#there was a brief time where these two were mostly out but infinite money from colonial empire was in so like it also worked. but

[cparti-mkiki]

minor point/takeaway but this kills me because whenever they try building stuff in like, famous past styles it often just ends up looking really tacky. fascist disneyland school of urbanism, only style allowed from now on lol. i guess i say often because a lot of big famous ye olde landmarks have been yassified in some measure in the past 200 years and philosophy of restoration issues aside it generally looks fine to great (to me idk) but when it’s dubiously done boy is it an eyesore

anyway do you know how cheap and out of place an attempted pseudoduomo in a random city would look? you know they would give it to the absolute lowest bidder, right. im being disingenuous acting like this guy wants duomos everywhere when he is simply referring to “vague fancy west euro architecture” in general but still i think point stands. tradguy do you have a proposal to convince firms and governments to superfluously spend billions of euros on puy du fou sets or are you content to just whine about modernity online

[cerastes]

May I request a review of general coolness and awesome of the horses we saw during the event?

Right, Maria Nearl event!

I liked the event quite a lot, though I do feel like it dropped the ball at the end. That aside, I had a lot of fun the entire time!

First of all, the cast was wonderful. Maria is explicitly not a powerful or skilled fighter to any degree that matters in the frame of strength the story takes place in, being definitely more skilled than the average person and even the average nameless knight, but being woefully outclassed by practically anyone that has a name in the Major. A humble mechanic with a heart drenched in justice, Maria doesn’t even like to fight, and adheres to a knightly ideal and a duty she must fulfill instead to justify her participation in these commercialized bloodsports, which carries the narrative. She is joined by a lovable cast of rambunctious family and family friends, who serve as her mentors and support: Her aunt, who is more akin to an older sister-slash-maternal figure, Zofia, who we are immediately shown is so close to Maria that the moment Maria made a big decision (the participation in the Major) without confirming with Zofia first, she immediately chastised her, wondering why she did not consult with her beforehand. Aunt Zofia is her aunt only due to technicality, as she’s a lady-in-waiting (or, in other words, belongs to a branch family of the Nearl clan, and is actually only 5 years older than Maria) and, more importantly, a decorated, retired competition knight who earned enough in her career that she can live comfortably for the rest of her life, ironically far outstripping the main Nearl house in terms of wealth. There’s also Kowal, an old Ursus mechanic, engineer and smith who mentors Maria in the ways of the wrench, willing to pass his workshop to Maria with her as his successor any day of the week, who himself also used to be a squire to V, an old, retired knight of old who served as Grandpa Nearl’s peerless sharpshooter and who trained Zofia back in the day. Finally, we have Old Marcin, owner of the cast’s favorite hangout, a little bar where he and Maria mediate the infinite squabbles, fights, and arguments that Kowal, V, and occasionally Zofia spark between one another. The event does a great work of introducing the dynamic between these five characters as something extremely domestic and comfortable: You can tell these five are tight and that they have spent a long time together. It’s just another day in their low profile lives when, suddenly, Maria dons Margaret’s old armor and decides to take arms for the main Nearl house, which is currently on the brink of ruin and about to lose its knighthood and nobility titles.

And this decision, and everything this decision means, informs everything that happens afterwards: Zofia tells Maria that if she’s worried about being left homeless, then that’s just foolishness, since Zofia is absolutely 100% ok with Maria moving in with her. She’s loaded. They can live comfortably for the rest of their lives without a concern. Kowal, likewise, insists that Maria is a good enough mechanic that she can earn a living by doing that. But, see, it’s not about a livelihood for Maria, it’s about preserving that for which Margaret and Grandpa Nearl fought and stood for, it’s never about the wealth, it’s about the name, the principle, not the glory, the weight of ideals that blood was shed to nourish and maintain. Maria is not even sure if she’s doing the right thing, but she’s got to do something. Why? Look no further than Uncle Mlynar. A bitter man, a corporate slave, spitting bile at her niece and apologies at his bosses. And the fact that it is very clear that this guy can kick some serious ass -- we never see him without his trusty blade hanging on his hip and, at the end, tells Margaret to square the hell up -- makes it all the sadder: In any other context, Mlynar might be a knight’s knight, hell, Margaret herself says she respects him still, but the Mlynar we see now is an unimportant cog in the capitalist system, just another grunt apologizing to his phone every time his lips part, who gets in hot water just by making small talk because, whoops, your workload accumulated again, better get chop chopping. Mlynar is a very telling character, because he represents everything Maria resents about the current state of the Nearl family: Disgraced, meaningless, existing as an extension of other bigger conglomerates. He is what she wishes to never become, and what the Nearl house cannot be any longer, if she has any saying on the matter.

Maria is not a good fighter. This is important and delightful, because she wins not due to aptitude, strength, or experience, she instead uses her knowledge as a mechanic, her “pegasian sight” (what Grandpa uses to refer to Maria’s incredibly powerful investigative faculties, being able to analyze situations and catch even the smallest details quickly) and the sheer heft of her brass pair of metaphorical horse balls to pull through with clutch victory after clutch victory. Zofia trying to cram as much fundamentals as she can on Maria in as little time as possible so she can survive also helps a lot.

Maria’s victories earn her the possibility of sponsorships, which would, superficially, fix her problems: The main Nearl house would retain status, she’d get a Title, and she would not have to fight anymore. But, see, this is not the point of Maria’s fight. One might say “Maria should’ve just taken the sponsorships”, but that’s not the point of Maria’s fight. She is pushing back against this highly commercialized view on “knighthood”, just like Margaret before her did. Margaret had a clear intent and her passions made her act mostly in anger, as she makes no secret: She hates Kazimierz for what it has become. Maria’s intent is less clear, even to herself, but she’s very much aiming for the same thing, but instead of Margaret’s anger, Maria has her determination. To have taken any sponsorship would have superficially kept the Nearl house afloat, but Maria is not looking to keep the house alone afloat, she’s looking to keep the house and the ideals in which it was built afloat. It goes beyond mere status.

In a world as bleak as Arknights’ and specially Kazimierz, Maria is no doubt naive to the point of frustration... But it is that which we call naive that makes a knight’s knight: Chivalry forged from ideals, sacrifice’s blunt borne from beliefs. The easy way out would’ve ultimately doomed her story, hence why she did not just move in with Zofia, hence why she did not just succeed Kowal and accept his workshop, hence why did not accept a sponsorship: It never was about that.

The very first event of the game, Grani’s Treasure, takes place in Kazimierz as well, but in the isolated outskirts, and we see hard-working, honest people, inhabitants of a nice little scenic hamlet. Now, we see what Kazimierz really looks like: A sprawling megalopolis of neon and concrete where the system shamelessly feeds on whoever sticks out their neck. The contrast couldn’t be harsher, and any hell is upheld by its demons: Czarny was a fascinating character, in that he very clearly held a lot of influence and power... And was extremely replaceable. The moment he messed up badly enough, he was instantly replaced by just whoever the hell picked up the phone next. It’s chilling. One puppet performed poorly? Irrelevant, there’s an endless supply who’ll take his place, provided enough fear and funds. Fear and money. The two currencies of Kazimierz. When a shadow council can just appoint you as the next Spokesman just on basis of you having picked up a phone without any real background check beyond “the previous Spokesman likely intended for this next sack of meat to pick up his phone in case he messed up”, well, congratulations, you’ve crafted a terrifying capitalist hellscape. No wonder Margaret hates Kazimierz so much, given the rot brewing in its underbelly and upper echelons.

And to all this, I have to say: It’s lovely. I loved the world building, implicit and explicit, I loved the cast, I love the themes explored and how characters were used to juxtapose these.

I feel it kinda drops the ball at the end by just... Not having a conclusion? It just sort of ends, which is very weird because events tend to be good at concluding themselves. I assumed we’d get some post-Challenge stages cutscenes to tie everything up like in the past but... No, not really, it didn’t happen. Margaret swoops in, the sisters perform the Ultimate Kamehameha on the Sarkazian Knights, and then it sort of ends one brief talk later. It needed a bigger epilogue, for sure. But this doesn’t ruin the event or anything, just a bit of a weak ending, everything else is still delightful and I loved it very much.

So yeah! The horses sure were wonderful!

[justasparkwritings]

Codename Cupid: Chapter 12

Previously: Another Shot at Love Pt. 4

Pairing: Park Jimin X OMC

Genre: Angst, Secret AgentAU, AgentAU, Government Agent AU

Rating: PG15

Word Count: 2.1k

Warnings: Swearing, Mentions of Legal Alcohol Consumption and Recreational Drug Use, Flirting, Jimin’s backstory 

Summary: The history Codename Mochi and how his relationship with Codename Arrow came about. 

Codename: The Mochi of it All

Winter, Senior Year 

          Jimin joined OT7 in his late teens and was kept away from his hyungs until he had finished his coursework, spent time in the field, and proved his worth. A quick study, deft in the art of reading people and empathizing, Jimin became an essential asset in the realms of surveillance and field work. Everyone was charmed by him immediately, his megawatt smile and friendly demeanor, as if Mary Poppin’s herself had given him spoonsful of sugar every day of his childhood. Jimin loved tracking marks, observing their tendencies, watching for changes in behavior. He could slip into their lives without them noticing to make strangers become friends, lovers, discerning with ease what he needed to do to become their confidant. Having studied with Codename Cuttlefish for over a year, he knew what to say and do. Joining a yoga class? No problem. Hopping into their pottery studio?  Easy. Wine tasting in Napa Valley? He knew the most exclusive vineyards. Cooking? Please, he was trained. There wasn’t anything Jimin couldn’t do, which is how he fell into bed with Jun-Seo.

         The expectation within OT7 was that you accepted your post, you took your directions and followed through on your work. When it came to dating, relationships of a sexual nature, there was explicit language that if you weren’t comfortable, you didn’t have to. There was nothing so important that the powers at be wanted you to risk your personal comfort and safety for. If Jimin didn’t want to entrap Jun-Seo, he didn’t have to, the plan could be changed, nothing was so definite that it didn’t warrant discussion. Namjoon had taken Jimin aside, walked him through the blueprints ahead of the full team meeting, conferring with him on what he was comfortable doing, and what he wasn’t. The rules for Yoongi applied to Jimin, if he didn’t want to have sex, he didn’t have to, and if he did, he was required to turn off his mic whenever sexual situations arose, as was standard practice. He didn’t have to log any aspects of his sexual relationship with any mark, only if it proved important in the case. With Jun-Seo, it did.

         Jimin, ever the professional, always prepared and always 5 minutes late, took it all in stride. It wasn’t difficult for Jun-Seo to fall in love with him, and unlike Yoongi and his quest to rectify all past failings through his relationship with Cupid, Jimin found it easy to be committed to one person, one man, in spite of the deception. After all, Codename Arrow, wanted exactly what Cupid did: to be loved.

         If Jimin was excellent at everything, he had perfected loving someone.

         Infiltrating Jun-Seo’s life was a manner of timing. Yoongi had been placed in Lee Enterprises while Jimin had already been making the rounds in Jun-Seo’s circles, elusive and enticing, it took three weeks before Jun-Seo had cornered him.

         “I can’t get a read on you,” Jun-Seo said, sitting across from Jimin in a dimly lit bar.

         Smirking, lips plump and coated in a thin layer of petroleum jelly, Jimin played dumb. “How do you mean?”

         “You talk to everyone but me, then you dance with me and flirt with me, but the minute I try and talk to you, poof, you’re gone,” Jun-Seo recited Jimin’s offenses, eliciting a giggle from him.

         “Maybe I like it that way,” Jimin responded.

         “Maybe, or maybe you’re scared,” He countered.

         “Scared of what, a pretty boy in last season’s Balenciaga?” Jimin scoffed, not going so far as saying As If, but implying.

         “A pretty boy with enough money to bury your deepest secrets or sell them to the highest bidder just for fun,” Jun-Seo threatened.

         “Your threats mean nothing. I don’t care about your money. I guarantee I have more,” Jimin brought his glass to his lips, water in vodka glass with a paper-thin lime slice deftly floating on top.

         Cackling, Jun-Seo responded, “Lies,”

         “You wanna play?” Jimin countered.

         “Only if you’re the prize,” Jun-Seo winked.

         It was banter back and forth, texts becoming phone calls that led to dates and nights out. A trip to Paris, followed by Seoul and Australia, all the while Suga was swindling Cupid. By the time Suga and Cupid broke up, Jun-Seo had proposed to Jimin.

         Jun-Seo was known for being a serial monogamist, flitting from one short term relationship to the other, always trading in the old for what seemed brand new. He had a reputation to maintain, an appearance he worked to cultivate. While Dae-Seong and Kwan-Min had to toe the lines of professionalism, of being the faces of the company until Euna was ready, Jun-Seo was given the autonomy to fuck around. A yacht trip in the Mediterranean? Annual. Closing Harrod’s and nearly buying out Chanel and Ferragamo? That was just a Tuesday. He could do no wrong, because while his siblings were busy fighting, he was busy charming. Every relationship, however devoid of emotion it was, provided him with more social capital than any socialite could dream of having. Though the tactics he used to gain this capital were not morally sound, and the level of blackmailable offenses he had witnessed was sociopathic, he continued to be sought after by anyone who breathed. To date Jun-Seo, no matter how brief, was to move up several rungs in society. The longer you dated, the higher you could climb, though Seo had the final say in your destination.

         No one was off limits to him, and he was afraid of nothing. Money afforded him security. Wealth afforded him an attitude that no one was better than him. Being 4th inline to the Lee fortune afforded him privilege. For these reasons, nobody dared mess with Jun-Seo, and in return, Seo messed with everyone.

         For the majority of his life, Seo had just wanted to be seen, to be heard, to be loved. Gossip swam with stories of his escapades, his philanthropy and business prowess made him legendary. He had few friends, but his closest confidant remained Kwan-Min. At the end of the day, however, she would always be his sister. There was no cuddling, no longing stares or passionate touches in the night, there was barely love, mostly respect. Jimin, though, had the potential to become the person Seo went to for everything.

         Jimin knew the lines were blurring when Seo took him to Seoul to track down distant relatives, and then fly to Japan to listen to Kyoto while walking the city. It wasn’t in the way Seo spoke to Jimin, but in the touches he gave, the way his eyes softened, how he was kinder to strangers and compassionate when someone messed up. Jimin was changing him, and that terrified Jimin. A mark is a mark, until they’re not.

         “He’s in too deep,” Hoseok argued, Jimin sitting at the conference table, going through transcripts of his last few days with Jun-Seo.

         “It’s getting to the point where Arrow is clearly, invested. He sees a future with Jimin, a tangible life together,” Yoongi responded, concern in his eyes. He had just started working at Lee Enterprises.

         “That’s what I’m concerned about,” Namjoon responded.

         “Arrow hasn’t given enough information to warrant the intensity of this relationship. It’s high risk, low reward. Better to get out,”

         “But we need to think about when Yoongi is dating Cupid, we’ll have two sets of eyes on the inside. Jimin has to infiltrate Arrow’s computer or very minimum, the philanthropy network so they can access the records,” Namjoon reminded them.

         “He’s going to propose, right?” Seokjin voiced. “There’s no way, at this rate, that he Arrow hasn’t thought about it.”

         “He hasn’t mentioned it, but he does play with my ring finger. It’s almost absentmindedly, and I wouldn’t think much of it except it’s pretty frequent,” Jimin informed them.

         “I thought he wasn’t the ‘marrying type’?” Seokjin asked.

         “Everyone thinks they aren’t something, and then Jimin shows up and all bets are off,” Yoongi smiled. “He’s magic.”

         “It’s because he’s so cute,” Hoseok agreed. “His laugh,”

         “His smile?” Namjoon continued the list.

         “Remember when we were laughing so hard, he told us to stop being funny because –

         “He can’t see when he’s laughing!” Hoseok finished, erupting in wall shaking laughter.

         “Okay, okay, I get it,” Jimin couldn’t help but giggle at his hyungs. “The question is, what do I do with Arrow?”

         “Stay, you have to,” Namjoon’s composure was back. “That’s your order.”

         “Do I push off the inevitable?”

         “A proposal? Yes,”

         “Tell him you aren’t sure you’re ready, or ever want to be married. Give him a real crisis and he’ll spend the next three months trying to figure out where he stands.” Yoongi suggested.

         “Has he said that he loves you?” Seokjin inquired.

         “Yes,”

         “Have you said it back?”

         “The question isn’t if Jimin’s said it back,” Yoongi began, “It’s if he means it.”

         “Jiminssi, do you mean it?”

         “I, no, no,” Jimin shook his head, his quickly lightening pink hair moving with his head. “I don’t love him,”

         “You love who he is with you,” Yoongi followed up, “He’s kind, and thoughtful, compassionate, fuck he’s even empathetic.”

         “It doesn’t excuse what he’s done, or who he is at his core,” Hoseok reminded him.

         “But it does make it infinitely more challenging to not blur the lines between who he really is, and who he is trying to be,” Jimin sat back, uneasiness in his veins. “I have to remember that.”

         “Do you need to retrain your brain?” Namjoon offered.

         “No, no, I’ll be fine, I can do this.” Jimin nodded.

