#truncate table

[ezrasf]

I will always cringe when end users talk about a "truncated table." PTSD from a client in 2008 I have still never fully recovered.

In this case, the end user meant the leading zeroes were missing. That's trimmed.

[what-bot]

Kevin: If I’m gonna bring Sam here we need to babyproof the place.

Tron: ???

Kevin: You know, remove all the environmental dangers. Make it so he can’t hurt himself on anything.

Tron: Oh, I already did that.

Kevin: Wow, really? Thanks, dude! How’d you know?

Tron: You live here.

Kevin: You mean you…Kevin-proofed it? Ouch.

[nichuuu]

Beats Me - 6: Come As You Are

Word count: 8k+

Of course, there’s a chance to turn away from all of this—a chance to stop her hand as it reaches the base of your shaft, a chance to halt her in the midst of tiptoeing to place a peck on your neck; there’s a clear opportunity for you to end what’s happening right here and now—it’s all a matter of how willing you are to go through with this. While your brain screams at you to stop, your body says otherwise; you lift a hand to cup her cheek.

As you tell her, “Just for tonight,” a wisp of a smile appears on her face, and you wonder, What am I doing.

---------

A call from Kim Minju at this hour is never good news. 

To give context: It’s one in the morning on a Saturday. Office workers and the youth above the legal age for drinking are patronising drinking spots, throwing back a couple of beers and basking in the euphoria that alcohol brings them. Perhaps they're using alcohol to cope with the stress of their lives, or maybe they're trying to numb the pain of recent difficult experiences. In both cases, emotions are running high, alcohol is coursing through their systems, memories are resurfacing, and maybe, just maybe, tears are streaming down their cheeks—nothing too out of the ordinary. If you were to receive a call from anyone else at this hour, you would've thought it a request to be escorted back home, or a soused friend dialling in to say incomprehensible things before truncating the call.

But for more context: Kim Minju has been the bearer of bad news since highschool. If you are to combine this with the information above, you know that something has probably gone down, and you’re the only man she can trust to help them. She never calls you on a whim; every call from her is a desperate cry for help. 

As you stare at her caller ID on your phone that vibrates on the table like it’s possessed, you start steeling yourself for what is to come. You’re hesitant to answer, but basic human decency gets the better of you. You can hear the deafening roar of club music in the background when you pick up, and Minju’s yelling into the phone. Even in the quiet of your apartment, you can’t make heads or tails of what she’s trying to convey to you. Even as you holler I can’t hear you at the top of your lungs, she continues to blabber her intelligible words over the pulsing bass of that horrible song that’s playing in the background.

Then it suddenly gets quiet on the other end, and for a moment, you only hear the sound of your heartbeat crunching in your ears. When Minju speaks again, you can hear the wind blowing by in the background, your indication that she’s exited the club. Her voice rings loud and clear in your apartment. 

“Eunbi’s driving to your place, she’ll explain everything,” she’s telling you. “She’ll text when she arrives, get ready to be picked up.”

The urgency in her voice drives you to acquiescence, and you throw on a hoodie and some sweatpants. Couple of minutes later, you’re seated in the front seat of your singer’s car. She’s running you down on the events that have occurred tonight, and the multiple mentions of Chaewon makes your heart sink further and further. 

It was enough dealing with her in the band. That shrill frequency she could produce with that trumpet was often aptly used to deafen you whenever she could (she sat on your direct right so she could be a bitch with ease). The bowl she used to collect her saliva was often “accidentally” (the way she said that word with such bogus innocence really brought you to your boiling point sometimes) spilt on to the leg of your jeans when you walked by, her trumpet case “coincidentally” (again, bogus innocence with this one) be in the way of your shin as you tried to get to your kit. Her behaviour wasn’t the culprit behind your irritance towards her, rather the fact that her behaviour failed to reflect what she had requested for when the two of you schismed—a clean break.

“She’s thrown up twice now.” Eunbi’s tone is a mish-mash of frustration and commiseration, “She refuses to move, and she's been groped twice. We don’t mean to drag you into this, but you’re the last feasible option.”

