Have a seat" he said motioning to the chairs in front of his desk so you sat down. He walked around to sit in his chair, eyes never leaving you. "We're getting another tech expert in here soon" Oh so that's what this was about. Did he feel like you would say something against the new person in that slot?

"Sounds good to me. No offense to any of the team but we all sorta suck at that end. I mean I'm decent and I still suck compared to the skills we really need"

You were trying to make a joke and actually got rewarded with a half smile from Hank. "Good, I'm glad you feel like that. Thing is we don't exactly know when they're gonna start so I need you to install the new software that was sent over for the tech room downstairs" "Why me?" You asked suddenly wishing you had never picked up anything about computers.

He shrugged and said "Well out of all of us here you picked up the most skills. It's simple stuff really but anyone else I'm afraid they'd crash the entire system"

You weren't going to argue with him so you nodded "Yes sir. I'll go get started now so if we happen to have a case pop up later" You stood to walk out but stopped when Hank added "Thank you. I mean I know you don't have that detective shield for shit like this but it helps"

You smiled and said "Don't mention it boss. I get my hands plenty dirty in the field. Why not put some tech work under my belt?" Then walked out to head down to the tech room.

----------

You walked into the room and felt a chill run through you and suddenly wished you'd brought your jacket downstairs. The equipment in here had to stay a certain temp and it used to not bother you but now? It felt like a frickin ice box.

You sent Kim a text begging for more coffee and your jacket before picking up a new laptop that was still in the box and looking over the manuals that were with it. "Well let's see how much actually sunk in" You muttered to nobody in particular as you went to work.

When Jay left around lunch saying he had to run to the airport everyone still in the bullpen spun around to face him "Is Mouse coming home today?" Erin asked, glancing back at the hallway you'd have to come up through. "Yea. She knew it was this week but not today. He's been dying to see her and I really hope Voight isn't going to want him to start until I can ease it onto her" Jay answered as he pulled his jacket on. "Wait, he's the new tech guy?" Kim asked in shock.

"He knows this team and I know he can be trusted" Hank cut in from where he stood at his office door.

Adam let out a low whistle and when everyone looked to him he pointed at your empty desk "Any of you think about the shit storm you're bringing down on her?"

"Yeah! I mean Jay you should've told her and Hank! C'mon man why would you spring something like that on her?" Erin threw in knowing out of everyone she could get away with calling Hank out.

He faced her before saying "She's a strong woman Erin. She can handle it. We need him here to fill the position and she isn't going to argue something for the good of this unit. As for her personal feelings she didn't let what happened affect her on the job and I don't see her letting it now. When and if there is a problem I will handle it"

Jay pointed towards the door "Well I'm gonna go. All of you can curse me once I leave and try to convince Erin to kill me in my sleep" "Such bullshit" Kim muttered to Kevin who nodded in agreement. "I give it two hours before they're either fighting or doing something that shouldn't go down at work. The way the two were about each other, that doesn't disappear" "She was a wreck when he left. I'd put my money more on fight" Adam cut in earning him a glare from Kim. Al stood up from his desk and said "Whatever does or doesn't go down is between them" and that was the end of the conversation.

-----------

You were sitting in the middle of the tech room surrounded by new coms, new cameras,tablets and laptops currently growing a headache. "I hate this shit!" You groaned and heard your phone go off where you had sat it on the desk but at the moment you could've cared less about anything anyone was telling you via text. If you were really needed they'd send someone down after you. Hank had banished you to this tech hell and you would be damned before you headed upstairs in defeat.

Walking up the stairs to the twenty first was a surreal feeling for Mouse. The last time he'd been here you had left in tears after telling him goodbye.

Every day he regretted hurting you the way he had. You had been made to feel like you were forcing him to choose to do what he wanted to with his life or being with you. You'd taken yourself out the equation and his heart still hurt when he remembered your eyes that night. You had still written to him once a month.

It was less personal then if you'd sent a hallmark greeting card but it was at least a sign you were alive and remembered he existed. The letters had stopped the moment he'd told you he had a discharge date. He wasn't stupid. He knew you didn't want to see him but when Voight had offered his job back along with the perks he'd offered he couldn't say no. Even if you hated him he would be able to see you. He was willing to hide in the tech room all day to stay out your way but the truth was more than anything he wanted another chance with you.

Trudy spotted him first and an actual smile perked up her face "Oh my god! Mouse!" He was shocked when she came around the counter to pull him into a hug. "You look good Gerwitz" "Thanks Trudy and I heard congrats are in order. You got married!" He replied smiling when she showed him the ring. "I'm gonna take him up" Jay threw in nodding towards the steps. Trudy's face went blank with horror "Um Jay she's still down in the tech room" "Good thing we're going up first huh?" Jay responded, dragging Mouse up the steps by his arm.

"Guessing she doesn't know I'm coming here today and probably doesn't know about the job?" Mouse pondered as they headed up to the bullpen and groaned when Jay did a so-so motion with his hand "Oh for fuck's sake Jay! You shouldn't have sprung this on her!"

"That's exactly what I said!" Kim spoke up from her desk before standing to hug Mouse "but welcome back still" The overall greeting was welcoming back a family member but there was still a feeling of dread that came along with knowing they were welcoming one and putting another's heart at risk in the process. After Al hugged him he pointed him towards the stairs "Well kid why don't you go down to the tech room and rip the damn bandaid off?"

If there was one thing Mouse was certain would never change, it was Alvin Olinsky. That man called everyone's bullshit.

He headed for the stairs hearing murmurs behind him but focusing on the fact that you were in front of him.

-----------

"Ugh! You stupid son of a bitch I already did that! I think you just don't fucking like me!" Yes you were arguing with a tablet but damn, it had gotten on your nerves.

"Well sweetheart if it doesn't like you it's got really bad taste" You heard a familiar voice say from behind you, causing you to startle as you jumped to face Mouse who was standing in the doorway.

You could feel your brain fuzz out like an old tv as you looked at him. His shoulders were broader than they had been before, biceps straining against the material of his t-shirt with his movements. A layer of scruff covered his jawline and he was about three shades tanner than the last time you'd seen him. The chain of his dog tags sticking out his collar made you subconsciously reach for the chain you hadn't worn in a year, knowing it wasn't at your neck.

When he moved his left arm you could see the hint of a tattoo peeking out his sleeve and knew you probably looked like an idiot sitting there surrounded by equipment and staring at him slack jawed but you couldn't help it.

All the love you felt for him and all the anger you'd buried at how he'd broken your heart washed over you in a crushing wave and it took effort to get your brain started back up. "Greg" you all but whispered and when he smiled had you been standing your knees would've gotten weak "She remembers! Can I get a welcome back?" You mentally slammed the door shut on all the emotions threatnening to spill over and held up the tablet before saying "Welcome back now come fucking help me"

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

You could feel your hands shaking as Mouse helped you to set up all the new equipment in no time. "Guessing you're the tech person?" You asked, breaking the silence in the room. He glanced up from the laptop he was currently typing on and smiled, something so familiar it made your chest ache "Only if it's ok with you. Voight offered"

"Why wouldn't it be? We split before you left, remember?" You knew you sounded cold but you had to. You couldn't bear to let yourself slip around him or you'd be pulled in. You couldn't let yourself feel everything you wanted because what if you did and then he decided once more it wasn't enough? "How could I ever forget about you telling me you didn't want to be with me anymore?" He asked in a small voice and you felt tears spring to your eyes so you quickly got to your feet "Looks like you've got this. I'm heading up"

Mouse regretted the words the moment he said them. He'd promised himself he'd give you space and time but God being this close to you after so long and not being able to touch you, you barely looking at him. He'd broken your heart he knew that but he hadn't exactly escaped unscathed either.

He called your name when you sprung up to leave but you practically ran from the room. A part of him wanted to run after you but he knew now wasn't the time. This was your job and his now as well. This was also just his first day back in Chicago and Jay hadn't even warned you. He looked back down at the stack of equipment and let out a sigh "Welcome home Gerwitz" he mumbled to the empty room before starting to put everything in its place.

Part 2

[faretheeoscar]

(143)

Pairing: Nathan Bateman x gn!reader

--Warnings: Nothing more than Nathan being a pain in the ass and some sexual innuendos, fluff by Nathan standards--

Also this drabble is so very nerdish from my part, it started as a blurb in my head when I started learning coding lol

A/N: English is not my first language so I'm sorry if there’s any mistakes.

Word count: 600~

Dividers source: animatedglittergraphics-n-more

Blue is reader

Green is Nathan

#include <iostream>

int main() {

    std::cout << "// You work so fucking hard. Lunch?"

    std::cout << "// Nathan, seriously? You hacked into my work just to ask me out?"

    std::cout << "// Not hacking if it's my own software"

    std::cout << "// Whatever, I’m busy" << std::endl;

changeText.addEventListener("click", function() {

  changeText.textContent = "Text has been changed!";

});

    std::cout << "// Come on!"

changeText.addEventListener("click", function() {

 override

changeText.addEventListener("click", function() {

  changeText.textContent = "Text has been changed!";

});

    std::cout << "// Nathan, STOP disrupting my work, please?"

    std::cout << "// I will stop if you have lunch with me"

    std::cout << "// Not gonna even entertain you, I have a lot of things to work on and I have to finish them quickly"

    std::cout << "// You need to stop being so stubborn btw... you’re too tense... you’re gonna have an aneurysm or something if you don’t take a break...and have lunch with me?"

    std::cout << "// NO, let-me-work!!" << std::endl;

    std::cout << "C:\\Users\\Bluebook\\Documents> del \"code_file.txt\"" << std::endl;

    std::cout << "Are you sure (Y/N)?" << std::endl;

    std::cout << "Y:" << std::endl;

    std::cout << "C:\\Users\\Bluebook\\Documents> del \"code_file.txt\" Successfully deleted"

    std::cout << "// DID YOU SERIOUSLY DELETED ALL MY WORK OUT OF SPITE?"

    std::cout << "// Not spite, you needed a break. Now you have one."

    std::cout << "// Unbelievable"

    std::cout << "// Now, lunch?"

    std::cout << "// No, fuck you"

    std::cout << "// Tempting..."

    std::cout << "// ..."

    std::cout << "// 0——->"

.