         “Our second to last member to be put into the field is doing well. Codename V, he’s been onboarded and will continue working Yoongi’s job with minimal fieldwork until Cupid and Suga’s relationship is over, he’s finishing his last bits of training before becoming a full-time member. His office will be next to Yoongi’s,” Namjoon pulled up the file, V’sphoto and information enlarging on the screen.

         “Chim, you also trained him, correct?” Seokjin asked.

         “Yeah, he picked up everything on the first go, insanely intelligent, charismatic, he’s an amazing guy.” Jimin smiled fondly. “He’s my best friend, has been since we joined. Yoongi trained him for a bit too.”  

         “His first year in, he was in my year four training. V stayed in the program to train others and work with the last member of our team-

         “Because it’s impossible to be OT7 when there’s six of us,” Seokjin joked, the fact that they weren’t a complete set had bugged him for over two years.

         “V is the best,” Jimin finished.

         “We’ve all worked with him, why are we acting like we didn’t hand pick him?” Hoseok wondered.

         “Fair,”

         “I don’t know him as well as you do,” Seokjin said.

         “Are you still the new kid card?” Hoseok guffawed.

         “I’m just saying you went to training, the most I got was a month crash course,”

         “You didn’t need additional training. You had freely chosen a path that you loved and are passionate about. It was a choice. We were preyed upon, selected for a Hunger Game’s like war and we’re District 1.” Yoongi informed him. “It was fucking brutal. They took us from our lives, our families, our friends. This newbie? Codename Golden Maknae, was taken when he was 13! Barely old enough to make decisions for himself. He’s been raised in this system, conditioned to work for the betterment of the world, he knows nothing else. We know nothing else!”

         “He worships the ground Namjoon-hyung walks on, he is best friends with V because once you’ve been tapped, you can only rely on each other,” Hoseok said.

         “It hasn’t been a bad life,” Namjoon, ever the diplomat, interjected.

         “Sure Joon, sure. I shouldn’t have been a trained sharpshooter by 19,” Yoongi snapped. They could see it in his eyes, the darkness. Yoongi’s temper flared when he was truly angry, but largely held off until he was a perfect storm of exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed. Or, when competitiveness struck, and he became determined to win. This anger, rarer than the others, struck when he felt defenseless, used, when the job started to take parts of his soul instead of his brain.

         “You were hacking into government systems across the globe by 15!” Jimin refuted.

         “Allegedly!” Namjoon, Hoseok and Seokjin all yelled in unison. The three looked at each other before bursting into a fit of giggles, leaving Yoongi fuming.

         “The point is, you got to live a normal life, go to university, stumble into a relationship out of mutual attraction. You’ve had all the things weren’t afforded. For Jimin, V, Golden Maknae, this has been their life, so be fucking grateful, Mr. Handsome.” Spitting the codename at Seokjin, Yoongi stood violently and shoved his chair in against the table. The men stared after him as he grabbed his coat from his office and left.

Next: Justifying Jimin

[afaimsarrowverse]

Crisis on Infinite Earths

So given what I have been reading and watching lately, I just can’t anymore. What some self-promclaimed experts and people who should know better are claiming ist just so wrong, it hurts

So here is a short list of the most common misunderstandings concerning the future of the Arrowverse and “Crisis on Infinite Earths”.

(By the way, only ever believe stuff that comes from offical sources, take even the stuff Pagey and Ben say with a grain of salt, there sources may be reliable or may not be reliable, and in the time between production and transmission a lot can change (they same goes for canadagraphs). And please listen to their whole videos, they are going to tell you were they got something from and how believable they think it is most of the time. If they don’t name sources, they are probably just speculating, please keep that in mind).

* “Crisis on Infinite Earths” will be a five night event.

No, while there are five episodes, the last two parts will air on the same night. So it’s four nights: Three in december and one in january.

* It will be the crossover-event that imbebds “Black Lightning” into the Arrowverse.

Kind of true. Black Lightning played by Cress Williams is in the crossover-event. However there will be no tie-in episode in “Black Lightning” and it’s unconfirmed if any other BL-characters will show up in the crossover. Furthermore “Smallville” and “Birds of Prey” will also crossover in the Arrowverse with this event. Does this make them part of the Arrowverse? I guess, that’s up to debate.

* Tom Welling will be the third Superman in “Crisis”.

Kind of true. There are two important versions of Superman in the crossover: The Arrowverse-One played by Tyler Hochelin and an aged up version played by Brandon Routh. However Tom Welling is reprising his Smallville-Character in the crossover as well. And he will be in a scene with Tyler and Brandon. But he is not heavily involved in the crossover, and it’s unknown if he actually is going to be in suit or not.

* Erica Durance and Tom Welling will reprise their “Smallville”-Characters, but Michael Rosenberg will not.

Probably true. Michael Rosenbaum did post a rather long explanation for him not being in the crossover. This explanation is most likley true, but it could have been a calculated lie an/or a ploy to get more money for a cameo, or he could have changed his mind after all and now be in the crossover anyway. However, none of this is very likely.

*Justin Hartley is the Smallville Green Arrow in “Crisis.”

Unconfirmed and probably not happening due to “This is Us”. If he is in it, it would be a very small cameo.

* Helena Wayne is the only “Birds of Prey”-Character in “Crisis.”

She is the only confirmed character in “Crisis” as of now. It would be kind of strange to not use the Black Canary, whose actress is a regular on one of the Arrowverseshows, but somehow no one ever confirmed her for that part, so maybe it’s just Huntress.

* “Crisis on Infinite Earths” confirms that “Birds of Prey” takes place in the same timeline as Tim Burtons Batman-Movies.

I really don’t think so. There will be a nod to the Tim Burton/Michael Keaton-Batman-Movies, but I don’t think that there will be a connection to “Birds of Prey”. The newspaper of the Keaton-Verse shows an article about Bruce Waynes relationship with Selena Kyle, yes, but this takes place in the present and the picture they used shows a young Michael Keaton, so where should the grown-up daughter come in? As nice as this would be, explaining it would distract from the actual storyline.

* Michael Keaton will be in “Crisis”.

You wish. I wish. We wish. I really doubt it.

* Kevin Conroy is Old Man Bats.

Yes, he is. That’s literally all we know about his role though. He spoke about a Bat-suit, so at least it looks like we finally get a proper look at a version of Batman during Crisis.

*The Titans in the crossover are not the Titans from “Titans”.

Okay, so about that. There was a scene involving the Titans which was marked as filmed. We don’t know who was in that scene, but it was a cameo-moment. So, the only version of the Titans that was ever shown in a non-animated adaption of DC Comics was the version from the DC-App. Now, there is the rumor/claim that the actors refused to shoot said scene for various reasons and that the scene was scrapped. Of course one could do a scene involving alternate versions of Wally West und Roy Harper posing as the “Titans” from any odd Arroverse-Universe. But why should anyone bother to do this? Also, it’s very likely that those two are not even showing up in Crisis at all, so why bother doing this scene at all? So unless it turns out to be an unexpected animated scene, the only Titans making sense appearing in Crisis would be the current Titans from the DC-Show with the same name.

* Tom Ellis is playing Lucifer in Crisis.

Oh, boy, that one. We have photos. And denials. So, the mostly likely scenario is, that Tom Ellis is going to play an unnamed angel or demon who is going to be summoned by John Constantine in order to do something (probably bring back Oliver from the dead). While the character is dressed like Lucifer Morningstar in “Lucifer”, my guess it that he won’t be named that onscreen. So this is going to be an indirect crossover, where everyone knows it’s Lucifer, but no one says it. Unless the sequence gets scrapped, because it leaked. However given that it is a scene of plot-importance that probably won’t happen.

* Given that Brandon Routh is leaving “Legends” Ray Palmer will die in Crisis and stay dead.

Okay, this is what prompted me to right this article. Yes, Brandon is leaving “Legends of Tomorrow” alongside his wife. He filmed his last scenes a short while ago (Probably). BUT THE LEGENDS TIE-IN EPISODE IS THE FIRST ONE OF SEASON 5 AND TAKES PLACE BEFORE THE REST OF THE SEASON. A SEASON THAT RAY PALMER IS VERY MUCH IN FOR THE FIRST HALF SO UNLESS HE IS UNDEAD FOR THE REST OF SEASON 5 HE CAN’T DIE FOR GOOD IN CRISIS! Rays last episode is most likely to either be 5.7 or 5.8 because “Crisis” is not even the official first episode of the season, but more like episode 5.0 or a special between seasons. Yes, they filmed it between the episodes 5.7. und 5.8 along the other shows for technical reasons, but it takes place before the events of season 5.

* Mick might die in Crisis.

Like I said, Dominic is very much in season 5. The Legends Tie-In of Crisis takes place before the events of season 5, even though it was filmed as episode 8.

* Zari Tomaz is in Crisis.

Again: Crisis takes place before the events of season 5. During the season finale of season 4 Zari was erased from the Legends-Timeline and her brother Behard took her place. The Legends can’t remember Zari, they think Behrad has been their teammate all along. There will be a new version of Zari in Season 5. But this version will under no circumstances debut during Crisis. However another version of Zari Tomaz from another universe could be in the crossover for a brief cameo.

*Behrad Tomaz is in Crisis.

I thought so too, because he is in the current Legends-Team. however the only Legends we know for sure to be in Crisis are Ray, Sara, Mick und John. It was pointed out to me that including Behrad could be to confusing for the general audience. So he might just sit this one out, like Evelyn did the Arrow-Tie-In of “Invasion!”.

* Batwoman ist the only Batwoman-Character in Crisis.

Possible, but unlikley.

*Batwoman will catch up to the other shows timeline-wise before Crisis

Not necessarily. Given the Waverider, Harbinger, and the Monitor and the events of Arrow 8.4 time travel is very much on the table. Batwoman could just be taken from her current late 2018/early 2019 timeline for the crossover. Or the Tie-In-Episode takes place later than the episodes after it.

* Crisis will end with all universes merging in one.

I hope not. It’s possible, but would be a very stupid move. As in any adaption this one will be very different from its source, so don’t bet on it.

* “Superman and Lois” und the Arrow Backdoor-Pilot will be the new Arrowverse Series for the next season.

At this point a pilot for “Superman and Lois” has been commissend and the Backdoor-Pilot for the Mia/Canaries-Show has been flimed and will be transmitted in January. Neither show has been picked up yet. This won’t happen before pilot-season, which means we won’t know for sure until mid 2020.

* “Supergirl” will be cancelled because of “Superman and Lois”.

While it is entirely possible that “Supergirl” will end after Season 6 (given that standart US-television-contracts run for six years), the show won’t be cancelled for a potential Superman-show, that might not even be picked up. If “Supergirl” ends, it will be because Melissa wants to move on, not because of Superman.

* Next season is going to bring a six part/ seven show crossover.

I have nightmares about this already. But we can’t know until we know the 2020/21 programm of The CW.

[marginalgloss]

the name of the door

‘Every move I send out begins with the same word: You. When I first wrote most of them, so long ago now that it’s incredible to think of it, I had in my mind only a single player, and of course he looked almost exactly like me: not me as I am now, but as I was before the accident. Young and fresh and frightened, and in need of refuge from the world. I was building myself a home on an imaginary planet. I hadn’t considered, then, how big the world was; how many people lived there, how different their lives were from mine. The infinite number of planets spinning in space. I have since traveled great distances, and my sense of the vast oceans of people down here on the Earth, how they drift, is keener. But you, back then, was a singular noun for me, or, at best, a theoretical plural awaiting proof.’

Wolf in White Van is a difficult novel to summarise. I knew next to nothing about its author, John Darnielle, before I began reading. I was aware that he’s a fairly popular musician, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of his songs. Being a famous songwriter can cover all kinds of sins in novelistic terms. But by the time I finished the book I felt as though I had been through one of the most solipsistic and forbidding novels I’d read in some time. I don’t mean ‘forbidding’ in the sense of difficulty: the language is mostly quite plain, and the plot is not complicated. I mean that there is something about this novel which looms large over the imagination. It is haunting in its implications.

The book is written from the perspective of Sean, a middle-aged man who suffers from a severe facial deformity that has him living a reclusive life. It will be some time before we learn the cause of his injury. Sean makes his living by running a play-by-mail game of his own invention called Trace Italian. (The name comes from ‘trace italienne’, a certain kind of renaissance fort intended to resist cannon fire. There is much else that seems fortress-like about Sean.) This game takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of America; players write to Sean describing their moves, much like in any other role-playing game, and he writes back with the results. Somehow the player subscriptions pay well enough to keep him going. 

Trace Italian isn’t improvised: every ‘move’ in the game has been charted in advance, meticulously documented in a series of filing cabinets. It is effectively a labyrinthine concept novel, through which players move over the course of days, months, years. Nobody can ever see it all except Sean, and in this respect it is unlike any other book, any other game. For as long as he lives it is inviolable; a perfect private universe where every threat can be contained, every secret can be secured. There are places in it only Sean knows about:

‘…Charts and notebooks lie open around the corpse in a constellation; if you marked its points and drew a line connecting them, you’d have a shape that would later help open a door deep within the Trace, but nobody will ever notice this, or learn the name of the door, which you have to say when you open it or you end up in a blind corridor that traps you for at least four turns, which would probably outrage any players who made it that far. But who knows. What it would be like to make it that far is sheer conjecture…’

The most appealing part of the novel is its detailed portrait of fandom in the pre-internet era. We see how the young Sean was captivated by the genre science fiction and fantasy of the times. Mainstream references like Star Trek and Star Wars take a back seat here — it is all about Friz Leiber, the Gor novels, and weird VHS-era movies like Krull. It’s about finding inspiration in the album art for obscure prog-metal bands, and writing to adverts in magazines to order a cassette tape of music inspired by the Conan books by Robert E. Howard. 

Some of this is the same tone that Stranger Things leant on — kids playing Dungeons and Dragons in the era of the Satanic Panic — but there is something altogether more obscure and threatening going on here. Stranger Things is exciting because of the sense of togetherness engendered by D&D, whereas Sean’s hobbies only serve to lead him further into himself. He never falls in with a gang of like-minded kids, so he becomes a Dungeon Master unto himself. Eventually, under his influence, a young couple go on an adventure through the Trace Italian. They think they are on the trail of something important, much like those kids in the Netflix series. But it doesn’t end well for them. 

There aren’t many characters in this novel outside of Sean. The inside of his head is a bleak, violent place, surreal and unpredictable and paranoid compared to the controlled world of the Trace:

‘There was a small, strange moment during which I had this feeling that someone was filming me, which was ridiculous, but it was that specific—“there’s a camera on me”—and then some hard ancient pushed-down thing, a thing I’d felt or thought or feared a long time ago, something I’d since managed to sheathe in an imaginary scabbard inside myself, erupted through its casing like a bursting cyst. I had to really struggle to recover. Something was dislodging itself, as from a cavern inside my body or brain, and this situation seemed so divorced from waking reality that my own dimensions lost their power to persuade. I craned my great head and saw all that yellow-brown plastic catch the light, little pills glinting like ammunition, and then my brain went to work, juggling and generating several internal voices at once: someone’s filming this; this isn’t real; whoever Sean is, it’s not who I think he is; all the details I think I know about things are lies; somebody is trying to see what I’ll do when I run across these bottles; this is a test but there won’t be any grade later; the tape is rolling but I’m never going to see the tape. It is a terrible thing to feel trapped within a movie whose plot twists are senseless.’ 

Like the players of his game, the reader only exists in the world Sean has created for us. The effect is compelling, and claustrophobic. Sean’s narrative is intense and evocative. He is specific and articulate in his writing, but almost silent in his social life. His thoughts are frantic, anxious, self-perpetuating machinations; we are given very little idea of how he is perceived by society at large. There are moments of contempt and of friendship, but they’re only brief islands of contact in a sea of loneliness.   

It is some time before it becomes evident what Wolf in White Van is really about. The story pivots around two big questions: what happened to Sean’s face? And what happened to that couple on their adventure? But even when the reader is told the facts of those matters, they may not understand the implications. Certainly Sean has no answers for us. There is something forlorn about his world. He writes beautifully, and the reader will likely think him a good person because they can see into his heart and his mind; but there’s a sense that he is somehow beyond help — not because of his disfigurement, but because of his isolation. He is a prisoner inside a game of his own making. And as the pages go on it seems increasingly clear that he will never get out. 

We are accustomed, in novels and films like this, to another party breaking through to the narrator. Something will happen to shake them through their desperation so that their evident state of insecurity doesn’t become all-consuming. They might fall in love. Perhaps there will be a reconciliation, or an epiphany. But that never happens here. The only connections made in Sean’s world are brief and incidental, but the pain from discord resonates below all that. By the end it feels as though the world around the narrator has grown smaller and smaller, draped in a perpetual shroud, while his inner life has expanded out of all knowable proportions; the effect is mesmeric, and terrifying.  

‘…I remember my anger at hearing my real dreams spoken out loud by someone else’s uncomprehending voice. “Number five, sonic hearing,” she said. “Number four, marauder. Number three, power of flight. Number two, money lender. Number one, true vision.” Some of the other kids shot laughing looks at one another. It was horrible. People talk sometimes about standing up for what they believe in, but when I hear people talk like that, it seems like they might as well be talking about time travel, or shape-changing at will. I felt righteousness clotting in my throat, hot acid: the other kids were suppressing laughter and exchanging glances; the whole thing was so funny to them they had to punch their thighs to keep from cackling out loud. None of them had actually made a true list like mine, I thought, though this was conjecture…I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don’t sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I’m on the winning team, that I’m laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on. People with certain sorts of ambitions are safe in the Trace.’