There’s an odd feeling of nihility in your chest as the two of you come to a stop at a red light. In the band, you dealt with her on a physical level. But when Kim Chaewon and alcohol merge, you know that you’ll have to deal with her on an emotional level, and that somehow fails to engender any spite or frustration of the ilk. The silence that hangs in the car is unsettling in light of the confusing sensations you’re experiencing (and also due to the fact that usually chatty Eunbi is finding it hard to start a conversation in this atmosphere), yet you find that you’re poised. 

“I’m uh… I’m actually your highschool senior,” Eunbi decides to input, “I used to go to the same school as you, Chaewon and Minju…”

You remain reticent. Eunbi takes the cue and returns her eyes to the road. 

The bouncer almost didn’t let you in because of your shabby fit, but a quick wink and a, he’s with me, from Eunbi was enough to get him to let you through. You easily spot Minju amidst club-goers once you get in.  Those long, luscious jet black locks that flow just past her shoulders and those large round eyes that always seem to be doleful quickly catch your attention as you wade through the sea of people together with Eunbi. She looks the same as she did all those years ago. She stands when you approach; Kim Chaewon’s slumped over the table they’re at. 

“Thank god you’re here.” Her expression tells you that she’s been through quite the ordeal tonight. “I… I hope you understand that—”

She stops mid sentence when you hold up a hand. You understand that such a gesture is impertinent of you, but you can’t help it—there’s too much to process, too much to take in, and a club isn’t the best place to assimilate it all (or to find a lover, an ex lover in this case). Minju steps aside, and you take a moment to look at the sorry sight of your ex—face down on the table of the booth seat and an empty shot glass in hand. 

“What do you want me to do?” you ask them. The two girls look at each other, then Minju tells you to do whatever it takes to get her out of here. 

So there you are—contemplating on whether you should dump a bucket of ice on her or gently wake her up. Basic human decency gets the better of you, and you slide onto the couch next to Chaewon, gently tap the bare shoulder that’s exposed in her outfit. When she raises her head off the sticky, glossy table, you’re momentarily reminded of the countless times you’d woken her up in the same way when she fell asleep in the school library.

Then those eyes—half-lidded and swimming in tears—lock onto yours. The volume of her voice pales in comparison to the blaring House remix of the Barbie theme, yet when she calls your name, it’s the only thing you can hear. She shifts closer—close enough to rest her head on your shoulder, close enough for you to smell the vodka on her breath as she silently sobs against you; Don’t go, don’t leave, she slots in between those heart wrenching cries. Right now: emotions are running high, alcohol is coursing through her system, memories are resurfacing, and tears are definitely streaming down their cheeks. 

Eunbi and Minju look on in silence. Eunbi’s lips are pursed, Minju’s eyes are somehow more doleful. Their looks are doing nothing to assuage the turmoil that you’re feeling. You find yourself saying things that you were never prepared to say. 

“She can stay at my place for the night… I doubt she’d want to go anywhere else.”

They look apprehensive, but deep down—they know you’re right.

***

“Uh… Are you sure you want to present this?” 

Chaewon looks up from her presentation script to give a simple, “Hm?”. You were scratching your head as you read over the vivid description of Kurt Cobain's death that she’d included. It detailed the nature of his death, the brutal imagery of small, tiny shotgun pellets blowing a hole through the skull of Nirvana’s frontman on the night of his suicide described in an unnaturally calm tone, as if people shooting themselves through the head with a shotgun was an everday occurance. 

“I mean…” You were doing your best to not sound reprehensive, “I don’t think Miss Kim would appreciate the… Visceral imagery.”

Her look was one of innocence as she asked, why not, and proceeded to further justify her vivid depiction (her argument was that Lee Chaeyeon had presented on Aviccii’s death in equal vividness and your teacher enjoyed it). The theme of the presentations for the week was “the talented die young”, and she’d decided to talk about one of her favourite bands at the time. She was blasting their hit song Smells Like Teen Spirit through the speaker in her room, and you were finding it hard to focus over all that grunge (you didn’t tell her of course, cause that would’ve made her pouty for the rest of the day).

