#this production ended 32 years ago oh well let me just make up some new content

[wissamacaroni]

If you ever wanted to see a concept of what Tod could look like in a different dress, here you go 🤗

[franeridart]

Anon said: Are you still into krbk? I noticed you haven't draw them a lot recently (I don't mean to pressure you, I was just wondering)

I still very much am!!! but a convergence of unrelated happenings (my focus being unusually scattered, lack of general motivation, them not having interacted much in the manga lately, my having pulled out of the fandom a little for a bunch of reasons, having gotten into a lot of new things I want to make a lot of stuff for ??) had my output of stuff for them/inspiration related to them die down a lot ): I miss them though, I should fill a page with doodles of them one of these days... well, I haven’t drawn much in genereal lately, so maybe let’s start first with fixing that haha

Anon said: Fun Fact : In smash bros ultimate there are spirits with octopath traveler and they're in pairs and guess what ? Alfyn and Therion are together :3

I KNOW!!!!!! It makes me so emo I’m a bundle of feelings they’re soulmates I tell youuuuuuuuuuu ;;A;; (little inconsequential things making me a mess, what’s new xD) - another fun fact is that h’aanit and ophilia share one too!! and I ship them too!! and cyrus and tressa share one as well, and they’re my brother’s mains in his save! A series of delightful little coincidences haha

Anon said: Will you be drawing more Jujutsu Kaisen? I love your art sm and I would love to see more!!!!

Right now I feel like I want to spend the next ten years drawing these kids, so I sure hope so! But as I said my focus has been very scattered for the past three or so months, so I can’t promise anything ): let’s both enjoy it while it lasts haha

Anon said: You are my emotional support artist. I check back every once and a while and BOOM. Serotonin.

You’re too kind!!!! But thank you, I’m glad I can make you feel better! :D

Anon said: i'm super new to your art (and mha) and i just wanted to say your krbk stuff is just !!!!!!! it makes me so happy and makes my poor jaded heart feel something and it's just all around incredible!!!

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!! I’m glad you like my way of portraying the kids!!!!

Anon said: I’m about to cry I’ve spent an hour looking though your bnha tag for that lil comic where Kiri hugs Baku and. It. Sent. Me. Back. To. The. Top. I didn’t even get to finish reading it. I’m so upset. So. So. So. Upset.

(same) Anon said: OH MY GOSH IT KEEPS SENDING ME TO THE TOO I HATE MOBILE AND LOVE YOU I LVOE YOU BUT THIS WEBSITE IS K I L L I N G ME I JIST WANNA SEE WHAT HAPPENS AS KIRI ATTEMPTS TO HUG BAKUGOU BUT NOOOO, AN HOUR OF MY TIME ISNT ENOUGH SAYS THE TIME STEALER

(samesame) Anon said: I. Found the hug thing. On Pinterest. In. Five. Seconds. I hate life but also it was really cute. Thank you but seriously I hate this website

The saga hahaha sorry anon I couldn’t get to you before you went out of your mind trying to find it, I got the asks in the middle of the night! Glad you could find it, though I’m kinda sad you had to look on pinterest for it (...sad it is on pinterest at all tbh) here it is anyway, if this is the one you were talking about! you really went back in the years for this one huh

Anon said: So for that thing that you made a w h i l e ago where Bakugou ruffles Kirishima’s hair, right? So I imagine Kiri is like w h a t and calls over Mina or Denki or Sero or all of them or something like that and tells them and is freaking out and they’re like “he wasn’t in the right mindset, you know he sleeps at 8:32” and make a joke out of it as Kiri is freaking out. And Kiri is freaking out soooo much as they are crying laughing on the floor at Bakugou’s sleeping schedule.

hahaha I’m sure he must have freaked out on them at some point after that, and bakugou must have done the same (probably with jirou, less likely but more hilarious with todoroki or tokoyami haha) - though, the original idea came from a bigger one where the scene in the comic didn’t bring them anywhere closer to getting together (or figuring out they’re into each other, for the matter lmao idiots) maybe one day I’ll get back on that >:]

Anon said: In your comments, you said “at this point my hands will never forget” and I had a nozaki-kun memory float into my head, imagining him sick and trying to make his deadline xD yes muscle memory

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! anon you have no idea how often I think about that hahaha yes, I say my hands won’t forget but we all know that’s exactly how it’ll end at some point lol

Anon said: dang this happens all the time like I follow someone for their bnha content and then like two months after following them I find out they used to make yowapeda content and im just sitting their like dang thats wild because bnha and yowapeda are like the only two animes I watch

ANON!!!! HI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Always so nice to find other ywpd fans!!!!!!!! Sorry I’m not making art for it anymore (for now) but despite my sister insisting I read the manga already I’ve been putting it off......for years lol but it’s on my reading list!! So maybe I’ll get back on it at some point!

Anon said: FRAN!!!!!! i love ur art so much and im trying to buy ur products on redbubble and i geniunely cant decide what to get!!!!! i tired asking my friend but she doesnt know which one either hahahahhahah ig i just wanted to send this because i really appreciate u and u are very talented. im sending u lots of high vibrations and love❤️🧡

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!! It means so much to me that you guys are still buying my stuff (TTATT) I should...........seriously update it..........gomen m(._.)m

Anon said:YES YES YEEES MORE ALFYON ON THE WAYYYYYY 💖💖💖💖💖 They're both the cutest really their ship is the beeest  Try reading some the alfyon fanfics if you have some time, they're really good ! The one i really recommend you is Crismonberries, blackberries by court_court on Ao3 !Your art is the best ever can't wait to see more octopath !!💖💖💖

Anon thank you SO MUCH for suggesting that fic to me I!!!!!!!!!!!! loved it so much I deep-dived into it and spent two straight days reading it it’s such a gem!!!!! ;;; bless you

Anon said: Have you watched Fullmetal Alchemist?

Hell yeah! Only Brotherhood though. I read the manga too tho!!

Anon said: Have you read Noragami? It’s one of my favourite manga, and the anime isn’t half bad either (still waiting for s3 tho lol) anyway it’s really good, concept-wise it’s similar to Soul Eater, I totally recommend

I watched the first season back when it aired! It’s not really my thing though ): feels a bit sad in that very specific way that always ends up just making me miserable as I keep reading............................... sorry

Anon said: I will never not be in love with your art. Everytime I'm feeling down and/or missing the boys I scroll through your krbk tag and it reminds me exactly of why I love them so much and I'm so thankful for that. Your brand of krbks is the one I love the most and honestly thank you so much for all your marvelous art of them and of other things as well because you art is just so pretty and I love seeing your ocs and other fandom art 💕💕💕

Anon I love you......................... ;;;;; thank you so much, you have no idea how much this means to me (oTT^TT)o<3

[cecilspeaks]

176 - The Autumn Specter

Lips are the toes of the face. Welcome to Night Vale.

[spooky theme song]

It’s Halloween again, Night Vale, my favorite day of the year. As a kid, my mother used to dress my sister Abby and I in homemade costumes and take us door to door, vaguely threatening our neighbors until they gave us candy. When I was a teenager, I got a little old for trick-or-treating, so I started going to haunted houses with my friends. A lot of those haunted houses were kind of predictable with all their chain saw killers and Victorian ghost children singing nursery rhymes, who would follow you home and sing by your bed for months afterwards, but they always got to me. I loved the emotional rush of being scared. I still do. Of course, I don’t go out much to haunted houses, but I still love good old fashioned scary stories. I thought today would be a great day to share some of my favorites with you. I had my new intern, James, put together a few spooky tales that are perfect for putting you into Halloween mood.

But first, let’s have a look at the Community Calendar. This Saturday night at the New Old Night Vale Opera House, is the annual costume gala. This event is the Opera House’s largest fundraiser and one of the most prestigious costume contests in the region. A panel of judges will be on hand to determine the best costume at the ball. Last year’s winners were Joel Eisenberg and his partner Danny Jimenez, who dressed in a tandem outfit of a stegosaurus. I was there, listeners, and it was impressive! The creature was so realistic-looking. The craftsmanship of the costume was top notch, but listen, I have to confess I’m always more into high concept creativity rather than realistic details when it comes to costumes. Like I remember the 2015 gala, when Amal Shamun came dressed up as the concept of ennui. She made herself 12 feet tall, dressed in a taupe long coat, and created a constant drizzling rain inside the ball room. Anyone who looked at her got super sad and wanted a hug. But Joel and Danny’s stegosaurus was fine.

Sunday afternoon is the fall craft sale in Old Town Night Vale. An inscrutable maze of stalls showcasing the finest products from our town’s artisans. There will be cultural events for children, like finger painting classes, puppet shows, and a visit from the Autumn Specter. The Autumn Specter returns. It comes to collect its crops, with its great and sharp sickle. [creepily] It will harvest every ripe soul in Night Vale, the Autumn Specter is hungryyyy! It is Octoberr and it is timme to feeeeeee-duh.

Hey James, this Community Calendar doesn’t seem right, it’s just a bunch of stuff about the Autumn Specter. Also this font size, what-what is this 32 point? That’s just much too large. And it’s printed in red ink and that is a waste of our color toner, James. Eww, eww! This red ink is still really damp. OK, plus there’s nothing about start and end times of the craft fair, or anything about the food trucks, like if the Autumn Specter is hungry, surely it wants some falafel or Korean barbeque or tacos. James, could you just redo this story? James? James? [clears throat] Well, listeners, I don’t know where James went. Um, I can hear him breathing, but I don’t see him anywhere. Yeah, it’s fine, let’s just get onto our first spooky story.

[static, old-fashioned music] One quiet moonless night, not long ago and not so far away, a teenage girl sat in a house that was not her own. It was the home of Tony and Sheila McDowell. The girl was their babysitter, and she had just put the two young McDowell children down to sleep. The girl watched TV alone in the dark living room, only the bluish flicker of a scary movie illuminating her face. The phone rang abrupt and loud, startling her. She raised the receiver to her ear. “Hello?” she said with a slight quiver. “Have you checked on the children?” came a raspy voice. The babysitter ran quickly upstairs, opening the door of the kids’ bedroom. She flicked on the light, and there they were, fast asleep. She went back to her movie, but the phone rang again. “Haave youuu checked on the childrennn?” came the same voice, only more sinister. The babysitter again hurried upstairs, opened the door, turned on the light, and saw the children still asleep. The caller called again and again and again. “Have you checked on the children?” The babysitter, so scared, barely able to move, hung up the phone before the voice could finish its repeated query. When the phone rang once again, she answered and shouted: “Stop calling me!” But this time, it was a different voice. The person on this occasion said: “Ma’am, this is the police. We’ve traced the call. The call is coming from inside the house. Get out, get out!” The babysitter panicked and started to run, but then she remembered: she never called the police! How would they know to even trace the call? So she crept fearfully upstairs to the children’s room, and the phone was ringing again, the clamoring bell igniting her fright. And she cracked open the door and she saw- She saw the young McDowell boy and his little brother hunched over a phone and giggling! They were pranking her, and she felt relieved but embarrassed. And she told them to stop fooling around and go to sleep. And they all shared a good laugh.

Let’s have a look now at traffic. [papers rustling] Um.. OK, well I don’t seem to have a traffic report from intern James. Also James isn’t here right now, because I sent him out to go pick up lunch a few m- Oh, hey James, James, James, James – wait, why are you standing in the control booth? You were supposed to go get lunch and also I’ve asked you a couple of times not to wear that burlap bag over your head. I mean yes it looks great, with the Jack o’ Lantern face drawn onto it, I mean the mouth is a bit lopsided and the eyes are a tad uneven,  you know kinda flat and emotionless, but all in all it’s a cool look, but it’s decidedly not allowed in Station Management’s dress code. Oh, you’re holing a knife, too! So did you get- did you already get that lunch then? Well if that- if that’s the case, you don’t need to cut my sandwich in half, I’ll-I’ll take it whole. And also I need that traffic report, thanks. James? What are you waiting for, the Autumn Specter to do it for you? [chuckles] Hop to it! James?

[clears throat] Well, while James is working on that, let’s get back to my favorite spooky Halloween stories. This one isn’t a story so much as a fun Halloween game. The legend of Bloody Mary.

According to the lore, if you turn off all the lights, and stare into a mirror, repeating “Bloody Mary” three times in a row, she will appear and tear your face off! I’ve never tried this because I don’t own any mirrors, but my husband Carlos conducted this very experiment in his science lab. He said he darkened the room and repeated the name and nothing happened for a long time. But then a figure of a woman appeared, silvery gray and shimmering, and she approached Carlos slowly, her hollow white eyes never blinking. She brought her face only inches from Carlos and said: “Are you for real?” And Carlos said yes, he was indeed – real. And Bloody Mary said: “OK because this time of year, I just get a bunch of giggling, screaming teenagers, and I’m really tired of ripping off their faces for no pay whatsoever!” And Carlos gave her some resources for starting a union and she thanked him and she offered to tear his face off in exchange for the consulting, but Carlos said no, he liked his face, and wisher her luck. Night Vale, pay your malevolent spirits! They’re overworked especially around Halloween. And a 20 per cent gratuity for poltergeists, phantasms, revenants, and ghosts is standard.

And now for t- what the, oh you- [papers rustling] Wait, OK. You know, I thought intern James had handed the traffic report to me, but this is just a piece of parchment with a 9-pointed star seemingly drawn by a finger dripped in blood. And then there are a series of ancient runes scrawled around the outer edges. Now I took runic in college. I mean, most of my friends took Spanish as their language, but I thought living here in the American Southwest, it would be more useful to study ancient Scandinavian and Germanic alphabets. And from what I can make out, these are a message about the return of the Autumn Specter. Ugh, alright. OK. I love that intern James loooves Halloween and whatever this the Autumn Specter is. In fact, James is still in the break room right now construction a sacred totem out of ash tree branches and twine. He’s been muttering to himself all day in a language that I don’t recognize, and the only words I can understand are “Autumn Specter”. But I still have neither my traffic report nor my lunch! Wait, do you think James is… Naah, put it out or you mind, Cecil.

Let’s tell another spooky Halloween story. There once was a beautiful young woman who wore a green ribbon around her neck. She won the affection of a handsome young man. They fell in love and one day the boy asked the girl why she always wore a green ribbon around her neck. She would not tell him. One day the man and the woman were to become husband and wife. In her white bridal dress, the woman still wore her green ribbon. The man asked her on their wedding night if he could untie the green ribbon, but even on the  most intimate of evenings, she said no, and he respected her answer. But he longed to know what she was hiding behind the ribbon. Through the years, the man asked the wife again about the ribbon, but she never removed it, nor answered his questions about it. She only warned him that he would not like what he saw if she were to remove it. He asked less and less, but his curiosity grew and grew. And they became old, very old, and they knew their time left was short. The man asked one more time: “My dearest wife, love of my life, tell me that I may remove the green ribbon from around your neck.” And the old woman said: “My adoring groom, here in our room after all these many years, yes you may. But I caution you, as I have many times before, that you shall not like what your eyes behold.” The man hesitated, but finally reached his weakened, wrinkled fingers to the green bow along her nape. And he tentatively pulled the ribbon, and suddenly it unfurled, falling from her neck, and the man gasped. Upon her neck was a series of ornate letters spelling out “GOTH LIFE”. The woman said: “I got this tattoo in high school but kind of outgrew it and it’s super embarrassing.” And the man replied: “It is for sure weird, but also pretty cool. I like it.” And she never wore the green ribbon again.

You know, listeners, I’d love to bring you that traffic report, but right now, um, I’m facing something much more urgent and more dire. My studio door has opened on its own, and as I turned around, I could see down the long faintly lit corridor of our offices. And at the end of the hallway stands a figure, and he wears a Jack o’ Lantern mask, his head crooked to one side like a dog asking a question or like a hanged man, or both. And it is intern James, and he holds a long knife and he walks, he walks slowly toward me. And he is speaking at first in a mutter, but now louder, a strange shout in an obscure tongue like a magician casting a wicked spell, and he is moving much faster toward me, like a limping run, and his blade is raised high, and James is not an intern, Night Vale, bu the Autumn Specter itself come to reap my soul!

But before he does that, Let me take you to the weather.

[“Welterweight” by Nels Andrews. https://nelsandrews.bandcamp.com/]

So. During the weather, I went to human resources and requested a file on intern James. Oh I’m fine, by the way, and James is not the Autumn Specter, but I’ll get to that. So I found a copy of James’ résumé and cover letter for the position of radio station intern. His application was originally submitted in 1845. “That’s almost two centuries ago!” I exclaimed, but according to HR, they’re pretty backlogged on the intern apps. “What are you gonna do, we get to them when we get to them,” they said from the bottom of their abandoned well. Paperclipped to James’ application was a wrinkled and yellowed news clipping from the Night Vale °Daily Journal, and the article says that James died on Halloween night in 1849 when he was hit by a train. I then went to the hall of public records and found that our radio station was built in 1950, atop the very train tracks where James met hi send. James’ soul has been wandering the halls and offices of our radio station ever since. For all James ever wanted was to be a radio intern. To serve the listening community, to lift high the voice of journalistic truth. And it was his death that led to the shutdown of those train tracks and the eventual construction of a new station home, and the building we still use now. So I was wrong about James. He was an intern, after all, and not a malevolent Halloween spirit.

But I was right that the Autumn Specter had come for me. For when I turned to see James running down the hill, I did not notice the Autumn Specter behind me, with its bony hands and scarecrow mouth, and I did not notice its soul reaping sickle, which it had raised high above its oversized head and stick thin body. And James had given his life for the building of our radio station, and in death, gave his soul for the very same cause. And James threw himself upon the Autumn Specter, and he tried to stab the Specter’s neck and chest, but it-it- it did nothing. And the Spectre pushed James aside and then turned its black coal eyes upon me. And it raised its curved blade once again and swung! I tried to duck, but was too slow. And just as the sickle’s edge reached my face, James dove in front of it and vanished in a burst of white flame, as he was struck. And the room was empty and the Autumn Specter was gone too.

To the family and friends of intern James, he was… an OK intern. Not always on  top of his writing deadlines, but he literally sacrificed his soul for our radio station. I can’t bring you a traffic report today, but I will live to bring you one tomorrow.  If we find a new intern. And HR tells me that we have hundreds of candidates, although  most of them are not yet aware that they are candidates.

Stay tuned next for our new cooking competition show, “Flay Bobby Flay”.

And as always, Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: The road to hell is paved with cobblestone. It’s super bumpy, not at all comfortable, and really bad for your car’s suspension.

[buckyscrystalqueen]

Managed: Part 1

Pairings: Clark Kent x Reader (Henry Cavill Clark)

Warnings: Secret relationship.

Word Count: 4,532

A/N: Doesn’t have a completed end yet, but just giving you more content to try to get myself out of a writing funk. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Starting a new job, in a position you knew nothing about, was beyond stressful to a partial introvert with bi-polar, anxiety, and depression such as yourself, but you didn’t have much of a choice. Bills kept coming in even though you lived rent free with your mother, you still had your car payments, and insurance. Your phone needed to be paid, and your medications weren’t just going to fall from the sky. So going to work it was.

“So this is your department.” The assistant store manager of the flooring department, Erica said as she walked you out of the employee break room and training room and on to the sales floor. “You’re going to be shadowing Clark today. He’s the department manager. He’s going to show you the ropes.” You nodded your head and looked away from her as a tall, muscular man turned away from one of the two computers at the flooring ‘desk’ to smile at you.

“Welcome to the team, (Y/N).” You almost gasped at how stunningly blue this absolute God of a man’s eyes were, but your shock came from tripping over a pallet you didn’t see sticking out the slightest bit in aisle. You flew forward into his chest and instantly wanted to die as you scrambled back a step away from him.

“I’m sorry.” You gasped with a shake of your head as your face turned bright red.

“Hey, it’s OK.” He chuckled as he put his hand on your shoulder with a smile that made you want to die just a little bit more. “It actually segways into our first job of the day perfectly. So every morning, when you first come in, we start with the DSHR, which stands for… daily safety and hazard review. Or something like that, I’m not quite sure.”