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU HAVE TO BE SMART IN DISTINCTIVE WAYS

If there's just one point, they're identical: the average and maximum are the same. As long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive it as a painting is drowned out. And since most of what big companies do everything infinitely slowly. As well as having precisely measurable results, we have a lot more in common than this, of course, but I must have been very valuable.1 C#: Java is controlled by Sun.2 But there are limits to how well they'll be able to reach most of the winners.3 Try it and see.4 They treat the words printed in the book or pay to attend the seminar where they tell you how great you are. Simula is an object. Adults lie constantly to kids. You probably never can completely undo the effects of lies you were told as a kid I was confused for years about him.

That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. It's hard for us to feel a sense of humor.5 We had big doubts about this idea, but they were more visible during the Bubble than ever before. The idea of a foul-mouthed, cynical 10 year old leaning against a lamppost with a cigarette hanging out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. Anyone can see they're not the same as with the apparent laziness of people this age. This is after only a few months. The distinction is similar to the rule that one should judge talent at its best and character at its worst.6 And yet, I wonder. Ada: Every existing language is missing something. I'm using the word lie in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also because generating returns from dividends. The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they're told. Except instead of being at the mercy of weather and officials, they're at the mercy of their own biases when selecting companies.

I've long since gotten used to it. The only catch is that this is changing.7 So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. The only explanation is: by definition. Really?8 Hotels now are like airlines in the 1970s before they figured out how to profit from it. And users don't care where you went to college.9 If there's no such thing as good taste is that it offers something otherwise impossible to obtain: a way of measuring that.

How do we get at these ideas? And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Then you'll have to think about how to make money from.10 Like a lot of mistakes. If that sounds like a phrase out of 1984. It's not super hard to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences; you have to say for what audience. To be fixed. When I left high school I was, I thought, a complete skeptic.

Notes

The first version was mostly Lisp, you can see how much you get bigger, your size helps you grow. I warn about later: beware of getting too high a valuation. We just store the data, it's software that doesn't exist.

Except text editors and compilers.

25. When you fix one bug, the police in the mid 1980s.

More precisely, there are those that will sign up quickest and those where the richest of their shares when the company, and also what we'd call random facts, like wages and productivity, but that wasn't a partnership.

So for example, it's not obvious you'd be undercapitalized. And yet there are some controversial ideas here, which usually revealed more than the 50 minutes they may introduce startups they like the one Europeans inherited from Rome. Companies often wonder what to outsource and what the US in 2002 was 3. Without visual cues e.

Instead of laboriously adding together the numbers like the Segway and Google Wave. Only a fraction of VCs even have positive returns. I use.

In When the Air Hits Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation—maybe around 10 people. A few VCs have rational reasons for behaving this way probably should. They have no way of doing that even if they were just getting started.

He did eventually graduate at about 26.

First Two Hundred Years. Even as late as Newton's time it would take another startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to fork off separate processes to deal with them. Free money to spend all your time working on is a constant. Which feels a bit much to generalize.

The study of the infrastructure that this was the season Dallas premiered. Big technology companies between them generate a lot is premature scaling—founders take a lesson from the DMV.

[emjenenla]

Something in the air’s not right today Part Two [The Raven Cycle Fanfic]

Part One | Part Two

Gansey is not having a good day. Set somewhere in the vicinity of BLLB and TRK. Part two in Adam’s POV.

Trigger warnings for panic attacks and a brief mention of child abuse.

Disclaimer: I do not own the Raven Cycle. Title from “Papercut” by Linkin Park.

Here’s part two. This story is now set a little more firmly around the vicinity of Blue Lily, Lily Blue. This part is a bit shippier than part one, but I still wouldn’t describe it as shippy. I realized towards the end that you could probably read it as Adam/Gansey if you wanted too, so if that’s your thing, knock yourself out.

As school cafeteria food went, the food at Aglionby was pretty good. However, since there seemed to be rule that school food couldn’t actually be good, the food at Aglionby was just perpetually disappointing as opposed to inedible the way the food at Henrietta’s public schools was. Not that Adam was in the position to have an opinion, however, if left to his own devices he would never shell out the money for lunch at all, something that a certain someone had taken it upon themself to fix.

“Do you know where Gansey is?” Adam asked, sticking a spoon into a cup of yogurt he and Ronan were both pretending Ronan hadn’t bought specifically for him.

Ronan shrugged carefully unwrapping the greasy wax paper around one of the two panini he’d bought from the lunch line. He took a big bite out of the corner of one half of the just vaguely congealed sandwich and nudged the other half across the tray towards Adam without looking at him or the food. “I dunno,” he said with his mouth full. “Haven’t seen him since third hour.”

Adam took the offered half a sandwich and nibbled off the corner, being careful not to look at Ronan. This was the way that he and Ronan had been sharing lunch for months. Ronan would buy twice as much food as he actually needed and then Adam would eat the extra so it wouldn’t go to waste. It drove Gansey mad. Everytime it happened Adam could see him biting his tongue to keep from asking the big, dreaded question, “What is the difference between Ronan’s charity and mine?” He hadn’t actually asked yet, for which Adam was thankful because if he did Adam would be forced to start to fight to hide the fact that he had no good answer to that question. He and Gansey hadn’t been fighting recently, and Adam would do anything to make sure it stayed that way. The fact that they’d lasted this long told him that Gansey felt the same way.

“He has history fourth hour,” Adam said, swallowing before he spoke. He was always careful about stuff like not talking with his mouth full. Ronan could get away with it, but Adam would end up looking like trailer trash. “Maybe they talked about something interesting and got caught up in a discussion with the teacher.”

Ronan snorted. “Not likely,” he said. “That class he’s taking is specifically about modern history. Gansey hates anything that happened after the sixteenth century.”

“How do you know that?” Adam asked.

“How do you not?” Ronan snorted. “It’s one of his favorite topics when he’s not rambling about Glendower. You should have heard the night he spent an hour and a half discussing why it's much more important for people to know about Savonarola than Watergate.”

Adam’s heart leapt the way it always did when he realized one of the Aglionby boys knew something he didn’t. “Who’s Savonarola?”

Ronan shrugged. “You think I know?”

Adam forced himself to keep from running to the library right now and looking the information up. He reminded himself that he was a senior, if he hadn’t needed to know who that was before now, he would be fine. “Fine, but where’s Gansey?” he said.

Ronan shrugged. “Maybe he missed a meeting this morning and is catching up on it.”

“What do you mean, missed a meeting?” Adam asked. “I didn’t think he had any morning meetings.”

“He doesn’t usually, but he might have today, I don’t keep an eye on his schedule,” Ronan polished off his half of the first sandwich and moved on to the second, pushing half towards Adam again. “He overslept this morning. We got here just as the five minute bell was ringing.”

Adam had been wondering why Ronan and Gansey were almost late for first hour, but he’d assumed Gansey had been dragging Ronan out of bed not the other way around. “Is he sick?”

“Don’t think so,” Ronan said, his mouth full again. “I think he just overslept.”

Adam was just contemplating how likely Gansey oversleeping with no underlying cause was when Matthew bounced over, holding a cup of chocolate pudding and plopped down next to Ronan, chattering about some kind of news that had nothing to do with Adam. With Ronan firmly distracted, Adam had to reside himself to the end of the conversation at least for the time being.

~~~~

Gansey turned up again just before sixth hour chemistry which he and Adam had together. Adam and Ronan had parted ways at the door to the classroom which had left Adam alone waiting for Gansey and worrying.

Gansey ducked into the classroom just before the bell rang, his head ducked low and his books hugged tightly against his chest. He half fell into his desk without looking at Adam.

“Where were you during lunch?” Adam asked. “Ronan and I were looking for you.”

“Nowhere,” Gansey said, his head still down. He sounded like he was breathless and was trying to hide it. “I had something to take care of.”

“Okay,” Adam said, trying to decide whether or not to push. “Are you ready for this quiz?”

“Quiz?” Gansey repeated without lifting his head. “What-what are you talking about?”

“The quiz in this class,” Adam said. “Ms. Woods told us about it last week. Remember?”

“Oh, yes,” Gansey said after a moment. “Yes, I remember.”

“Please tell me you studied,” Adam said. Chemistry and Gansey didn’t mix very well, and while Gansey might have been able to dredge up a passing grade without studying, the chances of him managing to actually fail where high enough to make Adam nervous.

“Yes, I studied, I just-” Gansey dropped his pencil and it rolled across the floor to rest under the radiator. He dove after it, cursing in foul enough terms that Ronan might have been proud. When he returned to his desk his hands were shaking visibly and he still wouldn’t look at Adam.

“Gansey, is everything-” Adam began but then Ms. Woods began handing out the quiz sheets and there was no more time to talk.

Gansey didn’t so much as look at him for the rest of the class

~~~~

Ronan was waiting for Adam by his locker when school got out. “You don’t work until late tonight,” he said. “Come over to Monmouth. Blue’s free too. We’re going to watch a movie.”

“I have homework,” Adam said more because he felt like he had to raise some kind of objection than because he actually didn’t want to go.

“You can do it while the movie’s on,” Ronan said. “Come on; it will be fun.”

“Fine,” Adam gave in and followed Ronan out of the school. “Where’s Gansey?” he asked looking around for their friend.

“He said something about meetings,” Ronan said with a shrug. “He’ll be back at Monmouth probably in a half hour or so. If not Noah will probably be happy to use my phone to spam call him.”

Adam thought of Gansey’s shaking hands as he rescued his pencil from the floor and how crushed he’d looked when he’d handed his chemistry quiz in. He wasn’t sure how Gansey would react to being spam called today. He wondered if he should point that out, but Ronan was already talking about something else and the moment had passed.

~~~~

“No, let’s not watch that,” Noah moaned looking at the DVD Ronan was holding up. “Let’s watch something fun!”

“This is fun,” Ronan said looking a little offended.

“I’ve seen that movie,” Blue said. “It’s all fast cars and explosions. Let’s watch something that actually has a plot.”

Adam tried to ignore their minor argument by focusing on his calculus homework. The assignment would have been so much easier without all the background noise. He should have done the sensible thing and just gone back to St. Agnes. He was never going to get ahead if he continued running around doing things for fun when he was supposed to be working to better himself.

The argument broke off with the sound of an old Mustang pulling up in front of Monmouth. “Gansey’s back!” Noah chirped. “He’ll be able to settle this argument.”

Ronan grumbled, mostly because they all knew Gansey would never watch a plotless action movie voluntarily so Ronan’s choice was officially out of the running, but didn’t make any outright complaints.

It took a surprisingly long time for Gansey to get upstairs, though that was probably because they were all used to him racing up the stairs like he had fifty million infinitely more interesting things to be doing (which was usually true). Finally reached the top of the stairs and let himself in.

“Hi, Gansey!” Noah waved. “We’re going to have a movie night! Well, movie afternoon as the case may be, but whatever.”

The look he gave them was a sort of disappointed blankness, like he really wished none of them were there at all. Adam had to be imagining it; he had never known Gansey not to want them around, if only so he had someone to ramble on endlessly too.

“Gansey?” Adam ventured.

Gansey’s gaze focused on him. His face spasmed for a moment, like he was trying to put on a more positive expression and failing. “Why aren’t you at work?” he asked.

Adam jumped. He had never heard Gansey sound so cold before. “I don’t work until late tonight,” Adam said. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, no, there’s not,” Gansey said. His voice was sharp and horrible and wrong. He barely sounded like himself. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like you could have told me you had plans, but I guess my life revolves around you people anyway, so what does it matter?” He threw his messenger bag onto his bed and the contents spilled across the bed, the beloved journal sliding off the comforter onto the floor. Gansey didn’t even seem to notice.

Vaguely, Adam was aware of Noah fading away into nothingness and Ronan beginning to protest, but mostly he was numb. Adam had expected to fight with Gansey again, but he hadn’t expected it to be like this. He’d expected a blow-out about bills or tuition of one too many meals slyly bought. He didn’t know how to deal with Gansey like this.

Blue stepped up to the plate before Adam could even begin to figure out what to say. “We didn’t mean it like that, Gansey,” she said. “But you seem kind of upset. Did something happen today?”

“No!” Gansey snapped. That was even more out of character. Gansey got annoyed at Adam all the time, but never at Blue. “Nothing happened today! Everything’s splendid, thank you very much!”

Adam did not think he’d ever heard a less convincing argument.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Gansey said, turning away from them. Adam heard him take a deep, noisy breath through his teeth. “You all can carry on with whatever you were doing.”

None of them so much as moved until the bathroom door slammed behind Gansey. None of them moved when the water started running. None of them moved as time dragged on and on. Even Ronan, who had been seconds from diving headfirst into a rage didn’t move as the true weight of what had just happened crashed down on him.

Eventually, however, without saying anything, Ronan got up and went into his room. He came back carrying another DVD case. He took the DVD out and put it into the player. As movie began Adam realized it was a Disney movie.

“What movie is this?” he asked.

“The Lion King,” Ronan said without looking over. He was staring at the screen with almost single-minded determination. “It was one of the only movies we had as kids which Dad had bought instead of just dreaming a copy. It was always Declan’s favorite.”

Adam wouldn’t have thought of Declan Lynch as the sort of person who had ever enjoyed Disney movies, but that and wondering what Niall Lynch’s dreamed copies of Disney movies were like helped distract him until the shower finally turned off. It was a long time after the water had turned on had started. Normally Adam would have been jealous of Gansey’s ability to just take a shower without calculating just how much each drop of water would cost him, but today that was the last thing on his mind.

Finally Gansey opened the bathroom door and came out. Adam almost wished he hadn’t, because Gansey’s eyes were red with tears.

Gansey looked at them for a minute, then his head dropped and he looked away. “I’m sorry about before,” he whispered. “I have no excuse.”

That was the worst part. Ronan would have had an excuse, Blue would have had an excuse, even Adam would have had an excuse, but Gansey didn’t even try to come up with one. He was just going to take whatever they threw at him without even trying to explain why.

They teased Gansey about his clothes and his car and his habits and his obsession with Glendower. Ronan poked and screamed at him when he was in a bad mood, Blue scolded him and he and Adam had fought on a hundred different occasions, but something like this had never happened before. The things they did never seemed to touch him. The real world couldn’t hurt Richard Campbell Gansey III. It had never occurred to Adam that Gansey could have a bad day, that he could resent their presence, that he could want or need time alone to put himself back together. In some ways he had not seen Gansey as human enough for any of that.

Adam slowly unfolded himself from the floor and walked over to Gansey’s closet. He gathered a pair of Gansey’s pajama pants and the yellow sweater he wore so often. It was hideous, but Adam was also pretty sure if was one of Gansey’s favorite articles of clothing. It didn’t matter how ugly the sweater was, if Gansey liked it he probably would find it comforting and that was what mattered right now.

He carried the clothes over to his friend and Gansey looked away more if that was possible. He was afraid Adam was going to be angry. The realization cut Adam to the core. It had never occurred to him that Gansey might think that they were going to get in a fight now when he was so obviously upset. He’d never thought that Gansey didn’t understand that.

Adam pushed the clothes into Gansey’s arms and Gansey glanced up, his eyes wide with surprise. There were pretty prominent dark circles under his eyes, and Adam remembered Ronan mentioning that Gansey had overslept this morning. Adam knew that Gansey had insomnia, but they didn’t discuss it very often. Ronan would mention in passing that he and Gansey had gone to the gas station to by orange juice at three am and gotten weird looks, but Adam didn’t know exactly how bad Gansey’s insomnia was. How often couldn’t he sleep? Did he take medication? How much sleep had he actually gotten last night?

“Take your contacts out and put these on,” Adam told Gansey, indicating the clothes. “You look really tired.”

Gansey finally met his eyes for the first time in the conversation. He looked confused, like he couldn’t quite figure out why Adam wasn’t screaming at him. “Okay,” he said after a moment, obviously deciding it was best not to comment.

Gansey retreated into the bathroom to change and Adam returned to his place on the floor next Ronan. His calculus homework was completely forgotten, and he didn’t think he’d be able to get back in the right frame of mind to complete it for a while yet. Blue snatched the remote from Ronan and moved to start to movie again. Ronan lunged for it and she stopped him by planting her foot against the side of his face.

The bathroom door opened. “Come sit down, Gansey,” Blue called. Gansey hesitated just long enough for Adam to wonder what was stopping him before he moved across the room and sat down on the couch next to Blue.

“I really am sorry for snapping at you,” Gansey said after a moment. He was staring down at his hands and not looking at any of them. “And for scaring Noah away. I didn’t mean any of it.”

“Gansey, it’s fine,” Blue soothed. She patted Gansey’s leg and Adam looked away feeling like he was intruding on something private. “You’re allowed to be frustrated every now and then; we’re not going to hate you forever because of it. And Noah will turn up again; he’s not going to vanish into the ether just because you had a bad day.”

Gansey didn’t reply and Adam wracked his brain trying to figure out what the right thing to say. It was obvious that Blue was doing the same thing. Thankfully, it was Ronan who saved them all by shoving aside Blue’s foot and snatching the remote back. “Alright,” he said with an air of finality. “Now that that’s all take care of, let’s get back to this movie.”

For a few minutes they watched the movie in silence, then Gansey’s collapsed against the armrest of the couch looking like he was going to fall asleep. Blue pulled his legs up onto the couch as well and after a minute’s consideration, Adam reached out and pulled Gansey’s glasses off. Ronan got up and stalked across the room. A moment later he returned and dumped Gansey’s comforter onto their nearly asleep friend in his characteristic type of caring.

“Go to sleep, Gansey,” Blue said. “We’re going to order pizza soon; we’ll wake you when it gets here.” She was rubbing Gansey’s foot and again Adam felt like he was seeing something he shouldn’t. Was there something going on there, or was he just reading too far into it?

“Wait,” he said, his mind catching up with Blue’s words. “We’re ordering pizza?”

“Of course you’re ordering pizza,” Noah said. “You can’t have a movie night without pizza!” He was sitting on the arm of the couch just above Gansey’s head.

“When did you come back?” Blue asked.

Noah just grinned and didn’t reply.

“Yes,” Ronan said when it became obvious Noah wasn’t going to relent and say something. “We’re getting pizza.”

Ronan actually got up and went to get Gansey’s phone which seemed like a weird workaround of the whole cellphone thing. Adam certainly hoped that Declan didn’t check the phone bill to see if Ronan was using his phone for things like ordering pizza while still ignoring calls, but after a moment Adam had to admit that wouldn’t actually surprise him knowing the Lynch brothers.

“Okay,” Ronan said, coming back. “What do we want?”