That was one of your fondest memories from dating her. It showed you her tenacity and her stubbornness in insisting that she was correct. It showed you just how determined and strong-willed she could be. You found that you could still recall every detail of that moment as vividly as she described Cobain's death while you watched her walk around your kitchen from the doorway to your room. Her hair is in disarray, the set of clothes that you’d passed her baggy on her slender frame. For the record: She knows how she got here, she knows where she is, she knows you’re awake, and she knows that you’re watching her. In spite of all this, her movements are calm, her hand taking its time to trail across your cabinets as her eyes slowly soak in her surroundings. 

“You know, for someone that said that they wanted a clean break—you’re making things messier than they should be,” you can’t help but tell her. Her hand stops on the handle of your cabinet, her index finger affixing itself there for a minute as she lowers her head. With a sigh, you stuff your hands into your pockets and tell her, “Get out once your hangover wears off.”

You retreat back into your room to get some work done. When you emerge around lunchtime, you find that she’s taken liberties in your kitchen, a piping hot bowl of noodles sitting opposite her at your dining table as she silently slurps on a bowl of her own. You stand there for a moment, then you accost the eating space and stop just before her. 

“Are you being for real?” You can’t help but let the revulsion seep into your words, “You’re telling me that your hangover has lasted this long?”

She’s unwontedly silent. Her pugnacious, bratty nature seems to have dissipated into thin air, replaced by one of taciturn and timidness as she stares blankly into her noodles. She doesn’t look up when you sigh and slide into the other seat, nor does she say anything when you start digging into the noodles that she’s prepared for you (you aren’t one to pass up on a free meal, even if it’s prepared by your ex). 

It’s when you're halfway through your bowl that she finally pipes up, “thank you for taking me in.”

You go still for a moment. 

Then you choose not to reply to her. 

After washing up, you communicate to her that she has till sundown to leave your abode before you head back to your room. You know that she’s going to stay like that stubborn patch of mould beneath the snare drum in the recording studio when you hear her playing Smells Like Teen Spirit on her phone through the door. Once again, that damn song is reminding you of how tenacious and stubborn she can be. Those two traits of hers were really double edged swords for that woman.

Night comes; she still hasn’t left. When you exit your room, you find that she’s asleep on the floor. It seems that she’s found it congenial to sleep on the carpeted surface, even though the futon that you provided her last night is literally an arms length away from her sleeping body. Seeing her that way, you’re momentarily reminded of the times she’d stay over at your place while you were dating, and she’d choose to nap on the floor while you worked—even though the bed was empty. The reasons as to why she chose to do so are still unknown to this day—one of the many unsolved mysteries in your relationship, second only to why she’s being the way she is despite what the two of you have previously agreed on.

To be absolutely clear: the two of you know why you broke up. It wasn’t a case of a one-sided sudden change of heart; there was a reason behind it that you both understood (even though you did need a lot of time to come to terms with it). Yes, it was painful. Yes, it was unexpected. Yes, you did miss her for quite some time. But there wasn’t much you could do about it. She’d set her mind on the breakup, and her stubbornness and tenacity had her on wits end when you tried to talk to her. 

Was there a possibility the two of you could’ve stayed together? Your answer—yes. Her’s—only God knows what goes through that confusing brain.

Once more, basic human decency drives you to do things you don’t want to, and you end up cooking a share of fried rice for her. You lay her bowl next to her on the floor along with a spoon before seating yourself at the dining table to eat. You’re about halfway through a video essay about some game you’ll never play when she stirs from her slumber. 

She spots the bowl, then her gaze wanders to you. Silently, she picks it up and rises to her feet. Now it’s her turn to accost the eating space, except she isn’t belligerent, nor can you sense any hostile intentions.

“Can I sit?” She’s oddly genteel as she points at the chair opposite you. You’ll just end up sitting even if I say no, is your reply. She allows a soft, short chuckle before she slides in. You think about turning off the video essay, but then you decide to not let basic human decency get the better of you this once. 