.

.

   std::cout << "// That was a dick btw"

    std::cout << "// I’m actually quitting now for real…"

    std::cout << "// Like hell you are…"

    std::cout << "// Come on, don't be so sensitive, Jesus Christ" ;

    std::cout << "// You just deleted all my week’s worth job .l. "

    std::cout << "// Stop moping about it, I have a backup"

    std::cout << "// Then restore it" << std::endl;

    std::cout << "// Not until you have lunch with me."

    std::cout << "// I'm calling the chopper and packing my things…"

    std::cout << "// WAIT, fine! I’ll reinstate the code… you big baby."

    std::cout << "// I was just joking, ffs" << std::endl;

 

   std::cout << "C:\\Windows\\System32\\Bluebook\\Documents> rstrui.exe" << std::endl;

    std::cout << "Files successfully restored"

    std::cout << "// Happy now?"

    std::cout << "// Asshole."

    std::cout << "// Is that an invite or a statement?"

    std::cout << "// Take a wild guess."

    std::cout << "// Worth the try…"

    std::cout << "// Now, are we done with your temper tantrum? Can we eat now?"

    std::cout << "// I can’t stand you..."

    std::cout << "// So is that code for Italian or sushi?"

    std::cout << "// Sushi..."

    std::cout << "// I'll tell the droids to start preparing it then"

    std::cout << "// Okay, I’ll be down in 5 minutes just don't fuck with my work again?"

    std::cout << "// I promise, but only if you let me fuck with something else later ;)"

    std::cout << "// Fine…"

    std::cout << "// Can you indulge me in something else?"

    std::cout << "// You’re really testing me here"

    std::cout << "// For science?"

    std::cout << "// Be the sushi table?"

    std::cout << "// I’ll go get undressed…"

    std::cout << "// Fuck yeah! (143) <3 ."

    std::cout << "// I love you too" << std::endl;

    std::cout << "C:\\Windows\\System32\\Bluebook\\Documents> Save" << std::endl;

    return 0;

}

143 in coding means “I love you” btw <3

Reblogs and comments are kindly appreciated!

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[deathbypixelz]

Alright. I'm making this post because I was unpleasantly surprised to find Microsoft had forcibly downloaded an """"ai assistant"""" onto my computer (called Copilot), and because finding a site that actually told me how to kill it for good -- in clear, truly step-by-step terms -- was way harder than it needed to be.

Preface: this is only relevant if you're running Windows 11.

Here is your target:

If you see this logo on your taskbar -- or... have Edge installed on Windows 11 -- you've got Copilot. You can't delete it on its own, Microsoft has integrated it into the OS as best they can. The most you can do is disable it (instructions for which are at the very end of this post).

So... to REALLY get rid of it you need to uninstall Microsoft Edge, because it's a part of/reliant on Edge. A lot of bells and whistles of Windows are also reliant on Edge, like widgets, but I never use those. I use my PC almost exclusively for gaming, and I don't want this slimy "ai" shit on my computer. I use Firefox anyway. Edge can go die as far as I'm concerned.

Here's the actual steps, copy-pasted from a website that took me way too long to find. It also really makes my browser chug for some reason, which is why I'm copy-pasting the whole thing. If you still want to look at the site itself, put it in reader view as fast as you can (link to site).

1.) Open Microsoft Edge, type "edge://settings/help" in the address bar, and then press Enter.

2.) Click "About Microsoft Edge" at the bottom of the left-hand pane. Copy the version number at the top of the screen, under Microsoft Edge.

3.) Press Windows Key + S to open Windows Search.

4.) Type "Command Prompt", right-click the result, and then select "Run as Administrator".

5.) The User Account Control (UAC) prompt will appear. Click "Yes".

6.) Navigate to Edge’s “Installer” directory by using the cd command. Depending on which directory your Command Prompt opens in by default, you may need to use the "cd .." command to go back a level or two.

Once ready, run this command:

cd “Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\Version Number\Installer”

Replace "Version Number" with your actual version number copied earlier.

7.) Next, run this command to uninstall Microsoft Edge:

setup –uninstall –force-uninstall –system-level

((It will look like nothing happened! Don't worry!))

8.) Restart your PC for the changes to take place.

((HOWEVER, Windows will try to reinstall it the next time your PC updates (or whenever it feels like it lol) so there's a second half to this))

1.) Press Windows Key + R to open Run.

2.) Type "regedit" in the text box and click OK to open the Registry Editor.

3.) The User Account Control (UAC) prompt will appear. Click "Yes".

4.) In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\SOFTWARE\Microsoft.

5.) Right-click the "Microsoft" folder, hover your cursor over "New", and then select "Key".

6.) Rename the new Key to "EdgeUpdate".

7.) Right-click EdgeUpdate, hover your cursor over "New", and then select "DWORD (32-bit) Value".

8.) Right-click the new value, which is currently named "New Value #1".

9.) Select "Rename" from the context menu.

10.) Rename the value to "DoNotUpdateToEdgeWithChromium".

11.) Right-click the newly-named DoNotUpdateToEdgeWithChromium value and select "Modify" from the context menu.

12.) The Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value window will appear. Change the Value data to "1" and then click OK.

((You are now free. If you ever run into a really serious, unavoidable issue with your OS that's clearly a result of Edge being gone, you can redownload it like a regular app. But you should be fine.))

((And, if for some reason you want still want Edge around but just want the copilot thing gone, here's what you do:

The command, for ease of copy-pasting: reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot /v TurnOffWindowsCopilot /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

You can't actually truly delete Copilot (without deleting Edge), only disable it. And as the reply says, you do have to do this every time you turn the computer on. I haven't tested that myself, but I believe it. I assume/hope that excludes just waking the computer up after it goes to sleep, but I don't know for sure.))

[novella-november]

Saw your post about dictating your novel instead of writing and wanted to ask more about your process if that's okay!

Do you find that when you dictate, most revisions you make are mostly grammar-related, etc? Or are you also doing line-level revisions?

My hesitation with dictation is that I'm a far more eloquent writer when I type. When I dictate my story, the quality of my writing takes a massive nosedive, and I rewrite most of it. I'm unsure if this improves with more practice or if it simply indicates that diction isn't for me.

I'd love your thoughts on this!

Most of the errors I am seeing with the dictation method is the lack of "quotation marks" around dialogue, excessive or inadequate punctuation, and a few words being misheard by the voice recognition and coming out as an incorrect word or name.

Especially while I am dictating I am making sure to include dialogue tags so it'll be easier to go back and edit for proper punctuation and word choice later on, most of the words coming out incorrectly are easy to sound-out, or I'll fix them as I spot them.

For me, the hard part is writing it down to begin with, so even if I do rewrite an entire paragraph later that was originally written with voice to text, that's still a lot easier for me than never having written it in the first place :)

Before I even consider beta readers my entire first draft is going to be very heavily edited and proofread, so a few errors now that are easy to fix later are worth being able to write so much so consistently in my free time!

As for eloquence of typing vs dictation, it is probably simply a matter of practice, perhaps using a software that is able to learn from your voice (just make sure you check any privacy policy to make sure its something your comfortable with using!) and of course, nothing has to come out perfect the first time, and its perfectly fine (and normal!) to rewrite scenes and entire sections of your story, practice makes perfect!

Your preferences will really boil down to "Write a lot faster in a span of time with slightly more editing time down the line" vs "write at a slower pace but needs less revision later"; if you're not sure, I recommend just opening a blank document, and reading aloud some text you've already written, and see how well the dictation works to capture it and if you're satisfried with the speed.

My current method of using it is having my bluetooth headphones paired with my desktop, and turning on voice to text using the windows+H key as needed for dictation.

[moonlit-tulip]

What's your favorite ebook-compatible reading software? Firefox EPUBReader isn't great, but I'm not what, if anything, works better.

Very short answer: for EPUBs, on Windows I use and recommend the Calibre reader, and on iOS I use Marvin but it's dying and no longer downloadable so my fallback recommendation is the native Apple Books app; for PDFs, on Windows I use Sumatra, and on iOS I use GoodReader; for CBZs, I use CDisplayEx on Windows and YACReader on iOS; and I don't use other platforms very often, so I can't speak as authoritatively about those, although Calibre's reader is cross-platform for Windows/Mac/Linux, and YACReader for Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android, so they can serve as at least a minimum baseline of quality against which alternatives can be compared for those platforms.

Longer answer:

First off, I will say: yeah, Firefox EPUBReader isn't great. Neither, really, are most ebook readers. I have yet to find a single one that I'm fully satisfied with. I have an in-progress project to make one that I'm fully satisfied with, but it's been slow, probably isn't going to hit 1.0.0 release before next year at current rates, and isn't going to be actually definitively the best reader on the market for probably months or years post-release even assuming I succeed in my plans to keep up its development. So, for now, selection-of-ebook-readers tends to be very much a matter of choosing the best among a variety of imperfect options.

Formats-wise, there are a lot of ebook formats, but I'm going to collapse my answers down to focusing on just three, for simplicity. Namely: EPUB, PDF, and CBZ.

EPUB is the best representative of the general "reflowable-text ebook designed to display well on a wide variety of screens" genre. Other formats of similar nature exist—Kindle's MOBI and AZW3 formats, for instance (the latter of which is, in essence, just an EPUB in a proprietary Amazon wrapper)—but conversion between formats-in-this-broad-genre is generally pretty easy and not excessively lossy, so you're generally safe to convert to EPUB as needed if you've got different formats-in-this-genre and a reader that doesn't support those formats directly. (And it's rare for a program made by anyone other than Amazon to work for non-EPUB formats-in-this-genre and not for EPUBs.)

PDF is a pretty unique / distinctive format without any widely-used alternatives I'm aware of, unless you count AZW4 (which is a PDF in a proprietary Amazon wrapper). It's the best format I'm aware of for representations of books with rigid non-reflowable text-formatting, as with e.g. TTRPG rulebooks which do complicated things with their art-inserts and sidebars.