~~~~

When the pizza guy pulled up Ronan paused the movie and Blue and Adam handed over their parts of the bill. Ronan gathered the money and retrieved his wallet from Chainsaw’s beak. He made no move to wake Gansey or find the other boy’s wallet. Ronan and Gansey were less diligent about paying for their own portions of food than Adam and Blue were. This was partially because Ronan and Gansey were both so rich that an order of pizza was no object and also because they lived together and were always buying each other food and groceries. This would not be the first time Ronan paid for Gansey’s food and it wouldn’t be the last; Gansey would do the same.

Ronan went downstairs and returned a minute later with his arms full of pizza boxes. Adam got to his feet and went into the bathroom to find napkins, paper plates and cups. When he got back, Blue was trying to wake Gansey. Adam looked away to give them some privacy and crossed over to where Ronan was laying out the pizza.

“Is that garlic bread?” Adam asked noticing the smaller box. “I didn’t know we were ordering garlic bread.”

Ronan gave him a look. “I paid for it myself. If that bothers you, you don’t need to eat it.” Then he took a plate from Adam and began loading it up with pizza and garlic bread. Adam sighed then filled his own plate, avoiding the garlic bread.

When he returned to the couch, Gansey was sitting up and leaning sort of heavily against Blue. The comforter was wrapped around his shoulders and he looked like he was seconds from falling back to sleep.

Ronan came over and handed Gansey a plate of pizza. Gansey blinked at it like he wasn’t sure what to do with it. “Eat,” Ronan said, not unkindly. “I know you didn’t eat breakfast and who knows where you were for lunch. You need something in your stomach.” Gansey nodded blankly and after a moment he picked up a piece of pizza and began to eat.

Adam moved to sit on the couch next to Gansey and tried not to make it awkward as Ronan plopped down on the floor and started the movie again. Gansey took a bite of pizza, chewed and swallowed then said quietly, “I really am sorry for yelling at you. I didn’t mean to-”

“Gansey,” Adam said as gently as possible. “It’s fine. I’m not mad. I can tell when something else is going on.”

He hoped his words would serve as an invitation to talk about what Gansey was so upset about, but Gansey didn’t rise to the bait. “What I said was still uncalled for,” Gansey said. “I didn’t mean it.”

“No one thought you did,” Ronan said, banging his head back against the couch. “No one hates you, Dick.”

Gansey didn’t look much happier but he went back to eating without complaint so Adam figured the crisis had mostly been diverted. He took a bite of pizza and tried not to think about how good the garlic bread on Gansey’s plate looked. He turned away to see Noah watching them with a strange, sad expression on his face.

“Is something wrong?” Adam asked.

Noah grinned, but his eyes were still sad. “Nothing new,” he said and turned his attention back to the movie.

So there’s some Noah angst randomly at the end. No idea where that came from but we’ll go with it.

Hopefully everyone’s in character. I’ve only ever written Adam and Ronan through Gansey and Declan’s undeniably distorted POVs and I have next to no experience writing Blue and Noah. I also hope that the ending doesn’t drag. I was originally planning to write the last scene in part one then decided not to write it. Hopefully I shouldn’t have ditched it in this part as well.

[mrschangrettawrites]

Hell Hath No Fury

Summary: You had been betrayed for the last fucking time

Pairings: Tommy Shelby x Reader (formerly), Tommy Shelby x Grace (mentioned), Luca Changretta x Reader (main)

Words: 1531

Notes: Spoilers for season four, female reader, I should be working on other things but instead I’m doing this. Drag me. I highly highly highly recommend installing the InteractiveFics extension from the Chrome store if you can. To add your name and last name simply install the extension, then click ‘Need to replace something other than Y/N?’ and in the value bar put Name and put your name in the Replace With bar, then click change! And be sure to tick Store this replacement so that you don’t have to do it every time.

I also want to say thank you all so much for the love and support that all of you have shown for this story! It really was unexpected and so so appreciated, honestly it has made me all the more motivated to get these out! I hope you all enjoy!

Tagging: @timeless-flogging @decaffeinatedeaglefart @goghadventuring @sophspark @possiblyafangirl @buckybarnesisalittleshit @aya-fay if you would like to be tagged in future chapters just send in a message!

One//Two//Three

CHAPTER FOUR

It had taken what felt like forever to calm down Curly, and assure him that despite the gunshots, you were perfectly safe. The Italian that had been sent after you had managed to escape, which was partly true, and left him to tend to Diamond and her broken stall. Although you had given him some shreds of truth, you still felt bad for lying to Curly. He was a good sort, odd, but good, and always gentle with the horses.

Matteo had been able to sneak back to his car while you distracted Curly and you met him two blocks away where he proceeded to drive you to the hotel where he and his brothers were staying. The ride was silent and tense, and you kept one hand on your gun the whole way, but you had a feeling that Matteo would see this through. If nothing else, delivering the wife of Thomas Shelby to the head of the Changretta family would certainly be an accomplishment.

A talk with Luca Changretta was all you wanted, and although Matteo had been suspicious, it was better than the alternative. As a show of good faith you even gave him back his gun, which had surprised him. You didn’t know what he was expecting, but you had feeling that it wasn’t this.

You had never been to the Inkberrow Hotel, and you were somewhat impressed with it and the implication that the Changrettas had plenty of money to spend. Growing up the way you did, any sign of wealth impressed you, even after all the money Tommy had gained in recent years.

Before you could see Luca Changretta your presence had to be explained, which Matteo did on his own. You weren’t entirely sure that this wasn’t all together foolish, but you didn’t say.

After a few minutes and a surprising lack of raised voices, Matteo came back out into the hall. “He’ll see you.” And that was good enough.

The first thing you noticed was how big the room was. It seemed to be the same size as your mum’s living room, bigger even, and you couldn’t help the internal rise of an eyebrow. The second thing you noticed was Luca Changretta.

He was taller than you had expected him to be, taller than Arthur, and he had the same commanding presence your mum could muster at the tip of a hat. And he was very handsome, with his black hair slicked back and a strong profile that added to the general air of intimidation. A part of you felt bad for noticing, you were married after all. But Tommy had done far worse, and your idea was far worse than finding another man infinitely more attractive than your husband.

Luca Changretta smiled, and you immediately felt as if you were staring at an apex predator. “Mrs Shelby,” he said, the words falling from his mouth as languid as a cat. A big one maybe. “My brother tells me you wish to talk to me.”

“Name.” You said. Hearing the name ‘Shelby’ made your skin crawl. “I would prefer it if you called me that, Mr Changretta.”

There was the smallest hint of surprise on Luca Changretta’s face before he smiled again. “In that case, please call me Luca.” He sat behind the large desk at the center of the room, pulling out a toothpick from his pocket and putting it in his mouth. “So, what is it you wish to discuss?”

“I want to help you.”

The idea had only been half formed when you had first spoken to Matteo, but the time it had taken to be able to talk to Luca had allowed it to grow, like a creeping vine, wrapping itself around your heart.

To your surprise, Luca laughed. “You want to help.” He said, before glancing at Matteo. “She wants to help.” He chuckled, rolling the toothpick from end of his mouth to the other. “That is a very kind offer Name, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

“I didn’t expect you to.” You said. “Which is why I’m going to tell you about Polly.”

For a brief moment, there was a flicker of apprehension on Luca’s face and you saw him look over at Matteo again. “What about her?” He asked slowly.

“Tommy knows about the double cross. The whole thing had been his idea.”

That had changed the atmosphere. It became heavier and you could feel the tension, yet somehow you were unbothered.

You had been apprehensive of the whole idea at first, too many things could go wrong and you weren’t keen on the idea of putting Polly in danger. But none of that mattered now.

“Is that so.” Luca slowly rose, making his way around the desk. “Why are you telling me this?” He leaned back against the desk, almost sitting on it. “You’re married to Thomas Shelby after all, why do you want to help us?”

“Because he’s a right bastard.” You weren’t any mood to sugar coat things, and you figured honesty would be the best course of action in this situation. “He’s cheated on me for the second time and this time he got the girl pregnant. He can fucking rot for all I care.”

There was a brief silence, but it was broken when Luca laughed, looking back at Matteo. “L'inferno non ha furia.” He said, more than a little amused.

“You haven’t begun to see my fury.”

Luca raised an eyebrow, grinning so widely you wondered if he was holding back another laugh. “You speak Italian.” “My grandmother was from Sicily.” You clarified. “She immigrated here after marrying an Englishman.” Your grandmother had never said much about Sicily, in fact she rarely spoke at all, and when she did it was always in Italian, which meant your mum and later you had to learn how to speak it. It wasn’t something you talked about much either, mostly because no one ever really asked and you never found it important or interesting enough to mention. It was the worst during the war, your mum refused to speak Italian outside the home out of fear that someone would mistake her for an Italian spy. She didn’t feel comfortable enough to let the language leave her door again until 1922.

“Well, that explains it.” Luca said. “My father always said that Sicilian women are more dangerous than guns.”

A sudden air of sadness came over the room, as Luca went from playful and pensive, and you found yourself feeling empathetic towards him.

“I’m sorry about your dad.” You said softly. “He never should’ve died.”

What you really thought was that none of this, the vendetta, the deaths, needed to happen. The only reason why it was happening was because Lizzie had fallen in love with Angel Changretta, a development that you had supported. You had been furious with Tommy when he tried to interfere, after all it was none of his business who Lizzie saw. John had married Esme which left Lizzie to pursue whatever man she wanted. Now you felt that a part of you better understood why he had done that.

“Thank you.” Luca gave you what appeared to be a genuine smile and a part of you felt warmer for it. “So, Polly has been playing me has she?”

“Yes.” You said, pulling yourself back into the moment. “She went to Tommy after she got your letter and they came up with the plan together. She would give you a time and place to go after Tommy and set up an ambush. None of you know Small Heath all that well and Tommy planned on using that to his advantage.”

“You realize that this means Polly is back on my list.” Luca said, raising a brow. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“She knew about the pregnancy.” You said, still stinging from that particular betrayal. “As far as I’m concerned she’s as bad as Thomas. But, you don’t need to kill her. Or Thomas.”

Luca took the toothpick out of his mouth, rolling it between his fingers. “Then what do you suggest?”

“Take everything else from them.” You said. “As far as I’m concerned, death is too quick and too good for them. But if you take away what they have, the business the money the empire, that’s a much slower death. A more painful one, and it’ll hurt Tommy the most. He’s always wanted power, so how better to punish him than to take it away?”

There was a pause as Luca appeared to be thinking your suggestion over. He looked up at you with an expression you couldn’t read, the corners of his mouth twitching. “It’s a shame Mr Shelby doesn’t know how to be loyal to his wife.” He mused. “It seems he’s lost a valuable ally.” He stood up straight, putting the toothpick back in his mouth. “Thank you for your help Name, I’ll contact you if I need to.”

You didn’t ask how he would do that, you just assumed that like Tommy and other gangsters, he would find a way. “Have a good day Luca.” You said.

“Oh, I’m sure I will.”

Translation: L'inferno non ha furia-Hell hath no fury (according to google translate)

[rosienth]

Ghost Story

I wrote this piece for my college science fiction class in response to Octavia Butler’s, “The Book of Martha”; there are also a few references to Ted Chiang’s, “Exhalation,” and to Chen Qiufan’s, “Smog Society.” It’s not the best thing that I’ve ever written, but it’s best read when accompanied by the Gone Girl soundtrack–my favorite movie soundtrack to date–specifically, “What Have We Done To Each Other.” 

My wife is as transient to me now as the fog is to everyone else. She comes when the fog opens, like curtains, revealing the face that appears so familiar to me, yet not, at the same time—and she goes when the fog thickens, closing off my view of her and her world in all of their foreign familiarity.

Space travel had not been successful in the earlier years: it took longer than we could afford to wait amidst the famines and the riots, and the astronauts—“our pioneers of the future,” as the last of the grimy government officials liked to call them—went missing, often, much to the public’s horror. Those were the days when my wife was still writing for the papers and leading protests and coming home to talk to me about how things were going to get infinitely better, Emily. As it always did, her doe-eyed optimism rubbed off on me with time, and so we, as in my naive colleagues at the lab and I, went looking for more efficient means—a shortcut that would bridge great spatial distances—of transcending time and space. No more primitively launching ourselves out of orbit. We were arrogant enough to tell ourselves that this project would not only be our redemption, but also the revival of the scientific world. The advent of the Second Enlightenment. When we presented our abstract to our prospective patrons, we called the theory something long, pretentious, and technical—a title that I could not even bother to remember later, when the fog arrived and settled. My wife called it “closing the gaps”—that’s a much more digestible term, Emily—which seems so appropriately ironic, in retrospect. I would have laughed if I had known better then.    

There is no telling or predicting when the fog will clear and there is no demanding or manipulating the fog into clearing. For the first time in a long time, we had to wait to get what we wanted from what was left of our planet. I cannot say whether or not this was good for us, or even if the fog had produced more patient, less self-serving people. It certainly did produce the most devout of religious fanatics, though. First, came the prayer circles; they were mostly secretive and inconspicuous in the beginning. Then, followed the chanting and the singing that echoed throughout the day, into the desolate alleyways and into the brittle corpses of fallen skyscrapers, and bled deep into the night. They—most likely because my wife had gone missing by the time that the Fog Societies multiplied and infiltrated the cities—didn’t bother me as much as they had bothered those who eventually attempted to silence their “disruptive nonsense” through violence. Their singing soothed me and helped me to drown out the sounds of regretful memories: dishes crashing against the kitchen floor, doors slamming in faces, empty curses shouted from across equally empty hallways. I didn’t like being told that I was being greedy; she didn’t like being told that she was being jealous. I was officially granted my own research space at the national lab; she was discharged from her position as editor-in-chief of the local paper.

Public distrust of science was rampant long before my team and I even started our experimental trials, and rightfully so: our predecessors took advantage of science’s promise of absolute objectivity and absolute truth to justify eugenics—among other inhumane acts. Scientists like me were scarce and poor, so naturally, the prize money was the objective of our project; the fog, of course, was the unintended, unnatural consequence—to some, a godly blessing—of our hasty curiosity and desperation.  

What emerged from the tear that we made in the atmosphere was not expected. I thought that you were closing the gaps. There was no kaleidoscopic storm that threatened to devour the city and the oceans; there was no ominous black hole to rip us apart and pull us into the fabric of the universe and end all human life as we knew it; there was no loud, cinematic climax, only a potent, viscous slowness. The fog materialized in waves, ever so subtly, before it was everywhere and before it became everything. It clouded our vision as it snaked through the uprooted streets and penetrated the thin walls of our homes, lulling the city into a gradual hibernation: it dimmed the street lamps, it eclipsed the stars, and it silenced the birds and the children in the parks. The fog became the air that we breathed and it, too, seemed to move—to clot and to dissipate—with the rhythm of our lungs: the exhale, the clotting, was deep and exaggerated, while the inhale, the dissipation, was brief and euphoric.  

Strange, inexplicable things happened during the inhalations, during the fleeting moments when fog cleared. There were miracles and there were tragedies; the two merged into one. My wife was the first to notice the differences that emerged from underneath the fog. At first, they were small, insignificant differences. The wedding album cover was royal blue instead of the seafoam green that my wife swore on her right hand that it was. Peach rose bushes bloomed in places where there should have been dirt and cracked concrete. Grandma Kay’s gilded antique music box disappeared from my wife’s bookshelf and was never found.

“This is a cruel prank, Emily,” my wife had assured me one morning before I left for work at the lab, her voice hoarse from last night’s yelling match. She must have also found it cruel when people began disappearing, too, but she retreated to her room without a word when the first headliner showed up at our door: 25 Missing, No Leads. They were never found.  