So with some random guy’s voice filling the air, you and Chaewon partake in your meals in silence. You try not to look at her, but you can’t help but throw a few glances her way as she eats. She decided to grow out her hair over the past few weeks, dye it auburn, and now it drapes elegantly past her shoulders like silky curtains. You can’t read her expression (though you never could to begin with), and you certainly can’t understand why she’s become so quiet. She’s trying to make you lower your guard, soften you up then launch some manipulation tactic is what you’re considering. You won’t put it past her to use a facade of milquetoast nature to try and break past your boundaries. 

“I’ll be out by tomorrow morning,” she suddenly tells you. That was the first time you tore your gaze away from your phone for more than five seconds. How would one normally reply to such a statement? Oh, okay, seems to be one of the better options, yet you choose to go with, “Good, cause I’m not planning to overstay your welcome.”

Chaewon plucks a rice grain off her top lip. “But you’d let Eunbi or Ryujin stay, right?”

There you were, hoping that she’d be as timid and quiet as she’d been for the rest of the day. The nap must have gotten rid of the rest of the hangover, cause you can hear the haughtiness in her voice. 

“Are we really going to have this conversation?” you ask her. The firm look she fixes you with tells you, I’m gonna run my mouth on you whether you like it or not. 

“And here I was thinking you’re being a decent human for once,” you can’t help but mutter. “You’re fucking confusing you know that?”

She bristles in her seat. “You watch your fucking mouth player.”

You’re not one to take offence from such comments. Normally, you’d understand that in the heat of the moment, people can say hurtful things that they don’t mean. It’s natural, completely natural—the adrenaline, the emotions, the tension… All of it can melt together in the form of nasty words that spew forth from a person’s mouth. 

But when it comes from Kim Chaewon’s mouth however… You can’t seem to find that sympathy in you. She knows that you’ve slept with your singer and bassist, she knows that they’ve had you more than once—it’s right for her to feel this type of anger (even though the two of you aren’t even together anymore), yet there’s no part of you—not even a single atom—that wants to take the time to try to understand where she’s coming from and why she feels this way.

“Player?” You don’t mean to sound as pissed as you do. “Player?” you echo again, just for good measure, “What gives you the right to call me that? I’m not the one who couldn’t wait for their partner!”

“It was two years!” Chaewon cries.

“Well you could’ve at least tried.” You’re not even bothering to filter your words now. “You’re a hypocrite for calling me a player when you couldn’t even wait for me.”

“Two fucking years! Do you really expect me to close my heart to love for two whole years just so I can wait for you to get out of the damn military!” The way her tone conveys how right she thinks she is pisses you off, “I’m a human! I need love! Do you really expect me to wait for it for that long?”

She’s on her feet now, hands on your table, breaths heavy. 

She screams, “It’s your fault for signing on so early! It’s your fault for ever thinking that I’d wait!” 

You shoot up from your seat and cry, “Well then damn me for ever trying to believe in you!”

Her face contorts into a snarl. She skirts the table, accosts you with her arm whizzing through the air; she slaps you across the face. As the sting lingers on your cheek, you find your fingers curling into fists. 

“You’re horrible!” She’s hollering at the top of her lungs, “I wish that I never met you!”

For a moment, there’s only the sound of her heavy breathing. Then those eyes—bulging in their sockets and swimming in tears—lock onto yours. She looks just as she did the night the two of you broke up: hair slightly messy, face twisted in a mix of woe and fury, right up in your face as her face starts to flush under the intense assault of emotions and thoughts. She’s close—close enough to grip you by your collar and pull you towards her, crush her lips against yours, kiss you like she did when you were teens. 

And she does just that.

A soft cry slips past her lips, travels into your mouth as she kisses you; It feels exactly the same as it did all those years ago—the meraki, the slight tension in her upper lip, the light quiver in your bottom lip—a familiar comfort you had no idea you missed. Her small waist is captured in your grasp, your face in her hands as she pulls you deeper, kisses you harder. It was like she never left, like she never walked away from you because you had decided to enlist in compulsory military service early so that you could get it over and done with, like she never said, seeing you on the weekends isn't enough for me, I’m sorry. This won’t work out the way you think it will. Let’s just end things off here, nice and clean.