And CBZ serves here as a stand-in for the general category of "bunch of images in an archive file of some sort, ordered by filename", which is a common format for comics. CBZ is zip-based, CBR is RAR-based, CB7 is 7-zip-based, et cetera; but they're easy to convert between one another just by extracting one and then re-archiving it in one's preferred format, and CBZ is the most commonly distributed and the most commonly supported by readers, so it's the one I'm going to focus on.

With those prefaces out of the way, here are my comprehensive answers by (platform, format) pair:

Browser, EPUB

I'm unaware of any good currently-available browser-based readers for any of the big ebook formats. I've tried out EPUBReader for Firefox, as well as some other smaller Firefox-based reader extensions, and none of them have impressed me. I haven't tested any Chrome-based readers particularly extensively, but based on some superficial testing I don't have the sense that options are particularly great there either.

This state of affairs feels intuitively wrong to me. The browser is, in a significant sense, the natural home for EPUB-like reflowable-text ebooks, to a greater degree than it's the natural home for a great many of the other things people manage to warp it into being used for; after all, EPUBs are underlyingly made of HTML-file-trees. My own reader-in-progress will be browser-based. But nonetheless, for now, my advice for browser-based readers boils down to "don't use them unless you really need to".

If you do have to use one, EPUBReader is the best extension-based one I've encountered. I have yet to find a good non-extension-based website-based one, but am currently actively in the market for such a thing for slightly-high-context reasons I'll put in the tags.

Browser, PDF

Firefox and Chrome both have built-in PDF readers which are, like, basically functional and fine, even if not actively notably-good. I'm unaware of any browser-based PDF-reading options better than those two.

Browser, CBZ

If there exist any good options here, I'm not aware of them.

Windows, EPUB

Calibre's reader is, unfortunately, the best on the market right now. It doesn't have a very good scrolled display mode, which is a mark against it by my standards, and it's a bit slow to open books and has a general sense of background-clunkiness to its UI, but in terms of the quality with which it displays its content in paginated mode—including relatively-uncommon sorts of content that most readers get wrong, like vertical text—it's pretty unparalleled, and moreover it's got a generally wider range of features and UI-customization options than most readers offer. So overall it's my top recommendation on most axes, despite my issues with it.

There's also Sigil. I very emphatically don't actually recommend Sigil as a reader for most purposes—it's marketed as an EPUB editor, lacks various features one would want in a reader, and has a much higher-clutter UI than one would generally want in a reader—but its preview pane's display engine is even more powerful than Calibre's for certain purposes—it can successfully handle EPUBs which contain video content, for instance, which Calibre falls down on—so it can be a useful backup to have on hand for cases where Calibre's display-capabilities break down.

Windows, PDF

I use SumatraPDF and think it's pretty good. It's very much built for reading, rather than editing / formfilling / etc.; it's fast-to-launch, fast-to-load-pages, not too hard to configure to look nice on most PDFs, and generally lightweight in its UI.

When I need to do fancier things, I fall back on Adobe Reader, which is much more clunky on pretty much every axis for purposes of reading but which supports form-filling and suchlike pretty comprehensively.

(But I haven't explored this field in huge amounts of depth; plausibly there exist better options that I'm unaware of, particularly on the Adobe-reader-ish side of things. (I'd be a bit more surprised if there were something better than SumatraPDF within its niche, for Windows, and very interested in hearing about any such thing if it does exist.))

Windows, CBZ

My usual CBZ-reader for day-to-day use—which I also use for PDF-based comics, since it has various features which are better than SumatraPDF for the comic-reading use case in particular—is an ancient one called CDisplayEx which, despite its age, still manages to be a solid contender for best in its field; it's reasonably performant, it has most of the features I need (good handling of spreads, a toggle for left-to-right versus right-to-left reading, a good set of options for setting how the pages are fit into the monitor, the ability to force it forward by just one page when it's otherwise in two-page mode, et cetera), and in general it's a solid functional bit of software, at least by the standards of its field.

The reason I describe CDisplayEx as only "a solid contender for" best in its field, though, is: recently I had cause to try out YACReader, a reader I tried years ago on Windows and dismissed at the time, on Linux; and it was actually really good, like basically as good as CDisplayEx is on Windows. I haven't tried the more recent versions of YACReader on Windows directly, yet; but it seems pretty plausible that my issues with the older version are now resolved, that the modern Windows version is comparable to the Linux version, and therefore that it's on basically the same level as CDisplayEx quality-wise.

Mac, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

I don't use Mac often enough to have opinions here beyond "start with whatever cross-platform thing is good elsewhere, as a baseline, and go on from there". Don't settle for any EPUB reader on Mac worse than the Calibre one, since Calibre works on Mac. (I've heard vague good things about Apple's native one; maybe it's actually a viable option?) Don't settle for any CBZ reader on Mac worse than YACReader, since YACReader works on Mac. Et cetera. (For PDFs I don't have any advice on what to use even as baseline, unfortunately; for whatever reason, PDF readers, or at least the better ones, seem to tend not to be natively cross-platform.)

Linux, EPUB

For the most part, my advice is the same as Windows: just go with the Calibre reader (and maybe use Sigil as a backup for edge cases). However, if you, like me, prefer scrolled EPUB-reading over paginated EPUB-reading, I'd also suggest checking out Foliate; while it's less powerful than the Calibre reader overall, with fewer features and more propensity towards breaking in edge cases, it's basically functional for normal books lacking unusual/tricky formatting, and, unlike Calibre, it has an actually-good scrolled display mode.

Linux, PDF

I have yet to find any options I'm fully satisfied with here, for the "fast launch and fast rendering and functional lightweight UI" niche that I use SumatraPDF for on Windows. Among the less-good-but-still-functional options I've tried out: SumatraPDF launched via Wine takes a while to start up, but once launched it has the usual nice SumatraPDF featureset. Zathura with the MuPDF backend is very pleasantly-fast, but has a somewhat-unintuitive keyboard-centric control scheme and is hard to configure. And qpdfview offers a nice general-purpose PDF-reading UI, including being quick to launch, but its rendering backend is slower than either Sumatra's or Zathura's so it's less good for paging quickly through large/heavy PDFs.

Linux, CBZ

YACReader, as mentioned previously in the Windows section, is pretty definitively the best option I've found here, and its Linux version is a solid ~equal to CDisplayEx's Windows version. Like CDisplayEx, it's also better than more traditional PDF readers for reading PDF-based comics.

iOS/iPadOS, EPUB

My current main reading app is Marvin. However, it hasn't been updated in years, and is no longer available on the app store, so I'm currently in the process of getting ready to migrate elsewhere in anticipation of Marvin's likely permanent breakage some time in the next few years. Thus I will omit detailed discussion of Marvin and instead discuss the various other at-least-vaguely-comparably-good options on the market.

For general-purpose reading, including scrolled reading if that's your thing, Apple's first-party Books app turns out to be surprisingly good. It's not the best in terms of customization of display-style, but it's basically solidly functional, moreso than the vast majority of the apps on the market.

For reading of books with vertical text in particular, meanwhile, I use Yomu, which is literally the only reader I've encountered to date on any platform which has what I'd consider to be a sensible and high-quality way of handling scrolled reading of vertical-text-containing books. While I don't recommend it for more general purposes, due to awkward handling of EPUBs' tables of contents (namely, kind of ignoring them and doing its own alternate table-of-contents thing it thinks is better), it is extremely good for that particular niche, as well as being more generally solid-aside-from-the-TOC-thing.

iOS/iPadOS, PDF

I use GoodReader. I don't know if it's the best in the market, but it's very solidly good enough for everything I've tried to do with it thus far. It's fast; its UI is good at getting out of my way, while still packing in all the features I want as options when I go looking for them (most frequently switching between two-page-with-front-cover and two-page-without-front-cover display for a given book); also in theory it has a bunch of fancy PDF-editing features for good measure, although in practice I never use those and can't comment on their quality. But, as a reader, it's very solidly good enough for me, and I wish I could get a reader like it for desktop.

iOS/iPadOS, CBZ

YACReader has an iOS version; following the death of my former favorite comic reader for iOS (ComicRack), it's very solidly the best option I'm aware of on the market. (And honestly would be pretty competitive even if ComicRack were still around.) I recommend it here as I do on Linux.

Android, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

It's been years since I've had an Android device, and accordingly have very little substantial advice here. (I'm expecting to move back to Android for my next phone-and-maybe-also-tablet, out of general preferring-open-hardware-and-software-when-practical feelings, but it'll plausibly be a while, because Apple is much better at long-lasting hardware and software than any Android manufacturers I'm aware of.) For EPUB, I recall Moon+ reader was the best option I could find back circa 2015ish, but that's long enough ago that plausibly things have changed substantially at this point. For CBZ, both YACReader and CDisplayEx have Android versions, although I haven't tried either and so can't comment on their quality. For PDF, you're on your own; I have no memories or insights there.

Conclusion

...and that's it. If there are other major platforms on which ebook-reader software can be chosen, I'm failing to think of them currently, and this is what I've got for all platforms I have managed to think of.

In the future... well, I hope my own reader-in-development (slated for 1.0.0 release as a Firefox extension with only EPUB support, with ambitions of eventually expanding to cover other platforms and other formats) will one day join this recommendation-pile, but it's currently not yet in anything resembling a recommendable form. And I hope that there are lots of good reader-development projects in progress that I currently don't know about; but, if there are, I currently don't know about them.