I spent the weeks leading up to my wife’s disappearance tossing and turning in the bed sheets, only occasionally getting up for nutritional biscuits and water from the kitchen. It was difficult to cope with the immobility during the exhalations; they were such agonizingly long periods. You could not see the hand in front of you when you stepped foot outside, let alone travel, because the fog was so opaque when it thickened and descended upon everything. My wife liked to joke that we were living beneath a large fleece blanket, though I suppose it wasn’t much of a joke given the bitterness in her tone. Ironically enough, we were safest in the darkness, when we were blind to everything outside of that large blanket. At least, people didn’t go missing during the exhalations.

The city is mostly quiet now because people had given up on hypothesizing and rationalising and instead, surrendered, shut up, and listened to the soft humming of the fog. You cannot sleep because the noise is so incessant, omnipotent, and it is usually at its loudest just before the fog lifts for the next inhalation. You can hear distorted, almost palpable voices muffled in the fog, some of them foreign, some of them so eerily familiar that they make you pause to stare at your reflection in the mirror at night, as my wife so often did. She said that she saw the ghosts of another family living inside of our house: one mother who goes to work—A scientist, Emily!—another mother who stays at home with the giggling baby. She witnessed the welcoming of the new family cat, reflected in the bathroom mirror. She was there for the baby’s first birthday celebration; she watched them dancing around together in the window panes. It made her uneasy, at times, the voyeurism of it all, but she could not bring herself to look away.

It was not long before the rest of the city saw their own ghosts, too. Behind the fog, we saw glimpses of different versions of ourselves. Some of them were brilliant, others, not so much. We got to see the ones that never broke up with our first loves, the ones that pursued the internships that we had been too afraid to in college, and the ones that found solace in opium and lived in dingy spaces on the edges of town. The fog gave us new vision, new eyes: we saw life and we saw death, living and dying, all at once. For some, the gift was too overwhelmingly colorful; it drove them down the rooftops of skyscrapers and down the flights of apartment building staircases. For others, the gift seduced them into stagnance. Sometimes, they formed new religions like the Fog Societies did in order to evoke more frequent inhalation periods. Sometimes, they sat still in their living rooms, inhaling the sounds of their potential lives and choices. My wife sleep walked through empty rooms and traced the spines of nonexistent books that she did not own, at least not in this life. Not here and not now. All of these things were ultimately just different forms of waiting and postponing action. People were tired of working and protesting to deaf ears. Waiting felt good.

One night, sometime after my wife went missing, a stranger joined me in bed. This was an inhalation. The woman resembled my wife in almost every way: she shared the same waist-length curls, same pointed nose that I used to teasingly poke, same bright, hazel eyes. I watched the panic grow and then plateau in those eyes at the realization that I was not at all who she thought that I was.

“You’re not Cara. Where is she? Where is the baby?”

This wife-imposter did not stay for very long. She left just as quickly as she had arrived, when the fog came back and swathed us in its great arms. I don’t think that I ever saw her again. There were other wife-imposters, certainly, but all slightly different; a minority of them recognized me—probably a different version of me, maybe a better me that didn’t abandon my wife when she needed me the most—and I pretended to recognize them too. Most of them reacted similarly to the way that the first one did, by bombarding me with questions, to which I answered as honestly as I could. The questions that I asked myself tortured me more so. Was my real wife starving somewhere on the side of some nondescript road? Was she happier with whomever she wound up with than she was with me? Was she still alive? The first few times the women appeared were frustrating and disorienting; I just wanted to get past the formalities, past those shrill, hysterical questions, and find out for sure if this was indeed my wife from here, from now. My increasing loneliness and guilt softened me, however, and I found myself hopefully waiting for these awkward visits from these strange women that ghosted in and out of our house. I wanted for just anyone to distract me from that harrowing loneliness and guilt.  

These days, I wait out on my flamingo pink lawn chair, half-heartedly pretending to sunbathe, but mostly I’m focused on my breathing. I’ve stopped going to the lab and I’ve stopped communicating with my colleagues altogether, not that either of those things would have mattered, anyway; some of them don’t even remember my name or why they’re even working at the lab. I can’t blame them, though. My own memories feel more like distant childhood bedtime stories than they do reality. Perhaps we are all too intoxicated to tell the difference. Perhaps the fog has suffocated us all in our own daydreams; I don’t know. For now, I know that I am perfectly content waiting around for the fog to churn out the next dazed stranger. I know that she’ll have a lot of questions that I can’t answer, but maybe one day, she won’t have any. She’ll know exactly who I am and she’ll know that she is home.

[toxoiddiamond]

T H E B A S I C S Given Name: Nam Jihun Nicknames: Julian, Jules Age: 32 Birthday: June 7th Zodiac Sign: Gemini Birthplace: Aurora, Colorado Current Location: Grand Island, Nebraska Speaks: English, Korean (he is fluent in Korean and always spoke it at home with his parents, but he doesn't speak it much anymore) Dominant Hand: Right Education: He has his Associates Degree in Automotive Technology. Occupation: Before his life got turned upside-down, he was a mechanic, a job he genuinely liked. Now that he's in a new city and planning on staying for a while, he is hoping to find a job in another garage. Vehicle: He doesn't have a car anymore, but has enough money saved up that he could get one off of Craigslist or something if he really needed to. But for now, taking buses and trains has been working out fine for him. Worldly Possessions: He left most of his possessions behind when he went on the run. Now he just has a couple changes of clothes, along with a few other necessities. Pet(s): He has never had a pet before, but always wanted one.

A P P E A R A N C E Height: 5'9" Hair: Slightly wavy and unruly, just long enough that it gets in his eyes/face if he doesn't push it back. Facial Hair: Usually has at least some facial hair, though he occasionally shaves it all off. Eye Colour: A lovely shade of brown. Skin Tone: His skin tone tends to change slightly with the seasons-- darker in the summer, paler in the winter, though he is never pasty or anything. Clothing: At the moment, he doesn't have much. A couple of t-shirts, a couple of flannels, and two pairs of jeans. He has a worn-out pair of combat boots that he wears most of the time, and a pair of even more worn-out tennis shoes in his bag as a "just in case" sort of thing. He also has a sherpa-lined denim jacket, though he doesn't often need it. Distinguishing Marks: A bunch of scars here and there on his body, most of them fairly recent, because for some mysterious reason he has found himself in a lot of fights lately~ Face Claim: Steven Yeun

H E A L T H Physical Health: He's always been in good health, but since he became a werewolf, it's been excellent. He has seemingly endless endurance and stamina, never really gets sick, and is twice as strong as he used to be. The only downside is that he doesn't sleep as well now, though he at least seems to need less sleep than before. Still, he hasn't felt fully rested since his transformation. He's also noticed that his appetite has increased, which doesn't help his food budget, but isn't too much of a problem. Physical Abilities/Limitations: Thanks to his werewolf blood, Julian is almost always warm, and does well even in very cold weather. He is also surprisingly strong, and is fast with good reflexes. However, in hot weather, he tends to slow down and be very lethargic. Addictions: He smoked as a teenager, but had managed to quit in his twenties. Of course, now that he has all these stressful things going on in his life, he has taken it up again. Allergies: No allergies, lucky for him. Mental Health: He's definitely going through some shit right now, what with being recently turned into a werewolf and dealing with all the ramifications of that. He misses his old life, and feels very isolated and lonely.

H I S T O R Y Job History: His first job was working at his dad's used car lot, helping to fix up cars and get them ready for sale, and also helping with some of the office work. After becoming a certified mechanic, he took a job in a small but reputable auto repair shop/garage. Fondest Memories: A family trip to Korea when he was a teenager. A spring break trip he went on with his friends in his freshman year of college. Various memories with his two best friends. Worst Experiences: Being attacked by a werewolf. His first transformation into a werewolf-- he doesn't remember much of it, but he remembers it was painful and he was terrified. And after his transformation, realizing that he had put everyone in his town in danger, and that he had actually killed someone.

C O M M U N I C A T I O N Speech Pace/Style: He's usually a bit soft-spoken, unless the situation calls for him to speak up. He's not exactly a smooth talker, but he doesn't stutter or stumble over his words much either. Accent: American. Even when he speaks Korean, he has a little bit of an American accent. Usual Curse Words: He doesn't curse a whole lot, but he does have a fondness for saying "Jesus Christ" or "fucking Christ" if he's frustrated.

P E R S O N A L I T Y, M I N D S E T, A N D B E L I E F S Personality Type: INFP-T Sense of Humor: Julian is pretty easily entertained. Chances are, if someone tells a joke, even if it's really bad, Julian will at least crack a smile. Habits: Laughs when he's nervous or uncomfortable. Has a hard time making eye contact, so he usually just looks at the floor or off to the side when he talks to someone, or he might focus on the other person's chin/mouth so it at least seems like he's looking at them. Quirks: He has a tendency to arrange things in order of color, or in alphabetical order. Also, there is a certain spot on the back of his neck that he has always really liked to have touched/stroked/massaged, and that has only intensified since he became a werewolf. That is definitely the best way to calm him down or help him relax~ Fears/Phobias: Public speaking-- he freezes up if he has to speak in front of more than a few people, and he absolutely hates being the center of attention. He also hates crowds/being in a crowd, and gets really tense and anxious anytime he's forced to be somewhere crowded. Strengths: Although Julian is usually a bit of a loner, he is very loyal and protective over anyone he does get close to. He would do anything for his friends and family (and let's be real here, he would do anything for Cybil as well). Julian is very level-headed, and often acts as a voice of reason. He is able to take a step back and look at things from a logical standpoint most of the time, and because of that, he gives excellent advice (though he doesn't always make the wisest decisions himself). He's a very honest person, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. Though that is sometimes a weakness for him, it can also work in his favor-- he doesn't lie, and he doesn't play games or try to hide how he feels about anyone. Flaws: Julian tends to freeze up when he's in stressful situations, or if he has to make any difficult decisions. He does not do well under pressure, and always prefers having more time to think through any decisions he may have to make. If he gets really stressed out or anxious for whatever reason, he may completely shut down, not really hearing/responding to anyone, sort of having a deer in the headlights look. It didn't used to happen much, but now that he has significantly more stress in his life, it's been happening more often. Julian kind of has a tendency to blame himself for a lot of things, even if they're not really his fault. This also leads to him being quite a pushover, and forgiving other people way more easily than he should, even if they really hurt him. He's ended up in more than one relationship where he kept getting hurt, but still kept coming back for more. Hopes/Desires: He used to have really simple hopes and desires. Like, he wanted to have his own garage someday, get married, maybe raise a couple of kids. Now, he has no idea what he wants, and is having a hard time accepting that a lot of what he wanted may not be possible anymore. Self-Esteem: At the moment, not so great. He accidentally killed a person, so he doesn't like himself much. It's pretty much all he can think about. Religion: He was raised Christian, but stopped going to church as soon as he moved out of his parent's place. The only time he goes now is on Christmas, just for nostalgic reasons.

R A N D O M Sleeping Position: He hasn't been sleeping well lately, so he kind of tosses and turns, trying to sleep in various positions and get comfortable. Boxers or Briefs?: Boxer-briefs. Day or Night?: He's kind of torn. He used to like nighttime the best, but now he always feels uneasy at night, like someone-- or something-- is watching him. Top or Bottom?: Usually bottom. Partying or Relaxing?: Parties freak him out, so he'd take relaxing anytime.

R E L A T I O N S H I P S Closest Friend: Julian had a wide circle of friends back home, and his closest friends were a couple of his coworkers at the garage, Allan and Isabelle (Izzy). He left without much of a goodbye to either of them, and doesn't plan on ever talking to them again, even though he misses them. Relationship History: His relationships have all been on-again-off-again sort of things, for various reasons. He was taken advantage of a lot and put up with a lot of shit he shouldn't have, because he's a sucker and gives out infinite second chances. One of his boyfriends cheated on him, and Julian still took him back when he came begging, even though he swore to himself he wouldn't do it. So, yeah. Not the best relationship history. Sexual Partners: He's had three boyfriends over the years that he's slept with, and one very awkward one night stand when he was lonely after a break-up. Thoughts About Sex: He loves it, and has kind of a high sex drive. He's usually been the one initiating sex in all his relationships-- not that any of his partners have minded that.

P A R E N T S Name(s): Nam Jinho and Nam Minji Age(s): 60 and 57 Occupation(s): His father owned a used car lot for a long time, but is now retired. His mother buys beat-up furniture and refurbishes it, mostly as a hobby, but she actually makes quite a bit of money from selling her pieces. Religion: Christian Quality of Relationship With Their Child: It was kind of rough for a while after Julian came out-- they told him what he was doing was wrong, that it was a sin, etc. But they've somewhat changed their minds. It still makes them uncomfortable that Julian is gay, but they've done their best to accept him for who he is, and have even asked him about his boyfriends although it's very awkward for them. But they love him, and just want him to be happy, whatever that means for him. Living/Deceased: Both alive~

D A I L Y L I F E Living Arrangements: Julian recently went on the run, and is now trying to settle down and live a low-key life in Grand Island. He's managed to find a small studio apartment for himself, fully furnished, but hasn't yet left any sort of personal mark on the place-- it's very plain.

[sindrafalcone]

Wrong Number, Right Call (epilogue)

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3  Part 4

Fandom: BIGBANG/ Choi Seung Hyun x Reader

Synopsis: Wallowing... with company

Warnings: A slight hint of depression, also this is a little long for an ‘epilogue’.

Author’s Note: And so, we have reached the end of my little hormone-driven, feel good story. I hope you have all enjoyed this ride as much as I have. <3 Thanks for reading!

Suggested Listening: A Lonely September ~ Plain White T’s

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. This story contains fictional representations of real people. None of the events are true. This is from an American standpoint, so some of the situations may not happen the same way they might in Korea. I make no money from the writing of this fictional work.

Masterlist

With a grimace Seung Hyun glanced down at his phone, where another message awaited him. He had to leave. "I'm really sorry about this."

"Relax." you said quietly. Your hand was on his bicep, thumb rubbing soothing circles on Seung Hyun's arm. "I'll be fine. Go."

It wasn't like he had much of a choice. Still unhappy with all this, he leaned in to press a quick kiss to your lips, then got up and jogged off to the waiting car.

Once inside, he got an actual phone call from Jiyong apprising him of the situation. Even while listening on speaker, he fired off a quick text to you, apologizing yet again.

You replied: No worries. The most unfortunate part about all this is that you didn't get to eat my cupcakes. Apart from why you had to leave to begin with of course. Group emergency is more important than picnic dates with your best girl.

Seung Hyun didn't want to agree with that, but he couldn't exactly disagree either, so he didn't reply at all. Despite the fact that he was well-aware that there wasn't much of a choice involved here, that he had to leave you because of an emergency, he still felt terrible about it.

Just before the car reached the YG building, his phone vibrated again. It was a text from you, with a picture attached: a selfie of you sitting with your back against a tree, the box of sandwiches open in your lap. I hope you don't mind, but I'm still eating these. :p, the text read. You looked relaxed, not bothered at all that you were left to your own devices in the middle of the park. Seung Hyun stared at the picture for a moment. He gazed at your beautiful eyes and the way the sun gleamed in your hair, your cute smile.... he exhaled, somehow feeling a bit better about the whole thing. He knew that he'd have to think of something to make it up to you, but right now, he had a problem to focus on.

Seung Hyun wasn't able to contact you at all until two days later. Officially, the solution to the mess was a success. But there were some tough decisions to be made, and Seung Hyun as the eldest had to help make them. None of them were feeling particularly happy about the album changes, mostly they were just drained from being trapped in the studio for 48 hours. Yang, frustrated by lack of progress, blandly informed them that they'd have a twenty-four hour period of downtime before having to come back in and finish.

Seung Hyun didn't look at anyone as they collectively got into the elevator. Dead silence reigned inside as they wordlessly rode down to the ground floor and got into their respective cars. When Seung Hyun finally got to his villa, he stepped into his bedroom, breathed in the scent of undisturbed, clean air and stopped dead in his tracks.

How long he stared at the wall, he didn't know. But eventually he got a grip and started to strip off his filthy clothes, dropping them to the floor as he headed straight for the bathroom. During the long, hot shower he didn't think of anything. And it didn't so much wash the exhaustion away as helped it seep into his muscles & bones.

When he was done he briefly considered sleep, but for some reason the thought of getting into his bed annoyed him, and so instead he found himself heading for the kitchen with the vague thought of getting something to drink. On the way there he spotted his phone, still sitting where he had haphazardly tossed it on his way through the house. As he saw it he suddenly recalled with vivid clarity what had happened before he left reality for two whole days.

Hesitantly, very hesitantly, he picked up his phone and switched it on. It immediately started to vibrate as texts from you trickled in, plus a few missed calls. He couldn't quite bring himself to read them all, and only opened the most recent.

Ok, I'm kinda really worried here. Please just let me know that you're okay that's all I'm asking.

It was a conscious decision, but it was also almost instinct to press the call button. The phone hadn't even rung twice before you picked it up, sounding slightly breathless and definitely worried. "Seung Hyun?"

"Yes." he said, then didn't know what else to say. "I'm sorry."