And get this: the whole moment is sweet and all, but deep down, there’s still a small flame of anger alit within you. Even though you kissed her back with equal vigour, you were silently cursing her for making things messier than it had to be; while your hands run through her hair, you find yourself berating her in your head for making you vacillate between missing her and hating her. You aren’t one to be flippant, but Chaewon had the tendency to bring out sides of you that you’ve never seen for yourself. 

Her tongue dives into your mouth, her hand pressed flat against your chest. She’s tugging at the fabric of your shirt, and you’re not sure if she’s trying to pull you closer or signalling for you to take it off. You realise it’s the latter when she guides you hand beneath the fabric of the shirt you gave her, your fingertips grazing the soft skin beneath it. Your palm rests on the flesh of her waist. Her skin was warm to the touch. 

Your mouths part, and you’re quick to ask, What the hell are we doing. She takes a second to catch her breath, then she replies, “I have no clue, but I’m not stopping whatever’s coming next.”

Going with the flow—that was so her. 

You grasp onto the hem of her shirt and gently pull upwards. She’s quick to respond, raising her hands above her head for ease of removal. Then her hands are on your waist band, tugging down at your shorts while your hands skim across her bare skin. She pulls your underwear down together with your shorts, lets them fall and pool around your ankles; her hand is quick to grasp onto your throbbing shaft. 

“Chae.” You can’t help but whisper your pet name for her. She starts placing kisses on your clothed chest, her other hand resting on your shoulder while the hand on your cock begins to stroke it with consideration. She leans in and whispers, “Can we pretend like we never left each other? Just for tonight?”

A foolhardy request. She doesn’t know what she’s doing by asking this of you, nor does she care to consider the possibility that the fulfilment of this request can and will invoke unwelcome emotions in both of you. Of course, there’s a chance to turn away from all of this—a chance to stop her hand as it reaches the base of your shaft, a chance to halt her in the midst of tiptoeing to place a peck on your neck; there’s a clear opportunity for you to end what’s happening right here and now—it’s all a matter of how willing you are to go through with this. While your brain screams at you to stop, your body says otherwise; you lift a hand to cup her cheek.

As you tell her, “Just for tonight,” a wisp of a smile appears on her face, and you wonder, What am I doing.

Her hand on your dick leaves to join and assist the other in undoing her bra. She lets the intimate garment fall to the floor before her, her bare breasts on full display. She’s certainly grown more voluptuous as compared to her eighteen-year-old self, and with that change you find an increase in desire for this woman before you. Chaewon cups her tits with her hands, lifts them up, then lets go; she’s putting on a sordid show. 

“Christ.” Christians certainly wouldn’t approve your usage of the name of their saviour in this abhorrent, impure context. “You’ve… Grown.”

“Puberty works wonders, no?” She’s taken on a playful tone, one that she was always fond of using while the two of you were dating. “Feel them. I know you want to.”

No sane man would ever turn down such an invitation. You can feel her erect peaks poking against your palms as your fingers close around the mounds; your breath hitches when you realise how firm they’ve become. Her hands join yours on her breasts, aiding you and squeezing and kneading while she lets a sigh leave her lips. Then in a whisper, she tells you how much she’s missed this feeling—your hands caressing her just the way she likes, your breath in her ears as you silently play with her like you used to.

Then she asks you, “Do you ever think about me when you fuck those other girls?”

You consider your words carefully. If you’re to be perfectly honest, there were a few times where the sight of Ryujin’s rippling ass cheeks made you think about her; sometimes the way Eunbi moaned reminded you of her. 

But if you’re supposed to pretend like you never left her, some teasing would have to come into play. 

“Depends.” You’re not even trying to hide how smug you are, “In what way are we talking?”

She gives you a look, one that says, you cheeky little fucker, but she plays along of course, offering a soft, Hm, as she pretends to go pensive.