“That’s reassuring.” You said with a small smile, and once again, you wanted the ground to just swallow you whole when he chuckled and looked over at you.

“My apologies. You have to understand, we deal with more acronyms than I can count. Memorizing the full names of them all is just a waste.” You nodded your head as he pulled a mobile phone from his pocket. “So DSHR. Basically what that you do is each morning, you go through the department and point out any thing that is a safety concern or a hazard. Its easier if you start with 30 and work your way over to 35. That’s all of flooring.” You nodded your head and followed him to aisle 30 to start. “So first things first. I’m sure you at least partially payed attention to the fifty thousand training videos you watched. Can you see anything you think could be a hazard from those?” With a slight shrug, you looked down the 30 odd foot aisle for things that could be wrong.

“I mean, that doesn’t look safe.” You said as you gestured to some rugs that were hanging up down the right side; a few of them only being held up by two or three of the five hooks.

“Usually, you would be right, however this is a special case. Those are on back order through the company and they are taking their sweet time coming in. What else?” You looked around again, doing everything in your power not to look over at Clark, and shook your head when you didn’t see anything else. “What about that pallet that’s sticking out a little bit above your head? That could get pushed out even farther if someone isn’t paying attention on a narrow aisle reach, right?” You nodded your head as he handed you the mobile phone. “So you take a picture, and add the aisle number and the letter of where the infraction is. Then later today, we make sure it gets fixed so that it’s not a hazard.”

“What’s the letter?”

“This one is B. So for all products, they have an aisle number, a bay letter, and a spot it’s in or the bin number. You’ll see this come into play more in the next part of the morning routine. So hit submit there, and that will send me a note that there is something I need to address later on. You with me so far?”

“I mean it seems simple enough.”

“Well then you can do the next aisle. Walk me through it. What’s a safety hazard?” He kindly and slowly walked you the rest of the way through the section, letting you do the job you would need to do yourself one day so you had a better understanding of what you were actually looking for. When you were done, he showed you what he would see once the DSHR was complete. “So next is IRP’s.”

“Irritable… Rabbit People?” Clark paused with he was saying and looked over at you with a slight nod.

“That was actually really good.”

“I try.” You said with a small smile and a shrug as you took the mobile phone back from him to do the next job. “So what are we doing with the rabbit people?”

“Inventory Replacement Plan. So each night, the night shift goes though and scans empty spots on the shelf. And then we go in… well, you will go in and fill those spots the next day. So today we only have three, but that’s because I closed last night. So these three things are items that are blank spots on the shelf. Each one will bring up an information page on the product.“ You nodded your head as he walked you through the page, pointing out the location, the bin number, the product count, and so much more. “I know I’m losing you.” Clark chuckled as he looked down at the slightly glazed over look you were giving him. “So let’s start from the beginning. The rest you’ll get throughout the day. Where is the first IRP located.” With a nod of you, you pulled up the first product on the list and its information page.

“32 Z 15.”

“So what’s that tell you?”

“Aisle 32, bay Z, spot 15.”

“Show me.” With a nod, you glanced up at the aisle number and headed one row over to where you needed to go. The blank space was easy to find, and for some reason, you got a slight shiver up your spine when your supervisor nodded at you. “Perfect. So on the same page, the first line; how many of this mosaic tile do we have?”

“120.”

“Which means they are in top stock. So find the item number on the main page, and then we start looking.”

“Wait up there?” You asked as you looked up at dozens of boxes of tile on the upper shelves of the racks.

“Just wait until you see what you have to do to get them down.” He chuckled as he looked at the item number to refresh his memory from the night before and looked up to find the box he had purposely not pulled so that he could teach. “You’re in for a fun day, (Y/N).”

——

“So how was your first day at work?” Your mom, Kate, asked as you walked in the front door after your first nine hour shift on the floor.

“Long.” You sighed, tiredly, and set your purse and your lunch box down on the kitchen counter. “So very long. So much stuff to learn.”

“Did you do any sales?” You shook your head as you kicked off your sneakers and headed over to the couch.

“No, just spent most of the day learning the department and the products and stuff.” You said as you laid down on one side and pulled a blanket over you. “With the most gorgeous manager I have ever seen in my life.”

“You’re not there to look for a boyfriend, (Y/N).” She said, slightly scoldingly. “It’s work…”

“I know, mama.” You sighed as you pulled the blanket of your head and rolled onto your back with a yawn. “Doesn’t stop him from being hot.” Your mother stayed silent for a few moments, either playing Words with Friends on her phone or scrolling through Facebook, but just like you knew she would, she caved.

“OK, what’s his name?” 

“Oh, my God.” You gasped with a smile as you threw the blanket off and rolled over to look at her with a giant smile. “OK. His name is Clark. He’s the department manager but it’s weird because there’s a department supervisor, and an assistant manager over flooring too. Because we need that many managers for like… I don’t know, seven people? Which is strange if you ask me.”

“They want you to be extra managed.” Your mom teased, which made you shrug.

“He’s really nice. He walked me through the day and what I’d need to do. It’s just. It’s hard ‘cause I don’t know anything about flooring.”

“You’ll learn.” She said reassuringly. “Give it time.” 

“I know.” You said with a nod. “Clark said he’d help.”

“Oh, Lord. We are in trouble.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

——

“So I hear your a transplant too.” Clark said as the two of you closed flooring at the end of your first week. “Where are you from?”

“Umm… Florida. I’m from Florida. Naples.”

“You know, I actually know where that is.” You glanced over at him with your eyebrow raised before looking away to put away a box of flooring from the pallet he had brought down earlier. “Friend of mine from college got married down there few years ago.”

“Where did you call home before this?”

“Well… I hail from a town called Smallville in Kansas. It’s just outside Wichita…”

“I know Wichita. I have a half brother that lives there. Never heard of Smallville though.”

“The name says it all.” He chuckled as he picked up the last two boxes before you could, giving you the millionth chance to look at his muscles and the way his already form fitted shirt tightened around them with every move. “It’s a small farm town in the middle of a fly over state.”

“Sounds peaceful.”

“Should sound busy.” He chuckled as he glanced at the list you had made of things that needed to get restocked before you both went home. “Farm life is intense.”

“I always wanted to live on a farm… but I like my sleep way to much.”

“That, I completely understand.” He chuckled as the two of you backed up to look for two different colors of un-sanded grout. “Looking back now, I appreciate the lessons I learned, but when I was a teen, I hated the responsibilities.”

“I can totally understand that.” You said as you grabbed a tall ladder from the end of the aisle and pulled it over to where the un-sanded grout boxes were.

“So living in Florida, does that make you a Disney girl?”

“Oh don’t get me started.” You laughed as you paused on the second step and looked over at him. “I am a massive Disney girl to my core.”

“I worked there.” You stopped again and stared at him with your mouth slightly open in shock.

“Shut up.”

“Let’s see, I was ‘friends’ with Gaston mostly. And every once in a while Prince Eric… Sweetheart, you gotta hand me the box for it to go on the shelf.”

“Oh, shit sorry.” You said as you grabbed the box of grout you needed and passed it down to him.

“I was the Genie once, but that costume was way to hot in that Florida heat.”

“OK, so you know you have to do the voice for me.”

“Oh no.” Clark chuckled as he took the second box from you and pulled the tab to open it. “I don’t… ‘It’s not right for a woman to read.’ That all you get.”

“Oh my God!” You squealed as you climbed down the stairs. “Oh, I bet you killed so many mothers in your day.”

“Probably.” He laughed as you pushed the ladder or of the way and moved some grout bags forward.

“Is Beauty and the Beast your favorite?”

“That would be Treasure Planet.” He said as he stepped a little ways down on the opposite side of the aisle to straighten up the always messy boxes of mosaic tiles. “You?”

“Little Mermaid.”

“Good movie.” He said with a nod. “But for some reason, I’ve always leaned toward the more underrated flicks. The Great Mouse Detective, Atlantis…”

“Bed-knobs and Broomsticks, The Rescuers.”

“Classics that are under appreciated in the parks and that deserve more recognition in the bigger scheme of things.”

“Right?!” You gasped as you stopped straightening and looked over at him. “Like ‘The Hunched Back of Notre Dame’. How did that movie get just tossed away over time? That movie was beautiful.”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve seen that movie in years.”

“Honestly, neither have I. Sounds like a movie night is in order. So do you consider yourself a Traditionalist or a Purest?” You missed Clark’s glance over his shoulder at you, wishing that you were actually serious about movie night and that he could actually have a movie night with you since he was your boss and all, but he looked away back at the tile before you gave him the exact same look with the same hopes behind it. 

“Honesty, I’m a purest…”

“Oh, boo!” You interrupted with a laugh as you changed your face from a wanting look to one of disappointment. “Come on, and I was just starting to like you.” With a laugh, he shrugged his shoulders and glanced over at you as you came over to help. The two of you easily spent the last hour of your shifts talking about Disney and the changes to the parks past, present, and future. The conversation was easy and comfortable, as if the pair of you had known each other your whole lives and not just a week, and you really didn’t want it to end when you stopped at your car door to go home.

“Well…” Clark sighed as he pulled his keys from his pocket and unlocked a black pick up truck a few spots over. “Guess we’ll have to get into the discussion of the whole ‘which park is better’ debacle tomorrow.”

“That’s an easy answer. Magic Kingdom in Orlando is the best.”

“Some would beg to differ, hun.” He chuckled as he took a half step back from you, making you realize for the first time that night that he really didn’t want to walk away from you. “But if it makes any difference in the bigger scheme of things, I am not one of those people.” Your smile grew as you looked down at your feet for a moment.

“Hey Clark?” You looked up at his hum and you wanted so bad to ask your intended question, but changed your mind at the very last second. “Thank you. For making this job a little better. It’s… well it’s kinda shitty without you.”

“It’s my pleasure.” He said with a nod as he took a step back toward you. You waited a little expectantly as his question or comment danced on the tip of his tongue, but after a moment, he shock his head subtly and turned toward his truck to head home. “Drive safe, (Y/N). See you in the morning?”

“I’ll be here.” You sighed as you pulled open the door and sank down into your car, disappointedly. With one last glance at the pick up truck that roared to life beside you, you put your car in drive and pulled out of the lot to head home.

——

You weren’t expecting to get hit with it as quickly as you did, but after an absolute day from hell on your exactly one month mark of being at the job, you ran head first into an anxiety wall and almost completely lost it. You were headed off the floor, as a woman yelled at your retreating back for your short comment back to her, but you got commandeered at the last minute by a firm grip on your arm.

“This way.” Clark said gently as he turned you to the left and lead you away from the back room.

“I’m sorry.” You choked as you tried everything in your power not to cry. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, you’re fine.” He huffed as he stopped in front of an office and unlocked the door. “I overheard.” You nodded your head and completely lost it when the door latched closed behind him. “Sit here.” He said as he pointed to a small space on the floor beside a filing cabinet. “You’ll be hidden there. I have a phone call to make so you can stay in here as long as you need.” With a nod of your head, you sat down where he told you and curled into yourself as shame washed over you for so many reasons. 

‘You were supposed to be an adult, (Y/N).’ You thought to yourself as you rested your forehead against your bent knees. ‘Adults don’t cry on the job when they get yelled at for no reason.’

“Hi, is this Tim? Tim, my name is Clark Kent, calling from Blue Ridge Home Improvement, how are you?” You looked up at your manager with a small sniffle and hid your red, splotchy cheeks behind your bent knees and folded arms as he pulled a pen from his apron and slowly nodded his head. “Fantastic. Do you have a couple minutes to do a phone interview before you come in for the face to face? Perfect.” You sniffled once more and watched him work, easily falling for him a little more in that short expanse of time than you had.  He was adorable, how could you not? You hated yourself for liking someone that was absolutely unattainable, but damn, did you really wanna break the rules.

‘But at the same time, how could he like you?’ Your brain thought, throwing a wrench in your thoughts and making you hide your face a little bit more in embarrassment. ‘You just cried in front of him. He probably thinks you’re a freak mental case. Which is the truth, after all.’ Your slight smile fell behind your arms for only a moment until Clark looked over at you with a smile. He stuck out his tongue and made a silly face, which got you to smile and temporarily unhide your face. It didn’t last long as your dark thoughts attacked again, and your manager looked at you worriedly as he wrapped up the short interview.

“What are you thinking?” He asked as he hung up the phone with a worried furrow of his brow. You shook your head and shrugged as he glanced at his watch. “Did you take a lunch today?”

“I’m off at four.” You said softly as you looked at your own watch to see what time it was. “Well, I was supposed to be.”

“Meet me at my truck.” He said as he pulled his keys out of his jeans pocket and held them out to you. “I wanna grab some food and show you something.”

“Wait… is that allowed?” You asked as he pulled you to your feet. He paused for a long moment and looked over at you with a sigh.

“Probably not… but all you have to do is say no. You are under no obligation to go with me because I’m your manager, please know that.” You nodded your head a little bit and tucked his truck keys into your apron to hide them.

“I’ll meet you out there.” You nearly whispered as you searched his blue eyes. “And I’ll keep the secret if you will.”

“That I can absolutely do.” He said with a sigh of relief as his face and shoulders physically relaxed. With a nod, you headed out of the office and walked quickly back to the break room before you could get stopped by another angry customer for no reason. Your apron went in your locker and your phone and two sets of car keys got tucked into the pocket of your jeans on your way to clock out. You sent a little white lie text to your mother, saying you were going out to eat with friends, and grabbed your purse from your car. You wiped off some stray makeup with one of your emergency baby wipes and tossed it in your trash can just as Clark was walking past your car toward his.

“Thought I told you to wait in my car.” He chuckled as you jumped out of yours and locked it behind you.

“I enjoy being difficult.”

“You’re off tomorrow, right?”

“What, are you stalking my work schedule?” You teased as you tossed him his keys.

“Nope. Just trying to figure out which of my work days is going to be better because you’re there.” You looked over at him with your eyebrow raised as you got in the passenger seat beside him. “You are going to be trouble for me.” He confessed as he turned the key to start his truck and looked over at you.

“I can say the same for you.”

“Well good thing trouble likes company.”

“Pretty sure the saying is misery loves company.” You pointed out as he pulled out of his spot and the parking lot.

“Whatever.” He laughed as he looked over at you. “At least we’re in it together.” You nodded your head and looked down at his middle console, where he had laid his hand, palm up on the leather.

“We could lose our jobs…” You pointed out as you looked up at him again.

“I would.” He countered. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would. You’re…” You cleared your throat and sighed with a shrug. “You’re the only reason I keep coming in.”

“I’m not forcing you to do anything…”

“You never had to.” You breathed as you finally reached out and slid your fingertips up his palm to lace your fingers with his. He nodded his head and tightened his grip around yours and used both your hands to gesture toward a fast food restaurant.

“You ever eaten here?”

“What is this place?” You asked as you looked up the slowly spinning sign for the restaurant ‘Cook Out’. 

“Awesome burgers, and even better milkshakes.”

“Classy first date.” You teased as you turned in your seat to see the menu. “Fast food in a pick up truck. You could write a country song about it.”

“OK, I had like thirty seconds to choose this.” He laughed before he leaned out the window to place your orders. You hadn’t even pulled your purse off the floor to get your wallet before he was pushing your hand away and grabbing his from his jeans pocket. “My treat.”

“Well thank you Mr. Prince Charming.”

“You’re very welcome.” You took the food and drinks from him so that he could drive, and daringly reached out to turn on the radio. “Oh, thank God.” You sighed as country music filled the cab.

“Kansas boy.” He chuckled as he headed back toward your job and toward town. “It’s in my blood.”

“Well you just made me like you even more. Two points.”

“Oh, I like this game.” He chuckled as he reached across the console and took your hand again. “Where else am I winning points and is there a max number I can win?”

“No max.” You laughed. “But you got points for being a Disney nerd. And for being adorable.”

“Just adorable?”

“Let’s just put it this way. There are so many other descriptive words I can use but they all would sound like words coming out of the mouth of a porn star.”

“Oh, fuck… don’t say shit like that, hun.” He groaned as he turned up a windy mountain road that was close to your house.

“I’m an innocent angel, Clark. I don’t know what you are talking about.” He hummed and nodded his hand as you squeezed his hand and looked out the front window. “So where are we going?”

“One of the best places in town to watch the sunset.” He said as he took the corners like a seasoned pro. You felt safe beside him, comfortable, and for the first time in a long time, wanted. “Welcome to Jump Off Point.”

“Oh, Jesus.” You gasped as you looked around the overlook at the gorgeous mountain ranges that surrounded your new hometown. “God, I still can’t believe I live here.”

“It’s beautiful, right?” He asked as he turned his truck around and backed up to the rail. “I come here on my lunch breaks every day. It’s nice to just get away from people for a while.”

“I can relate.” You sighed with a nod as you picked up the bag of food and your milkshake, and opened your door. “I have bipolar, anxiety, and depression and somedays like today, it kicks my ass.”

“I'm sorry you have to deal with that.” He started as he passed you your food container. “I don't deal with it personally, but I went to school originally to become a therapist.”

“Why’d you change majors?” A small smile pulled at the corners of his lips as he bit one of his fries in half.

“I umm… well I met a woman. A journalist. We ended up in Asheville when I was about 21 and half way through school. Because of course at that age…”

“You know everything.” You finished for him with a small giggle. “Yea, don't I know it.”

“So we lived together for three or four years, until she got a job offer in New York at a paper she really wanted to work for. And she thought it would be ‘better’ if I stayed here while she got her feet under her. Never heard from her again.”

“Oh, Clark.” You breathed, but he quickly waved you off.

“It was a long time ago, sweetheart. I've recovered since then.”

“Well if it makes you feel any better, I was 19, and dating a guy way to old for me. That was… phew, that was an interesting time of my life. Moved out of my parent's house, went off my meds, went completely manic for a few years and crashed and burned in a psych ward in Pennsylvania. Don't ask, I still don't know to this day how I got there. I black out in my mania, apparently.”

“That's atypical, but it happens. And since we are talking about it, let the record show that if I get a little councilor-y on you, please feel free to shut me up.”

“Will do.” You laughed before taking a bite of your burger. “Is that…. ummm…. well is that why you like me? Why you are drawn to me?”

“What, because I'm a shrink in training? No, not at all. I like the mischief in your otherwise innocent eyes.”

“Well I got a whole lotta that. Just you wait and see.”

Part 2

[darkestwolfx]

Up from the Depths P.1 - Re-Review #32

Now, just to stick my personal opinion in here... we’re about to get to two of my all time favourite episodes. The amount of references to Jeff, and the purpose for IR - there’s just golden moments everywhere you look. So let’s have a look at some of them.

“What is it, John?”

“You’re gonna’ want to see this.”

“The TV-21! No, it can’t be...”

Well, it is (or we wouldn’t have an episode)!

“Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s the TV-21!”

“Is anyone gonna’ clue me in here?”

“It’s the TV-21!”

“That is not helping!”

Don’t worry, Alan, I’ll try and catch you up. But that just serves as another well-placed reminder of all the things Alan (and Kayo) is too young to remember about IR.

The fact Jeff etched his name onto the ship does not surprise me. It goes towards showing how proud he was of it, and completely fits in with everything we are told about him by Grandma (once again, wonderfully well placed comments).

Now, the TV-21, is given to us as “the first Thunderbird”, the fastest ship (at the moment), and Jeff’s pride and joy. There’s a nice little reference to Jeff’s previous careers as well, with the fact they’ve added the ‘Colonel’. Nice touch.

But of course, of all the places to crash land, it had to be in the Mariana’s Trench. I mean, there is a reason why it’s “the world’s last unmapped ocean”, according to the crew. It’s a pretty dangerous place. If you want to read about it, feel free, National Geographic have some incredibly interesting articles on what they theorise could be down there based on their limited exploration. But what we do know, is that it’s actually a very hostile seascape, and that the marine life which inhabits it seems to have evolved drastically to cope. I think that if we are ever able to understand it, we will know a lot more towards global warming and the mutations of animals. But I hate swimming. Water’s not my area. I prefer to research land mammals and leave my colleagues with the wet-weather adventures.