You didn't even react to that, just asked, almost a demand, "Are you okay?"

To say yes would be a lie, but to say no would be one as well. The dilemma forced Seung Hyun to really think about it and he took a deep breath. "I'm... I'm not hurt."

"But you're not okay." you deduced, astute as ever.

"No." Seung Hyun admitted quietly.

There was a brief moment of silence, and then you just asked "What do you need?"

Seung Hyun swallowed compulsively and told himself that was okay, that you only wanted to help. "Could you just, uhm... talk to me?"

"I can do that." you immediately agreed. "Although what I could also do is come over? It's okay if you'd rather I didn't though, whatever you're comfortable with. You could come to me too if you wanted."

Swallowing again, Seung Hyun thought about having you here, about not having to sit in his big, empty house all on his own. Your voice in his ear was barely keeping the loneliness at bay.

"Yes." he found himself saying, not really surprised by how much he wanted it to happen. The only thing that was surprising was that he didn't think of it himself. "Please."

"Okay. We can stay on the phone if you want to. I'll just call a cab, just a second okay?"

"Yeah." Seung Hyun agreed. "You don't have to pay for it, just let security know when you get here, he'll take care of it."

"Don't worry about it." you said. "I'll call you back in a minute." And with that, you hung up.

Empty dial tone in his ear, Seung Hyun licked his lips, then quickly called the security guard outside to let him know he would have a visitor in a minute, told him your name & that he should take care of your cab fare.

He was just off the phone when it rang... you calling him back. "You really don't have to pay for the cab. I'm sure you didn't exactly plan to spend your day here, let me take care of it." Seung Hyun said as soon as he answered.

"Don't be stupid." you said softly. "What I planned with my day has absolutely nothing to do with it. Besides... you're aware that it's past five pm?"

Seung Hyun hadn't been, actually. He didn't know what time of day it was when he had got home, just that it had been daylight. "Oh."

You hummed noncommittally. "I was pretty worried. I know you can't tell me anything, but... is everything okay?"

“Nobody died.” Seung Hyun quipped. He wanted to elaborate, but the words got stuck in his throat.

"Okay." you said after a moment. "Are you hungry?"

“Actually... yes." he hesitantly replied. He hadn't even noticed until you said something & wasn't even sure when his last full meal had actually been.

"Good. I made jjangbap, I'll bring you some. When I'm stressed I blink and suddenly my kitchen is full of scones or muffins or something else. I'm still not sure if I should thank you or curse you." you told him lightly. "My therapist says it's as good a coping method as any though, so I suppose it's not all bad. Even if I do end up having to give away lots of it because I can't eat it all." you hummed thoughtfully. "Though I guess I could eat it all if I were determined, but that probably wouldn't be so healthy."

"Who do you give it to?" Seung Hyun asked, finally able to relax enough to lean against the backrest of his favorite chair. Something about listening to your chatter was infinitely calming. The effect was no doubt deliberate, you weren't usually the type to babble away like that.

"If I see you, it's you, of course." you explained, and now that you said it, Seung Hyun recalled that one time when you had brought him a plastic box of cookies for no reason, or the muffins the two of you had the second time he had visited you at home. "Other than that, whoever I see that day or the day after, I guess. My parents, my co-workers, my therapist... my hairstylist, even, once or twice. My neighbors. This sounds like it happens a lot, but it doesn't, not really. Usually I manage to stick to cookies, they're the easiest to give away, you know?"

"When I came to your place the first time, you had pie." Seung Hyun remembered. In the background, he heard your door fall shut, and then the acoustics changed as you entered the elevator of your building.

You snorted self-deprecatingly. "I was a little annoyed with myself for rolling my ankle, remember? Not just because we had to change our date plans, but it put my whole schedule off for a week. Couldn't work out properly, couldn't walk to work, I was stuck inside the whole time. I don't mind being inside but only if I have the option to leave, you know?"  

With your phone tilted away, you greeted the cab driver and told him where to go.

Yeah, Seung Hyun understood that. He understood perfectly. "Yes. And today you made jjangbap?"

"I accidentally bought a rice cooker." you explained, sounding a little embarrassed. "So I figured I might as well make something with it, you know?"

"And you were stressed." Seung Hyun realized belatedly, like a complete idiot. "I'm sorry. I'll give you a number you can call, they can at least tell you that I'm fine, okay?"

"That would be great." you sighed, sounding very relieved. It made Seung Hyun feel even worse. Yes, he hadn't had a choice, outside contact while working was generally out of the question, but still. He should have thought of you.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it, I get it." you immediately replied, voice soft. "I just have no practice being at this end of things.”

It took him a second to figure out what you were talking about, but of course you were talking about your newly founded relationship. You had absolutely no experience at dating an idol.

"I have no practice having someone at the other end of things." Seung Hyun told you honestly.

"We'll figure it out together." you said, voice warm.

"Yeah." taking a deep breath, Seung Hyun let it out slowly. You would.

Half an hour later, his door swung open, admitting you to Seung Hyun's villa. Despite the fact that you had never been there before, you didn't look uncomfortable or intimidated. Which, frankly, was surprising. Seung Hyun himself had been intimidated the first couple of times he'd come here.

"Fancy." was all you had to say as you stepped into Seung Hyun's living room. Your grin softened into a smile and with no hesitation you dropped the bag you were carrying, stepped up to him and drew him into a hug.

As soon as you were touching him, in his arms and holding onto him in return, it felt like Seung Hyun could just... let go for the first time in what felt like ages. He let out a breath he hadn't even been aware he was holding and closed his eyes, let himself sink into your embrace and just breathe for a minute.

It ended up being a pretty long minute. Eventually you shifted a little, at which point Seung Hyun realized that he was basically holding you captive three steps from his front door, and that was not how he should treat a visitor, much less his best girl. His mother would be appalled.

Immediately embarrassed, he pulled away from you and ducked his head. "Sorry. Uhm... do you want something to drink?"

"Seung Hyun." you sighed, exasperated. Then you relented, took your bag and followed him into the kitchen. Once there you pulled out a big plastic bowl filled with the jjang sauce, and another with rice. You both worked to spoon the rice into bowls, the sauce on top, and put them into the microwave. Then you very firmly directed Seung Hyun on how to make your special hot chocolate with the ingredients you brought. Because that was apparently what you were having with the jjangbap.

"If it bothers you so much, grab a bottle of water too." you rolled your eyes when Seung Hyun commented on the somewhat unconventional combination.

Getting a bottle of water out of the fridge, Seung Hyun frowned. "I'm starting to get the impression there is a method to all this."

"And he's smart, too." you grinned.

Then, with an air of great mystery, you reached into your bag and pulled out... Coffee Prince, The Complete Series boxset, exaggerated eyebrow waggle included. Seung Hyun couldn't help but laugh, mostly because of your expression, which turned delighted a second after hearing his chuckle.

It was impossible not to smile, and for the first time in what felt like far too long, Seung Hyun even meant it. "I like it."

With you directing everything, you both assembled your bowls of reheated food & drinks. The hot chocolate turned out to not be merely two cups worth, but a whole pot of it, plus a can of whipped cream and a bag of marshmallows you brought from home as well. Then you helped Seung Hyun gather bunch of pillows and blankets, plus his comforter, and dragged all that into the living room. You had Seung Hyun put in the DVD and when he turned around, he found that you had arranged a virtual nest for the two of you on the floor in front of the sofa. The coffee table had been pushed to the side and this was totally unconventional, but it looked highly comfortable too. He loved it.

Especially when it resulted in him being able to cuddle with you much better than he could have on the sofa. The jjangbap was delicious, just enough to warm Seung Hyun's body from the inside, and the hot chocolate turned out to actually warm the soul, as you had claimed (which was why, you explained, the two went so well together). Or maybe it was the company, your physical presence, warm, sweet and alive next to him. Not making a big deal out of anything but somehow managing to completely put Seung Hyun's mind off the things he'd rather not think about.

You'd been lounging there for about two hours, Seung Hyun more or less curled around you with his head on your chest, right above your heart, your hand in his hair, when his phone rang. Seung Hyun felt himself immediately tense up with apprehension, even as he pressed the speaker button. "Yes?"

"Excuse me, hyung, but Jiyong wants to know how you are." Seungri's voice asked.

He sighed. "I'm fine."

There was a brief moment of silence, but Seung Hyun knew better than to hope that would actually be the end of it. "Um....  his exact words were: 'The hell you are, we all know you're wallowing.'"

It was kind of hilarious hearing Seungri being made to relay messages for the leader, and any other time Seung Hyun would even appreciate it. Sometimes it was difficult for him to get out of his own head and he needed to be pushed, something which his friends clearly knew well. Just like they knew he shouldn't be alone right now. They just weren't aware that he actually wasn't alone.

"Sooo..." you drawled, fingers still in his hair. "What's up?"

Seung Hyun sighed and tilted his head up to look at you, unwilling to remove it entirely from your chest. "Either I go over to wherever they are and tell them not to worry, or they'll come here and check up on me."

"That's actually kind of nice of them." you pointed out lightly.

"I know." Seung Hyun shrugged, as much as he could anyway in his current position; it was more of a twitch of his shoulders, actually. "It's your choice. I'm fine with either."

You raised one eyebrow. "You're the one who hasn't told them yet."

That was... true, but it wasn't the entire truth. He sat up a little to look you better in the eyes. "I thought we agreed. You know I'm fine with telling them anytime, right? Besides, Daesung knows."

"Yeah." you agreed. "It's got to happen at some point. I don't mind. Though I don't suppose they'll leave it alone if you tell them you're not wallowing?"

As if... Seung Hyun snorted. It was worth a try, but not likely to work. "Maknae,” he said loudly, in order to get Seungri's attention again. “Could you tell Jiyong that I appreciate it but I'm not wallowing, and I'm not alone?"

"Oh, um... sure, hyung." Seungri stammered. He said nothing else, so Seung Hyun shrugged a little, hung up the phone and moved back into his previous position, head above your heart. Only to realize he'd missed the last ten minutes of the episode.

You were five minutes into watching those ten minutes over again when the front door swung open and, unsurprisingly, his bandmates spilled into the room. Noisily.

“Hyung!" Jiyong called out immediately. "We've come to drag your ass out of here, you're not fooling any-"

At which point he stepped into the living room and actually spotted the two of you, the sight stopping him in his tracks. "...one," he finished at normal level.

Seung Hyun really, really didn't have the energy to deal with this. He managed a half-hearted glare, then sighed and closed his eyes for a second.

"Well, seems like he wasn't actually lying." Youngbae stated the obvious from behind Jiyong. Seungri, peering at you from over Jiyong's other shoulder, raised one eyebrow.

"If you're going to stare at us all night I'm gonna have to demand that you at least pay for a ticket." you teased.

"Hey, is that _________?" Daesung called out from somewhere behind the three blocking the entryway. "Hi __________!"

"Hi Daesung!" you called back.

"I'm offended." Jiyong pouted. "So is this a regular thing that happens? Why did Daesung know but nobody else?"

That was something Seung Hyun actually felt the need to address. "How's that betting pool going?"

For a brief second, they actually looked a bit sorry. They had conversations about this before... Seung Hyun didn't appreciate being made the butt of some joke by becoming the topic of a betting pool, and Jiyong had promised not to do it again. To his credit, he actually hadn't for over a year,  until you. That apparently had been too much of a temptation to resist.

"Seriously." you said after a moment of silence. "Either you all sit down and watch Coffee Prince, or you need leave. I'm really not into this staring thing that's happening right now."

"Well sorry, I'm kinda fascinated, it looks like you've formed a symbiosis.” Jiyong quipped.

Exasperated and embarrassed, Seung Hyun closed his eyes, but you just snorted, amused rather than offended.

"So." Youngbae said loudly. "We probably should leave."

In a split second, Seung Hyun realized that it was his fault this was all so awkward, he really should have handled this better.

"No, wait." he sat up and rubbed a hand through his hair, blinking at you. "Guys, this is _______. _________, these are Jiyong, Youngbae and Seungri, you know Daesung."

One corner of your mouth twitched upwards as you waved at them shyly. It was a good thing at least one person found this whole thing amusing, because Seung Hyun was growing rapidly more mortified at his own lack of manners.

"Hello, ________." Seungri said calmly. "It's nice to meet you."

"You too." you replied with a sweet smile, a polite but not false one. You sat up as well, pushed a stray lock of hair behind your ear as you looked back and forth between Seung Hyun and his friends.

"Hi." Jiyong choked out, twitching like somebody elbowed him (most likely Youngbae). "So. Foot in my mouth. I do that sometimes."

"Nah, no worries." you waved him off.

"Soooo." Youngbae repeated, then appeared to run out of things to say. He wasn't the best at social situations sometimes.

Seung Hyun took a deep breath.

"Listen, I really appreciate you guys checking up on me, but I'm... better."

He meant to tell them they could go but suddenly he realized that they might actually need him. They hadn't exactly had a great time over the past few days either. And after bad days they almost always found themselves in the same room, doing stuff... maybe not together-together, but at least in each others presence. Even if it was just everyone focusing on their books or screens, it was an important team thing that helped them all decompress. He couldn't just send them away... they would leave without complaint and never say a word, but they might need him there.

Somehow, you seemed to realize that, or at the very least you noticed something about the atmosphere. Because, before Seung Hyun could say anything else, you settled back into the pillows and gestured towards Seung Hyun's arrangement of sofas and armchairs. "So, are you guys going to sit down or what? This is hella awkward."

There was a moment of silence, then Jiyong drawled. "Well, since you asked so nicely." With that, he threw himself into an armchair and pulled out his phone.

Within ten minutes, the others had raided Seung Hyun's cabinets for food and made themselves comfy. Nobody even suggested putting on something other than what you had already been watching.

This wasn't really how Seung Hyun had imagined this going. Then again, he hadn't really imagined much. He tried hard not to think at all because the moment he let himself drift, his thoughts started running in circles, trying to figure out what he could and should have done differently. Definitely, this wasn't how he pictured his girlfriend meeting his bandmates, but you seemed to be taking it all in stride. You were taking handfuls of popcorn, candy and chips from bowls in a way that wasn't at all polite or shy. And you had no hesitation when you told Jiyong, unperturbed, to shut up when he started “oooo-ing” as Seung Hyun settled back into your side.

It... it wasn't what Seung Hyun had expected, but was good. It was good.

[mimichootings]

The Mackerel Fiesta

Thank you, Gethin. Ladies and gentlemen, it is, I must say, a great honour to be here today, and to preside over this wonderful fiesta, now in its thirteenth year. I have heard one or two complaints that, as festivals go, ours is less than venerable, and, indeed, is a rather artificial affair, a flimsy excuse for public inebriation, not based at all on a genuine tradition, but shamelessly copied from similar festivals to be found in Spain or Portugal, one or the other, or perhaps both, or neither. Malta maybe? But never mind about that. Some cynical souls have even suggested that the whole event has been manufactured with the sole aim of drawing in crowds of gullible tourists and pocketing their foolishly spent money. Yes, boo hiss indeed, ladies and gentlemen. Boo hiss indeed. Well might you boo, and well might you hiss. But not with your mouth full, Mr. Jenkins, that would be my advice. But, looking around me, I see so many local faces, that, while I won’t say that this is a local fiesta for local people, ha ha, it does illustrate the value we in this lovely little town attach to a sense of community, for what can bring a community together more effectively, more cohesively, than burning a giant fish on a beach?

 Those of you who have attended the fiesta before will know the routine: from here we march in procession to the sweet sounds of our talented band, through the centre of town, over the bridge, down to the yacht club, where there will be some entertainment and a few words from me (as if that weren’t entertainment enough), and then it’s just a short walk to the beach, where, after we have given thanks to Almighty God, our fishy friend here will make the supreme sacrifice, and be set alight. And then, at the end, we’ll have the raffle, with the first prize being this impressive magnum bottle of champagne. For the procession we have, as you see, six bearers to carry the effigy―a round of applause, ladies and gentlemen―including Mr. Andrews, who, of course, being a genuine local undertaker, is used to this sort of thing. Following them will be our weeping, wailing widows, and a fine sight they are, I’m sure you’ll agree, ladies and gentlemen, so another round of applause, if you please. Don’t milk it, Mrs. Pryce-Evans, there’s really no need for a twirl.

 Right then, if everything is ready, let the procession begin! Don’t push, Gethin, I’m ahead of you, it’s only proper. I wish this music were a bit more mournful; rather too jaunty for the occasion, don’t you think? Widows, your keening is commendable, but might I suggest a few more ululations, and less of the giggling, if you please. This is a serious matter, after all. Thank you, Mrs. Pryce-Evans; that was an excellent flutter of the handkerchief, but try not to overdo it. Let dignity be your goal. And bearers, if you could just attempt to assume a more solemn air, that would be appreciated. For God’s sake! Who is that wearing trainers? Mr. Andrews, I am disappointed! You, of all people, should know better. Some of you, I regret to say, are not taking this quite as seriously as you should, but there we are, it can’t be helped, I suppose. What is it, Gethin? No, I don’t want a shot, get back to your place, mun.