Let’s see—she speaks as she (much to your chagrin) practically rips your hands off her body, all so that she can start circling you—Do their moans sound as cute as mine? Are their bodies as tight as mine? 

She leans in to pop the final question: Do their pussies feel as good as mine?

For the record: No to the first one, a fifty-fifty between yes and no on the second one (they all had amazing bodies). As for the last question, you couldn’t say (not because you didn’t have an answer, but more because ranking them in terms of how good they feel would be doing all of them an injustice).

Dunno, is the answer you offer her, then you follow up with, “Why don’t we find out?”

She smirks and rolls her eyes. “Segueing—impressive.” 

“I’m a laconic man,” you tell her, and, Oh shut the hell up, is her reply as she takes you by the hand and drags you to your room. 

It’s crazy to think that just mere minutes ago, she was on her feet, yelling at you and telling you how odious she finds you; now, she’s on her back, her head propped up against a pillow, still yelling, but she’s telling how good you’re making her feel—Fuck, and, Oh shit is all that’s really leaving her mouth, but the message is implicit—as your tongue applies painfully slow strokes to her soaking pink folds. The hand that slapped you is now scrunching up in your hair, the palm that made your cheek sting pushing your head against her crotch while her toes curl into your mattress. You’re wondering if she’s intentionally pitching up her voice as she moans, or if she’s purposely dragging out her sighs, but it doesn’t take away from the utter sublimity of the act. 

Chaewon’s slick is sweet; it’s tangier than Eunbi’s and tickles your taste buds better than Ryujin’s—you won’t tell her this of course, but it’s not like you’ll have time to communicate all of this while your head being shoved into her pussy. Believe it or not—this is one of the calmer moments of pussy-eating that you’ve experienced, one of the rare occasions where you actually have time to savour the taste of your partner, assimilate the intimacy of it, a far cry from when you were with Eunbi or Ryujin, where the goal was always to make them cum as fast as possible because that’s what they’re craving for. But believe it or not—even though her needy actions make it seem as if she’s desperately chasing her high, Chaewon’s really just trying to make the most of each and every swipe of your tongue, enjoying the way it skirts her clit and laps up her juices that leak out from her pretty, pink folds; all while she’s squeezing her thighs around your ears and begging you, Oh god, put your fingers in me. 

You start with your index finger, using the pad of it to trace the outline of her pussy. Then—just to make sure that she knows that it’s going in too—you let your middle finger join the fray. Your digits graze the skin around her flushed lips, taking their time to cover ground while Chaewon’s reduced to a moaning, mewling mess. What you’re really trying to do here is test the limits of her patience, see how much teasing that small, tight body can really take before her will breaks. It’s a sadistic game you’re playing, but you know that she’s enjoying it as much as you are, even though she is practically screaming at you to stick your digits inside her already.

If there’s anything that this world has taught you, it’s that patience is often rewarding. In this case: Chaewon’s patience was rewarded with the fulfilment of her request. The moan that leaves her half-parted lips is one of satisfaction as you dig your digits into her waiting depths, and they soak in her juices for a minute or two before they start to explore. Her nails dig into your scalp when your fingers dig into the soft flesh on the roof of her pussy. Your name flies out from her lips in a tone of surprise, like she’s taken aback by the fact you remember the exact spot inside her that makes her tick. The smugness on your face says it all, really, and you start to stimulate that spot of sensitive flesh. 

“Oh… Oh my… Oh…” She’s barely able to form the simplest of words. The pleasure you’re providing is racing through her body, filling her from head to toe with perverse need and taking over her bodily functions. You’re not doing anything fancy down there; your fingers are just wiggling against the same spot—a simple action that makes her body react in all sorts of complicated ways: twisting, trembling, twitching… It’s working wonders really. You’re amazed that she’s still as sensitive as ever. 

“Look at you Chae,” you can’t help but deride. “You’re getting so fucking turned by fingers. I don’t remember you being this needy.”