So, overall, this is all I've got! I hope it's helpful.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I WOULD HAVE BEEN DELIGHTED IF I'D REALIZED IN COLLEGE THAT THERE WERE PARTS OF THE WORLD THAT DIDN'T CORRESPOND TO REALITY, AND WORKED FROM THAT

So were the early Lisps. We're Jeff and Bob and we've built an easy to use web-based database as a system to allow people to collaboratively leverage the value of whatever solution you've got so far. This probably indicates room for improvement.1 What would you pay for right now?2 If you'd proposed at the time.3 I've read that the same is true in the military—that the swaggering recruits are no more likely to know they're being stupid. And yet by far the biggest problem.4

If you want to keep out more than bad people. I am self-indulgent in the sense of being very short, and also on topic. Another way to figure out how to describe your startup in one compelling phrase. Most people have learned to do a mysterious, undifferentiated thing we called business. The Facebook was just a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a programming language unless it's also the scripting language of MIT. Committees yield bad design. When you demo, don't run through a catalog of features. A couple weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. If we want to fix the bad aspects of it—the things to remember if you want to start startups, they'll start startups.5

Cobol and hype Ada, Java also play a role—but I think it is the worry that made the broken windows theory famous, and the larger the organization, the more extroverted of the two paths should you take?6 And a safe bet is enough.7 Though in a sense attacking you. They didn't become art dealers after a difficult choice between that and a career in the hard sciences.8 You can, however, which makes me think I was wrong to emphasize demos so much before. Kids help. But the short version is that if you trust your instincts about people. That's becoming the test of mattering to hackers. One of the most successful startups almost all begin this way.9

But something is missing: individual initiative. He got away with it, but unless you're a captivating speaker, which most hackers aren't, it's better to play it safe. But if you want to avoid writing them. What you should learn as an intellectual exercise, even though you won't actually use it: Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you think What did I do before x? If you had a handful of users who love you, and merely to call it an improved version of Python.10 The political correctness of Common Lisp probably expected users to have text editors that would type these long names for them. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than the company that solved that important problem. Since a successful startup founder, but that has not stood in the way of redesign.11 I would have been the starting point for their reputation. Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in a big program.

I know because I've seen it burn off.12 For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. Maxim magazine publishes an annual volume of photographs, containing a mix of pin-ups and grisly accidents. One of the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people who use the phrase software engineering shake their heads disapprovingly. We've barely given a thought to how to live with it. The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it.13 It took us a few iterations to learn to trust our senses. Gmail was one of the founders are just out of college, or even make sounds that tell what's happening.

And odds are that is in fact normal in a startup. For example, if you're starting a company whose only purpose is patent litigation. You're just looking for something to spark a thought.14 Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted.15 There is not a lot of wild goose chases, but I've never had a good way to look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. What sort of company might cause people in the future, and the classics.16 001 and understood it, for example. One trick is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. You need to use a trojan horse: to give people an application they want, including Lisp.

Notes

So it may be that some of the economy. Angels and super-angels will snap up stars that VCs miss.

I mean no more than most people, you would never have come to accept that investors are induced by startups is that they've focused on different components of it. I thought there wasn't, because people would do fairly well as down.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit adds: Paul Buchheit for the linguist and presumably teacher Daphnis, but it is. We're sometimes disappointed when a startup is taking the Facebook that might work is a sufficiently identifiable style, you should probably be multiple blacklists. I'm compressing the story.

Good and bad luck. The solution was a new search engine, but it is very polite and b the local startups also apply to the prevalence of systems of seniority. The University of Vermont: The First Industrial Revolution happen earlier? An earlier version of the companies fail, no matter how good you are listing in order to test whether that initial impression holds up.

So what ends up happening is that the lack of transparency. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912. Loosely speaking.

On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005. Ashgate, 1998. No big deal.

Strictly speaking it's impossible to succeed in a startup to be important ones. The earnings turn out to be significantly pickier.

Many famous works of anthropology. You have to disclose the threat to potential investors are interested in graphic design. Japanese are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves. Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce?

Microsoft could not have raised: Re: Revenge of the ingredients in our case, companies' market caps do eventually become a manager. I took so long.

The moment I do in a couple hundred years or so and we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and logic.

There need to import is broader, ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers. Parker, op.

We don't use Oracle. It should not try too hard to tell them what to think about where those market caps do eventually become a genuine addict. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell the product ASAP before wasting time building it. One YC founder who used to build their sites.

In fact the secret weapon of the web and enables a new airport.

An Operational Definition. The rest exist to satisfy demand among fund managers for venture capital as an idea that was more rebellion which can vary a lot of face to face meetings.

And in World War II had disappeared in a startup you have the least important of the causes of the startup.

It's more in the old version, I want to give each customer the impression that math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is worth more, because the kind of social engineering—A Spam Classification Organization Program. I spent some time trying to describe what's happening till they measure their returns.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, Peter Norvig, Sarah Harlin, Jackie McDonough, Eric Raymond, Fred Wilson, Trevor Blackwell, and Dan Giffin for sparking my interest in this topic.

[sweetmidnights]

It Is the East and He Is the Sun-- Chapter 2

Pairing: Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor

Summary:

“I bet you $100 that he’s the reason Pez is late. That stupid, entitled motherfucker with his perfect fucking hair,” Alex lamented, rolling his eyes and slouching indignantly in his seat. It was stupid how soft his hair looked and even worse how much Alex wanted to feel it for himself.

“I really don’t think that Henry has control of the traffic patterns, Alex. You’re being ridiculous,” Nora chastised as Pez started to scoot down their row toward the seat next to her.

“Maybe not but the Mountchristen Corporation sure seems to think they are God and he is not exempt from that. Eat the rich.”

--

Or: The queer community theater AU that you never knew you needed. Alex is Romeo, Henry is Julien, and theater magic might just make these enemies fall in love.

Warnings: 18+, verbal ridicule/abuse, homophobia (If you would like to avoid the lines of homophobia, stop after reading "Henry could practically see the wheels turning in his head" and start again with "The phone lit up again, a text message with the preview hidden.")

AO3

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

After auditions at the Jup, Alex accompanied Nora back to the house that she and June had bought just a few months prior in South San Francisco. It was on the smaller side, only one floor with two bedrooms and one and a half baths. In the main section of the house was a decent-sized living room separated from a small kitchen by a wall with a breakfast bar carved out of its center, four stools tucked neatly beneath it. There was art covering the walls and plants nestled in every empty corner, on top of bookshelves and end tables. Nora kept an organized, complex watering schedule for each of the plants, much to June’s dismay. Her background in software engineering aided it in its interactive interface, the culprit of many a lonely night in bed as Nora used all of her free time to tend to this pet project. It all seemed to work out in their favor, though, as it was now in development with the company she worked for to be integrated into their next app release. And, every week, June seemed to come home with a new piece of art to add to their collection. Their most recent addition was a small painting inspired by Minerva Cuevas and her Feast and Famine show, the piece commenting on the exploitation of Latin America for food production. The week before that, it was a tarot deck reimagined for an intersectional, queer, trauma-informed reader with full-color art and shining golden edges. 

For dinner, Alex helped June with making empanadas and esquites using recipes they learned from their abuelita during their summers in Mexico visiting her. Nora watched on from the small table tucked at the end of the kitchen under a window as the siblings squabbled and took turns pushing each other out of the way when one would say something especially wicked about the other. The two were like peas in a pod, Alex always saying that he lucked out because he was born with a built-in best friend and June then would roll her eyes affectionately and say that after three blissful years as the only child, Alex came screaming into the world and she had not known a moment of peace since. 

After they ate, the topic of conversation shifted to the play and how Alex had received a callback for the part of Romeo. For a while, they focused on Alex’s excitement and how well he did at the audition. June even mentioned that she was going to talk to her boss at the San Francisco Bee about doing a piece on the Grand Jupiter and a review of the production. But, as it always did, Alex’s inevitable rambling tirade shifted to one particular Fox-Mountchristen with piercingly blue eyes and an offensively charming smile who just waltzed into auditions for the first time and took them by storm. He alternated between lamenting about how infuriatingly perfect Henry was and how ridiculous it was that not only was he singled out to read for a specific part but he got a callback on his very first try. 

“I just don’t understand why you’re so up in arms about this, Alex,” June’s voice rang from the kitchen, putting away the last dish from dinner as Alex sat sprawled on the couch, open Shiner in hand. Her wild, curly hair was tied into a low ponytail, some pieces left out to frame her face. There was a bit of soap smudged on her strong, Claremont jaw, one of the features Alex had always noticed when they would stand together in front of the bathroom mirror as children. They both looked so much like their father with their dark, curly hair and full eyebrows but they both seemed to have their mother’s jawline and June, their mother’s high cheekbones. 

“Because, June!” Alex exclaimed, free hand gesturing wildly. “Henry Fox-Mountchristen is the most insufferable man on the planet! How do you just walk into an audition for the first time and get a fucking callback for the lead?” 

“You might just be the most ridiculous person I know,” Nora chimed in from the loveseat, legs pulled to her chest and laptop resting on the top of her knees, the middle of her shirt wet from dishwater. June soon enough plopped down next to her and snuggled into her side, pressing a kiss to her cheek. 

“I am perfectly reasonable about this, you’re just a hater. You can’t just walk around getting everything handed to you on a silver platter just because you’re part of the richest family on this side of the planet and quite possibly the direct descendant of a Greek god. Damn cheekbones.”

“Okay, now you’re definitely exaggerating. They’ve got nothing on Bezos,” June replied, accidentally knocking her head into Nora’s laptop as she sat up straighter. 

“No, Bug, they’re like the Rockefellers of Great Britain. They’re old money. Henry probably sneezes into hundred-dollar bills,” Alex said, rolling his eyes and taking another swig of his beer. 

From the outside, it seemed like there was nothing that the Mountchristen Corporation didn’t have a hand in. They had started in the oil business in the early 1900s and expanded over the decades into manufacturing, political lobbying, healthcare, and most recently, technology. Everywhere Alex looked, there was another article about new assets acquired by the Mountchristens, new public policies being implemented with their support, new record-breaking profits, and exposés on their exploitation of resources and labor in the global south. It made Alex’s stomach roll to think about exactly how much wealth, how much power Henry had at his fingertips, how much damage and destruction that was born because of just one family. 

“You should know as well as anyone that family is not the only thing that dictates who a person becomes. If it were up to Mom, I would be the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg and you’d be the youngest person elected to Congress in this era. And for a while,  that is exactly what both of us thought we should do with our lives before we listened to our hearts,” June said, her eyes warm and inviting, sounding just like an older sister. “But, now I’m writing arts and culture articles for a local newspaper and you’re studying to become a civil rights lawyer.” 

“Okay, and?” Alex asked, crossing his arms in front of himself. “If I recall correctly, Henry is the very well-known face of Mountchristen Tech. Doesn’t exactly scream ‘I’ve rebelled from the status quo.’”

“All I’m saying is give Henry a chance. There might be more to him than meets the eye.” 