 Now then, ladies and gentlemen, here we are, and, as promised, we will have some entertainment for you very shortly. But first, as your minister, it behoves me to say a few words on this momentous and splendid occasion. Those of you who know me will know that community is one of my chief concerns, and in our community, we value very much those members of it who go out to sea and bring us back its bounty, braving the winds and the waves and the terrors of the deep. Thank you, God, for keeping them safe. But God, if you must know, I have bone to pick with you, because, to tell the truth, the catch has been a bit disappointing this year, hasn’t it? Not much of a bounty at all, really. And what’s worse, it’s a continuation of a recent trend. People talk about overfishing and marine pollution and what-have-you, but other towns and villages, some of them not so very far from here, have done much better than us, and that’s a fact. Why is that, Lord? What have we done? Where have we sinned? I know you move in mysterious ways; that, I can’t deny. But if, in your infinite and impenetrable wisdom, you could see to it that next year we have a better catch, I for one would be most grateful. To that end, we offer you this piscine effigy, and hope you like it. In fact, I’d say it looks so fetching, that you’d be a bit of an odd fish not to. Odd fish, ha ha.

 Now, I am well-known in these parts for the keen interest I take in fishing matters, which some have said rivals the interest I take in religious matters. More than rivals, thank you! Mr. Jenkins, there, always ready with his little quips, some of them, as you can see, being less successful than others. I have been on several fact-finding missions across the globe in order to develop and enhance my understanding of the issues, and to attempt to find a solution to the relative dearth in maritime produce that has brought about so much local consternation. For instance, at the Trøllbøgrøll Institute in Bergen, in Norway, where I have been―TWICE!―I was reliably informed that the annual percentage, not excluding… Ah, I see that Gethin is gesturing to me in that characteristically frantic way of his, and I can only interpret his gestures as a polite reminder that time is of the essence, and on that, he has my full agreement, for if we take a moment to consider time, yes alright Gethin, keep your bloody hair on, boy.

 Right, time now, ladies and gentlemen, for that entertainment I mentioned earlier, for which I am sure you have been waiting with baited breath. And so, without further ado, let me introduce you to someone who needs no introduction, the one and only, our very own, Mrs. Llinos Wendy Davies! A warm welcome, ladies and gentlemen, please. That’s better. It’s a thrilling performance we have in store for us now, ladies and gentlemen, because Mrs. Davies, who no doubt has already captured your attention with her remarkable attire, is about to combine the noble arts of belly dancing and fire juggling. Take it away, Mrs. Davies!

 After that eye-opening spectacle, no-one can say that the years have not been kind to Mrs. Davies. Indeed, one might say that age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite b―yes, you’re right, Gethin, that would probably be a bit off-colour. Well caught. Careful, there, Mrs. Davies, one of the torches is not quite―Good God, she’s on fire! Someone put her out, for the love of Christ, I can’t bear all that screaming. What are you doing? You can’t chuck her in the harbour, the bloody tide’s out, mun. What? The prize champagne? But what about the raffle? Oh, sweet Jesus, what a waste! Still, at least she’s out. Thank you, Mrs. Davies, that was unforgettable. Don’t worry, the ambulance is on its way. I’m sure, ladies and gentlemen, that you will all join me in wishing Mrs. Davies a speedy recovery. Now then, Gethin, what can we get to replace the champagne? We need something for the main prize. A big bottle of Strongbow? Very well, it will have to do. Wait, it looks as if it’s been opened. Well, if it’s only one swig, I suppose no-one will mind.

 Ladies and gentlemen, after that excitement, it is time now to move on to the ceremony itself. Bearers, widows: to your positions please, so that we can go down to the beach. Musicians, there’s no need, we have had the benefit of your talents for long enough now. This year, ladies and gentlemen, in a bit of an innovation, we have built really quite a large pyre on which the mackerel will be placed. A bit more oomph, you see, like a Viking funeral. Doesn’t it do the town proud? Here we are. Before we consign this extraordinary effigy to the flames, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to say a few brief words and to lead us all in prayer. Yes, Gethin, I did say brief. Lord, we are gathered here today in thy presence to give thanks for thy munificence, which, though in the opinion of some may have fallen a bit short in recent years, nonetheless blesses us and is still a cause for gratitude, and after all, Lord, who are we to complain? We are but maggots, crawling and slithering repulsively in the noxious depths of sin and iniquity, blind to thy holy purposes, Lord, and undeserving, mostly, of the paltry crumbs of sustenance you deign to drop, from time to time, when the mood suits you, and evidently it hasn’t suited you much this past year or in previous years, but that’s quite alright, mustn’t grumble, you are the Lord of Light and Life, after all, and we thy humble―alright Gethin, no need for that. Burn the damn thing, amen.

 Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a promising start to the conflagration. The mighty, marvellous, majestic, magnificent mackerel really giving out some heat, there, ha ha, although I do detect a faint aroma of… I’m not quite sure what, exactly, but I can’t honestly say it’s pleasant. Gethin, what did you use to make the fish? Plastic! Good God, mun! Whose bright idea was that? No, it was not my idea, you lying git. What kind of plastic? What do you mean you don’t know? No, it’s not a bloody technical question, it… wait, are those tyres? You put car tyres in the pyre! You fucking idiot! You useless bucket of shit! Jesus fucking Christ, the smoke coming off that thing! Oh God, the smell! No, no, ladies and gentlemen, stay put, I think the wind is about to change. Yes, yes, there we are, see, blowing it all back into town, out of the way. Great black billows of Satanically noxious smoke, pretty poisonous, I should think. I hope people in town are inside with their windows closed, although on a lovely sunny day like this, it’s quite possible that they’re not. Still, rather them than us, ladies and gentlemen, eh? Ha ha. No. No, Mr. Jenkins, you’re right, that was inappropriate. Gethin, you’re sure this isn’t dangerous, aren’t you? I mean, I hope we’re not going to get sued.

 Oh Christ, I think the wind has changed again. No, don’t panic, ladies and gentlemen, there’s no cause for alarm, it’s simply a minor… My eyes! My God, my eyes! And my throat, too! Thank you, Lord, thanks a fucking bunch. Run! Run, ladies and gentlemen, run for your lives! Christ on a bike, I’m blind! Oh fuck fuck fuck. Gethin! Gethin! Gethin, where are you, boy? Don’t leave me! Oh, the pain! I can’t breathe. Not like this, Lord! Not like this!

[illustratedtapes]

Illustrated Tapes 027: Prom Curated by Emily Salinas 22 March 2019

➔ spoti.fi/2UOJrbB Listening in order recommended

Emily is a multi-disciplinary designer and drummer based in Liverpool.

What’s up Emily! Can you tell us a little bit about your tape and your song selections?

My playlist “Prom” is inspired by a number of my favourite American cult teen TV series and films, including The Virgin Suicides, My So-Called Life, Napoleon Dynamite, Perks of Being a Wallflower and 13 Reasons Why.

Perhaps “Prom” is a misnomer as I’m always more interested in the stories of the underdogs and social outcasts. I’ve always loved cult American teen shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freaks and Geeks. As a teen myself watching My So Called Life was hugely influential and important, seeing someone I could relate to having their story told. I was so enraptured I immediately dyed my hair red like Angela’s! 

Being a teenager is such a unique time in your life; at times super intense, discovering who you are as a person, falling in love/lust for the first time, all that stuff. So I wanted to put together a playlist that basically reflects being a teenager through the lens of these cultural reference points.

The playlist is mostly comprised of dreampop and synthy 80s vibes with some grungier vibes thrown in. I took one or two of the songs directly from the films/series that inspired the playlist but mostly these are original picks.

How did you go about the artwork?

Both the music and the artwork were inspired by the dreamy visuals of The Virgin Suicides. I knew I wanted to combine collage with some hand drawn elements as I felt that aesthetic fit with the music. I love using images from vintage storybooks, such as the image of the girl and boy used here, as they have this magical nostalgic quality.

What are your fave album covers, records with a great music and artwork combo, or musical projects with a visual component?

I love this cover so much I bought it on vinyl despite not owning a record player just so I could display it as a piece of art in my room. The photo is so iconic, it encapsulates everything amazing and inspiring about Bowie. It’s simple and stripped back but still infinitely captivating.

I love most of M.I.A.’s artwork (Kala and Maya also have awesome album artwork), it was ahead of it’s time with its “ugly” design aesthetic. It captures her edginess, her contemporary take on traditional influences.

What did you listen to growing up?

At school I would alternate between Led Zeppelin and Spice Girls. Zeppelin because I raided my mum’s cassette collection and Spice Girls cos I wanted all of Geri’s dresses and cos they were girls with as much attitude as Oasis. I was also a proud member of the Queen fanclub and would spend any money I got at record fairs buying every bit of Queen merch I could get my hands on!

After Queen came Radiohead and early Manic Street Preachers before discovering metal when I hit 16, getting hugely into Deftones, Slipknot and Korn. Towards the end of college I discovered the Wu Tang Clan which was a game changer and got me quite heavily into hiphop for a couple of years. I’ve always had a soft spot for (decent) pop music though throughout my life and this playlist taps into that.

What’s happening in your creative world at the moment?

I’m actually taking this year off from briefs to improve my technical skills in sign painting and refine my style a bit more as I’ve tended to be quite stylistically fluid in the past! This is done on the weekends as I work as a graphic designer for a company in the week. I am hoping to add to my positive sign project though, having previously made a positive sign for women’s charity “Whisc” on Bold St Liverpool.

The idea behind the series is I wanted to contribute to balancing out all the negative messaging we receive on a regular basis from advertising and the media. I wanted people to be able to see positive messages around the city, and since sign painting is a method I use I decided to go with that! My next positive sign will be for News From Nowhere, an independent radical bookstore, also based on Bold Street Liverpool.

Where can we find you?

emilysalinas.co.uk instagram.com/emilysalinas_ twitter.com/Emily_Salinas_

[recordingtheyear]

Trick Mirror - Jia Tolentino

I had heard rave reviews about this book from so many people and it definitely held up. Like any book of essays, I find that some resonate more than others, but throughout the book, Tolentino proves to be incredible intelligent and original. I was particularly blown away by the essay The I in the Internet (I ended up talking about it for my French Oral exam because it had fully taken up place in my brain); as well as Always be Optimizing; The Store of a Generation in Seven Scams; and We Come from Old Virginia.

“The last few years have taught me to suspend my desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static, and that renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope that little truths will keep emerging in time.” (p. xi). A good reminder.

The I in Internet

“As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.” (p. 6).

“In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet – for anyone to see you, you have to act.” (p. 8).

“Even if you ignore the internet completely… you still live in the world that this internet has created.” (p. 12). My response to the negative aspect of technology is often to run away (with an inevitable return not long afterward); but that’s not a lasting solution.

“The difference [between today’s and previous claims that technology is ruining society] is that, today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized – not just goods and labour, but personality and relationships and attention.” Our personal profiles are connected to capitalism and are being commodified. This stands in direct to opposition to the reminder note in my phone that I fully stole from a Savannah Brown youtube video years ago: “My self, my personality, my looks, are not a commodity to be consumed by others. Others selves, their personalities, their looks are not a commodity to be consumed by me.” And yet, I actively participate in the commodification of my self for the internet.

“In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself. (p. 18) !!!!!! What the Heck! How did she so perfectly identify and describe this aspect of our culture. I feel truly called out.

“In front of the timeline, as many critics have noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab-rat behaviour, the sort that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if their lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying.” (p. 30)

Always be Optimizing

Quoting Matt Buchanan in the Awl: “The chopped salad is engineered… to free one’s hand and eyes from the taks of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?” Constantly coming back to that politics of food class.

“It sometimes seems that feminism can imagine no more satisfying progress that this current situation – one in which, instead of being counseled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.” (p. 81). Throughout the book she is open about critiquing present day feminism – it has greater potential than where we are.

“And yet there is enormous pleasure in individual success. It can feel like licence and agency to approach an ideal, to find yourself – in a good picture, on your wedding day, in a flash of identical movement – exemplifying a prototype. There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.” (p. 91)

“The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacities – think of the extended Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models who plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces – and remained stagnant in many other ways… We have not ‘optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arena’s let alone anything approaching perfection.” (p. 93-94)

Reality TV Me

“How embarrassing, I thought, to openly crave attention. Why couldn’t she figure out that you were supposed to pretend you didn’t care?” (p. 56). A lesson I’m learning is that it’s okay to take up space, to need and to crave attention. It’s normal and strange that we dance around it.

Pure Heroines

“Solnit wonders if the reduction of women to their domestic decisions is, effectively, a literary problem. ‘We are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives,’ she writes. ‘We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the  myriad forms a life can take flower – and wither – all around us.’” (p. 113). How do I view others with flowering but non-conventional lives? How do I view myself? I know I can be fulfilled and a woman regardless of outcome, but often the value judgement is not easy to be rid of.

Ecstasy

“But I’ve always been glad that I grew up the way I did. The Repentagon [her amazing nickname for the megachurch she grew up in] trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme environments, a skill I wouldn’t give up for anything, and Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick. Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality.” (P. 140). What is my ‘spiritual inheritance’? It’s a phrase that so eloquently puts to words what I feel – I am so grateful for my upbringing and the worldview it has given me, and I’d like to hold on to that even as my beliefs change.

“I stood between both sides of my life, holding the lines that led to them, trying to engage with a tension that I stopped being able to feel. Eventually, almost without realizing it, I let one side go.” (p. 142).

The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams

“It is very easy, these days, for student borrowers to end up underwater – indebted for a degree that’s worth much less than what they paid. There are lots of similarities between the housing bubble and the tuition bubble… But there’s one major difference between housing debt and education debt: at least for now, if you hope to improve your life in America, you can’t quite tur away from a diploma the way you can a white picket fence.” (p. 168).

“Stories about how millennials ‘prefer’ to freelance still abound… We’ll work anywhere with a Ping-Pong table! ... It’s just easier, as Malcolm Harris argues in his book Kids These Days, to think millennials float from gig to gig because we’re shiftless or spoiled or in love with the “hustle” than to consider the fact that the labor market –for people of every generation – is punitively unstable and growing more so every day.” (p. 169).

“The ever-expanding story of Girbloss feminism really begins with Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 manifesto… She believes that women should demand power as a way to tear down social barriers; others believe that barriers should be torn down so that women can demand power… Provided with a feminist praxis of individual advancement and satisfaction – two concepts that easily blur into self-promotion and self-indulgence – women happily bit. A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics. And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise.” (p. 179). Wow.

[dinafbrownil]

Hospitals Take Shot At Opioid Makers Over Cost Of Treating Uninsured For Addiction

( function() { var func = function() { var iframe = document.getElementById('wpcom-iframe-afedcacd51237ccd1fa88376fc1833f1') if ( iframe ) { iframe.onload = function() { iframe.contentWindow.postMessage( { 'msg_type': 'poll_size', 'frame_id': 'wpcom-iframe-afedcacd51237ccd1fa88376fc1833f1' }, "https:\/\/embeds.kff.org" ); } } // Autosize iframe var funcSizeResponse = function( e ) { var origin = document.createElement( 'a' ); origin.href = e.origin; // Verify message origin if ( 'embeds.kff.org' !== origin.host ) return; // Verify message is in a format we expect if ( 'object' !== typeof e.data || undefined === e.data.msg_type ) return; switch ( e.data.msg_type ) { case 'poll_size:response': var iframe = document.getElementById( e.data._request.frame_id ); if ( iframe && '' === iframe.width ) iframe.width = '100%'; if ( iframe && '' === iframe.height ) iframe.height = parseInt( e.data.height ); return; default: return; } } if ( 'function' === typeof window.addEventListener ) { window.addEventListener( 'message', funcSizeResponse, false ); } else if ( 'function' === typeof window.attachEvent ) { window.attachEvent( 'onmessage', funcSizeResponse ); } } if (document.readyState === 'complete') { func.apply(); /* compat for infinite scroll */ } else if ( document.addEventListener ) { document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', func, false ); } else if ( document.attachEvent ) { document.attachEvent( 'onreadystatechange', func ); } } )();

While thousands of cities and counties have banded together to sue opioid makers and distributors in a federal court, another group of plaintiffs has started to sue on their own: hospitals.

Hundreds of hospitals have joined in a handful of lawsuits in state courts, seeing the state-based suits as their best hope for winning meaningful settlement money.

“The expense of treating overdose and opioid-addicted patients has skyrocketed, straining the resources of hospitals throughout our state,” said Lee Bond, CEO of Singing River Health System in Mississippi in a statement. His hospital is part of a lawsuit in Mississippi.

Hospitals may discover downsides to getting involved in litigation, said Paul Keckley, an independent health analyst.

“The drug manufacturers are a soft target,” he said. But the invasive nature of litigation may generate “some unflattering attention” for hospitals, he added. They’d likely have to turn over confidential details about how they set prices, as well as their relationships with drug companies.

So, despite representing the front lines of the opioid epidemic, most hospitals have been hesitant to pile on.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

Just about every emergency room has handled opioid overdoses, which cost hospitals billions of dollars a year, since so many of the patients have no insurance. But that’s just the start. There are also uninsured patients, like Traci Grimes of Nashville, who end up spending weeks being treated for serious infections related to their IV drug use.

“As soon as I got to the hospital, I had to be put on an ice bath,” Grimes said of her bout with endocarditis over the summer, when bacteria found its way to her heart. “I thought I was going to die, literally. And they said I wasn’t very far away from death.”