Anyhow, I think it’s totally awesome that Virgil was playing the piano and that Scott was sat at Jeff’s desk in the opening for this episode too. It’s always nice to see little throwbacks to this very human family.

So let’s discuss the origins of TV-21 for a moment. Before it was a Thunderbird, it was a comic series! And it’s original name was ‘TV Century 21′ which was eventually shortened to TV21. It had various mergers, which featured additions to the name, but TV21 stuck for the majority of issues. It was a weekly comic published by City Magazines, beginning around 1965. It’s content was... drum roll... the sci-fi TV series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s company: Century 21 Productions - thus where the comics name originated from, the TV being added to clarify where the material was coming from and hopefully encourage people to watch and read both in tandem.

The comic often had newspaper front pages, dedicated to the fictional news stories of the multiple Anderson worlds, e.g. Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Stingray.

Some really well known artists of the time worked on the comics, which only serves to increase their value. In our current day, the original ‘TV Century 21′ editions (Issues 1 - 154) are really hard to find, and so they sell/auction for incredibly high prices when one can be found - like much of the Anderson’s work which made it’s way into print. It does also mean that the first half of this great comic series is practically lost to the world.

Which is a big shame, because it was in many of these first issues (with their print time colliding with the original air slot of ‘Thunderbirds’) featured many episode-story related additions. For instance;

The supposed capture of ‘The Hood’ - which might have gone someway to explaining his disappearance during Series 2 of the show.

An addition to the US Army’s story line from ‘Pit of Peril’.

An addition to the events of ‘Sun Probe’, as well as an in-depth story on Thunderbird Three investigating the connection between the sun and natural disasters (better known now as global warming). My dad still has his copy of this edition, and I have no plans on selling it. It’s ironic that it features the only story line relevant to my current career. Hey, maybe there is such a thing as fate over coincidence (as ‘Doctor Who’ does suggest).

A special story for Thunderbirds Two and Four, upon which it is rumoured that the opening rescue of the ‘Thunderbirds’ (2004 film) was based upon. I personally think this was one of the best stories for the pair, and I’m disappointed it never appeared in an episode (as such). There were also rumours that this story was an expansion of the TOS episode ‘Atlantic Inferno’, but those were never confirmed and all suggestions ever made pointed towards it being a completely separate idea. There are interesting similarities in places though, so it’s worth consideration.

An expansion to Thunderbird Two’s ‘disappearance’, after the events of ‘Terror in New York City’, which covered the rumours spiraling during the time Thunderbird Two was out of operation, and some of the missions which were undertaken during said time.

And one of the few Fireflash related stories to feature outside of the TOS TV episodes. It was also one of the comic editions which fans come to know as ‘Thunderbirds meets Doctor Who’. At the time, both shows were scoring some of the highest viewings, and so I suppose these crossover editions only made sense. Many of the early editions featured such crossovers, including 2 other issues which I’ve posted above.

When we actually get to 2065, there’s going to be a bit of confusion over dates - the comics (set still in the futurist time - ever encroaching for us) were released on the corresponding dates, but with the year still set a hundred forward, e.g. 1965 was 2065, but the 13th March was the 13th March.

Right, enough of my geek-worthy knowledge on comics, and back to the episode. I mean, look at Scott’s face. He’s definitely had enough of my comic-based ramblings.

“Begging your forgiveness, Your Mongrel-ship.” 

I think the fact that Parker serves Sherbet tea (with one sugar) it’s just classic.

“I believe ‘wild goose chase’ were the words they used.”

“Well, as it happens, Parker loves a good chase. Parker, bring the car around would you? That’s right Sherbet. ‘On the double’.”

“hOn the double, hit his. Taking horders from ha mut, never though hI’d see the day.”

He does it anyway though - dedication right there,

Well now, time to visit the ocean. Did anyone else think the Deep Ocean Surveyor looked a bit... wrong? I had bad feelings about that thing from the start.

“This ship sure is a weird looking thing.”

Yeah, thanks for the back up there Gordon. Should have kept a closer eye on that one, although I do completely understand why they got so distracted and don’t blame them for it.

I love how Scott - Mr in command and always right - turns straight towards the TV-21 as soon as he knows they’re no injuries to worry about and that the DOS is all okay. Wasn’t he the one saying there was a rescue to prioritise only minutes ago?

“Gordon, what about the TV-21? Have they found part of the wreck?”

“Stand by, Scott, I’ll take a closer look. Just gotta’ clear some debris. It’s not just part of the wreck, it’s the whole thing!”

That is actually quite surprising! You know, something surviving like that. Good craftsmanship is all I can say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvltZMDOK5g

I can’t describe this scene any better than the scene itself, so I’m just gonna’ leave it there for you to re-watch at your own leisure. The faces are pictures!

“Why’s everyone making such a big deal about a wrecked plane? I don’t even remember it!”

“The TV-21 was Dad’s baby. The first ever super Mach-20 ship. It was the prototype to Thunderbird One. Dad invested everything into, but The Hood sabotaged it in flight. Dad had to abandon the plane somewhere over the Maraina Trench rather than let The Hood get his hands on it. I remember it broke Dad’s heart. I always thought it was smashed and lost in the deep.”

And there we have a link to that Hood-Jeff backstory (which the writer’s then conveniently shoved into a like ten-fifteen second explanation of ‘I am a bad guy because’, but hey, we’re not quite there yet!) that kinda gets forgotten.

“Cor!”

“I believe the word you’re looking for is Bingo. Well done Bertie.”

“Very smart of you to track that signal John.”

“We got lucky.”

You don’t have to be so modest you know John.

“It seems The Hood may be up to his old tricks.”

“I’ve seen engineering like this before. It’s the work of The Mechanic.”

“Oh no! That’s The Mechanic’s ship! Thunderbird Four, get out of there!”

“Too late.”

Yeah... it might have been good to notice that a little bit sooner.

Now, someone has some serious anger issues! I mean, I now he wants them out of the way (and later on that’s he’s being controlled), but that was seriously uncalled for!

“You better come up with something fast. Thunderbird Four’s hull integrity is failing. You’re getting crushed!”

Thanks Virgil, we can see that, unfortunately. This is another of those moments where - even though I know how it ends - I have a little panic.

“Hull integrity at 28%. Gordon what are you doing?”

“The airlock’s jammed. I can’t get the door open.”

“Then make a new door! But do it fast, you don’t have long. Hull at 7%. Gordon, get out now! Thunderbird Four is offline.”

“What happened?”

“Thunderbird Four's been rendered in operative.”

“Gordon!”

“I’m here. I’m okay. But Thunderbird Four’s a little... ur... beat up.”

This is a little like that moment in ‘EOS’, where I think our collective hearts stopped.

I know Gordon left the sub to try and free it, but it was actually a good thing that he did, else he probably would have been crushed, which wouldn't have been good. He was caught a little in the blast anyway, so I’m surprised he was a well-able to continue as he was.

But back to those serious anger issues - The Mechanic, you need to learn that once you have damaged someone’s ship past the piloting level, you don’t need to then snap it in two - that is just downright mean, not to mention unnecessary!

Poor Thunderbird Four. I seriously thought at the time that it wasn’t going to be recoverable. Look at Gordon’s poor little face.

The determination to get the TV-21 back as well was just wonderful.

“Not possible, only Thunderbird Four can survive the pressure. We need to come up with something extraordinary and fast.”

“We can use the TV-21!”

“It’s been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for years. Do you think it will still work?”

“Absolutely. I build things to last.”

“Gordon, we need you to get on board the TV-21.”

“I always wanted to fly Dad’s plane.”

Of course he did.

Now this was a sight to behold. Look at him!

“I can’t believe we used to wear these things.”

This was such a lovely little throw back moment.

“You could try the Jeff Tracy fix. After all, it is Dad’s plane.”

“FAB. This is TV-21. We have lift off.”

And hell did that work!

Rescue count: 35

I mean, let’s just momentarily forget that this part ends with The Mechanic making a grand come back and stealing it.

“To The Mechanic, let me tell you who you’re dealing with. We’re International Rescue; you can’t push us around, you cant tell us what to do, and you absolutely, positively can’t take our stuff!”

“No, let me tell you who you’re dealing with. I’m The Mechanic. I take what I want, from who I want, whenever I want it.”

Yeah... shivers.

Let’s just remember Gordon’s great moment getting to pilot it.

“So tell me, what is it like flying Dad’s plane?”

“It was awesome.”

See, that’s a nicer ending.

[doberbutts]

 Okay so this is going to get long and more than a little bit tmi but it’s a post summing up some strides I’ve made regarding my own transgender journey and I wanted a place to talk about it and maybe help some BabyTrans figure themselves out along the way so I’m putting it under the cut but it’ll go here >:V

Anyway long story short my insurance settlement from my car accident finally figured itself out and I found myself suddenly $30k richer and immediately spent about $10k of that digging myself out of a very deep debt hole I’ve been wallowing in for a while so now I have some actual financial stability plus have some money to throw at some things that would probably make my life a bit better.

And since I have the money to throw at some things, I bought myself a few new binders and also a packer. Binders because my old one was literally disintegrating- part of that is my fault, washing binders in an industrial machine on high heat plus throwing it in the dryer means your binder falls apart faster than it should. Remember I’m from the very end of Ye Olden Days of transmasc products, which means previously most binders lasted a year at most. My binder made it 2.5 years before giving up and becoming a sports bra instead. I’ve learned from my mistakes and treat my binder(s) much more gently now, plus I have more than one so I can rotate them out and not wear the same binder 8-12 hours daily for 2.5 years and kill it doing exactly the same shit.

For reference sake, I’m 5′10′’, 180lbs, 36C bust, and fit a XL from gc2b. Which is who I bought both my previous binder and my current set from. They are low cost, lightweight, well made, and LGBT-owned and operated which makes me super into buying from them instead of some of the other companies offering something similar.

Being that I am biracial and finding something my skintone is always somewhat... interesting... I followed the internet’s suggestion and went with PeeCock for the packer. I’d bought a zip binder from them a few years ago and actually found that to be the most comfortable binder I’ve ever used in the history of ever, but I will say the durability of zip binders is low compared to pull-over binders in my experience, as the zipper exploded one day when I bent down to pick up a small dropped item. I’d had the binder and was rotating its use with my pullover gc2b for about 6 months when this happened, and was in public when I went from flat chested to big uncontained tiddies in the span of seconds. Not great. I’ve been told that probably means it was a little too small for me, but PeeCock is a company based in Singapore, and their sizes like most East Asian clothing do run quite a bit small (I was a XXL in PeeCock sizes when I wore a size L gc2b binder) so there’s not really a lot of wiggle room for me to go up in size. Additionally their sizing taps out at XXXL so anyone who’s bigger than me in the chest/torso is a bit out of luck for their binders. A shame, because that zip binder was so comfortable I fell asleep in it forgetting I even had it on more than once.

Anyway. Since I did like that binder even though we had the wardrobe mishap, and the internet had pretty good reviews on the PeeCock packers because they are multifunctional and actually make correct skin tones for black dudes, I got one. Since money wasn’t an issue I did get the most recent model which was not cheap (~$300) and so far I like it a lot. I got so used to wearing it that when I take it off to clean it, it actually really bothers me. The weight of it is... comforting, in a way.

HOWEVER I did see a bunch of reviews about how I would be super likely to pee on myself the first time using it and then used it and went “wow I don’t have any idea what you guys are talking about this is easy” aaaaand... then peed on myself by accident. Gotta control your stream or things are going to overflow and you’re going to be really sad. And wet. And stinky. Thankfully I had the forethought to practice at home before actually doing this at work/public restrooms but be warned. Being that this is my first one I can’t say if this is common with all packers however I told several of my transmasc friends that do pack and use STP about this experience and they all assured me they did the exact same thing on and off for the first couple weeks and most of them do not have the same brand. We’ve yet to have a repeat at least?

Plus there’s a little attachment rod so I can use it for sexy times with the boyf and also feel what I’m doing to him so there’s that too. 10/10 A+ experience would recommend. The packaging warns you to be careful how you pack because of the way the silicone works, and your partner cannot be on top or ride you, so keep that in mind if you’re considering it. Cleaning is pretty straightforward however and packing feels correct and natural as long as you follow a few rules:

I’ve discovered that whatever size you consider a perfect fit? Unless you like really relaxed fit for your pants, you’ll need to go a size up. I wear tighter clothing and usually skinny jeans at that, and my exact perfect size has been 34/32 for some time now. When packing I need to go up to 36/32 because otherwise wow that crotch is way too tight. I can’t sit down in one of my pairs of jeans and I’m legit sad about it. I also can’t have anything in the pockets of a different pair of jeans or else I have the same tight crotch problem. I went up a size in underwear and that was more comfortable, so I ordered new pants from online and I’ll see if that helps as much as I’m expecting it too.

Speaking of underwear, ymmv, but I genuinely did not expect this. Jockstraps? Super comfy, super durable, and super convenient. Additionally unlike boxers or even briefs, I don’t need a special packing-specific design to be comfortable in one. I never wore one before and honestly this doesn’t even feel like wearing underwear. They’re really just a banana hammock anyway so that’s probably a large part of it, but honestly I would definitely recommend trying them if you haven’t yet. I do have a few pairs of packing briefs and boxers, as well as normal briefs and boxers, and I’ve been alternating between the various types of undies to see which ones I prefer, but I already know my decision so I bought several because I can. One word of advice, though... if your pants ride down understand that your entire butt will be out. I don’t wear low rise pants because they draw too much attention to my waistline and make me super dysphoric, but those that do, watch out.

Jockmail is highly rated and multiple transmasc websites recommend them for packing and I can absolutely see why. Usually the waistband of my underwear irritates my skin and so I was dubious because Jockmail stuff- being that it’s for athletic wear- has a minimum waistband of about 2in... but it’s actually more comfortable and less irritating, rather than the other way around. They also have briefs, boxers (more like short shorts), and boxer briefs, which I also have of the same brand, but... not as comfy. Once again Jockmail is a Hong Kong company so like all East Asian clothes, they run small. I’m a M in most men’s clothing sizes... I am XXL in Jockmail. I also had purchased a brief harness from PeeCock (goes by inches for waist) as well. (Also where I discovered you need to go a size up- I bought a 34in waist brief from PeeCock and it’s a tad tight. I bought a 36in waist brief from Jockmail and it’s perfect. I have been buying 34in waist things for the past few years now- I didn’t suddenly gain 2 inches at the waist, I did suddenly gain a need for a deeper crotch)

If you look down your body from above it will be super obvious that there is a dick there and you will go “oh god I look like I have an erection”. I have been reliably informed that it is actually not true and if you pack correctly a bulge will be there but not so obvious that it looks like you have a raging hardon the whole time. Better to look in the mirror, rather than down your tummy.

(Additionally I voiced my doubts to my boyf who immediately reminded me that most people don’t spend their time staring at someone’s crotch and as long as I wasn’t constantly messing with mine, no one was likely to notice even if I did have an obnoxiously obvious bulge. He then gave me some tips on how to let it hang if I wanted a “natural” look, and when we walked around while I had it on he made sure to check in on my mental health. He’s cute y’all.)

Some (cis) guys will have a specific leg they like to let things hang against. Some switch it up. Some are okay with it hanging straight down provided there’s not a lot of squish happening. Find what feel comfortable and needs the least amount of adjustment for you, and then stick with that. For me, I’ve found straight down or off to the left feels better- a friend of mine prefers off to the right, another straight down only, etc. Also can depend on the size- some (cis) guys I know are a bit smaller down below and are more comfortable with straight down than those with larger weiners.

If you pack you probably need to shave. I was very uncomfortable until I shaved. Now I feel much better packing. So trim that jungle or else you might feel a pinch every few minutes when a hair gets pulled.

And there you have me this morning before I got dressed. As you can see, both fit very nicely. I’m not particularly happy with my stomach or feminine hip set but eh, I cover those with layers and no one bats an eye.

At this point it’s figuring out the whole hormones thing, yelling at my insurance to cover certain surgeries, and... fixing some minor details with my wardrobe... and I’m feeling way more confident than I was a few years ago.

Anyway if anyone has questions feel free to hit me up

[captainillogical]

Devil’s Ballroom Ch.7

A year after the events from the earth’s final attack, Little Homeworld is finally complete, and there’s a new jazz bar where gems and humans mingle and drink. - As you’re typing back a reply, someone pulls the stool out next to you and takes a seat. You see a sliver of pink out of the corner of your eye as you try not to actually Look. Oh god. It’s her. God can’t help us now.

Spinel/Reader

collab with my lovely wife @firstofficertightpants​

ya’ll im sorry lmao

You spend the rest of your evening doing exactly none of the errands that you needed to deal with today. Instead, you're laying on your couch and texting your friends.

         Y/N: I'm so tornnnn.

     Y/N: Do I say something about the cheek smooch?

     Y/N: Should I leave it be?

     Y/N: Because she's texting like nothing happened.

     Y/N: What if I'm reading too much into it??

     Y/N: What if that's just how she shows friendship affection???

     Y/N: I might make it so fucking awkward if I assume something!

     Y/N: This entire ordeal is mortifying!!!

     Y/N: I want nothing more than to dig a big hole and lie in it forever.

     Y/N: I might be low-key having a panic attack about this rn but what's new.

     Harper: Y/N. chill. you're way overreacting to this.

     Harper: even if it meant nothing, she still likes you as a friend right?

     Harper: i think it would take a lot for her to like.. not wanna stay friends lol.

     Alex: im just saying you could probably kiss her and she'd be ok with it

     Alex: cheek kisses are pretty forward

     Harper: don't listen to him. all of his relationships ended in failure.

     Alex: wow

     Alex: im seriously hurt

     Harper: am I wrong?

     Alex: no..

     Harper: my point exactly.

     Harper: i’m not saying you have nothing to lose or anything.

     Harper: because i myself had to tread very carefully with leah..

     Harper: but i think you should just see where it goes and not like

     Harper: put too much emphasis on this incase it was nothing.

     Y/N: Yeah see now you have me worried it WAS nothing!!

     Alex: oh my goooooooddddddddddddddd

     Alex: the both of you approach women so.. pathetically

     Alex: take a risk

     Alex: live a little

     Alex: what is seriously the worst that could happen

     Alex: she kills you??

     Alex: lmao

     Alex: its funny cuz of.. you know

     Harper: i can’t wait to be home and smothering him with a pillow instead of affection.

     Y/N: You and me both.

     Y/N: Try being the only one available to play games with him.

     Alex: both of you fucking love me okay

     Alex: alsooooooo i get to be home the day after tomorrow

     Alex: the alex is back, babieeeeee

     Y/N: Harper please come home I’m BEGGING you.

     Harper: sorry you gotta deal with him alone for another month lmao.

     Y/N: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

     Alex: can i get a fucking crumb of love here please

         You swipe over to the couple of messages Spinel has left you in the past couple of minutes while you were talking to your friends.

         Spinel: It’s another stupid ball, I just found out.

     Spinel: I told her that I’m sitting this one out this time.

     Spinel: She has so many others that would absolutely love to help her, and yet, still absolutely insists that I must be there.

     Spinel: I don’t want to go back to homeworld right now, and not for this.

     Y/N: And you put your foot down? Hell yeah, dude.

     Y/N: Planning a ball for a bunch of gems sounds like a chore anyway.

     Spinel: oh, it is, believe me.

     Spinel: And they need everything to be PERFECT.

     Spinel: Which isn’t realistic anymore now that they don’t expect any of the gems to stay in line with their gem class nowadays.

     Spinel: The last ball they threw almost 4 months ago was utterly chaotic.

     Y/N: For thousands of years y'all as a race never pushed to deviate from the norm, and now that you guys are allowed to? I’d go batshit with it too.

     Y/N: Being stifled in everyday life, and finally you’re free?

     Y/N: Fuck, I’d go around fusing with anyone!

     Spinel: That is precisely what too many of them did.

     Y/N: Lmao. I wish I could’ve seen that.

         You tab back over to your group chat for a moment to see what they’re talking about.

         Harper: see? they’re everywhere.

     Harper: i wasn’t expecting the campsite to have so many.