Alex sank further into the couch and felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Instead of taking a moment to even think about the possibility of June being right, he pulled the device out and looked at it. Across the top of the screen was a notification for an email from the ACLU DC, subject line reading “ACTION NEEDED: Interview Request for…” Alex felt his heart clench in his chest– it had been his dream since he decided on law school instead of politics to work for them, fighting for the rights of people who looked like him, who loved like him, who lived like him. But, at the same time, he would be leaving everyone and everything he had ever known and moving across the country by himself. He had stayed in Austin for college when his mom was elected governor and then followed Nora and June to Silicon Valley for law school when Nora was hired by a tech startup and June got her post at the Bee. He wanted this job more than anything but he didn’t want to have it at the expense of losing the people he loved. 

It was just an interview, right?

When Alex arrived at the Grand Jupiter the next day, coffee cup in hand, Henry was already waiting outside the emerald door, tugging on the golden handles once before dropping his hand to his side and leaning back. He was wearing a tidy grey suit with a matching grey tie, hair perfectly coiffed and glowing under the light above him. It had been dark for hours at this point, the winter sun setting before Alex had left his last class for the day– said class leaving Alex feeling deeply underdressed as he walked up to the taller man. With a pair of jeans and a Standford Law hoodie on, Alex couldn’t help but feel completely out of place next to someone in head-to-toe Burberry. 

“It appears we are quite early,” Henry said, tucking his hands into his pockets. 

“What, feel guilty for how late you were to auditions?” Alex replied, only a little bite to his words. There was a pained look on Henry’s face, one that Alex had never seen from him before. He wanted to ask why 

“Honestly, I felt terrible about it. I never want to disrespect Mr. Luna and all of the hard work he puts into the Grand Jupiter. He’s a godsend to this place and its people. I tried to send Pez ahead of me but the bugger wasn’t convinced I would still show up if I was left alone.”

A small smile spread on Henry’s face as he talked about Pez and Alex couldn’t help but smile, too. The response had surprised him, to hear the reverence with which he spoke of the director, someone who was also so dear to his own heart. Rafael had long been someone that Alex looked up to, who he wanted to emulate. As a teenager, Alex watched with bated breath as Rafael worked day and night during the Obergefell v. Hodges case as one of the junior lawyers. In all of the press coverage, there Rafael was, standing behind the lead attorneys as they fought for marriage equality. Alex Claremont-Diaz vowed from that day forward that no matter what he did with his life, he would make sure it was worthy of the generations of kids just like him who would see him and be inspired, too. 

“Let’s just go around back, I know Zahra has to be here already,” Alex said, hoping to diffuse some of the tension he felt in his chest at Henry’s words. 

Sure enough, when Alex jiggled the ancient knob on the stage door, it popped open and there Zahra stood with a binder in one hand, the other pressed against the doorjamb of the small office next to the bathroom. The nameplate on the door read Shaan Shrivastava, facility manager. Screwdrivers, gaff tape, and light gels were lining the various surfaces in the space, filing cabinets and rolling tool chests made the space feel even smaller. A box of donuts sat on a stool just inside the door. Alex snagged one as he passed.

“Those aren’t for– Yes, Alex, please help yourself, because you’ve been working so hard on the fly system today with the rest of the stage team,” Zahra said, already exasperated by the youngest Claremont-Diaz.

“Thanks, Zahra! I knew you would understand. It’s hard work.” 

Alex bounded past Zahra and into the furthest dressing room, dropping his bag like he owned the place. Henry watched from near the entranceway, hands still shoved in his pockets and unsure of where to go. 

“You may as well have one, too, Mr. Mountchristen,” Shaan said from inside the office, noticing even from the strange angle that Henry was feeling out of place, unsure of what to do or where to go. 

Henry walked into the small space and grabbed one of the sweets, opting for a simple glazed donut as opposed to the chocolate and sprinkle monstrosity that he watched Alex escape with. 

“Shaan, please, call me Henry. How are you today?” Henry asked with a warmth to his voice that was not often heard. He had become quite fond of Shaan over the years of knowing Frankie and consequently being dragged into helping with various projects. For the last production, Henry had been a stagehand, donning all black and moving set pieces, fixing microphones and facilitating quick changes. 

“I’m great, Mr– Henry. I finally was able to fix the rigging on the upstage curtains. I’ve been meaning to do it since closing night.” 

Henry laughed lightly and looked at his shoes, remembering the absolute nightmare that the upstage rigs became that final night and for no apparent reason. 

“A pain in the arse, that one. I’m glad you’ve gotten it sorted.”

Zahra, then, quickly shooed Henry out of the office and toward the dressing room that Alex had found himself occupying. Inside, Alex was kicked back in a chair, feet crossed and resting on the counter in front of the mirror, mouthing the lines written on a piece of paper in his hands. Henry’s breath caught in his throat at the sight of him, the warm light casting a glow on his features, making his dark curls shine. 

Alex must have heard Henry step into the room, quickly turning in his chair to look at him. 

“Mountchristen,” Alex said as a means of greeting, nodding in his direction and then turning back to the paper in his hands. There was no bite to his voice, a strange departure from what normally transpired between the two. 

“Fox,” Henry stuttered out. Alex swung his head around, eyebrows furrowed and mouth pinched together.

“Huh?” 

“I prefer to go by Fox, if it’s all the same to you,” Henry supplied, stilted and tense. He wasn’t sure why he said anything, well desensitized to the name his grandmother insisted her front-facing grandchildren maintain. But there was a tugging in his chest, an unfettered desire to hear it, if even just once. 

Alex looked Henry up and down, lowering the paper to his lap. He contemplated for a moment before shrugging, an air of indifference in his posture but the hint of a smile at the corner of his lips.

“Fox it is, then.” 

Henry smiled shyly at Alex and then turned from the room, exiting toward the sound of commotion on the stage. 

Standing in a half-circle downstage were three people, Rafael Luna with his clipboard and the other pair reading for the roles of Romeo and Juliet: Imani and Sunny. Imani was standing close to  Sunny, laughing brightly at something the other must have said. Imani’s teeth were bright in her mouth, framed by full, dark lips and her hair spilled in twists down the middle of her back. She stood several inches taller than Sunny thanks to a pair of well-loved combat boots. Sunny’s smile was more subdued, their laugh more of a wheeze through their nose, their eyes crinkled at the corners where thick, charcoal eyeliner was smudging after a long day of wear. The two were thick as thieves and one was never seen without the other whenever they could help it.

Henry shuffled further onto the stage and was welcomed warmly by all three. Alex joined them shortly after, Rafael giving him some shit and Sunny bartering some of their mom’s homemade kimchi in exchange for more of the tamales he had given them over the holidays. The familiarity of it all was overwhelming for Henry and he couldn’t help but think that maybe Frankie was right, maybe this was exactly what he had needed. 

Imani and Sunny auditioned first and their talent was undisputed. They both commanded the scene with such ease, the banter believable and entertaining. But as Henry watched on, he couldn’t help but feel like there was something missing between the two friends. Individually, they played their parts well, but there was something just wasn’t there, a certain je ne se quois. Henry, however, felt a cold pit start to form in his chest, wondering how he could ever measure up to the two seasoned actors. Anxiety settled in his bones, a familiar ache of uncertainty and inadequacy making his fingers tap quietly against his knee as he watched on.

“Very good, friends,” Rafael called from his seat in the house, scribbling some final notes onto his sheet. “But I wouldn’t expect anything less from the two of you.” 

For the first time since sitting down, Henry chanced a look in Alex’s direction. He was kicked back in his seat, ankle crossed over his knee, foot bouncing but otherwise looking unphased. There was a certain air of confidence about him. Henry was equal parts intrigued and envious by it. 

“Alright, let’s have Alex and Henry, please,” Rafael called into the space and Alex immediately hopped to his feet. 

“Hope you’re ready to see how it’s done,” Alex said to Imani and Sunny, ribbing the two of them with a smile on his face. 

“You’re full of shit, Alex,” Sunny called back, a tempered but warm smile on their face. Imani just flipped him off.

On the stage, Alex and Henry both clutched at the papers with their sides on them, the only thing indicating that Alex might be just as nervous as Henry. Which he was, of course. This was his last chance to play a lead role before he graduated, before his life would take him who knows where. No. He wasn’t going to think about that today, he needed to be in the zone. Alex shook his head and bounced on his toes a little bit, trying to shake the nervous energy from his bones. As a small child, his mom would call it wiggling out the sillies when he would just be thrumming with energy and nowhere to put it all, and even now, sometimes it was the only thing that helped. 

When Alex caught Henry’s eye, there was something there he couldn’t quite read, a glaze over his features, and the corner of his lips pinched. It was that same look on his face that he always seemed to have when Alex was around, that entitled, pretentious, holier-than-thou look on his face that drove Alex crazy. With everyone else, Henry was perfectly fine, kind even. But when it came to Alex, it felt like Henry would rather be anywhere except in his vicinity. 

So, when Henry started to fumble over the lines as they tried to read from their sides, Alex had half a mind to let him crash and burn; to let the man who was practically handed this role just like everything else in his life finally be forced into failure. But when he looked at Henry once more, at the way his knuckles were gripping at the paper and the light sheen of sweat on his forehead under the stage lights, Alex softened. He remembered his first audition, he remembered how nervous he had been. He thought about what Henry had said outside the stage door, about how much he respected Rafael and the work of the theater. 

He couldn’t let him drown. 

“Hey, Raf, can we have a second?” Alex called from the stage, not waiting for a response before stepping closer to Henry. A brief panic flashed over his features as Alex approached but Alex laid a comforting hand on Henry’s arm.

“Alex, I’m so sorry,” Henry started, scrambling for a better grasp on the paper in his hand. The edges were starting to curl from his grip. 

“Fox, breathe,” Alex soothed, watching as Henry flipped through several different emotions in the span of a few sections. When his eyebrows recovered from their trip to his hairline, his jaw unclenched and his shoulders slowly relaxed. He took a deep breath, in through his nose and out of his mouth. Alex flashed him a playful smile, throwing on his best Texas accent and clapping Henry on his shoulder.“Ain’t so bad, huh, sweetheart? You can do this.” 

If a shudder ran through Henry, Alex definitely didn’t see it or have any feelings about it. They began again. 