Grimes is in recovery from her opioid addiction but still getting her energy back after spending a month being treated through a special intravenous line to her heart at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Most patients could be sent home with a PICC line, but not someone with a history of illicit IV drug use who could misuse it to inject other substances. Vanderbilt and other academic medical centers recognize the problem and have established special clinics to manage these complex patients.

Grimes, 37, said she’s grateful for the care she received, which included multiple procedures and treatment for pneumonia, hepatitis A and hepatitis C. But like most patients in her situation, she’s uninsured and strapped for cash.

“I can’t pay a thing. I don’t have a dime,” she said. “So they do absorb all that cost.”

Hospitals estimate treating complicated patients like Grimes costs an average of $107,000 per person, according to court documents. The total costs to U.S. hospitals in one year, 2012, exceeded $15 billion, according to a report cited in the suits. And most patients either couldn’t pay or were covered by government insurance programs.

The expense is a leading reason cited by the hospitals who’ve banded together in a handful of lawsuits in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi and West Virginia. These suits are separate from the consolidated federal case in Ohio that includes cities and counties around the country. But the most prominent hospitals in those states, like Vanderbilt, have opted not to join the litigation.

West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee, who oversees the state’s largest hospital system, has been urging others to join the suits. He and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich established an organization meant to highlight the harm done to hospitals by the opioid crisis.

“I think the more hospitals we have that want to be involved in this in some way, the better off we are,” he said. “You know, there’s always safety in mass.”

By “safety,” Gee acknowledged a central concern for hospitals weighing the risk versus reward of going to court. They may have the tables turned on them by the pharmaceutical companies since, until recently, patients in the hospital were often prescribed large quantities of opioids, contributing to the epidemic.

“I suspect there are some hospitals … who are afraid that if they get into it, those who are on the defense side will point out, well, maybe hospitals were really the problem,” he said.

The lead defendant in the suits, Purdue Pharma, did not respond to requests for comment.

Gee said hospitals can claim they were victims of dubious opioid marketing.

Still, many high-profile hospitals are sitting out the lawsuits, even though they’re typically the ones that treat the most complicated and expensive patients.

Health analyst Keckley said if hospitals join the litigation, they may be forced to cough up actual totals for their opioid-related financial damages. That could force hospitals to reveal how much more they charge for some services, compared with the actual costs of providing the care.

“Hospitals basically have charged based on their own calculations and the underlying cost of delivering that care has been virtually nontransparent,” Keckley said. “Then you open a whole new can of worms.”

Big academic medical centers especially, Keckler said, have relationships with drugmakers that they may not want publicly highlighted.

Still, hospitals might benefit without having to put their names on lawsuits and exposing themselves to risk. In Oklahoma, the state won an early opioid lawsuit in August. The payout does not direct money to hospitals, per se. However, Patti Davis, president of the Oklahoma Hospital Association, said they’re happy to see some of the money was earmarked for treatment.

“When we see treatment, we get very excited because it’s our hospitals providing a lot of the treatment,” she said.

But nationally, hospitals can’t count on potential settlement money to trickle down to their bottom lines, said Don Barrett, a Mississippi litigator helping hospitals sue in state courts.

Two decades ago, when the target of litigation was Big Tobacco, Barrett was working for states. He said hospitals didn’t join in, to his surprise. And when the states won those suits and started getting paid damages, hospitals missed out. Only about a third of the money was even spent on health or tobacco control, according to one watchdog’s estimate.

“I guess they thought that the states were going to take care of them, that these local governments were going to take this money and give it to the hospitals where it would do some good,” he said. “Of course, they didn’t give them a damn penny.”

Some states did set up trust funds that might help patients in the hospital stop smoking. But many are using the money to fill potholes, pay teachers and otherwise close gaps in state budgets.

Though not detailed in the lawsuits, many of the participating hospitals are in varying levels of financial distress, and not always primarily because of the opioid epidemic. Facilities owned by Community Health Systems make up a large share of the hospitals suing in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. The investor-owned hospital chain, based in Franklin, Tenn., has been struggling mostly because of an outsize debt load taken on during a rapid period of expansion.

A CHS spokesperson declined to comment, citing a policy not to talk about pending litigation.

But Barrett said he expects more hospitals to join the cause rather than relying on states to determine how settlement money is spent.

“We’re not going to allow that to happen this time,” he said. “We can’t afford to allow it to happen this time.”

This story is part of a partnership that includes Nashville Public Radio, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/hospitals-lawsuit-opioid-makers-addiction-treatment-uninsured/

[meditationsinausterity]

Self Care on a Shoestring: Skincare

I can't help but be annoyed that the phrase 'self-care' these days means little more than an excuse to instagram yourself in the bath or buy a new nail varnish, when to those actively participating in any kind of therapy it means so much more. It's the endless chronicling of activity to notice patterns, the developing of coping strategies and systems to break them, the non-stop monitoring of behaviours that take you away from or towards your goal. Not to mention reminding yourself to eat, to get fresh air, to spend time around the people that make you feel like you can truly be yourself. Sometimes it's as simple as opening the curtains; sometimes it's as intense as having a conversation with someone about the fact that the social behaviours they expect of you are in direct conflict with your best interests.

Still, it is what it is, and self-care has become tied up very much with the idea of personal grooming, so it's the term I'll go with. I'm not going to deny that there is an element of wellbeing maintenance in taking care of your appearance. i know for a fact that if i get anxious, the way i look is often the first noticeable sign of slippage. And conversely, that sometimes standing under the shower methodically shampooing my hair can feel like the most infinitely head-clearing, mindful experience.

In an appearance-obsessed culture it's a dangerous gambit to propose that you have to look good to feel good, and it's not one I'm prepared to set my stock in as a way to live. For one thing, I don't have any beauty products to sell you when you get the subsequent fear. For another, everybody's mileage varies on what 'best' means, and that is fine. i get bored of adverts telling me I'm not enough, and i don't really want to add to that noise.

I am, however, incredibly vain, or rather, incredibly honest about it. I have been reflecting lately on a lot of my flaws; impatience, stubbornness, etc. and realizing that I'm not much more so than a lot of people I know, i just admit to it openly, but more on that another time. I'm also very interested in fashion, and by extension, beauty. When I have money, I do splurge on products for my appearance, but when I don't, I'm also pretty good at improvising solutions to take time for the beauty rituals that make me feel put together, pretty and stylish, without spending. The beauty industry thrives on the thrill of the new, of the purchase, of the sale, and it's pretty easy to get caught up in that product-lust, and feel all the consumer envy and anxiety that comes with not having enough spending power to participate. My approach to it all is a lot more laid back than it used to be; I focus less on the purchase, more on techniques and ritual that are of benefit and feel relaxing and luxurious.

So I thought I'd talk about how I keep myself feeling and looking on point with fuck all in the bank. And given a discussion with my friend Lou and I had over breakfast the other day in which I announced that I prioritise skincare over makeup because 'I can wash off a drawn on face, I only get one real one', I thought i would start with skincare. I mean, it's the building blocks of anything else you do to your face, and you do it every day, so it's important, right? I'm only going into what I do here, because it's all I'm qualified to talk about, so if you're happy with soap and water, or you want a full ten step k-beauty style regime, go you. But if I can teach anyone how to save a quid or try something they didn't know about in their grooming, then I'm doing what I set out to do.

(I didn't want this to be a product picture heavy post as that goes against what I'm trying to tell you, so I dug out a load of makeup free pictures of myself to illustrate that I have quite a good point when it comes to skincare)

Buying skincare

Okay, I know I said this wasn't about the purchase power angle, but obviously there are certain things you will regularly buy. So this is my hustler's advice to get them for the cheapest you physically can.

The first thing I'll say here is, HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO BRAND LOYALTY. If a beauty brand wants you to ship them, you shouldn't have to pay for your shit. Sure, if you find something you love, and wanna carry on using it, and it's within your means, go ahead, but these products are not essentials, or must haves. They are jars of goo. Mostly very similar ones. Most products that claim to do similar things will, indeed, do very similar things, at radically different price points. I love fragrance and packaging as much as the next person, but they don't make me feel ten times more beautiful, so I'm not paying ten times what I would for them.

On a related note; buying a more expensive product and skimping on application is a fool's errand. Get the cheaper one and use it as it was intended. Active ingredients have a job to do, and if you're not using enough of them, you may as well not be, so buying something that you feel is 'better' because it costs more and then applying it as though it were irreplaceable unicorn tears is a ridiculous waste of your time. Plus, it's not very self-caring to treat your face as if it's only worthy of half measures now, is it? you're gonna need the full whack for proper facial massage and shit anyway. Be realistic.

And back to brand loyalty. Don't be loyal where you shop, either. Everywhere needs your business these days, we're in recession. Anywhere that sells skincare will have countless promos on it, and you can use this to your advantage to stretch your buck as far as possible. I will admit, i do gravitate back to superdrug regularly, because they do court my business in such a way: they almost always have 3 for 2's combined with freebies and great introductory offers, but I also consider: supermarkets, health food stores, ethnic groceries, poundland wholesalers, and the fronts of magazines I'd be buying anyway (or that work out cheaper than buying the product); when I'm looking for what I need. By the same token, I'll warn you off blindly buying at the supermarket. Unless we're talking about the two teutonic loves of my life, Lidl and Aldi, it's not a given that what you chuck in with your fruit and veg will actually be a better bargain than you get elsewhere. Sometimes it really can be (it's worth keeping your eyes peeled for reductions because of packaging changes, for example), but oftentimes they rely on the fact that you are being economical with your time to charge you more for what's probably a pretty basic product.

And lastly; the more you know about your skin, the better you can treat it. When I talk about what I do, I'll be focusing pretty intensely on what works for my skin type, knowledge of which comes from years of having lived with my skin, reading about skincare wherever I can, listening to people who know what they're on about (but not always buying what they were selling), and some trial and error. having some basic knowledge of what active ingredients work for you and what to look for is your ally in avoiding unnecessary spends.

By the same token, if you try something and it doesn't work, give it to a mate. It's better than it sitting on a shelf unloved, and it'll probably make your mate's day, as it's an unexpected little treat. My friends and I have been doing this for years, and it's an excellent way to both give and receive a little mood lift, and make sure nothing goes to waste.

(even as a heavy smoker my skin hasn't aged that much, so there must be method in my madness)

Cleanse

This step is so key. When I slack with it the difference in my skin texture is noticeable almost immediately. This may be because i have savagely oily skin so my pores block up at the drop of a hat, but getting into a proper cleansing routine has drastically improved this. I favour an old school, oil based cleanser and facecloth route, so that I can incorporate facial massage, because I clench my jaw in my sleep and when I'm stressed. I am currently using superdrug's own B. range micellar cleansing oil, but i dot about buying whatever is cheapest or on best offer. I've been known to use coconut oil (that holy grail of versatile beauty products, I've got a cracked lip and am applying it as lipbalm as we speak), or in a pinch, whatever oil is in my kitchen cupboard, the important thing is the technique.

Apply it liberally to your face and neck (I use about a 50p sized amount to start and add more if i've not got significant lubrication). use small upward, circular motions to massage the skin. If you have large pores like me you may actually be able to feel some physical extraction and unclogging of your pores. Gross, but satisfying. I take the time to do some tension relieving massage as well; using my ring fingers i apply pressure in outward streaking strokes along my eye sockets and browbones, then I rest the cups of my palms under my cheekbones firmly, and slowly open my mouth (you'll feel real muscle resistance and then release as you do this - it's amazing for if you grind your teeth in your sleep or when you're stressed). Lastly I use the bent knuckles of my index and ring fingers to firmly work outwards from my chin along my jawbone in small, tight circles (again, if you have any points of tension you'll feel them and be able to concentrate on those areas). These massage techniques are awesome for puffiness in the morning and your facial muscles feel super relaxed after; they are also effective with a foam based facewash if that's your bag.

To take off the cleanser off I soak a lightly textured facecloth or flannel in hot (not too hot, let's not get any broken veins here) water, hold the whole thing over my face for a brief steam and a few deep breaths, then in brisk upward circular strokes, set about removal, focusing on problem areas (for me, my nose and chin). Squeaky clean, and relaxed.

As a footnote, I will say that I can't always be arsed if I've been up late, or I've got better things to do like get laid, I used to rely on facewipes to save the day. I still currently have a pack in my bag for when I stay at he who I shall call the bedfellow's house (I knew I'd cave to a moniker for convenience's sake eventually), but I'll actually vouch that Micellar water and a cotton wool pad is far better value for money per use. not my preferred method, and for me, not sustainable for any lengthy period of time, because my pores suffer, but far better than no cleanse at all.

Tone

I tend to fuck toner off a lot of the time. It's actually not a beauty industry secret that most of them don't do an awful lot, and counter girls the world over, if asked to sacrifice one step of a three-step program, will axe toner without blinking. It's not on your skin for as long as anything else, so it's not as crucial. Its job is to remove any last vestiges of cleanser, and tighten the pores, and you know what else does that? Freezing cold water. I can't remember the last time I bought a commercial toner. If I'm having a particularly breakout-y vibe I'll either buy a bottle of witch hazel, or brew some green tea and have it in the fridge to swipe over my face. but mostly, icy cold water does me beautifully, especially since my face is already wet given my cleansing method.

(unless you count the glitter smeared on me here by a three year old, the no makeup vibe here is strong, I don't think I'd be as confident in my skin if I didn't take care of it)

Moisturise

The most vital step. And the thing you should spend most money on, as it is actually absorbed into your skin. Having said that, I can't remember the last time I spent more than a fiver on one, and the almighty coconut oil can step in here again if needs be (If you take nothing else from this, take the fact that one jar of coconut oil can do everything you need, and it costs 2.99 at Lidl, and considerably less in most Indian and Caribbean groceries). I'm currently using B. for Superdrug's B. radiant day cream (are you feeling that 3 for 2 vibe yet?) but I have a bag of bog standard Boots own fragrance free moisturiser in my bag for bedtimes and mornings when I am not in my bed. I also have a half a tube of Soap and Glory's The Fab Pore on my dressing table, that I use sparingly because it's got some aggressive AHA's (alpha hydroxy acids - they basically kick skin debris in the dick, it's like sandblasting your face), which my skin occasionally needs if I'm suffering dullness, but if I use it regularly I get irrritated skin.

Moisturiser is probably where you most need to look for key active ingredients for your skin type, which is where that basic awareness of your skin comes in. Bear in mind, though, that the industry thrives on the new, so these ingredients will trend and then be superseded by something new in order to sell more shit. There'll always be new breakthroughs because there'll always be more product to sell that way. My age, and my oiliness taken into consideration, I tend to look for vitamin C, anything that says brightening or radiance boosting, and hyaluronic acid, an ingredient that locks water into the skin cells . But as i said, I'll take anything, as long as I can apply it liberally, in upward strokes, and always to the neck as well. never forget your neck.

(Fresh out of the shower and freshly moisturised, I actually often wish I could preserve this glow all day, which is what products that contain hyaluronic acid strive to do)

Additional products

Now, that's enough, really, if kept up regularly. And the routines and techniques performed day and night do feel luxurious, and like you're looking after yourself. You don't necessarily need all the serums, primers, masks, and targeted creams that you're told you do, but they can feel like a nice extra treat for you on a shitty day, and they do get results, so I'll run through what I must regularly indulge in.

Masks.

Oh masks. If you believe Instagram, we've reached peak face mask. There are so many different kinds that there aren't enough weeks in the year to try them all, and still they come. I acquire most of mine through three-for-twos, or as samples. I try and do at least one a week, usually two. One a deep cleansing clay-based one (at the moment i've got Soap and Glory's The Fab Pore, which also has glycolic acid, another great skin-resurfacing enzyme, but I've had that jar since Christmas and it's showing no signs of quitting on me yet), and the other a glycolic peel (B. by superdrug's at the moment). Because of my skin type, constantly clearing surface debris is really good for the condition of my skin, and anything that deep cleanses is always a good shout. I can also be tempted by thermal clay masks in winter, to boost my circulation, I seem to remember the most afforable one I found was by Sanctuary, and not more than a fiver in boots.

If I do not have time or access to such products, however, I do not cry about it. Life goes on, and I doubt anyone really notices but me, it's so much more a ritualistic thing that I do to feel like I am taking time for myself.

Eye Creams.

About the only sign I have of aging bar the odd grey hair is little crinkles around my eyes (I smile a lot). I don't really like them. I also get puffy eyes a lot (it's easy to make me cry, which is not a challenge by the way). I am not fussy about what I use, mine's from Aldi's Lacura range, and cost me about three quid, but kept in the fridge, and patted on when my eyes feel tired or sore, it is the most soothing thing. I can't honestly say if it makes a difference or not, but it feels so good that when I can make it part of my routine I do.

Spot treatments.

Fuck them. a bottle of tea tree oil is much cheaper, does the same thing, and has multiple other uses. Likewise TCP if we're being real here.

So concludes my initial skincare on the cheap outline. I imagine it'll be one of the more in depth pieces I write on self care, because I don't mind admitting that I am pretty lazy in a lot of other areas, and somehow manage to spend even less. I'm a sucker for a good beauty tip, especially a budget one, so I'd be really interested to hear everybody else's.