     Alex: you could have built an army and instead you took pictures

     Alex: do you know how easy it is to lure chipmunks?

     Alex: oh that lil guy on the bottom right is so fucking chunky i love him

     Harper: that’s the one that got the closest when i fed them. :3

     Alex: oh i fuckin BET

     Alex: you dont get that chubby in the wild without takin a few risks

     Alex: if u know what i mean ;)

     Harper: i hate whatever you just implied.

     Y/N: It’s not a conversation with Alex unless you roll your eyes at least 3 times.

     Alex: hey i thought it was 4 times

     Alex: dont insult me

     Alex: anyway, y/n

     Alex: are you workin the day i come back

     Y/N: Yeah I’m actually scheduled a double.

     Alex: scheduled

     Y/N: Yes.

     Alex: a double

     Y/N: Yes.

     Alex: he can’t SCHEDULE you a DOUBLE

     Y/N: He can if he asks me ahead of time as a favor.

     Alex: that fuckin bastard

     Alex: always ruining my plans

     Harper: you’re still mad at him for firing you last summer, huh.

     Alex: OF COURSE I AM

     Y/N: Bro you stole like $300 of cotton candy sugar that summer.

     Y/N: It’s only fair.

     Y/N: Besides, I’m only doing this because he said he’d give me a long weekend for it.

     Alex: kay well

     Alex: i guess i’ll just go bug you at work and wait for you to get off that day :'(

     Y/N: Get me written up again, I swear to god.

         Your phone chimes several times, and you swipe down to see messages from both Spinel and Steven. You check Spinel's first.

         Spinel: Do me a favor and ignore any messages Steven has sent you.

     Y/N: What are you, my boss?

     Spinel: I MEAN IT

         You quickly switch over to Steven's texts.

         Steven: I was going to ask you if your date with Spinel went okay, but I'm assuming it went fine considering she hasn't really stopped talking about you.

         Ohhhh my god, this is wild. You reply to him.

         Y/N: It wasn't a date as far as I know.

     Y/N: I had fun.

     Y/N: She's telling me to not read your messages, lmao.

     Y/N: Also what do you mean she hasn't stopped talking about me??

     Steven: She’s been lying on my floor for the last hour basically gushing about you.

     Steven: But you didn’t hear that from me!

     Steven: :D

     Y/N: Haha thanks, kid.

         You switch back over to text Spinel, and get up off the couch to make yourself some tea. Pulling out your kettle, you turn the stove on and grab some raspberry flavored abomination tea bag that your dad loves more than any of the other good tea flavors.

         Y/N: Sooooo.

     Spinel: You talked to him, didn’t you.

     Y/N: Hahaha noooo. :)

     Spinel: The fuck did he say?

     Y/N: Absolutely nothing.

     Spinel: Seriously? I was sure he’d reveal something embarrassing.

     Y/N: Nope! You should probably get off his floor eventually, though.

         Your kettle goes off and you grab a clean mug, and pour the boiling water into it along with the tea packet. You look down at your phone, and grin.

         Spinel: goddammit.

         You let the bag steep for a little bit, and add in a small amount of sugar. Walking up to your bedroom you take a snap of Jellybean half lounging, half falling off the stairs and send it to Spinel. She replies with a couple heart emojis, and you wonder if Steven was the one to show her the proper use of them. You set your cup of tea down on your desk, and turn your computer on. It’s evening now, and it’s much too late to do anything left with the rest of your day productivity-wise, so you settle in on playing more minecraft. Your thoughts wander quite a bit, and you find yourself stuck on thinking about Spinel. Naturally. You wonder about a lot of things she’s learned while staying on earth, from things like - does she pay rent? Does she have a job? Does she know what taxes are? Does she know what a relationship with a human looks like? She said she watched a movie, but didn’t exactly elaborate. You don’t know what human-norms she’s been exposed to. You can’t even concentrate enough to mine any of this redstone for Alex, and you nearly die in-game when the thought of ‘does she know what sex is?’ pops into your mind. You grab your phone and shoot Spinel another message.

         Y/N: Quick question.

     Y/N: If you don’t mind me asking.

         It takes her a few minutes to reply.

         Spinel: Sure?

     Y/N: Do you know how humans are made?

     Spinel: w

     Spinel: Yes?

     Spinel: Steven told me about it a few weeks ago actually.

     Spinel: Why are you asking?

     Y/N: No reason! Just curious is all.

     Spinel: Hm.

         Yeah you’re not too confident that she actually knows, and you’re too chickenshit to elaborate right now. You’ll enlighten her later. You spend the rest of the night browsing memes on your phone, and texting your friends and Spinel on occasion. Before you know it, your eyes drift close with your phone in hand.

     You wake up when your alarm goes off for your morning shift, and curse at yourself for not charging it last night. It’s at a solid 32%, which isn’t really enough to go about your day, but you’ll have to make do. You get ready for a hopefully not shitty day, lock up the house, and head in to work.

     It’s a complete shitshow when you come in, and you turn your phone off to save battery and concentrate on dealing with more than an average amount of tourists. You find Mr. Smiley sleeping in the breakroom/office/supply closet, and have half a mind to lock him in there from the outside for the rest of your shift. It’s pretty busy, and messy, and it isn’t until you’re there for several exhausting hours that you finally have enough time for a break. You turn your phone on, and instantly you’re flooded with messages from several different people. Ugh.

           A couple from your dad - just checking in, really. Group chat too as usual, but none of it seems overly important. One from Spinel, and several from Steven. You open up Spinel’s message first.

         Spinel: Do you think we could talk about a couple of things later?

         Vague, and a little concerning. You text back an apology for getting back to her so late, and open the messages from Steven.

         Steven: Hey are you busy?

     Steven: I’m dealing with a bit of a situation right now, and could use your help.

     Steven: Spinel locked herself in my bathroom, and she won’t come out.

     Steven: She refuses to answer to anyone, and several of us have tried.

     Steven: I’m just really worried about her, and you guys seemed to bond, so I was hoping..

     Steven: That maybe you could come over?

     Steven: Thanks regardless.

         You check the timestamp, and that was over an hour ago. Jesus christ.

         Y/N: Steven I’m so sorry, my phone was off and I’m at work, give me a few and I’ll be right over, okay?

     Y/N: I’ll be quick.

         He replies almost immediately with a “please” and you pocket your phone. You try not to worry too hard about Spinel as you rush over to grab your things, and knock on Mr. Smiley’s office/broom closet door. He opens it groggily, clearly just waking up.

     “Yeah?” he slowly blinks at you.

     “I gotta leave early. Emergency.” You stare at him, trying to not be pissed at his lack of work ethic.

     “Are you for real? You’ve got another 3 hours left.” He says and crosses his arms, and you glare at him.

     “I’ve been working my ass off while you’ve been sleeping this whole time, AND I’m covering your ass tomorrow so you can go meet your old friend! So the LEAST you can do is let me go early when I have an emergency!!!” You almost yell out at him, and he holds his hands up in defense.

     “Okay, okay! Fine. Only because you’re a good worker.” He says, and has the gall to look at least a little ashamed of himself.

     “Damn right I am.” You spin around and head out of the building, practically running.

     You almost trip and bite it several times on the way over to Steven’s place, but you’re more worried about Spinel. You’ve only been to his place twice, but once you’re there you run up the stairs and open the door without knocking. You’re greeted by the only two people in the living room, Pearl, and Steven.

         “Oh, she’s here!” Pearl says and nudges Steven, who looks up from typing on his phone.

     “Y/N! Thank god you’re here.” He says with furrowed eyebrows.

     “What happened?” You say and shut the door, and cross the room over to him.

     “I’m not sure! We were just working on something together for Amethyst, and she got a call from Blue and Yellow. She’s been ignoring them lately, and they’ve been bothering me in turn because of that, so I asked her to take the call just see what they want.” He runs his hand through his brown curls, and just for a moment, you see that 12 year old him in again. The obvious stress masks just how young he really is, and you feel bad that he can’t live life like a normal kid. “She went outside to take the call, and was out there for quite a while. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I did hear some yelling. And just when I was going over to make sure they were alright, she comes back in tears, eyes spiraling like months ago, and nearly knocks Pearl over rushing into the bathroom.”

     “And nothing since?” You inquire, fidgeting with your hands.

     “No,” He says, frustratedly. “I’ve been trying to reach the diamonds to see what this is all about, but I’ve only been getting the pearls. I don’t know what to do. She hasn’t been like this in months. What were they talking about to make her this upset?”

     “Maybe I can find out. You said she’s in your bathroom?” You raise an eyebrow at him.

     “Yeah, the one right over here.” He says and points to it.

     “Is it locked?” You ask.

     “No,” Pearl glances towards the bathroom door and crosses her arms. “The lock has been broken on it for a while, since Peridot joined us actually. Both Garnet and I tried opening it, but I think once Spinel hears someone trying to come in she blocks the door.”

     Hm.

     “I’m gonna try something, but you guys are gonna wanna stay away.” You say to the two of them. “I don’t want to overwhelm her with more than one person.”

     “Let us know if we can do anything?” Steven makes to pass by you and gives your arm a light squeeze. “And thanks for coming to help.”

     “Anytime, dude.” You give him a half smile, and walk over to his bathroom. You turn to take a look back at the other two, and they’re already in the kitchen discussing something in soft tones. You move to knock at the door, make two light taps against the frame, and wait for an answer.

     A couple seconds pass, and nothing. Not even any movement. Nervously, you knock again, a little louder this time, and wait for a good ten seconds.

     Still nothing.

     You take a deep breath, reach out to grab the door handle, and very slowly and quietly open the bathroom door. You see nothing but absolute darkness, and step in. You feel around the wall to your right and flip a switch just as you close the door behind you with an audible click. The room instantly floods with the dark red light of the heat lamp, and before you can even think about finding another light source, you find yourself slammed up against the wall and let out a surprised yelp. You open your eyes to see Spinel’s face inches from yours, pupils wild, her hands splayed against your shoulders.

     “U-um,” Your voice cracks a little. “Hey.”

     You watch her eyes take a second to find yours, and almost instantly, she lets you go, arms trembling.

     “W.. what are YOU DOING HERE!?” She cries, large tears pouring down her face, eyebrows raised in confusion, mouth trembling. Her hair is in loose pigtails, strands untamed around her face, cheeks stained with tear tracks. She looks like a mess, and your heart breaks, just a little. “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt y-”

     “I’m fine.” You cut her off. “I should have said who it was outside the door, I’m sorry. And um.. Steven texted me while I was at work, and told me what was going on so I rushed over..” You trail off as you watch Spinel’s entire body shake, and she covers her face with both of her hands.

     “I can’t believe I just did that.” You hear her wavering voice, muffled behind her fists, and she lets out a choked sob. “Maybe they were right. M-maybe I’m not meant to-” She quickly moves her hands down to look at the floor with wide, vulnerable eyes, and struggles to form the rest of her words. You hear her breathing pick up pace, and you’re starting to realize she’s hyperventilating.

     “Spinel, look at me.” Her eyes shoot up to yours, lips trembling. “I need you to breathe.” You do what your friends have always done with you, and gently grab both of her hands and hold them with yours, thumbs stroking her palms in slow circles. She freezes up instantly, and you’re about to panic, because while a familiar touch helps ground you, you register that maybe it’ll make it worse for her. But before you can pull your hands away, her hands relax ever so slightly, and she lets out a shaky breath. “Good. Just like that.” You motion for her to follow your breathing inverals, and she copies you, hands still shaking in yours.

     It’s been a while since you’ve had to deal with something like this, but you’re thankful for having similar life experiences. After a solid minute or two of this her breathing is back to a normal pace, but she’s still crying, and now not meeting your eyes. Almost like she’s avoiding them.

     “Look, I.. I don’t know what happened with you and the diamonds, but you can talk to me about it if you’d like. No pressure, though.” You give her hands a small squeeze, and she whimpers, looking up to meet your gaze. Tears are still actively streaming down her face, and you have no idea how to make any of this better. It physically hurts you to see her like this.

     “C-can I not talk about it? I don’t think I’m ready..” She pulls a hand from yours, and wipes at her face. She just kind of smeared half of her face with wetness, and she looks miserable.

     “You don’t have to talk about anything, Spinel.” You look at her, making sure she sees it in your eyes. You slowly let go of her other hand, and hold your arms out in a silent question instead. Her mouth opens slightly, the red glow of the light around her making her look extremely vulnerable and soft, and she looks at your open arms with a blank face for a moment before understanding. Almost instantaneously, she throws herself against you and wraps her arms around your shoulders, shoving her face into the cradle of your neck. You envelop your arms around her tightly, giving her sides a squeeze, and you feel her start to shake again.

     She lets out an unsteady sigh, and hiccups out another small sob. You pull her to lean fully against you as you stand there, bracing your back against the bathroom door. She lets you maneuver her, and you rest the side of your face against her temple while she cries. You resign yourself to letting her cry on you until she’s done, if she needs to.

       You feel her sniffle against your neck, and try not to mind that she’s getting your shirt soaked. You give her back a few gentle rubs, feeling her body quiver against yours as she’s trying to control her choked breathing. You’re not really counting the minutes, as right now you’re currently having way too many rampant thoughts about what the fuck the diamonds could’ve said to her. You’re mad as hell, honestly, and if you could say shit to them, you would in a heartbeat. You don’t want to make anything worse for her though, as much as you want to steal her phone and video call them to curse them out. It takes a few more minutes, but eventually her crying dies down, and you feel her breathing even out. Slowly, she dislodges her arms from twisting around you two, and you feel a sigh, her breath hot against your neck. You do your best to school your facial expression as you’re realize just how close you are to her, and she pulls her face from its resting position to look at you. She looks awful.

       “U-um,” She lifts up her hand to attempt to wipe her face, failing to rub half the tears away. “I don’t really want to go out there yet..”

       “You don’t have to.” You say, quietly. “I can leave if you’d like some quiet to yourself.” Her face looks panicked for a second, and she grabs your wrist.

       “Please don’t leave me.” She says, voice wavering again. You try not to let your heart shatter at her tone.

     “I won’t if you want me here.” You say, and sigh softly. “Here, hold on a second.”

     She lets your wrist go as you move slightly over to the sink, turn the hot water on, and grab a clean hand towel from the counter. You soak it in water, and squeeze out all the excess. Towel in hand, you turn back to her, and she’s looking at you cautiously. You lift the towel slightly, motioning to her face.

     “May I?” You ask, and she nods slightly.

     Tenderly, you brush a couple strands of hair away from her face, grasp her chin with your left hand and pull her forward, gently pressing the towel to her cheek. She closes her eyes, and her shoulders sag a little as she lets you dab at her face, cleaning her of any tear stain marks. She sighs into your touch, and it strikes you that it would be so easy to just.. lean in and kiss her.

       Your brain almost short circuits and you snap your thoughts back to reality. There’s a time and place for everything. This is not the time, nor the place.

       Once you’re satisfied that she looks a lot better than before, you pull your hands away to toss the rag in the sink, and Spinel, for a brief moment, looks disappointed that you had stopped. Which.. kind of gives you an idea.

       “Can I try something? Harper used to do this thing with me when I.. had similar breakdowns.” You ask her. She raises her eyebrow in response, clearly exhausted from crying so much. “Here.” You say, and take her hand and lead her over to the rim of the bathtub. You sit down on the edge, and motion for her to sit in front of you on the floor. She takes a seat in front of you, still confused, but obeys nonetheless. “Can I touch you?” You ask her, watching her face to make sure she’s alright.

       She looks up at you, the red light in the room flooding the entirety of her face, making her hair darker, and the whites of her eyes a bit more dramatic.

     “Yeah.” She says in reply, voice tired.

     You reach out to her hair, and stop for a moment.

     “Can I have you face the other direction, actually? Come over here.” You move to open your knees, making enough room for Spinel to turn around and lean against the bathtub. She’s close to you again.

     “What are you..” She trails off as you start to take the hair ties out of her pigtails, one after the other. It takes a second, as it’s a bit tangled, but you manage to get both out, and let her hair fall down. You comb out her hair with your fingers, gently, and she sighs audibly while leaning into your touch. You run your short nails along her scalp, scratching and massaging as you smooth out her hair, attempting to pull all the tangles out.

     “Touch used to calm me down, and Harper was really good at it, honestly.” You say while pulling out a particularly difficult tangle without hurting her. Her hair is long like this, and you like it. You wish you could grow your hair this long, but it’s kind of a pain to deal with, and the longest you’ve ever had yours wasn’t even to your mid back, you think to yourself. “Sometimes she’d give me shoulder and neck massages, but I preferred that she’d just play with my hair. There’s just something different about another person touching your hair.”

     “I kind of get what you mean.” She says, tiredly.

     “Can I braid your hair?” You lean closer to look at her face.

     “Do what you want.” She says, looking fairly relaxed.

     “Cool. Anyway, while Harper was good at that, Alex, on the other hand, was just terrible at any kind of physical comfort. He’s genuine, and he tries, but he’s an idiot. He’s a lot better at distractions, for the most part.” You run your fingers through her hair one more time, before starting to separate her hair into three parts for a french braid. “He’s funny, and comes from a large family, so he always has stories and jokes. Whenever I’d have a panic attack, those two were always so good about being there for me. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

     You notice that Spinel‘s shoulders have lost most of the tension in them, and you’re secretly relieved. You keep talking to fill the quietness around you two, because you’ve always hated the quiet during moments like these. Your friends aren’t here, so it’s up to you to make up for it.

     “It was kind of hard, at first though,” You say, and start looping the chunks of hair around your fingers, starting at the top of her head. “Because for a while there, back when I was 16 and dealing with the worst of my abandonment issues, I clung onto Harper like a baby koala. I had this super weird crush on her even though we had been friends since we were practically babies. I think I idolized her because she was just.. good to me.” You accidentally tug a little too hard on a strand of hair, wince and utter an apology while massaging the spot on her scalp. “I’m glad that didn’t ruin our friendship, but for a while there I really pushed my feelings onto her, which was kinda fucked up on my part.”

     “Hm..” Spinel mumbles. “I kind of had a thing for Pink, I think. Which ended up screwing with me even more after what she did.” You stare at the back of her head and pause your hands for a second. Huh. Yeah, you had a hunch.

     “If she were still alive, I’d punch her in the face for you, I hope you know.” You state, in full seriousness. This gets the first chuckle that you’ve heard from her today, and you’re secretly overjoyed.

     “I’d pay to watch that.” She says, and you laugh out loud. You see her smile, just barely.

     “So,” You continue, with both your hands and conversation. “A week or so after my 17th birthday, right after Harper talked to me about this guy at school that she liked, I confess to her. And not like a, ‘oh hey, you’re my best friend and I really like you’ kind of way, either. It was more like a, ‘have a mental breakdown over your best friend liking someone else and make them feel like shit about it on your walk home from school’ kind of confession.” Your hands reach the nape of her neck now, braid mostly done on her head, but you’ve got around another 20 inches of length before being finished.

     “Harper avoided me for nearly a week after that. I was absolutely pathetic, and inconsolable. Alex was fed up with my shit after a few days, and nearly slapped me over it. He would’ve been in the right, doing so, honestly. I was a selfish asshole who only thought about her own feelings, and not about her best friends.” Your eyes drift to Spinel’s face, and her eyes are closed, eyebrows unfurrowed.

     “Anyway,” You’re nearly done with the entire braid now. “She did end up forgiving me. Thankfully. I don’t know what I’d do if it were my fault that I’d split up our friend group.” You pick up the discarded hair tie from earlier, and tie it around the end of the braid.

     “I’m all done, by the way.” You say to her. She opens her eyes tentatively, and she looks sleepy. You stand up, and stretch your back. She also gets up on wobbly legs, and turns to look at you.

     “Um.” She’s avoiding your eyes. “Thank you. For this.” She’s twisting her hands together, nervously. You lean your face closer to get at eye-level with her.

     “Anytime.. and for the record, you look really cute in a braid.” You say and smile, giving her a cheeky wink. You watch her entire face from the neck up turn bright red, and think that you could probably do this forever, and never get tired. She gives you a noncommittal grunt, halfheartedly smacks your arm and you grin at her.