“If I profane my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:” Alex began, stepping forward and grabbing Henry’s hand, untangling it from its grip on his sheet. 

“My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

Henry looks over his lines briefly before looking up at Alex, flicking between his eyes, his lips, and back again.

“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,  Which mannerly devotion shows in this;” Henry returned, stepping slightly closer and placing his other hand on top of their conjoined ones.

“For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is a holy palmers’ kiss.” A current of electricity flowed between them where their hands connected, their chests rising and falling deeper, their lips slightly parted as they breathed each other in.

“Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?” Alex’s gaze turned wicked, a playfulness and a wanton desire curling around his lips.

“Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer,” Henry said with a feigned innocence, almost taunting Alex. “O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.” With his free hand, Alex half-folded his paper, bringing the back of his fingers up to caress Henry’s cheek.

Henry leaned into Alex’s touch, closing his eyes. “Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.” 

“Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.” Alex dropped the hand on Henry’s face bringing himself closer to the cheek and ghosting a not-kiss there before pulling back. “Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.” 

Henry opened his eyes, pulling back slightly from Alex, glancing down at his lines before pulling himself closer, leaning down. “Then have my lips the sin that they have took.” 

Alex snaked a hand around Henry’s waist after a last cursory glance at the words on the page and smiled at the taller man. 

“Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.”

Alex and Henry leaned together, warm breath hitting warm breath, ghosting their skin. Their foreheads nearly touched, their chests closer than they ever had been before. With closed eyes, Henry turned his head, slightly nudging Alex’s cheek with his nose. Alex tilted his chin ever so slightly toward the touch, shoulders rising and falling with his erratic breath. There was Alex and there was Henry and nothing else existed. 

“Incredible, guys!” Rafael called from the house, breaking Alex and Henry from their reverie. They both jumped back slightly, dropping hands and opening their eyes, Henry’s piercing blue thinned completely around his blown pupils. A pink blush tinged the tips of his ears and Alex could feel the warmth spreading in his own cheeks. 

“I could really feel that one,” Rafael continued with a laugh. “Thought you might actually go for the kiss.” 

“Fuck, me too,” Alex huffed under his breath so that only he could hear it. He had never had a scene feel so real before. The stirring in his belly and fluttering in his chest must have just been from being so deep in the character, that’s all. 

Rafael dismissed them all and promised a returned cast list in the very near future. Imani and Sunny met them on the stage and congratulated them both, fawning over each others’ performances and wishing them luck. Henry and Alex walked off the stage together, returning to the dressing room where Alex’s bag had been dropped. Henry lingered in the doorway, much like he had when they first arrived. 

“Thank you,” Henry said simply after a moment, the two words filled with all the things he couldn’t say. 

“Of course,” Alex replied, shrugging his shoulders, knowing exactly what Henry meant. “It’s just what we do here. We’re a community, a family.” 

Henry nodded once and turned on his heels, walking toward the sound of chatter in the facility manager’s office. 

Alex finished shoving his script back into his school bag and slinging it over his shoulder and making his way toward the stage door. 

“Alex is great. I really didn’t think he could do it, not like that,” Alex overheard Henry say to Shaan. Something prickled at Alex’s spine, crashing him down off his high. Was Henry seriously telling the first person he could find about how much he didn’t believe that Alex could actually measure up? That familiar sense of anger and distaste raised in the back of his throat, the one he had harbored since the day he met Henry. Another day, another fucking example of just how above everything Henry thinks he is. Of course, it was too good to be true. June could kiss his ass.

Alex stormed out the stage door, banging it open before he could hear Henry continue to Shaan. “I was frozen and Alex pulled me out of it. He’s already one of the best actors here but he’s also incredibly kind. I was ready to make a right fool of myself and he didn’t let that happen.” 

All the words Alex couldn’t hear. 

Henry rode the high of his callback with Alex all the way to the office the next morning. Mountchristen Tech was housed in a relatively tall building with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on every level. Large, revolving doors lined the main entrance into a lobby filled with chandeliers and slate-colored walls, modern chairs and tables, and an intake desk with three workers and the newest computers hot off the latest device release. The floors spanning upward were filled with every kind of worker– the lower floors home to engineers and designers with ping pong tables and nap pods, the higher floors with office after office of suit-clad business people and an abundance of single-serve coffee machines. The top suite was saved for those with the highest rank and often was empty save for the administrative assistants and Henry. But, today, the floor was filled with activity and chatter. Mary Mountchristen had made her monthly appearance that morning with Phillip in tow. Normally, Henry would try his hardest to interact with them as little as possible but today he was preparing himself for a meeting he had been dreading for weeks. 

A little less than a month ago, Pez approached Henry with a request, a proposition of sorts. The San Francisco youth center was in need of an executive director and Pez wanted it to be Henry. From the beginning, Henry had played an instrumental role in the development of the shelters, spending hours outside of his position at the Mountchristen Corporation working on details with Pez, strategizing, and even traveling to scope out possible build locations. The homeless LGBTQ+ youth shelters felt like Henry’s baby with the time and effort he had put into creating them. It had started out as a small favor to Pez, whose degree was in musical theatre, while Henry was finishing his MBA but turned into his passion project. Being forced into business and the closet at behest of Mary Mountchristen hadn’t come with many outlets for Henry to be himself; but using the knowledge and money he had obtained because of the dynasty to help queer kids was Henry’s perfect rebellion. 

Pez knew that Henry had been waffling with Frankie about leaving his job with Mountchristen Tech and Henry wasn’t naive enough to not recognize his request for what it was. But, Henry had scheduled a meeting with his brother and grandmother during the conversation anyway. He figured trying to get out of it could be a later Henry problem. Between his volunteer hours and his visits with Frankie, it had slipped his mind until his calendar had notified him after the chemistry read of his next day meetings. Still floating somewhere in the clouds after being on the stage, of reading with Alex, of performing queerness outside the four walls of his glass closet, he decided that maybe he should just go to the meeting and see what they say about him stepping down or stepping back to help Pez. 

Now, however, as the clock was about to strike 4 pm, Henry was feeling more frazzled and much less confident in his decision. But he stood and walked to Mary’s office anyway. And that’s what mattered, right? 

“The marketing numbers are finally improving again, Henry dearest. I was starting to worry you were going to run the division into the ground,” Mary said without looking up from the computer screen in front of her as Henry walked into the room. Her hair was in a short, razor-straight bob and she wore large, black-framed glasses atop sunken cheeks, complemented by a bright red lip and crooked, yellowed teeth. Her aesthetic had morphed over the years from a regal socialite to a fashion-forward CEO trying to stay relevant. Keyword: trying. Despite its evolution, however, there was one constant: her appearance was jarring, intimidating, and cold. 

“How could I ever do such a thing,” Henry responded, cold and emotionless. Mary’s words had a way of cutting to the bone before you even got a word in edgewise. It wasn’t uncommon for her method of greeting to be carefully crafted to position its recipient at the bottom of an already unfair hierarchy, disadvantaging them from the get against any attempt toward control. 

“You’ve never been one for the art of business, Henry. My hesitation in confidence of your success is not undue. Especially considering your choice to major in literature at university. Imagine if we hadn’t encouraged your graduate studies, then you certainly would have ruined what is shaping up to become our most lucrative asset of the new age.” 

Henry pressed his fingers into the palm of his hands, digging crescent moons into the soft flesh there as a pressure bloomed in his chest, tightening and tightening despite his best efforts against it. It took him back to a time long before the meetings and mandates, back when he was still small enough to ride on his father’s shoulders and yet old enough to wonder why– why he was so small, why he loved reading books when Phillip liked rugby, why the sky was blue, why their neighbor got a puppy for Christmas but Santa didn’t bring one for them, as well. He was small, curious, and full of wonder. But even with pudgy hands and rounded cheeks, he was not exempt from his grandmother’s ridicule. So as he ran towards his father’s arms, hoping to be held a little closer to the leaves of the trees, his grandmother chided him against such an unflattering display of affection and his heart had cracked in two. The small boy full of curiosity and wonder only learned one thing that day: his heart was much softer, much more delicate than was expected of him and he needed to hide it away behind blocks of cinder and cement to keep it safe. 

“I’m sure you didn’t call for a meeting with us just to hear Gran prattle on about your plentiful shortcomings. What is it that you needed?” Philip asked from his seat near but not next to Mary’s desk. He hadn’t always been so sharp with his jabs but after the passing of their father and his subsequent launch into the stratosphere of corporate power, he seemed to have traded his empathy and respect for something much darker. 

Henry took a deep breath and stepped closer to them both, fixing himself as a point in a triangle, sitting near Phillip at the clear glass table.

“I want to pivot in my career. I have been offered the opportunity to work with the Okonjo Foundation in a hands-on directorship of one of their youth centers. I believe this would be the best move I could take in advancing my career.”

He had practiced saying those sentences for hours leading up to this meeting, workshopping which words would be most effective and which ones would lay too much of himself bare for the wolves to eat. 

“Advancing your career?” Phillip asked incredulously. “You’ve gone mad, Henry. You will never be able to climb out there in the real world like you can here, with us.” 

“Phillip makes a compelling point, there is no opportunity like the ones we have afforded to you despite your misgivings.” Mary said, tapping her chin with a manicured finger.  “You’ve not got what it takes to fight alongside those of us who’ve made their life's work of being the best, of making the most money, of ensuring the success of the company no matter the cost.” 

“Being concerned with the welfare of those whom we employ and our impact on the environment are not frivolous misgivings that make me incapable of running a business,” Henry replied, feeling the skin under his collar starting to heat up. “If anything, it makes me better equipped for competing in an ever changing, ever growing society.” 

Before any response could be made, Henry’s phone vibrated on the table, lighting up with an email from queerlyproductions@grandjupiter.org, subject line reading “Congratulations! You’ve Been Cast!”. A brief rush of excitement flooded Henry’s body until he looked up and saw Phillip, too, staring at the words on the screen, eyes narrowing. The joy was quickly replaced with terror as Phillip’s mouth began to move and Henry could practically see the wheels turning in his head. 

“That cannot possibly be for you, Henry. Queerly Productions? The Grand Jupiter? You could not be so daft as to participate in such a thing,” Phillip said, disgust dripping from his voice. 