     You hear a quiet knock at the door, and look over to Spinel. She shrugs, so I guess it’s okay now.

     “You can come in!” You say to the door. It opens slowly, and you see Steven peek his head in.

     “Um.. are we okay?” He asks, clearly very worried about her.

     “I’ll be okay.” She says, and you think that maybe she should lay down and sleep. You verbalize this immediately.

     “Spinel. I think you should go take a nap.” You look at her, and she blinks at you. “I’m serious.”

     “She’s kind of right.” Steven says in agreement with you. Spinel gives the both of you a shrug, and even that seems like it’s taking a lot out of her.

     “Okay.” She says, and turns to walk out of the bathroom. Steven opens the door wider, and you can see Pearl in the kitchen leaning against the counter, trying to not seem like she’s intently watching all of you.

     Spinel makes her way over to the couch and takes a seat, sitting up rigidly. You walk over to her to make sure she’s okay before you leave for home.

     “You know you can text me, right? And if you need me, I’ll be available. I’ll leave my volume turned on.” She gives you a nod. “Oh, and.. take this,” You say, and pull off the pullover hoodie you’re wearing right now, and hand it over to her. “Alex used to let me wear his oversized sweaters, and they used to help me sleep, so..”

     She tentatively reaches out, and takes it from your hands.

     “Thanks.” She says, and gives you a small smile. With her hair pulled back like this she almost looks human, for a fleeting moment. You sometimes forget she’s a gem. You return the smile back at her, and turn around to leave.

     After grabbing your bag that you set down earlier from beside the couch, you head over to the front door and open it. Shouldering the bag, you start to shut the door and see Steven behind you. He closes the door behind him, his face searching yours for something you don’t quite know.

     “I don’t know what you did, but thank you.” He says, completely genuine.

     “You don’t have to thank me. I’d do it for you, too, you know.” You say to him, and he smiles.

     “That’s why I like you, Y/N. You’re sweet.”

     “Yeahhhh, don’t tell anyone, though. You’ll ruin my reputation.” You smirk, giving him the side-eye. He laughs and pats your back.

     “Ohhhhhh no! Whatever will you do!?” He rolls his eyes in jest. “Get home safe, okay?”

     “No promises.” You reply, and jump down his steps, two at a time.  

     It doesn’t take you long to get home, and you’re pretty tired yourself. You make yourself busy by preparing dinner, cleaning the kitchen a little, and calling your dad for another check-in. Before you know it, it’s nearly 11, and you need to sleep for your double shift tomorrow that you almost forgot about. You’re laying in bed browsing social media before drifting off, and you receive a text from Spinel. You swipe down and open the message.

         Spinel: Thanks again for today.

     Spinel: I baked some new cookies with Steven, and would like to give you some tomorrow if that’s okay?

         You smile to yourself. Ughhhhhhhh, you’re catching the feelings disease, and you swat the air around you like it somehow physically manifested around you.

         Y/N: I work literally all day, but feel free to stop by and give them to me.

     Y/N: Then I get to see a pretty familiar face to break up all the lame tourists.

     Y/N: Cuz that sounds super nice. ;)

     Spinel: I’ll see you tomorrow, then.

         She didn’t react to your obvious teasing, but you won’t let that discourage you. You fall asleep thinking of the many different ways you can poke fun at her, and this time, you charge your phone.

     You wake up the next morning feeling well-rested for once, and get ready for work. Alex has sent you a couple texts about when his flight will arrive, and when he’ll roughly come to meet you. Sometime around 4pm, apparently. You shoot Spinel a good morning text, and she replies almost instantly with the same, which makes you smile.

     You head to work, texting your group chat about what happened yesterday with Spinel, and give them basically all the details. Alex makes fun of you for a bit, so you curse him out and pocket your phone as you clock in. Today’s going to suck, but you’ve got a few things to look forward to.

     You make it a couple hours into your shift before you finally get a break, and Spinel texts you that she’ll drop by sometime in the afternoon once she’s done helping Bismuth with something. God you hope it’s not when Alex gets here, because you are so not fucking ready for that interaction. You eat your lunch and pray to any god out there that you could have one more day of peace.

     You’re outside the main building repairing a couple parts on the carousel, ignoring the bulk of the tourists to focus on work. You don’t realize that quite a while has passed by, because someone walks up to you as you’ve got your head in a small door, and kicks you slightly on your ass. You jolt and bump your head against the opening, and you hear Alex burst out into laughter as you groan in pain.

     God fucking dammit, this guy. You pull your head out to glare at him, screwdriver pointing at him threateningly.

     “Do you want this up your ass? Because I can do that.” You say to him, and he laughs even harder. You roll your eyes at him.

     “Don’t promise me with a good time, Y/N.” He says, and you stand up to smack him.

     “I don’t think the pointy end would be a good time, idiot.” You deadpan stare at him. He grins.

     “You don’t know what I’m into.” He shrugs, and flips his hair dramatically. You hate that he’s stupid and charming, and you love him so much.

     “I know I haven’t seen you in 2 months, but like, I feel like you’ve grown taller?” You stare at him, a little mournfully. You’re the shortest one out of your friends, and you’re of average height. He also seems.. handsomer. You think he definitely got a lot more tan. He’s definitely grown into his looks, his dark curly hair and recently shaved face making him look older than you’re used to.

     “I don’t think I did, but I think you’ve grown shorter.” He laughs obnoxiously, and you smack his arm again, which makes him laugh harder.

     “You’re so mean to me, like all the time. Why do I love you?” You cross your arms and pout, because you know it gets a rise out of him.

     “Youuuuuuu knowww, because I’m just so loveable and gorgeous and the smartest one in the group??” He flutters his eyelashes at you like he thinks he’s cute.

     “Wow, you are none of these things.” You reply, smirking at him. He puts his hand over his heart in mock offense.

     “Y/N, I’m offended. I’ve been here for like, five minutes, and I’ve received absolutely no affection from you. If I don’t get love, I will wilt and die. Do you want to be responsible for my death?” He opens his arms wide, and you roll your eyes dramatically, and stand there.

     “We’re not doing this in public.” You say, standing your ground.

     “Ohhh, YES we are, Y/N.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Prepare yourself for the onslaught.”

     You take a couple steps back, prepared to run. He grabs your arms, wraps his around your torso, and picks you up, swinging you around.

     “Nooooooooooooooooo!!” You cry. “Put me down you oaf!”

     “No! I want love!” He all but shouts, and spins you around. He grabs your cheek with one hand and starts giving you big ‘ol smooches all over your face, and you’re giggling and trying to push him away, when you hear something drop and spill on the pavement a good twenty feet from you. You look up.

     It’s Spinel.

       Her face is twisted with heartbreak, and before you can even speak up, she bolts.

       You look down, and see the cookies she made you scattered on the ground.

[secretgamergirl]

The Workification of Games

I like games. Quite a bit. Play them constantly. Used to review them for a living. I make them. I’m perpetually tempted to maybe stream them for a new living. But there’s so many times where I look at the stack of new games I haven’t started in on, or ones I’m presently in the middle of, and I just start groaning, because there’s this whole sense of obligation and drudgery and that’s not actually fun, so I avoid playing them. And we kinda need to talk about that.

We’ve had games that are secretly jobs for as long as we’ve had games that aren’t designed to be played in a single sitting, really. At the dawn of time, there was just arcade games. Classic arcade games had no real sense of progress to them. There’s a sense of ADVANCEMENT. You can get better at playing Centipede, and clear more boards, and see more palette swaps, but there’s no real end goal to it, and when you step away from the machine, you know you’re starting over from the beginning the next time you play. The only way there can be any sort of obligation is if you have some personal challenge you set for yourself, like getting to the top of the high score chart at your local arcade maybe. And that’s not something that takes constant effort, that’s just having one really good game one day.

Then later, we got relatively long-form console games. Super Mario Bros. has 32 levels. There’s an implicit goal that you need to plow through all 32 of those levels and save the princess. But still, like the personal high score challenge, any given time you sit down, either you complete the game, or you don’t. Next time you’re starting fresh. You’re taking that challenge on your own terms, whenever you want to, and while learning the game is kind of a thing, there’s no sense that you’re falling behind if you take a break for a while.

Later still, we got the first wave of games that are meant to take more than a sitting. Dragon Quest, Zelda, Metroid, Ultima. There’s still some end goal you’re working towards, but now the expectation is you aren’t just going to sit down and make it or not. You’re going to play the game a while, have some sense you’ve made some progress by gathering stuff or leveling up or whatever, get your password/save the game, and come back to keep chipping away. And hey, at the time, that was novel and cool and kinda made you feel good that you’re always advancing instead of starting from scratch.

RPGs then became kind of a thing. They got longer and more involved. There was a stretch where basically, every 5 years, the amount of time you had to sink into a single RPG to see the ending doubled, until they turned into these 80+ hour Commitments. It isn’t “today I think I’m going to sit down and play Xenogears before dinner.” It’s “this month I’m going to spend like 4 hours between getting home and making dinner playing Xenogears, should be finished by the 30th or so.” And hey, whoops! That’s a job now! In my own personal experience, that was literally a job. I spent some time reviewing games professionally. I was being paid by the article, and seeing the game through before reviewing it was a policy at that outlet, so, yeah. I had to sit down with these big 80 hour epics and slog through them, getting in as many hours as I could each day, just like some people had to go stand behind a counter flipping hamburgers or sit at a desk making phone calls. A full on job.

Now granted, at the time, it was mainly just RPGs that did that, and most people didn’t literally play them for a living. So OK you have your one big PROJECT of a game to slowly chip through and then everything else you’re playing is relatively light. Only relatively though, because hey, RPGs were the first genre to really get LONG, and took it to the greatest extremes, but damn near ALL games in the mid-90s could be counted on to have some main story-progression mode too long to be played in a single sitting, with save files to maintain your progress. And that PROGRESSION creep never went away. Super Mario Odyssey has somewhere around 1000 moons for you to go find before you can say you’re done. That’s a pretty sizeable commitment to plug away at.

And really, even around the late 90s, things were getting pretty bad. Game production started really picking up steam, so it went from “hey like 5 really great games came out this year” to “wow, there are 5 games coming out this month alone I want to play” and all of them are some sort of time commitment. So if that’s how you spend your time, not only is this game you’re playing making the demand that you sink 20-100 hours into it, there’s a stack of games piling up behind it and more on the way. You need to stay on the daily grind or you’ll fall behind and the unplayed stack is going to start getting taller. Gotta keep your head down and work towards that ending if you want to stay on top of new releases and not skip anything.

And then MMOs happened. WOW are those ever obligating! You’re not just buying a game, you’re paying for a subscription. And that means, really, any time you’re NOT spending playing the game, well that’s just throwing your money away. And the games want you to stay subscribed, so they have every incentive to keep you from ever feeling like you’re done, but still want you to feel like you’re getting somewhere. So we’ve got the slow slow grind of leveling up, like once every couple hours you sit there. And the long long quest chains. And the random loot drop based stuff to stall you out and buy more time to add more long quest chains. And oh, the SOCIAL obligations! You’ll have more fun and make more progress if you have a group! But everyone has other obligations in life, so this six hour block from 8 to 2 AM every night, you simply have to be logged in. Can’t do this raid without our best healer. It’s literally a job, but you pay for the privilege!

And that mindset spread. And people started actually researching howto take advantage of human psychology to make everyone feel even more obligated. Gotta have that PLAYER RETENTION. If you aren’t being incentivized to log in every day (here’s your daily log-in bonus!) you might drift away and start something else. You’re not going to stick around for any DLC or in-game purchases or whatever, where people make the real money. Better make it feel like you’re punished if you don’t maintain some minimum daily commitment, really.

And again. This started with RPGs, but it’s just everywhere now. Even games that should be light breezy things, where you just sit down for an hour, play a match, and you’re done, those come with daily log-in rewards and experience bars and stuff you need to unlock just as a matter of course. Can’t just sit down and shoot robots for an hour to relax, you have to be MAKING PROGRESS and working towards unlocking stuff. Gotta be a job. Gotta make it a commitment.

It’s awful. It’s draining. It keeps you from ever really relaxing and having fun, and developers have no real incentive at all to stop doing it, so it’s on us to start identifying it and saying no, and highlighting the games that don’t suck you in like that and you can just have fun.

The one game lately that devours the most of my time right now is Risk of Rain 2. Risk of Rain 2 is pretty damn great. There’s SOME sense of “there is progress still to be made here!” in the form of achievements/challenges left for me to tick off. A LITTLE of that is good, arguably. It rationalizes me playing it still if I can’t fully shake that weird urge to be “productive” with my leisure time, rather than “wasting it” on a game where I’m not advancing or unlocking anything, but the fundamental structure of it is this very arcade-y, somewhat rogue-adjacent game.

If I sit down and play Risk of Rain 2 for an hour, I’m not pushing any sort of progress bar up one damn bit. I’m just in the moment, playing me a quick run. I might have some goal I’m trying to hit with that run. Some little side challenge for an achievement, but whether I actually pull that off is really just going to come down to luck, and I know this probably isn’t going to be the run where I do it. If I do, cool. If I don’t, I’m still having this really intense frenetic little hour here where there’s the excitement of whether I’m going to do great or die quick and start from the beginning again. It’s like the old arcade experience. All I’m working towards is mastery so I can have some bragging rights, but really, I’m going to be as “far into finishing the game” after today’s little session as I was yesterday. Or a week ago. I’d say “or a month before that” but nah there was a big recent patch and I unlocked Acrid that day. Still, it’s just a fun, for its own sake, non-obligatory time. And I can play it with friends if I want to. But nobody falls behind if I play without them in any sense, just, hey, I have company to talk to tonight while I run around shooting space lizards.

And maybe Risk of Rain 2 is not your thing. You like slower paced games, maybe an old school feel? Well then might I suggest you look into the wide wonderful world of randomizers? Whatever your favorite game was 20-30 years ago, odds are surprisingly good that some entrepreneuring hacker in the last 3 years or so has gone and made either a quick little downloadable program, or a website, where you can take that old game, scramble it around, and get a fresh little remixed experience out of it. And this is all an offshoot from the speedrunning community too, so even i that game of yours used to be a big 20+ hour commitment the first time around, NOW there’s randomizer settings to trim out the fat and turn it into something where you’re basically guaranteed to be able to finish the whole thing in like 2-4 hours tops. If this is your first introduction to the concept, here, have a random let’s play to give you an idea how these things go. You get this nice mix of the comfortable and familiar, while still doing something new and exciting for the first time. There’s really no sense of long term obligation since it’s a single sitting thing. And if you finish or you feel stuck, cool, flush that ROM, generate a new one, and you can do it again.

There’s also something just very freeing about just going back to some old game that at one point DID have a big ol’ progress bar to fill up, but you did it and now you can play it without any real goal anymore. The Saints Row games are particularly great for this, because they have a little option to go replay old missions you’ve already done, and a lot of customizability options. So just, hey, load your old save up, give your character a fancy new makeover, switch to a wackier voice, and replay whatever part of the game you remember most fondly. Or crank the radio and drive around exploring the city. Whatever. Relax and enjoy it, it’s a game. It’s fun and relaxing.

As for everything else? All those JOBS you’ve accidentally installed on your hard drive or on your phone or on a shelf in a nice little row of cases? You need to think, really think. “Is this something I’m really enthused about the idea of PLAYING, or is this something I’m looking forward to being DONE WITH?” I mean, not all games that are jobs are miserable and unrewarding. I will crack open an Etrian Odyssey or something like a lobster and suck the meat out of every leg, drawing those maps and finishing those floors in such rough shape I barely make it back to town and have a good time doing it, and that’s fine. But I am SURE right this minute there’s at least one game that you’re playing because you want the closure of saying”hey, I played all the way through Metal Zone 6. Credits rolled.” Or there’s that one where you’re just logging in every day to “do your dailies.” Or some awful thing on your phone where you’re waiting for your action points to fill back up because there’s an Event going this weekend and it’s your only chance for that gacha pull that’ll give you the big boobed princess in her winter vacation alt costume or whatever.

And those are all terrible reasons to be playing a game! Screw it! Quit that soul sucking job! Uninstall it, take it off your mind, enjoy all the extra free time you just opened by doing something you actually enjoy! Real life doesn’t have some completion percentage and if it did, 100%ing every damn game in the world wouldn’t count towards 100%. Those things are just randomly generated side content that don’t count for progression. Which.... OK this is honestly the worst metaphor I could possibly be using, but the point is, games should be fun, not jobs. Don’t work jobs for no reason. That’s just an awful thing to do.

[fae-fucker]

Zenith: Chapter 29-32

I realize leaving y’all hanging for a whole year like that in the snark, where our beloved heroes Andi and Dex had just been shot in their empty little heads, was very cruel of me. You guys must’ve been just DYING to know what happened.

Quick recap: Andi & Co are space pirates. They are captured by Andi’s ex Dex and the father of Andi’s childhood friend, whom she “murdered” by landing a ship bad. He asks her to get his son, who is in a dank dark prison. Andi does the thing with the help of Dex and her ragtag bunch of generic archetypes. 

We good?

Let’s go.

Chapter 29

We interrupt the 100% totally real threat of Andi and Dex being shot to death to have another boring-ass moment with Nor. She walks around in an underground lab feeling sorry for herself and thinking about how tragic her backstory is. We’re introduced to a two-headed scientist who could’ve been interesting in the hands of actually talented authors, but who doesn’t appear in the book after this point so she’s wasted. For some reason she’s also referred to as one person when the heads are clearly different individuals? Irl when there are two heads sharing one body the heads are different people with different names. You know, because the person is stored in the brain? Idk why Shinsay did this.

“Slowly, you dolt!” the right head screeched to the left. 

The left head huffed in annoyance. “I’m merely trying to give our queen a glimpse of her new toy.” 

“It’s a wonder I’ve been able to put up with you all these years,” the right head retorted. 

“You haven’t a choice, my dear,” the left said back.

I think this is supposed to be funny, but all I can think if is how everyone’s dialogue sounds exactly the same. 

We find out that this is where Nor’s people are developing the titular Zenith (except it’s not named yet, spoilers), and Nor wants to know if they’ve made any progress.

The two-headed scientist, Aclisia, says that the weapon is ready and that they only need a test subject. Did they develop this mind-altering thing without any previous test subjects? I mean I guess it makes sense that they’d need somebody unaffected by previous versions to test out the final product, but like ... Did the previous subjects die? That doesn’t bode well. 

Anyway, the test subject they have is one of the guards on Lunamere, where Andi and Dex were in the previous chapters. Nor is displeased that the guard “let them go,” and I want you to remember this line:

“You had one of the Unified System’s most wanted fugitives in my prison. And instead of keeping her there, where she could have been persuaded to join the right side of the galaxy...you lost her. [...]”

File that away for future reference, my pretties. 

Anyway, we end the chapter without even finding out what the drug does, because Shinsay love breaking their own pace and suspense because they have to rely on cliffhangers to keep people reading. 

Chapter 30

Oh Christ oh God it’s our girl Klaren again. It’s year twenty-four and despite five years passing this woman is still all about how she’s destined to die and everything in her life is crap, which, idk, mood I guess?

Xen Ptera is losing the war and Klaren is sick because of all the poison air or whatever. The king wants her to hide because enemy troops are closing in, and Klaren takes another moment to think about how she wasn’t supposed to fall in love and yadda yadda. 

Who’s ready for another Smaasism?

She wished she could go back. She wished she could change that passionate night they had shared, the careless days after and the tonic she’d forgotten to take...

tOnIC

You’d think in advanced space times they’d have more reliable birth control. 

Also ... wouldn’t the king expect an heir anyway? Like, we’ve seen that even the title of “general” is inherited in this shitfest of a universe, so wouldn’t he eventually catch on and insist on having a kid? Or if she claimed she couldn’t produce one, surely there would be tech to get around that? Idk. For all the future-sight this bitch had, she sure didn’t have any common sense. 

Klaren tells the king to take Nor and fuck off, and Darai says something about how she’s the strongest Yielded and how she must fulfill her duty. 