“Oh, I’ve heard of that little theater, the one where they put on all those little… performances,” Mary supplied, still processing. 

“It’s just a play, Phillip. It’s not a big deal,” Henry replied, trying to keep a cool facade. “I promised a good friend I would participate.”

“Not a big deal? No, it’s only the public face of our rapidly growing technology division participating in some gay little performance at a theater built for fairies,” Phillip replied, standing and beginning to pace. Behind him Mary started to put the pieces together. Henry’s heart clenched. 

“Henry Mountchristen, you know better than this,” Mary chided, remaining seated. “Need I remind you that you are to be leading a life worthy of the position you have been gifted at the hands of my and my husband’s hard work? And how easily it all could be taken away? Whatever did happen to Beatrice anyway? Once we closed all of her accounts and foreclosed her penthouse, I lost track of where she ended up in life. Washing dishes and sleeping in train stations perhaps?” 

Henry quickly stood to his feet, anger radiating from his bones, “Do not say her name. You don’t get to speak about her that way.” 

“It’s simple, Henry. We have given you the widest berth we could for your proclivities and dalliances. We have turned a blind eye to your Saturdays at that facility and the weekends you have spent backstage for this theater. But to act on stage in such a flagrant display of that behavior? It’s a disgrace to the family name.” Phillips words cut like ice in Henry’s chest. 

The phone lit up again, a text message with the preview hidden. Henry ignored it as the words spinning around him started to twist and coil in his mind, in his chest, in his hands and stomach. For his entire life, he had been told that who he was, was not good enough, was not tolerable, was not acceptable, was not right. To be faced with it again was nothing short of overwhelming and Henry questioned why he had ever thought any of this was a good idea. 

“Between your father and your sister, we have had to do more than enough damage control. You’re not leaving the company to go work with that center. We will do a press release about your volunteer work with that theater to clean up the mess you have made of your image. You are nothing without us, Henry, and you are right to remember that,” Mary said resolutely, leaving no room for argument or question. Henry felt like he was three feet tall. It was better he tucked his tail between his legs and left before things could get any worse. 

Checking the time on his phone and noticing the late hour, Henry finally unfroze from his spot standing between the two poles of a vicious magnet and made his way for the door.  Bea’s gig was to start within the hour. Without a final word, he left, grabbing his things from his office and making his way to his car. He sat behind the wheel unmoving for several long minutes that could have stretched into hours, cataloguing the sensations in his body. His heart was beating too fast, his breathing too shallow. His muscles felt like lead and his ear rung with a deep, deafening sound. It felt like he was plunging into cold water, the world around him muffled and out of reach. But as he catalogued all of these sensations and placed himself back into time and space, he felt himself begin to calm. And as every time before and every time that will come again, Henry continued forward. 

------

page divider by @firefly-graphics

please let me know what you think :) thank you for reading!

[elysianfieldsarchive]

The triumphant return of Mystery Month!

Are you guys excited? We sure are! We haven’t run Mystery Month since 2022, following a community-voted decision to alternate between Mystery Month and Drabblemania for our July events. And the results were amazing. We don’t like to brag (oh, who are we kidding, we LOVE to brag!) Drabblemania 2023 was a huge success. That said, we think the community chose very wisely, because our original Mystery Month is an event like no other, and we’re excited to get back to it!

If you weren’t around in 2022, or need a refresher, here’s the crux:

For the entire month of July (with a little spill over into August), participants will create works (either text-based stories or narrative artwork) that are five chapters long. Each chapter must respond in some way to a given prompt, and the works must be complete at five chapters – no longer, no shorter – with said chapters posted within the relevant time windows (detailed below).

The prompts will be issued every week, which means you have exactly one week to write/create art and post. Is it intense? Hell yes, it’s intense. But is it fun? Considering you guys wanted to keep the event, we’ll say hell yes, it’s a lot of fun.

Your contribution can be a sequel to any existing work, but it doesn’t have to be. The only requirement, beyond what we mentioned above, is that it be brand-new, not an existing WIP, and written specifically for this event.

PROMPTS? WHAT PROMPTS?

So glad you asked!

The prompts will be provided by…*drumroll please*… You all!

In 2022, we shifted format from the EF admin-provided prompts to community-sourced. It’s more fun that way (and ensures the participating Mods don’t have the unfair advantage of knowing what the prompts are ahead of time). So you, dear EF community, will be providing the prompts that will guide the works we create.

But as we are benevolent overlords, we will provide one (and only one) prompt ahead of time. And that is the fifth and final chapter must be HEA/HFN.

HOW DOES THIS WORK?

As in 2022, you are invited (nay, encouraged!) to enter as many prompts as you like in our prompt form. These prompts can be anything – a line of dialogue, an object, a character, a color, a number, a creature feature, a situation, etc.

The only consideration we ask you to make in providing prompts is to adhere to the Spuffy wisdom of Five Words or Less for each prompt to avoid stressing out our creators. Beyond that, get as wild and creative as you like! Each week of the event, the Mods will use randomization software to pick a prompt from the list you provide us, and that prompt becomes your challenge for that week’s chapter.

Even better? We’ll save the unused prompts to source again for the Drabblemania 2025 Bingo Boards.

And yes, we do have plenty of prompts left over from 2022, but Elysian Fields has grown a lot over the last two years, and we want to provide our new members with the chance to contribute to the prompt list. It’s a great way to give EVERYONE the chance to be involved – our creators, our readers, and even our lurkers.

I ONLY HAVE A WEEK TO CREATE A WHOLE CHAPTER? BETA AND EVERYTHING?

Yes, beta and everything. 

THAT’S SCARY

We know. :devil emoji:

SO WHAT IF MY CHAPTER ISN’T DONE IN TIME?

This is our most stringent time-sensitive event. The “This Story is Part of the 2024 Mystery Month Event” tick box will DISAPPEAR after the first week is behind us and any works that do not update within the specified timeframe will be removed from the event.

Should you not update in time, though, don’t worry. You are welcome (read: encouraged) to continue your work at your own pace. You simply won’t be eligible for the author award and are no longer beholden to the prompts.

WHAT IF I GET TO CHAPTER 5 AND I HAVE MORE STORY LEFT?

The intent behind this event is COMPLETED WORKS. So if you get to Chapter 5 and you don’t think your work is complete, your choices are:

Make it a series and continue it later, with your Mystery Month fic as the first complete work in that series.

Remove the work from the event and continue as you would a regular, non-event work. At this point, you are no longer beholden to the prompts or eligible for the author award.

WHAT ABOUT ARTWORK-ONLY STORIES?

We thought about it, but we feel that submitting individual artwork pieces wasn’t in the spirit of the event, which is to work a narrative together through the randomness of the prompts. So, for this event, to keep the playing ground even for all creators, all pieces submitted must be narratives.

BUT I CAN SUBMIT NARRATIVE ARTWORK, LIKE A COMIC OR SOMETHING SIMILAR, RIGHT?

Of course! We hope you do! Submitting narrative artwork will make you eligible for the artist award, as will creating a story banner or illustration for any event piece.

YOU KEEP TALKING ABOUT AWARDS! TELL ME MORE!

Happy to! Wouldn’t be an EF event without awards. And this year, the awards (as well as the event banner) were designed by our good friend @trevorcarlee (for those of you who don’t know Trevor, he’s one half of EF’s favorite podcast, Another Buffy Podcast, an amazing artist, animator, and all-around swell human being).

Look how pretty!

AS A REMINDER: We now have the new beta/artist fields to submit with your story info. You must use these fields to make sure your betas and/or artist receives their award. Commenters will need to leave a minimum of 15 comments between the posting window (July 1 – August 4) that contain at least 5 words (for any stories here on EF, not just on challenge fics).

If you have to withdraw your submission from the event after posting the first chapter, any betas or artists who helped will still receive their awards.

SO ABOUT THOSE DATES…?

Here they are! Please note, all dates start at 12:00 am site time and end at 11:59 pm site time of the day given. Site time is currently in Eastern Daylight Time, and site time is posted underneath the Shoutbox if you ever need to check.

Friday, June 28: Prompt One Announced

Monday, July 1st to Sunday, July 7th: Posting Window for Prompt One

Friday, July 5th: Prompt Two Announced

Monday, July 8th to Sunday, July 14th: Posting Window for Prompt Two

Friday, July 12th: Prompt Three Announced

Monday, July 15th to Sunday, July 21st: Posting Window for Prompt Three

Friday, July 19th: Prompt Four Announced

Monday, July 22nd to Sunday, July 28th: Posting Window for Prompt Four

Monday, July 29th to Sunday, August 4th: Fifth and final chapters to be posted

If you have any questions, please comment below!

ARE YOU READY?

START SUBMITTING PROMPTS!

[sororalice]

Book Review: “The Hierographicon” by Cory C. Childs

A font system for occultists and more from the author of “A Little Orphic Initiation: Three Easy Pieces for Prose, Poetry, and Piano”

Disclosure: I know the author/compiler of this text and software personally and work with them professionally. Nonetheless, I will endeavor to be as objective as possible.

“The Hierographicon” by Cory C. Childs, billed as a “Technical Toolkit for Esoteric Artist and Academic Esoteric Alike”, is actually a compilation of several texts, separated using a schema based upon the Greek Muses, an ennead of goddesses that, according to Hesiod, are the children of Zeus, king of the Olympians, and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. From this divine origin comes art in all its forms, and each muse is reflected in the present text as different aspects of the work are brought to light.

At the core of the work is the font system (for that is the only word I can use here, for this is no mere font) which is linked to at the beginning of the text and available free of charge. The installer for the font also installs a shortcut to activate the massive and complex system of shortcuts that make the font system usable.

As an offering, especially a free offering, the font system is excellent. It allows for a single Windows installation for an extensive number of languages and symbol sets useful to occultists (note that while I am sure classicists, philologists, and folklorists—among others—may benefit from this font system as well, I am primarily speaking as an occultist writing for other occultists). This font system works in any Unicode-based writing software (though, as noted in the text, it will argue with Microsoft Word’s shortcuts…solutions are offered within the text) and, for those with an urge to get under the hood, the entire Unicode specification document is included.