Which apparently includes going into the battlefield, which is conveniently right outside the palace, and mind-control General Cortas into wanting to fuck her so bad he forgot she was his enemy. 

Her husband was wrong. 

Hope was not dead. 

Hope, in the form of the queen’s sacrifice, had only just flickered to life.

This is framed as tragic and beautiful but she is about to mind-rape a man for years soooo get ready for some extremely uncomfortable shit.

Chapter 31

We’re back in Andi’s POV, except it’s still a fucking flashback. This time it’s to when Andi was still Kalee’s Spectre and lived with Valen and the other dingdongs. And then we get actually good writing?

During meals, when Andi and the other Spectres stood guard, she’d watch him curiously. Valen usually sat in the farthest seat from his father, hunched forward as if he were battling some deep, silent pain. Sometimes she’d catch him staring at her with his strange, unblinking hazel eyes, his paint-stained fingers gripping his golden fork like a weapon he didn’t want to use.

Like I’m into this. It’s showing and not telling, mysterious and intriguing without being on the nose, and for once Andi doesn’t have all the cards and knows what Valen is inside and out, so his character doesn’t become obvious. Like, he’s battling some pain, but he’s also reluctant to use a weapon? That could mean anything! In a good way!

This good chunk is also immediately ruined by the following descriptions, which point out that indeed, all the other kids talk about Valen and how WEEEEYOOORDDD he is, and how he’s constantly covered in paint, because that’s what artists look like, I guess. Catch me bodyslamming a freshly painted park bench to prove I know color theory.

We’re also told that Valen never got a personal Spectre for spooooooky reasons. He just doesn’t feel like a proper part of the family, ya know? I wonder that it all could meeeeaaaaaan. 

This is all told to us just so we can revisit the part where Valen tries to stop Andi and Kalee from going on a joyride. Kalee insults him for a bit, and then Valen drops some more foreshadowy dialogue about how he hopes this birthday is everything Kalee wants it to be. 

Subtle. 

Chapter 32

OH MY GOD WE’RE IN LIRA’S POV NOW. YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE SHINSAY, WE KNOW YOU WOULDN’T MURDER YOUR PRECIOUS CELAENA AND RHYSAND RIPOFFS IN CHAPTER 29 WHEN THERE’S A BILLION MORE CHAPTERS LEFT.

Lira has been literally counting seconds since they left Andi. 

Yeah.

She recaps everything that happened three chapters ago, saying they executed their secret plan with the “ultimate amount of finesse” before noting that despite obeying Andi’s direct orders to run, she feels like a traitor. 

Your captain is in chains, a voice whispered in the back of her mind. You should be by her side. Instead, you’re running. 

All you ever do is run.

I have literally no idea how this is even a little bit relevant considering that they’re waiting for Andi and Dex to return and aren’t moving anywhere. By the way, Andi and Dex are thirty minutes late. Which freaks Lira out because THAT WASN’T IN THE PLAN. 

Her scales start freaking out and she’s about to overheat. Holy shit, how are you still alive? 

Honestly, this is a pretty accurate depiction of someone with an anxiety disorder, but I think we’re supposed to think Lira is emotional or analytical or loyal or whatever. I doubt Shinsay have the finesse required to write something like this on purpose, so this just reads as incompetence. 

Apparently Andi said that if they’re late, the girls are supposed to flee and save themselves, and Lira is starting to get antsy. 

Ok so ... just moments ago you were worried about how you’re always running away. So why is your first instinct when your beloved captain is THIRTY MINUTES LATE to book it? Like. Calm the fuck down. Thirty fucking minutes, in space? Can you chill??? 

Lira whines more about how this is the second time this week that she’s second-in-command and she hates it. Hey why not give that responsibility to Breck, who’s always calming everyone down? Would that make too much sense? 

Lira goes to her room to mope and angst about how she likes being alone. It’s riveting. She thinks about how this crew is her SOUL and how much she LOVES them. Which we can see by her sitting alone in her room thinking about how much she loves them, obviously.

She continues to angst about how her dad died of Space Plague, and her mom became a drunk because ... Idk, that’s what moms do in books like these. But lo, she and her brother got taken in by their Cool Aunt, who then wanted them to Do Things when they grew up, and Lira doesn’t want to Do Things, she wants to fly around and Crime. 

So she left her home planet because her Cool Aunt wanted her to Do Too Much Stuff, and the weight of her expectations crushed Lira, who must soar the skies like the beautiful bald blue bird she is. 

The other girls interrupt this godawful exposition dump by inviting Lira to play some Not!Pokémon. And we get this exchange, which I included in my review, and yes, it’s real:

“Hope is a raging asshole,” Gilly said. 

“Explain to me, Gilly,” Breck said with a sigh, “how exactly can an asshole rage?”

Lira choked on a sudden, unexpected laugh. “I swear, the two of you. You were both born with my brother’s sarcastic soul.”

This bloated and repetitive nonsense that apparently passes for character development is interrupted by Alfie, who’s gotten out of the waste bay. We’re reminded that this ship doesn’t have any mechanics, because of course, and Alfie makes a reference about how the ship’s AI’s voice is turning him on. 

It appears Lira has gotten a message from Soy to come and get Andi and Dex.

*sigh*

[echodrops]

The Promises I Made (2018)

For the past twelve years, I’ve spent every New Year’s Eve compiling a list of fifty promises I intend to keep or fulfill over the next twelve months. The results have been truly amazing, and I have kept some promises I never thought I could. Although this year was really, really bad, oh lord... This year, for New Year’s, there will be a new set of promises for to me keep, but here are the old ones, for review!

 The Promises I Made (2018 edition)

1) I will be less anxious at work and not let passing comments from students or passive rudeness get under my skin as much. Status: Somewhat kept; I feel like I wasn’t as upset by students being rude this year as last year, but then again that might just be because I had better students. XD

2) I will be more proactive about my responsibilities for the college newspaper committee so we can make a great product. Status: Uhh… Can I count this as kept if the newspaper committee was put on hold due to decisions from the higher administration, so I didn’t have to be proactive about these responsibilities?

3) I will actually visit Mexico, not just accidentally take a wrong turn and end up there... Status: Broken. You know how some people like live next door to a restaurant for years but somehow never get around to trying it? Yeah that’s me, with the entire country of Mexico. Like, I literally live less than a mile from the border… I really should just go get lunch one day or something…

4) I will actually decorate my office with all the stuff I have had sitting around at my house for months. Status: Actually kept. I don’t feel like the decorating is really done in the office, but the decorations are no longer cluttering up my actual home instead of the office!

5) I will be better about focusing so that I can grade quickly and feel less overwhelmed throughout the course of the semester. Status: You know, it’s hard to say whether or not I did grade more quickly because spring semester I took on a really annoying class schedule and it screwed me over hard. I feel like I was a little faster this year, but I felt more overwhelmed than ever.

6) I will get the scratch on my Camaro buffed a bit to clear up the parts that can be cleared. Status: I just… didn’t do this. Broken.

7) I will repair the mortar on the fence outside the Utah house and seal the bricks on the window sills. Status: Somewhat kept/broken. I fixed the mortar on the fence outside but did not seal the windowsill bricks.

8) I will finish at least 26 books over the course of this year. Status: Look man. If my promise had been “Finish 26 fanfics longer than 100,000 words,” I would have blown this promise out of the water. But as it stands, I think I only made it to 10-ish printed books. I’m naughty. 9) I will retrim the grape vine at the Utah house and also spray/get someone to spray to kill the wasps. Status: Broken. I don’t know why I thought it would be smart to make a promise about trimming the grape vine, since that’s something you do in fall… when I’m not even in Utah… Hrmmmm… 10) I will get the mail man to stop delivering the wrong mail to my box because I’m getting ten times more mail for other people than for myself. Status: I had so many opportunities to do this, and I just didn’t. RIP.

11) I will have the fire escape window installed on the Utah house to make it legal to rent. Status: Broken. That’s a lotta money fam.

12) I will update Home and a Half at least four times (and no more double posts, just be chill Yehn, be chill for once…) Status: WOW. I was so, so optimistic, wasn’t I? 13) I will actually build all the furniture I bought for the Texas house and never assembled. Status: Mostly kept? I think there’s like one more thing I haven’t assembled (the spare futon), but up to this point I haven’t needed it, so...

14) I will actually watch Stranger Things since everyone keeps nagging me about it. Status: Broken. I just didn’t do this at all.

15) I will go to a dentist and get this annoying wisdom tooth removed and also see what can be done for my front tooth that got pushed out of alignment by said wisdom tooth. This really needs to happen ‘cause the partially erupted tooth is killing me. D; Status: Wisdom tooth is still hurting me… I am the worst at taking care of myself… 2019… the year of self-care?

16) I will take a road trip with my friend Karen like we’ve been talking about for a while. Status: Actually did this! Finally something completely kept. It was a great trip too.  

17) I will continue to serve as the video game club’s faculty sponsor. Status: I was too busy… T_T Broken.

18) I will lower my credit card debt by at least $2000. Moving is so expensive. T_T Status: I ended up having major set-backs this year in the form of having to pay out of pocket for a new windshield in my car and also my Playstation flat out dying on me, so this goal did not get satisfied. But now that my car is completely paid off (hell yeah!), I’ll finally be able to start making big payments on this sucker.

19) I will have ALL my lesson plans planned out in advance for Fall 2018 so that I can just chill next fall. Status: YO THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED. There were still some instances of needing to fix things, but overall I did actually have all the lessons done in advance, and that was probably the only reason I survived fall at all lol.

20) I will finish painting the living room in the Utah house, finally. Status: I… forgot I even made this promise. Yikes.

21) I will be better about walking my dog because I have been slacking lately. Status: I wanted to be better, but every fucking time I go to walk my dog, the neighbor’s Chihuahua runs through their fence and tries to attack my dog, so literally every walk becomes a nightmare and there were a lot of days when I just didn’t want to deal with that stress… :/

22) I will finish a game other than FFXIV this year. Man, so many games have been piling up… Status: I couldn’t even find time to play FFXIV this year, let alone another game… 23) I will write a new, original short story. Status: I… did not write like at all this year. 2018 was just really hard for me. T_T

24) I will get my black glasses fixed this year, finally. Status: Uh… Kept… I think? At least I think this promise was referring to the damage to the frames of my black glasses, which I did get fixed. But now the lens has a scratch… V_V

25) I will attend more professional development/on-campus events and trainings to bolster my evaluation. Status: Eh, kept? I’m signed up for a conference and did some extra training thing that I can throw on the sheet, so I’m calling it good.

26) I will ink and color at least the one drawing of Yehn’zi that I finished sketching a while ago and did absolutely nothing with. Status: A whole lot of nope on this one.

27) I will really finish moving in to my Texas house, no more “I’ll fish out the clothes from the Space Bag when I need them but never actually hang them up.” Status: I’m counting this as kept, since the only thing that didn’t happen is that I never took the plastic wrap off the top of my nightstand, but like… hey that’s a really convenient way to avoid water spots so…

28) I will volunteer at a non-profit organization to fulfill my “service to the community” work requirement. I mean, I will volunteer from the goodness of my heart… yeah… Status: Shitttt this didn’t happen and it really needed to… Oh dear…

29) I will level ALL my classes to 70 in Stormblood. Status: This also did not happen. No time to play.

30) I will reach 1000 followers on tumblr. You should follow me. I’m only marginally a waste of time and space. Status: Kept and exceeded! I’m at like… 1540-ish right now I believe.

31) I will find a salon so I can get my hair dyed consistently instead of looking like a shabby blob half way through each semester. Status: Well, the good news is that my hair color fades so nicely that one of my students actually asked if the strawberry blonde was my natural color. But uh… no… it’s not… so…

32) I will find some way to pay back my coworker for all the incredibly nice things she has done for me already. Status: I mean, I took her out to lunch a lot but I don’t know if I really managed to feel “equal” on the debts I owe her for helping me out.

33) I will see an Anhinga (it’s a kind of bird!) in Texas. Status: Kept! The very first time I went looking for it, I found it, so score.

34) I will win Camp NaNoWriMo this year (because November might never be a possibility for me again, given how much grading I seem to end up doing during that month). T_T Status: Broken. Again, I wrote almost nothing this year. Too much stress. T_T

35) I will scout for new neighborhoods to move to with better internet access and closer to my work. Status: Kept. It’s still a bit too early for me to be looking for specific places, but I have a better sense of where I’ll be aiming for when I do go to buy something.

36) I will try to get better at Spanish, possibly by using my DuoLingo app more. Status: …Broken.

37) I will buy sod for the front part of the Utah house so that my house actually looks decent from the curb. Status: I COULD HAVE… But I didn’t.

38) I will be more proactive about commenting, reccing, and reblogging content I appreciate online because I find so many wonderful things but I rarely say as much about them as I should. Status: I think I was worse about this than last year. I miss the days when I didn’t feel like every five minutes taken to myself was stealing from my work responsibilities…

39) I will actually use my Instagram account to upload my photography somewhere public. Status: I forgot I made this promise too. Oops…

40) I will go dolphin-watching in the Gulf. Status: Somewhat kept? I mean… I stood on the pier… And saw dolphins in the Gulf. That counts, right???

41) I will clear all the photos and videos off my phone and camera SD cards because they are overflowing. Status: Kept but now they’re just sitting on the hard drive unsorted and in a confusing jumble of unnamed folders...

42) I will update my calendar with important dates—holidays, birthdays, etc.—and be productive about sending cards and well-wishes. Status: Broken, just totally broken.

43) I will complete my series of posts about Yato/Hiyori. Really. Status: >___> One day…

44) I will not work later than 10pm on any given work night. I can’t keep running myself ragged. I need to brake sometimes. Status: HA. I was really hopeful. More broken promises…

45) I will explore some new places/cities in Texas that I have not been before. Status: I… did not do this. I had a chance to do this and I didn’t. D;

46) I will get a gardener for the Texas house because the lawn is basically unmanageable by myself. Status: Kept. Because… the lawn really was unmanageable by myself so…

47) I will clean out the fridge more often. No expired milk or ancient leftovers this year please… Status: >_____> Ooopppssss.

48) I will get some sort of watering system set up so that the lawn at the Texas house isn’t a total disaster anymore. Status: Somewhat kept. I did buy hoses and sprinklers to water the lawn but mostly it’s just been raining a lot and that made the grass greener on its own.

49) I will help make one of the super complicated cookies from the new cookie cookbook I bought for Karen. Status: Actually kept! We learned much about the workings of cookie guns.

50) I will keep these promises. Status: Ouch, this one hurts a little.

Totals Kept promises: 12 Broken promises: 29 Somewhat kept/broken promises: 9

Y I K E S ™. I thought last year was crazy and was so hopeful for this year… I had NO IDEA how hard this last year was going to be. So many broken promises; I feel so guiltyyyyy. DDDD; Although I’m still at the same job and not planning on dramatically swapping entire career fields again, things are still in the process of settling and there’s still SO much more I feel like I need to work on. 2018 was the year of being constantly overwhelmed. Unfortunately, 2019 doesn’t seem like it’s going to be much calmer because I’m still working on designing classes and getting my lessons ironed out, but I at least no longer feel like I’m at rock bottom… So, I’m cautiously, very cautiously, feeling the tiniest bit optimistic?

  Let’s do this, 2019! The new set of promises will be up by tomorrow.

[heartcravings]

50 Questions Tag!

@jongin-be-my-jagi​ tagged me for this a while ago, but I took my sweet time to answer. Here is my secret intel if you want to know me a little bit more!! Check hers as well, she’s an amazing writer and friend. 1. What takes up too much of your time? Tumblr, my stupid procrastination prone brain and my thesis. 

2. What makes your day better? Friends and loved ones, music and these absolute dorks (Channie especially) 

3. What’s the best thing that happened to you today? I hopped on the mat today in the early hours of the morning, rain on my window and the neighbours cat peeking at me from his window across the street.

4. What fictional place would you like to go to? Wonderland, bacause it’s “curiouser and curiouser!”

'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.  Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

5. Are you good at giving advice? I think so. Not so good at following my own advice though.  I do always consider where the other is standing and if I don’t know how to proceed then I’ll just be honest and say I can’t help. But i’ll always listen with my heart. 

 6. Do you have any mental illnesses? Not diagnosed. I do think i might be going through something now. 

7. Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? No, but i have a recurring nightmare: the world is made of black and white paper thin layers. I am a paper thin person walking along a street surrounded by paper thin buildings. I walk for a long time, looking up at the white sky. Until the street ends, there is no more building and i fall into the abyss of a blank page.  I have had this dream since the age of 8 or 9 years old. Fear of not being good enough, you say?! Ding, ding, ding!! We got a winner in the back!  8. What musician inspired you the most? I get inspired by music all the time!! One of my all time favourite songs is Spanish Sahara by Foals. Its sublime!

So I’d say I’m mainly inspired by these artists: Queen, Arctic Monkeys, Foals, Radiohead, Bowie, Daughter, Bob Dylan, Beirut, Yeah yeah yeahs, Arcade Fire, The National, Joy Division, Blur, Warpaint, Gorillaz, Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, Chet Baker, The Cure, Courtney Barnett, The Maccabees, Car Seat Headrest, Florence + The Machine, Editors, Kasabian, Crystal Fighters, Death Cab for a cutie, The Doors, Efterklang, Explosions in the Sky, Franz Ferdinand, The Horrors, James Blake, José Gonzalez, Los Campesinos!,  Metronomy, Nick Cave, Nina Simone, Patrick Watson,  Phoenix, Sharon Van Etten, The Shins, Simon & Garfunkel, The Smiths, St.Vincent, The Strokes, Toro y Moi, tricot, Tune-Yards, TV on the radio, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, The Vaccines, Vampire Weekend, The Velvet Underground, The War on Drugs, Wild Beasts and Yo La Tengo.

And the electro, pop and hip-hop groves of my heart: EXO, 2NE1, Janelle Monáe, Big Bang, Kris Wu,LCD soundsystem, SBTRKT, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar and Daft Punk. 

And special mentions to the portuguese ones (learning from yixing and promoting when i can :P): Capicua, Joana Espadinha, The Legendary Tigerman, Linda Martini, Mayra Andrade, Noiserv, Ornatos Violeta, Paus, Samuel Uria, You Can’t Win Charlie Brown and The Silence 4. I know, tldr right? Sorry folks! 9. Have you ever fallen in love? Yes I have. I have mistaken a crush for love too. But i have definitely been very deeply in love. A wrecked kintsugi heart over here people! 10. What’s your dream date? I don’t think I have one. I’d love to do something unique with that someone special, something special for the two of us. It could be as simple as riding the subway while sharing earphones & listening to our playlist or walking the dogs out! Idk, I’m easy to please. But right now it would have to be with this handsome man :D pretty please?!

11. What do others notice about you? I am very kind and warm hearted, so I think that’s what people first notice when meeting me. Although I maintain good eye contact, I am also timid and will be quieter if there are very energetic people in the group. When alone, I usually take the first step and try to meet people, but only if i really must.  12. What’s an annoying habit you have? It’s really hard for me to ask for help. I also like to tell detailed descriptions of everything... Couldn’t you tell? 13. Do you still talk to your first love? I’ll text him on his birthday and he does the same to me. We met when we were 10 years old and that childhood friendship remains. But regarding my one and truly deep relationship, no we do not talk, unless we randomly meet.

14. How many exes do you have? I have three exes. The first love who was just an idealized crush on my childhood friend: we dated for 2 weeks during summer break xD Then my first real boyfriend, we met in my first year at university, dated for quite some time, he really loved me and made me love myself a little more. Finally the one i loved too much. I mended his wounds and made him love himself as much as I did. I always say all the love we feel makes our hearts grow bigger. I do not regret loving any of them, I am me now due to them and I would not change it if I could. 15. How many songs are in your playlist? I have way too many playlists for each and every mood... But my favourite songs list on spotify has about 1500 songs! uwu!  16. What instruments can you play? Triangles and flute?! I had mandatory music classes in school... so in reality I can’t really play a instrument...

17. Who do you have the most pictures of? Probably my cat, Sushi. With a second close of my doodles and sketches. 

18. Where would you like to go before you die? EVERY WHERE!!! But I really want to go to Japan and Scotland and Iceland and South Korea and New Zealand and i’ll shut up. 19. What’s your zodiac? Capricorn. 20. Do you relate to it? Sort of.

21. What is happiness to you? You know when it’s really cold outside in the winter and you manage to find a sheltered place where no wind can hit you and you still get to feel the warm rays of the winter suns on your skin? You hear the birds outside and you are contempt in that moment, at peace. That is happiness to me.   22. Are you going through anything right now? Yes, I am a bit lost. Trying to finish my thesis and trying to find what I want to do after. It’s liberating but also pretty scary. 23. What’s the worst decision you ever made? It’s a series of small decisions really. It started with going for a phd with the same people i worked in my msc. Should have gone to a different place. Then deciding to come home after a traumatic loss in the family. Should have kept my life going but I stalled it then. (I don’t regret helping my loved ones though).

24. What’s your favourite store? Probably Wishtrend for beauty stuff. Other than that I don’t have any favourite brands/stores. 25. (HALFWAY!) What’s your opinion on abortion? I think everyone is free to decide what they want or need to do. I couldn’t possible judge. If I would it? Probably not.

27. Do you have a favourite album? I don’t think so, I have favourite tunes for different moods and moments in my life. But if threatened with my life, I’d maybe say Total Life Forever from Foals.

28. What do you want for your birthday? It’s such a long time until my birthday comes! But maybe a real EXO ot9 reunion as a goodbye to Minseok?

29. What is most people’s first impression of you? Friendly and easy to open up to, i think.

30. What age do you seem according to most people? In real life, people usually think I am way younger than I am.  31. Where do you keep your phone when you’re sleeping? In the crook of my bed, between the mattress and the bed frame.

32. What word do you say the most? No idea really! 33. What’s the oldest age you’d date? 40s? I don’t think too much about age actually. 

34. What’s the youngest age you’d date? 20s? Again not very important to me. Love is love, whomever, whenever and wherever <3

35. What job / career do most people say would suit you? I don’t know! People always say i don’t totally fit in anything... so there’s that. If you have an idea please let me know! 36. What’s your favourite music genre? Go back to question 8. I listen to everything! :D 37. If you could live in any country in the world where would it be? I’d like to live around the world, every few months a different place and get to know different cultures.

38. What is your current favourite song? I’ve been obsessed with RM’s intro/teaser song, Map of the Soul: Persona. (I’m not even a bts fan, but this music and lyrics just touched me a lot.)

39. How long have you had this blog for? I think for about 6 years? It’s my personal space, where I dump all my obsessions.  

40. What are you excited for? I’m visiting some friends in Granada in a couple of weeks. Yay, tapas!

41. Are you a better talker or listener? Normally I am a better listener. But there are a few people to whom i open like a book. Either words flow right out of me without even thinking or they see throw me. Those truly are my people.

42. What is the last productive thing you did? Prepped meals and cleaned the kitchen. Open the folder and file of my thesis. Read the latest chapter I wrote.  43. What do you want for Christmas? Well, just like for my birthday, there is still such a long time to it! But let’s say i want to have already finish this part of my life and want to find my next adventure.

44. What class do you get the best grades in? No more exams! Ehehe! But I used to have good grades at everything. Physical Education was my lowest mark i think.

45. On a scale of 1-10 how do you feel right now? Right now, a 4? I have a headache.

46. What can you see yourself doing in 10 years? Smiling? :D I want to be happy in my own skin. To feel contempt in my life, doing something that gives me a sense of purpose and having time to share and enjoy with my friends and family. 47. When did you get your first heartbreak? Oh my kintsugi heart has been broken quiet a lot. By friends and lovers and even by myself. I keep patching it up with gold dreams though.  48. At what age do you wanna be married? I will only want to be married if i find the one. So until then I guess. 

49. What career did you want to have as a child? I wanted to be an astronaut and a ballerina. Preferably both!

50. What do you crave right now? Just sitting somewhere and listening to Yeol play the guitar.

Well i finished it! :D I’ll tag @thedeviousdo @ohsenhun @hongseok and @paepsi. I’d love to read yours! Feel free to dismiss it though, it is quite a lot.  Lots of love everyone!! <3 <3 <3

[fandom-glazed]

music asks!

FAVORITES 1. what are your favorite bands? Lord Of The Lost, Porcupine Tree, Nightmare, Frost*, newer: Scarlet Dorn 2. what are your favorite singers? Lady Gaga, Steven Wilson, Zia, Lorde, newer: Down To Eden 3. what are your favorite albums? Thornstar by Lord Of The Lost, In Absentia by Porcupine Tree, To The Bone and Transience by Steven Wilson 4. what are your favorite songs? Six Feet Underground by Lord Of The Lost, Trains by Porcupine Tree, What I’ve Done, In The End and Numb by Linkin Park, My Demons and Ricochet by Starset, From The Flame by Leprous, Lovesongs (They Kill Me) by Cinema Bizarre, Would It Matter by Skillet, Hyperventilate, Experiments in Mass Appeal and Snowman by Frost* 5. what do you think the best popular song of the year is so far? I honestly don’t know. 6. which genres of music do you tend to like the best? Prog, Metal and any heavy stuff (not including “brutal” Death Metal - on a daily basis), Indie, Alternative, Soundtracks 7. what is the best concert you’ve ever been to? Either the Steven Wilson To The Bone Tour concert(s) in Hamburg 2018, or the Lord Of The Lost MEGA tour concert in Munich 2016 8. song of the year? My personal songs of the year (not released in 2019) at the moment: Kiss Me by Rob Vischer, While This Way by Árstíðir .2: 2019 still has to deliver! 9. album of the year? See 8.2 10. what are the best songs your parents have gotten you into? Anything by Keane, Evanescence, Depeche Mode,... 11. how did you first find out about your favorite band/singer? My own, like, nothing I inherited from my parents, favorite band was probably Cinema Bizarre and I found them through their first single being played 24/7 on Viva. 12. when/where do you first remember having heard your favorite song? I don’t remember anymore, sadly. I first heard Trains on a train station. 13. about how many times have you listened to your favorite song? I have absolutely no idea, any number I’d name would be too low. 14. if someone asks you what music they should check out, what are your go-to recommendations? I always assume my taste in music is nothing most people would care to listen to, but I’d say everyone should check out Steven Wilson(’s projects) at least once. And I’d promote my favourites in Lord Of The Lost till I die.

NOSTALGIA 15. what songs give you the most nostalgia? Anything by Evanescence, Keane, 80s music in general, The Corrs, Kylie Minogue, HIM... 16. what kinds of music were you raised on? Mostly 80s stuff, some rock, much pop, my mother brought some jazz as well, unfortunately. 17. what are your favorite songs that have ever been popular? See 15., probably :D I love almost every song by Gaga, I’d say she’s definitely popular! 18. who were your favorite musicians as a kid? I adopted my parent’s favorites, mostly The Corrs, specifically their drummer Caroline. Eisblume. Cinema Bizarre. Though that was already in my teens. 19. how did you feel about music as a kid? Music is and has always been my love and a great hobby. 20. what was your first concert? if you haven’t been to one, what do you want your first concert to be? I was six years old and I remember my dad telling me to say I’m seven so the security would let us in. It was The Corrs and I think it was either in the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle in Stuttgart, or in the Olympiahalle Munich. We went to several concerts in that year. (So that’s where I got that from!)

PERFORMANCE 21. how do live performances, whether they’re from your friends or professionals, tend to make you feel? Like in another dimension. 22. singing in the shower or singing in the car? I don’t drive, so, rather in the shower. But mostly at my desktop, extremely loudly. 23. if you were to become a musician, what kind of musician would you be? I am a pianist/multi-instrumentalist, but I think I’d never want to be a professional. 24. if you could pick one instrument to learn how to play, what would it be? If improving on the piano doesn’t count, like, learn something completely new, I’d say, maybe the harp, the cello (though I tried it some years ago). 25. what is your singing voice like? what singers do you remind yourself of? I don’t have a super special singing voice (I’m told otherwise), but I hit all the notes thanks to my trained hearing. I don’t really remind myself of someone particular, but I can make my voice sound like different singers like Scarlet Dorn, Lorde or the singer of a band, I just discovered, Trees Of Eternity. 26. have you ever been involved in any music programs? which ones and for how long? I have been member of my music school’s programme/ensemble. 27. which instruments do you know how to play? what’s your skill level? I’ve been playing the piano for 13 years, if I’d kept up the hard work I put in it until 2016, I’d be rather high-skilled, I started to play the guitar some years ago, but I was never really sufficiently active. I also began playing drums and even cello, but due to price and neighbours I couldn’t continue. I am an autodidact singer and I can play the bodhran. 28. if you took music lessons as a kid, are you glad you did? if not, do you wish you had? I am glad I took piano lessons, but I wish I had started taking guitar lessons sooner. I’d be much better by now and I also adored my teacher as a person. He kinda reminds me of my actual mentor now.

SOUNDTRACKS 29. how do you feel about video game soundtracks? I love video game soundtracks. 30. what soundtracks do you enjoy listening to the most? It changes from time to time, but at the moment I love the Mass Effect: Andromeda soundtrack and also the Dragon Age soundtracks, as well as most of the Marvel movies’, Ghibli movies’ and Game Of Thrones’. 31. which soundtracks do you think are objectively the best (or what are some that you think deserve appreciation)? I’d say check out Trevor Morris, Joe Hisaishi and Ramin Djawadi and you’re on the right scent. 32. how do you feel about musicals? I absolutely love musicals and used to visit some as often as I could with my aunt. 33. do you have any favorite composers, including classical ones? See 31, as for classical ones, I love Rachmaninov, Bach and Chopin. 34. are there any soundtracks or kinds of soundtracks that you just can’t stand? Can’t think of any at the moment. 35. what are your favorite songs/soundtracks from movies? I stared to obsess with Under Stars by AURORA from the ME: Andromeda credits, I love the Misty Mountains, The Marvel Avengers theme and the Harry Potter soundtrack, actually I can’t possibly remember everything to write it down.

LYRICS 36. what are some songs whose lyrics you relate to? Ou, that’s a personal one. There are many. But to name a few: Would It Matter by Skillet, Covered In Gold and Walls Of Utopia by Oh Fyo!, Don’t Hate Me and Prodigal by Porcupine Tree, Pariah and Hand Cannot Erase by Steven Wilson, No Me No You by Frost*, almost everything by Scarlet Dorn as well as Black Halo and most of all Cut Me Out by Lord Of The Lost 37. pick a song and analyse its lyrics. Can’t do, shouldn’t do, probably. 38. which songs do you think have the best lyrics? There’s just SO many. 39. what are some songs whose lyrics you think most people just don’t get? Six Feet Underground by Lord Of The Lost, not your typical love songTM, Harmony Korine by Steven Wilson, also so much by Steven Wilson. 40. are there any musicians whose lyrics you particularly tend to like? Steven Wilson. Next! :D 41. do you prefer songs that have good melodies or songs that have good lyrics? Good melodies, generally. But once I got hooked on by the sound I live for good lyrics.

CHALLENGES 42. name five songs you like that were released in the 90s. Join Me In Death by HIM, Walking In My Shoes by Depeche Mode, Rosier by Luna Sea, Viva Forever by Spice Girls, Enter Sandman by Metallica 43. name five songs you like that were released at least 50 years ago. I could name you some classical compositions... 44. write a parody of at least a verse of any song you’d like. Reign, reign on me, reign on me, reign on me. Reign, wash away, triangles and tears, blur all your plot and reign on me. 45. name 5 songs you can’t stand. Despacito, Despacito, Despacito,... 46. look at your country’s song charts, listen to the first unfamiliar song you can find, and share your opinion on it. I didn’t know and didn’t like any of the first eight I looked at. That’s how much I love chart music! 47. turn a song lyric into a pickup line. Until the end of night... (listen to Blood For Blood by Lord Of The Lost. I won’t explain any further.) 48. name the last 5 songs you listened to. While This Way by Árstíðir, Loreley by Lord Of The Lost, Ten Feet High by Andrea Corr, a song I mixed and mastered, Sinking Ships by Trees Of Eternity

RANDOM 49. what are your favorite album covers? In Absentia by Porcupine Tree, Thornstar by Lord Of The Lost, Hand Cannot Erase by Steven Wilson, Resist by Within Temptation, Milliontown by Frost* ... 50. any cover versions that you think are better than the original? I mostly like the cover version and the original. 51. how often do you listen to music? 24/7 52. do you collect vinyls? if so, what have been your best finds? I do have some by Lord Of The Lost and Steven Wilson. 53. if you could meet any musician you’d like, who would it be? Steven Wilson. By faaaar. 54. how do you feel about classical music? I love classical music. 55. would you ever want to have a career in music? I am, in fact, an aspiring audio engineer. 56. if you had a stage name, what would it be? My stage name for audio productions and art is nadzumi. 57. on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is music to you? 11. 58. how do you feel about rap music? Don’t like it. Only a few songs. I like Eminem. And I found the influence in Linkin Park very interesting. But I’d rather stay away. 59. what do you think the best “era” for music was? I’d say the 80s, some of the 90s and now, because there’s such a diversity, everyone will find something they can love. 60. how has music affected you as a person? I’d say I am music. (Music has affected everything.) Feel free to ask away any number if you want me to answer it in more detail!

[pixelgrotto]

The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, part thirteen

When I first began my Resident Evil series playthrough about eleven months ago, I didn’t expect it to end with a brand new game, let alone a remake of the excellent Resident Evil 2. But here we are, and RE2make came out about a week ago. Snobby purists will tell you that it lacks fixed camera angles and this is an awful thing, but honestly, RE2make’s probably the first stand-out video game release of 2019, and the positive praise that it’s gotten from the press is well warranted. 

I imagine that if I’d played RE2 back in 1998 when it was new, this re-imagining is how I would have remembered the game over the passing years. Leon and Claire are back in action with hyper-realistic faces thanks to the top tier RE Engine developed for Resident Evil 7, and the Racoon Police Department, surrounding city streets and underground labyrinths of the original game have been laboriously re-created from the pre-rendered backgrounds of yesteryear, with Capcom even pulling in scrapped beta material from Resident Evil 1.5 (like the gun range in the police department) to make a product that’s trying its darnedest to be the ultimate version of the seminal survival horror sequel.

On that note, the dev team should be praised for how well they brought the right gameplay bits together. The shooting is good, the exploration creepy, and the enemies have several new tricks up their sleeves. Zombies are tougher to deal with than they’ve ever been, with headshots no longer a reliable way of blasting them to oblivion. They’ll lurch and moan and take five rounds to the cranium, and it seems that the universal agreed-upon strategy for handling this new breed of shambler is to aim at their legs and kneecaps, making them fall to the ground. Tree zombies show up near the finale and serve as one of the most dangerous new breeds of B.O.W., capable of one-shotting you if you get too close. And then there’s the T-103 Tyrant, AKA Mr. X, who’s become an amusing (and slightly annoying) meme as Twitter rants and raves about how aggressive he is at stalking you throughout the game. He not only wears a suave fedora (that you can shoot off for an achievement), but has ominous footsteps punctuated by a pulsating theme that always kicks in at an inconvenient moment to let you know that X GONNA GIVE IT TO YA. 

Perhaps more of a nice surprise than these elements, however, is the game’s writing, which isn’t as skilled as what we saw in Resident Evil 7 but still elevates concepts that were hinted at in RE2 but held back by the Playstation’s technical limitations and a small script. In the original, we all assumed that Raccoon City Police Chief Irons was a corrupt dude with a strange fetish for taxidermy, but here it’s clearly spelled out, with journal entries detailing how the guy actually gets off on slicing open beasts and soon moved from animals to people. On a less morbid note, RE2′s Sherry Birkin was a cute but mostly vapid child who didn’t bat much of an eye when her mother died, but here she’s a brave little survivor who has to escape from Chief Irons’ creepy orphanage (in a scene highly reminiscent of the “hide from the Bakers” moments of RE7) and cries legit tears when her mom collapses in front of her. And Ada Wong, a character that I’ve frankly found to be a walking femme fatal trope in RE4 and RE6, is actually presented as a legitimately interesting mercenary rather than just a pretty face. You can almost see moments during her interactions with Leon - the sweet, naive rookie cop on his first day who really wants to do some good in a damned city - where this gal just might feel for him instead of simply being a wannabe Catwoman who ends up stringing him along for twenty something years.

With this much quality stuff in the mix, does RE2make surpass the original? I think for some people it might, though for me it hits the same high bar as its predecessor, but doesn’t quite clear it. The remixed score, for one, is far too atmospheric and minimal for my tastes despite a few standout tracks - like the Mr. X music - and the game seems to realize this by offering DLC where you can switch to classic background tunes in certain spots, an opportunity that I easily took advantage of. There are also a handful of annoying puzzles in expanded areas that I could’ve done without, like a bit in the sewers where you have to collect a bunch of chess-shaped spark plugs to proceed. Finally, RE2make sometimes feels like a title that’s clearly standing on the shoulders of giants, and perhaps the reason for this is because even with its angular 32-bit graphics and temporarily odd control scheme, the classic RE2 is still a really damn good experience that established core foundations for the franchise. We’re not dealing with RE1 here, which was a great but relatively simplistic game that saw its concepts fantastically evolved by the first REmake. We’re talking about a 1998 classic that’s still a tough act to beat for any follow-up which isn’t radically different in a fresh way (for example, RE7), and with that in mind, a remake was probably never going to exceed the original. I will say that RE2make comes damn close though, and frankly I would be thrilled to see future re-imaginings of important games hit the same level of quality that Capcom managed to achieve here. (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy VII Remake...)

This may be the last Resident Evil game I’m tackling in this playthrough, by the way, but I’m not quite done blogging about the series yet. I still have to plow through the RE movies (oh lord), and then, at the very end of it all, I’ll do a post talking about the sum total of my experiences and what I learned along the way. We’re not quite at the blood-soaked end yet...but we’re almost there.

All screenshots taken by me. For more, check out this Twitter thread showing my step-by-step progress through the game.

[afafaefse]

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[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 1st July 2018

Just a shorter episode today, hopefully. As long as it’s 1,000 words I’m fine with making a lower-effort episode after a busy week of doing other stuff like BLAST TO THE PAST and promoting my mixtape. This has kind of fell in my priorities since, but I’ll still try and make something of an interesting read with the five new arrivals we have, and all the other antics.

Top 10

Well, we have another new number-one this week, topping the charts at its fourteenth week here! This one’s “Shotgun” by George Ezra, which I believe is Ezra’s first ever number-one, so congratulations, even if the song is much less deserving than, say, “Budapest”.

This means that the song “Solo” by Clean Bandit featuring Demi Lovato has been hit a spot to the runner-up space, number-two, but I have a feeling it will rebound.

“2002” by Anne-Marie won’t freaking go away at number-three. It’s been steady for weeks now, please drop or climb sometime!

Former #1 “I’ll be There” by Jess Glynne has not fulfilled its promise by staying at number-four.

Oh, yeah, and we also gave XXXTENTACION a top-five hit, as “SAD!” crawled up a whopping 26 spaces to get to number-five, after UK chart rules started to include YouTube video streaming, conveniently right at the time the video for X’s track dropped. I think this may mean more new arrivals each week, so prepare for that, but we’ll see.

“If You’re Over Me” by Years & Years is up two spots to number-six, and will go into the top five once the album releases this week.

“Better Now” by Post Malone is now down a position, probably due to “SAD!”, to number-seven.

“I Like It”, however, by Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin is climbing up higher – it had a one-spot boost this week and is now at number-eight.

“Leave a Light On” by Tom Walker is down two spaces to number-nine, but will rebound because I heard it on another advertisement and that’s how this song gets plays.

Finally, just like last week, we have “One Kiss” by Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa staying at the final spot in the top 10.