The use case given by our author for the font system is that of an occultist researching a particular spell in the PGM (the “Greek Magical Papyri”), which almost certainly contains several ancient languages the reader does not know. Speaking from experience, this can be a difficult task involving several reference texts in addition to the PGM itself, and part of why it is so difficult is because until now it has been nearly impossible to take accurate notes for later research and reference. This font system makes this laborious process much easier, allowing the working occultist to note down accurately exactly what the text says in a document for later work, which saves time and energy for the actual research required to make sense of the spell and make it useable.

The font system itself is articulated in to several subsystems, which are helpfully explained by the Muses in turn. In addition, several appendices are included. This is where our dear author shows their impishness as well as their literary ability. Among the appendices are works by the odd and interesting author of the 19th century, Isaac Preston Cory, with whom our author clearly feels a peculiar kinship and with which the average reader may feel varying degrees of interest, but the real gem of the work, at least from an aesthetic point of view, is our author’s brilliant and scintillating literary offering satirizing the best and worst of our little occult community.

About halfway through the book, in section Ω, right after the “Agrippa’s Pseudo-Koryphanean Alphabetic Correspondences” and right before “Orphicum Fragmenta” sits the sort of long, fantastical riff one would expect to run into into in the best of William S. Burroughs on a real good fix (think “Interzone”, “Nova Express”, or of course “Naked Lunch”) where the reader is led through a goth club filled with a menagerie of magickal helpers and hazards. While it is a short piece wedged in among the “real material” on offer here, I feel like this jazz solo of a short story can stand alone on its own merits.

All in all, “The Hierographicon” is an interesting, if uneven, contribution to occult literature. The font system will, I am sure, prove invaluable to many, and the various appendices are interesting enough to support their added weight. Well worth the price.

“The Hierographicon” by Cory C. Childs can be purchased on Amazon here (not an affiliate link): https://a.co/d/68rUK14

[giants-club]

In which Arilin says pointed things about open source, open data, and social media

N.B.: As I was writing this, an entirely different kerfluffle started about Meta, Facebook's parent company, working on their own ActivityPub-compatible microblogging service. While that may be a field of land mines topic worth writing about, it's a topic for a different day.

Cohost's recent financial update revealing they are running on fumes can't help but bring to my mind what I wrote back in December:

[Cohost is] still a centralized platform, and that represents a single point of failure. If Cohost takes off, it's going to require a lot more money to run than they have right now, and it's hard to know if "Cohost Plus" will be enough to offset those costs.

I have a few friends who are Cohost partisans. While its "cram posts into 40% of the browser window width" aesthetic is claws on a chalkboard to me, it's easy to see why people like the service. They have the nice things from Twitter and Tumblr, but without the ads and the NSFW policies and the right-wing trolls and the Elons. They don't have the annoying things from Mastodon---the nerdy fiddliness around "instances" endemic to any such service, and the prickly, change-resistant and mansplainy culture endemic to Mastodon in particular. They even have a manifesto! (Who doesn't like a good manifesto?) Unfortunately, what they don't have is a business model---and unlike the vast majority of Mastodon instances, they need one.

To the degree I've become a social media partisan, it's for Mastodon, despite its cultural and technical difficulties. I'm not going to beat the federation drum again, though---not directly. Instead, I'd like to discuss "silos": services whose purpose is to share user-generated content, from tweets to photos to furry porn, but that largely lock that data in.

Let's pick two extremes that aren't social media: the blogging engine WordPress, and the furry story/image archive site Fur Affinity.

WordPress itself is open source. You can put up your own WordPress site or use any number of existing commercial hosts if you like.

WordPress has export and import tools: when you change WordPress hosts, you can bring everything with you.

WordPress has open APIs: you can use a variety of other tools to make and manage your posts, not just WordPress's website.

Fur Affinity is not open source. If FA goes away, there won't be another FA, unless they transfer the assets to someone else.

You can't move from another archive site to FA or move from FA to another archive site without doing everything manually. You can't even export lists of your social graph to try to rebuild it on another site.

FA has no API, so there's no easy way for anyone else to build third-party tools to work with it.*

Cohost is, unfortunately, on the FA side of the equation. It has no official, complete API, no data export function, no nothing. If it implodes, it's taking your data down with it.

Mastodon, for all of its faults, is open-source software built on an open protocol. Anyone with sufficient know-how and resources can spin up a Mastodon (or Mastodon-compatible) server, and if you as a user need to move to a different instance for any reason, you can. And I know there are a lot of my readers who don't dig Mastodon ready to point out all the asterisks there, the sharp edges, the failures in practice. But if you as a user need to move to a different Cohost instance for any reason, there is only one asterisk there and the asterisk is "sorry, you're fucked".

I've often said that I'm more interested in open data than open source, and that's largely true: since I write nearly everything in plain text with Markdown, my writing won't be trapped in a proprietary format if the people who make my closed-source editors go under or otherwise stop supporting them. But, I'm not convinced that a server for a user-generated content site doesn't ultimately need both data and source to be open. A generation ago, folks abandoning LiveJournal who wanted to keep using an LJ-like system could migrate to Dreamwidth nearly effortlessly. Dreamwidth was a fork of LJ's open-source server, and LJ had a well-documented API for posting, reading, importing, and exporting.

To be clear, I hope Cohost pulls out of their current jam. They seem to have genuinely good motivations. But even the best of intentions can't guarantee…well, anything. Small community-driven sites have moderation faceplants all the damn time. And sites that get big enough that they can no longer be run as a hobby will need revenue. If they don't have a plan to get that revenue, they're going to be in trouble; if they do have a plan, they face the danger of enshittification. Declaring your for-profit company to be proudly anti-capitalist is not, in the final analysis, a solution to this dilemma.

And yet. I can't help but read that aspirational "against all things Silicon Valley" manifesto, look at the closed source, closed data, super-siloed service they actually built in practice, and wonder just how those two things can be reconciled. At the end of the day, there's little more authentically Silicon Valley than lock-in.

------

*I know you're thinking "what about PostyBirb"; as far as I know, PostyBirb is basically brute-forcing it by "web scraping". This works, but it's highly fragile; a relatively small change on FA's front end, even a purely aesthetic one, might break things until PostyBirb can figure out how to brute-force the new design.

[golmac]

Inform Basics (#17: your project)

I've said it before: we've covered enough material for you to start your own Inform 7 project, even if you are a beginner like me. Let's take a break from coding to talk a bit about development environments.

Have you downloaded an Inform 7 Integrated Developemnt Environment (IDE for short) yet? If you've been clicking on my code snippets, you've already encountered Borogove, an online IDE for not only Inform 7 but several other IF development platforms. Its ability to share live snippets of code that are fully functional in many forum softwares is rather amazing and makes it easer to assist other developers in need.

Nevertheless, I don't recommend it for creating a full-fledged game. Why is that?

No external file support for features like images, sound, and other shared documents.

The Index is not fully functional, as it does not contain links to either default or custom actions.

Borogove does not support Inform 7's table of contents feature (more on this in a minute).

My understanding is that it does support external files for Inkle and others, but not Inform 7. While I encourage using the snippets as a great way to share and demonstrate code, Borogove falls short of the standard Inform 7 IDEs. Windows, MacOS, and Linux are supported. You can find and download the latest versions here:

Note that Windows Defender and other antivirus softwares tend to mistakenly flag the interpreter executables--git, frotz, and glulxe--as malicious. This has been reported to Microsoft repeatedly, but the files have yet to be whitelisted. If you get an error about these files, you can consider it a false positive.

After installing the IDE, you'll find a two-panel layout. By default, the left pane is for entering and reading source code, while the right pane contains a playable instance of your compiled code. You can compile and recompile by clicking "go" at the top-left of the application window.

My practice is to create a backup of a project every couple of days, while compiling frequently as I work. In informal polling, Inform 7 authors of varying levels of skill tend to do the same.

On to the main purpose of this post: using Inform 7's built-in features to organize your program. Let's look at an automatically generated table of contents for Repeat the Ending, which is among the larger (code-wise) Inform 7 games. The left-hand pane of the IDE shows tabs at the right and top edges. The top tabs are "source" and "contents." This is a screenshot of the contents tab.

See the slider at the bottom? Inform 7's automatically generated TOC features five tiers by default, and the slider can be used to dictate the level of detail displayed. Those tiers are as follows:

Volume (top level)

Book

Part

Chapter

Section (bottom level)

We can use these tiers in our code, and the IDE will detect them automatically. The practice looks like this:

Volume 1 - Global

It's as simple as that. We have a lot of freedom in what we say there. That isn't to say there aren't restrictions:

The heading must have a blank line above and below it.

The heading cannot contain characters that have specific functions in Inform 7 code. No periods, colons, semicolons, and the like.

The heading must begin with one of the five designations (volume, book, part, chapter, and section)

You have a lot of freedom in terms of how to order your code. I've gotten the impression that I do things differently, but I like the way my approach works.

For top-level headings, I used the following:

global: used to define verbs, data, kinds, variables, the player characters, and so forth. All things that apply to the game and its world generally.

the game: the actual geography, things, and specific action responses.

the companion text: the entirety of the Reader's Guide to Repeat the Ending.

the artwork: I chose to maintain the rules governing the display of artwork and alt descriptions separately.

mix and match: a true mixture of various late stage requirements.

Regarding mix and match: some rules in Inform 7 must follow related rules. For instance, a region (a group of individual rooms that can be dealt with as a collective) must follow the room definitions. For this reason I decided to define certain rules related to regions at the end, even if they seem to be global rules. This is the way that those late definitions were used:

The game world is a region. The eighties and the 90s are in the game world. Energy is a backdrop. Energy is in the game world. Instead of doing anything to the energy: say "It doesn't work that way. Entropic magic requires specificity.".

Sometimes, things just make sense at the end. I also kept all of my test scripts there.

How should you build your TOC? While you can see my example above, give equal or greater consideration to what will be easiest for you to read and update. The TOC is a tool to for you to manage your project. If it doesn't make intuitive sense to you, it's worthless. Think about the way you process information and build from there.

I hope this is helpful! Consider maintaining a test/scratch project where you can keep copies of useful code and test the cases we discuss here. Feel free to AMA!

Next: scenery and backdrops.