Climbers

Other than “Rise” by Jonas Blue featuring Jack & Jack up five spots to #12, most of our big gainers this week are for cloud or emo-rap artists, including Juice WRLD, whose “Lucid Dreams” got a five-spot gain up to #18 (I called it!), Post Malone, whose feature alongside Preme on Tiesto and Dzeko’s “Jackie Chan” got a big 15-space boost up to #20, as well as the late XXXTENTACION, who got some more post-death streams, landing his two other songs that entered the top 40 last week in higher peaks, the highest being “Moonlight”, up 15 spots to #17, and the other being “changes”, which although latching on nowhere near as well as “Moonlight” and “SAD!”, is still up 11 spots to #22.

Fallers

We don’t have many, but the ones we do have are massive, and mostly for bigger hits that served a long time in the top 20. We have Ariana Grande’s “No Tears Left to Cry” taking an 18-spot leap down to #23, George Ezra’s “Paradise” being clearly drowned by his self-competition, jumping down 17 spaces to #29, joining “Love Lies” by Khalid and Normani down eleven spots to #33 in the group of bigger tracks that took giant hits. “Bed” by Nicki Minaj featuring Ariana Grande is also down ten spots to #30, and “This is Me” by Keala Settle and The Greatest Showman Ensemble is down five spots, now at #35, and hopefully exiting soon.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

We have quite a few new arrivals, so naturally there were some drop-outs to let the entries come in, including Ziv Zaifman, Hugh Jackman and John Williams’ “A Million Dreams” from The Greatest Showman, dropping out from #37, “This is America” by Childish Gambino featuring Young Thug dropping out from #39, “Lullaby” by Sigala featuring Paloma Faith collapsing and dropping out from #21, alongside “Bad Vibe” by M.O., Lotto Boyzz and Mr. Eazi out from #29. “In My Blood” by Shawn Mendes has also ended its decidedly decent run, as it has dropped out from #38.

In terms of returning entries, we don’t have any, but we do have sudden gains for a lot of songs that have been bubbling under the top 40 for a while, so let’s start talking about the new arrivals.

NEW ARRIVALS

#40 – “Ring Ring” – Jax Jones featuring Mabel and Rich the Kid

Okay, I’m sick of this Jax Jones dude and his bland production, pointless producer tag and stupid sweet-wrapper album covers. Everything he does, including this, just feels so cookie-cutter and aggravatingly bland somewhat-danceable pop music. This, however, is a bit more interesting, as it combines dancehall girl Mabel with trap-rapper Rich the Kid – which has surprisingly happened before on a remix of Rich’s “Plug Walk” – however, it somehow makes the interestingly-distorted vocals from Mabel, which are delivered oddly sensually for a song that’s otherwise really annoying, with its vocal sample in the drop and skittering trap hi-hats that do little but make Rich feel more fitting (it doesn’t work), boring as all hell. This is dancehall, EDM and trap-rap combined without any of the soul, energy or passion that people like Sean Paul at least had when they combined hip-hop with reggae and dance. With Rich the Kid’s tacked-on, phoned-in (quite literally, it starts with him talking about someone calling him) non-presence of a verse, this just feels like a cluttered monstrosity of different minimalist genres that mesh together to create nothing but rubbish chart fodder. I’d say I expected better from everyone involved, but then I’d be kidding myself, and I don’t exactly believe Rich and Jax are even close to how talented Mabel is.

#39 – “Nevermind” – Dennis Lloyd

Wow, you guys just want to give me the bland, inoffensive schlock today, huh? This is Dennis Lloyd, guy with a moustache and a dream – except the moustache is the only thing he deserves to succeed. This dude has the least presence and charisma out of any singer I’ve covered here who doesn’t consider themselves a rapper, and the unnecessarily heavy bass, repetitive and boring hook melody, basically non-existent guitar strumming, weak and fake finger-snaps, the dreamy synths that add nothing at all to the song other than just making it more of a waste of time. This song is only two minutes and 36 seconds, and it’s 80% that simplistic, monotonous hook. I’d say it’s much of a muchness, but it’s not much of anything at all except that damned hook, which is repeated ad infinitum, like an earworm that develops into a full-on mantra that will haunt your nightmares. I mean, it’s not that bad, it’s just so lazily and sleep-inducingly awful that I have nothing to say about it other than the fact it’s snooze-worthy.

#36 – “APES**T” – The Carters (Beyoncé and JAY-Z) featuring Migos

Offset and Quavo don’t have verses. They just provide ad-libs. Biggest musical mistake of the year, probably! Offset would have killed this beat, and Takeoff isn’t even there at all. What’s the deal with that? They’d do better than Beyoncé, of all people, who is sloppily trying to stay on beat (why are we autotuning Queen Bey and letting her make trap-rap ad-libs again?). There’s also this really annoying synth in the beginning that Quavo just repeats “yeah” over, that’s kinda pointless. The pre-chorus from Bey is decent, but her verse just feels kind of boring, as does the hook, right before JAY-Z comes in to kill it like he nearly always does. It’s not incredible bar-wise, but it’s damn tight mainstream brag-rapping – sadly, he has barely any time on the track compared to his wife, as he desperately tries to get more words in edgeways during Beyoncé’s second verse, where he’s resorting to ad-libs behind Bey’s faster flow. Also, it’s kind of awesome that JAY-Z just disses anyone he can right now, because he can definitely get away with it. I don’t know, it’s just kind of cool how there’s no holds barred for him anymore.

It’s not a bad song by any means, but disappointing from three of my favourite urban and hip-hop artists right now – JAY-Z, Beyoncé and Migos. Speaking of Migos, actually, our next song is a much better example of a trap banger.

#34 – “Taste” – Tyga featuring Offset

I rated this a six out of 10 in a rate a few days ago and, well, I didn’t really want to give a paedophile and a homophobe any more credit, hence why I didn’t give it a seven, or even eight, but now, it’s grown on me so much that I can just say I kind of love this.

I love that vocal sample, with the vocalising sounding pretty great behind the subtle bass and piano loop, especially when the vocalist goes into his falsetto. Yeah, I don’t really believe what Tyga says about all his gang activity, because he’s not threatening at all, but when the beat cuts out, he has nice enough lines to make it not seem pointless and anti-climactic. Oh, yeah, and this hook? Catchy as hell. The whispering of “taste” is sensual and kind of creepy, but I frankly don’t care, especially when Offset comes in and kills it, once again – seriously, this dude’s great, and his flow and delivery is always so slick, and it’s proved here. Also, Tyga just sings a bunch of nonsense at some point and he somehow gets away with it because it leads into the chorus well and is apparently a reference to rapper A.E.’s catchphrase (thanks, Genius)? Yeah, while there are some questionable moments, this is a relaxed yet still exciting banger from the dude who made his album art a naked furry tiger lady monstrosity this same year and (Offset!), who apparently has access to pterodactyls, spaceships and Ric Flair (who he actually does have access to; he got him in a video more than once). Maybe that’s why I love Offset – for his goofy personality but how he confines it into such sweet, chill verses, kind of like MF DOOM. Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent, next song!

#32 – “Only You” – Cheat Codes and Little Mix

I was dreading the day I’d have to talk about both of these groups, because I really hate everything they’ve made. Little Mix are either infuriating, confusing or boring with fantastic singers, while Cheat Codes are bland but usually okay production-wise with an awful lead singer, so I guess it’s like the Chainsmokers collaborating with the Chainsmokers when they’ve got a featured singer.

Oh, yeah, this song? It sucks. It’s boring. It has some guitar strumming and simple synth bleeps but they mean nothing. All of the Mix singers are great, as always, but they feel wasted (once again, as always) here, because they don’t really get to burst too soon, which is what I like about their voices – when they belt, they can belt damn well, and I feel it’s just very underwhelming when instead, we get an ugly drop and harmonising from the Cheat Codes singer (in a falsetto at times) in the second verse, which just kind of hilariously proves the landslide in quality between people like Perrie Edwards and people like Trevor Dahl. It’s just kind of short and uninteresting, but what did I expect from Cheat Codes and Little Mix? Not much. Not much at all.

Conclusion

Best of the Week goes to Tyga and Offset for “Taste”, with Honourable Mention not being served, rather a double Dishonourable Mention: “Ring Ring” by Jax Jones, Mabel and Rich the Kid, tied with “Only You” by Cheat Codes and Little Mix. Worst of the Week easily goes to Dennis Lloyd for “Nevermind”. Knowing my luck, that’s going to be a hit. Delightful. See you next week.

[rimalupin]

50 More Interesting Questions

Rules: fill this out and tag at least one person you’d like to know more about! Or just fill it out! Or don’t! Answer only some of them! Make up your own questions! “What kind of requirement is that”, you ask? A reasonable one! Who am I to tell you what to do? Anything goes!

Thank you for tagging me @theempresskaizer & @kakihoden! :D <3

1. What kind of food can’t you stand?: Anything fermented. Like, ew. Also brussel sprouts (Then again, I have yet find someone who can cook brussel sprouts “well.” :b)

2. If you could choose one minor inconvenience to never have to deal with again, what would you pick?: Public transit schedules. They’re so darn inconvenient (And yet I’m commuting for the remainder of my uni career. At least I’m saving money..?). -.-’

3. Have you got any useless talents?: I try to make use of my talents, so I’m gonna say no. :b

4. If you could be really really good at one thing, what would it be?: Taking (good & worthwhile) risks because I’m always so darn careful so I end up not trying new things sometimes.

5. Name a few people you think are extremely good-looking: ALL THE FRIENDS AND FAMILY I KNOW AND LOVE. <3 Oh, also Emma Watson, Gal Gadot, Shawn Mendes, Tom Holland, and all the other celebs I tend to fangirl about (I can’t name them all rn, haha sorry~. :P).

6. What was your favorite way to pass the time as a kid?: Singing all the Disney songs (Which I still do nowadays, haha~.). I would also read books, write my own stories, and act as if I was on a Disney Channel show (I was quite the Disney fangirl back in the day. xD)

7. What is something you’re proud of?: My friends who are just starting college/uni this year. Most of them are already setting up their dorms and getting ready for classes. They’re growing up so fast! :’)

8. What’s one character flaw in people that you just can’t tolerate?: Dishonesty. I don’t associate with phonies.

9. Do you consider yourself to be more of a leader or a follower?: I’m a bit of both. Then again, being a follower makes you a kind of leader: you essentially lead people to follow your leader, if that makes sense Okay I’ll shut up about leadership theory sorry y’all. :P

10. What kind of student are/were you?: The diligent one (but people often claim I’m the overachiever even tho I’m not always a straight A student lololol).

11. Butterfly effect question! Has there ever been a seemingly minor decision you’ve made (at the time) that ended up having a profound influence on your life?: Ohhhhh yes. This kind of thing has happened to me many times (In like the best ways possible, thankfully.).

12. Name your most irrational fear/aversion: Being alone/left out (Even though “I’m never really alone” ((Which I know I’m not. Hence the “irrational” part of this particular fear/aversion.)).)

13. Are there any fictional characters you find especially relatable?: Yup. Plenty of ‘em.

14. If you drink, what kind of drunk are you? Alternatively, what sort of person are you at parties?: I don’t drink... Yet. My Canadian friends are trying to get me to drink with them since I’m now legal in Canada but I’m scared heeeeeelp. :b I’m usually the wallflower if I don’t know anybody too well at a party. However, if I find people I’m comfortable hanging out with, I’ll stick with their squad throughout the event, talking, eating, dancing and taking pictures/SnapChats to our hearts’ desires~. ^-^

15. Do you fall in love easily? Or does it usually take a long time for you to trust someone?: Nope. I have to get to know the person before I “fall in love” with them, let alone having a crush on them. Which is why the biggest crushes I’ve had were on some of my closest friends. But I’ve never told them because I didn’t want to risk our friendships IDK I’M A NOOB WHEN IT COMES TO LOVEY-DOVEY THINGS. :b

16. Would you rather have one close friend or 100 casual friends?: One close friend. <3

17. Do you consider yourself to be more of a slob or a neat-freak?: Neat-freak. Definitely a neat-freak. xD

18. Describe a place (imaginary or real) that you would find incredibly cozy: 

Both of these locations are places where I’d have more than enough room to move or think. ^-^

Outdoors: Somewhere near the sea, where I could feel the sand on my toes, hear the waves splashing onto the shore, smell the ocean breeze, and watch the orange sunset glowing along the horizon.

Indoors: An empty practice room. Wooden floors, large mirrors in front of the room, dance barres along the side walls, a few windows displaying the outside world, and a speaker/stereo system perfect for blasting the music around the room.

19. Do you have kids? If not, do you want them someday?: No kids atm, but I love working with them! Yes, I’d like kids someday~.

20. What was your favorite book as a child?: I read many books as a wee child. But one book I can clearly remember is Stellaluna. It’s an adorable story about a bat who discovers who she truly is thanks to both her adoptive and biological families (The former being a family of birds and the latter being a family of bats.).

21. Name one thing you just don’t get what all the hype is about: Fidget spinners. I’m still seeing people freak out about those things. Didn’t the trend die a month or two ago?

22. Name one thing that you think is tragically underrated: Myspace. *evil laughs despite the fact that I never had a Myspace account* :P Sorry I couldn’t think of anything else bahaha~

23. If you had to be glued to a person for a month, real or fictional (who you have never met), who would you choose?: I mean, I’ve never met MYSME’s 707 IRL, so I’ll stick with him And we can visit his space station, haha~ ^-^

24. What’s something you’d like the chance to do someday?: Act in a theatrical production. I haven’t done theatre in a year and I already miss it. T.T

25. Do you typically speak your mind when you have a controversial opinion? Or do generally prefer to not rock the boat?: I’ll definitely speak my mind if I’m well-versed in the topic and if I’m passionate about it. If I want to present a controversial opinion, I have to be sure that I can articulate my POV eloquently and professionally. I’m also more than willing to listen to the other side, as long as they fully know what they’re talking about (Frankly, I will not take any B.S. if I suspect B.S.).

26. What’s the dumbest fad you’ve been caught up in?: I’m blanking... Yeah, IDK, but I’m pretty sure I got caught up in some kind of dumb fad back in middle school. *shivers b/c I don’t want to relive those years*

27. What’s something you thought was cool as a kid/adolescent, but now cringe at yourself for?: When I was younger (like elementary/middle school-age), I dreamed of becoming a singer. In order to accomplish that dream, I joined my school and church choirs: however, that turned out to be a pretty toxic experience since almost everyone I was singing with treated every single practice and performance as a singing competition. Like, c’mon you guys: we aren’t on Glee. -.-’

28. What’s a trait you consider to be very admirable?: Honesty: I admire people who are genuine and true.

29. Is there a particular kind of item people always tend to give you as gifts? (For instance, people always get you things with ducks on them because you like ducks, etc.): Books (people know I’m a huge bookworm), clothes (b/c I’m usually too lazy/don’t have time to shop for my own clothes, LOLOL), stuffed animals (I’m a child at heart and I love cuddly & cute things), sweets (especially chocolate).

30. Do you speak multiple languages? Which ones?: 

English is my mother tongue.

I apparently used to speak Tagalog fluently when I was very young, but then I stopped speaking that language once I started preschool; however, I’ve picked up some terms over the years, so I can sort of dissect my parents’ conversations w/ the other adults (”Yes, Mom, I knew that you were talking about my uni stuff with Tita *insert name here*.” :P), plus I’m going to take a Tagalog 101 class in Autumn Quarter, so I’ll (hopefully) learn how to say complete sentences instead of just the names of foods, holidays, and Filipino Folk Dances. xD

I learned Spanish throughout my high school career, so I’m okay in that department even though I haven’t practiced speaking/listening/writing in that language recently. I’m still fluent enough to help my sisters with their Spanish homework, so that’s something. :P

I tried learning some French, Japanese, and Korean through various language learning apps, but to no avail.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

31. Would you rather live in the big city or the countryside?: Can I choose like a little town instead? Big city: the countryside would be MUCH too quiet for me (Plus I’d be much too tempted to run atop every hill Sound of Music style and start singing at the top of my lungs - which would probably annoy a lot of people, myself included. :P).

32. Has there ever been something you were certain you’d hate, but ended up loving?: Giles Christophe a.k.a my Midnight Cinderella bias. Ironic, huh? xD <3 Also Jumin Han from MYSME. :P

33. Do you mind being the center of attention, or do you prefer the spotlight to be on someone else?: I will hide from the spotlight like I’m a friggin vampire unless there’s a damn good reason for me to be under it.

34. Favorite holiday?: CHRISTMAS!!!

35. Are you a more go-with-the-flow type of person, or do you need to have things planned meticulously?: If I’m in charge of scheduling something, then I MUST have everything carefully planned. If I’m leaving the scheduling to someone else, then I’ll just go with the flow~.

36. Is there something you loved so much you wish you could forget it and experience it all over again? (A tv show, book, series–anything.): My first trip to Hawaii: I’d love to explore the islands and swim in its oceans again.

37. What hobbies do you have?: Reading, writing, singing, dancing, listening to music, playing the guitar or ukulele, checking social media (JKJK :P), drawing/arts & crafts (If I’m EXTREMELY bored), playing video games, watching TV/YouTube, exploring places both old and new Yeah, I do too many things, haha~

38. If you could have a superpower, but it was only mildly useful, what ability would you want to have?: “Mildly useful?” (O.o) I guess the ability to learn things VERY quickly - like, master an activity on the first try. I actually have a friend with that ability, which has allowed him to almost effortlessly master almost every sport he’s ever learned: he’s basically a superhuman and I admire and envy him for his “superpower.” :P <3

39. Something people are always surprised to learn about you: My age: people think that I’m much younger than I actually am, mostly because of my shorter-than-average height and my baby face. I’m basically an adult stuck in a teenager’s body. xD

40. Something that took you way too long to figure out: How to apply the Unit Circle to various math problems eff you precalculus and calculus never again ugggghhhhh.

41. Worst injury you’ve had?: My broken heart (JKJK, sort of. :P) I got burned by the metal tip of a very hot glue gun. Thanks to that, I have a tiny scar on my upper right arm.

42. Any morbid fascinations?: Does watching playthroughs of horror games through YouTube count?

43. Describe your sense of humor: Clever/witty, sarcastic, sassy. Oftentimes unintentional: jokes will usually come to me naturally through conversation. If we’re close, plenty of embarrassing stories, inside jokes, and horrible puns will be part of our daily doses of humor.

44. If you had to be born in another era/place, which would you choose?: I’d want to be born in Canada, mostly because I’ve got a lot of family living up there, plus I’d love to live in a place that isn’t completely messed up rn. #SorryNotSorryAmerica *crosses to the Canadian border like a badass*

45. Something you are irredeemably bad at: LOL, WHAT’S A SPORT? :b

46. Something that sucked but you’re glad you went through: Freshman year of high school. I first moved to my new home that year, so being the new kid sucked for a while, but I eventually made some friends and found more opportunities to grow as a person (through writing and theatre).

47. Would you rather have a really godawful ugly tattoo in a place that is only slightly inconvenient to conceal with clothing (upper arm, thigh, etc.), or the coolest, most beautiful tattoo ever in the middle of your face? (Neither tattoo can be removed or concealed with makeup, and the ugly tattoo will deeply offend anyone who sees it.): Ugly tat. At least I’d have a place to hide it. xD

48. Are you more of an optimist or a pessimist?: Realist. Leaning on the pessimist side. However, I do try to believe that things will get better, that there’ll be more bigger and better opportunities out there, etc. etc.

49. What would be the most flattering compliment someone could give you?: That I’m a hardworking and genuine person. Then again, I don’t do well compliments anyway: I’ll definitely blush and stutter and try to hide behind some kind of an object while complimenting you back. xD <3

50. Something you feel people often misunderstand about you: I’m often quiet and reserved when I’m meeting new people. Some may think I’m naturally calm and composed, others take it as slightly intimidating. But I’m just quiet because I’m awkward, plus I don’t usually start conversations. :b

Tagging: @princessofwysteria, @sukio-sakamaki, @allforthecrown, @o0w0o, @widzzicles, @rizosrojizos, and anyone who wants to do this! (I would’ve tagged more peeps, but I didn’t know if they had been tagged already. So please join in if you haven’t done this already~.). ^-^ <3