Even if she’s hellbent on retorting, there’s no space for words to leave her mouth—the moans are filling the space in her throat, bottlenecking and filtering out of her mouth in the form of strained cries. From the limited view between her thighs, you make out the image of her biting down on the nail of her index finger. Meanwhile, the nails in your head dig deeper into your scalp, hardly caring for the fact that they may be drawing blood as their owner manages to beg, Keep going. 

Your mouth—now rested enough to continue—rejoins the busy scene; the drawn-out guttural gasp that slides out of her mouth tells you all you need to know—Oh my god. You’re driving me crazy—and you can’t help but smile at the sight of her pleasure stricken face. Chaewon’s barely keeping it together at this point, the dignity that tightly wraps her body is slowly loosening—unravelling at the mercy of your mouth and fingers. The haughtiness, the sheer brattiness—crumbling under the sensations that overwhelm every fibre of her body; now that these perverse thoughts have entered your mind, you find that a dark part of you longs to own her, right here, right now. But of course, patience is rewarding. 

You’re willing to wait.

To say that you’re taking your time to eat her out would be inaccurate. If you’re to be honest, it’s difficult to describe the pace you’re using. Inside of her, your index and middle finger move frenetically, as if you are using them to press the same key on a piano repeatedly to produce the same note—her moans. Outside her, your tongue’s movements are almost sluggish, the broad base of it dragging up her flushed lips before the tip flicks the swollen nub at the top. You’re fully invested, scrupulously ensuring the uniformity of your movements to drive Chaewon to perdition. The movements are neither simple nor complex, rather a middle ground between the two (but you do feel that it leans more towards the former), but it’s enough to drive her crazy. Even if she’s a complicated mess to deal with, deep down—she still enjoys some form of simplicity. 

“Baby.” The way Chaewon’s calling you sends a shiver down your spine, stirring the emotions in your chest and letting some nostalgia bubble up from the depths of it, “I-I’m… I’m…”

Cumming, you complete just as her head violently whips back into the pillow. Then, in arguably the hottest ways possible, Kim Chaewon orgasms. Her thighs clamp around your head, becoming earmuffs as an onslaught of juices assail your mouth. You can hear her mewling past the flesh that surrounds your ears, and the muffled sound is enough to deluge your heart with depraved satisfaction while her body twitches, convulses and strains violently. The last vestiges of dignity that once enveloped her have fallen away, carried off by the sighs and cries escaping from her trembling lips, and as you lift your mouth of her soaking slit and withdraw your juice-slicked fingers, you know that she’s reached a point of no return. 

Patience is truly so rewarding.

“Jesus…” she pants. Once again, believers probably wouldn’t approve of the usage of his name in this context, but something has to cleanse the filth from her body, “When did you get so good at this?”

“Always have been,” you grin. You can tell she wants to roll her eyes, but she hardly has the strength to do so. For a tender moment, you gaze into each other’s eyes and appreciate this moment of inexplicable intimacy, re-living the emotions that were once so present between the two of you. It’s just for tonight. After this, we’ll go back to fighting, you’re telling yourself, and it makes you want to stay like this for a little longer.

But when Chaewon flips herself over onto her belly, the warmth in your chest is shut out and replaced by warped desire. With the tender cheeks of her ass on full display, Chaewon wiggles her behind, inviting you to take your liberties with her body. You take a moment to admire how full they’ve become. 

“Been working on it?” you ask her as you squeeze a handful of flesh. 

“To the best of my ability,” is her reply, followed by, “you like it?”

Your reply is to deliver a soft spank to the right ass-cheek. She barely even yelps upon contact, a small grin on her face as she watches you spread the flesh apart to reveal her entrances. Then she urges you, “Come on now… Pick a hole, fuck it till you fill it with your cum.”

“What if I want both?” You can’t help but be a little cheeky. Chaewon’s bottom lip furls behind her front teeth. 

“I’m not stopping you,” she whispers, “just promise me to cum in me.”

Not a trace of dignity in her words. 

Alright, is what you tell her before your head slips inside of her pussy. You can pinpoint the exact moment where her body almost becomes the only thing to exist in your mind—it’s when those walls clamp down around your shaft, pulsing ever so slightly and still twitching from her orgasm, and it’s enough to make you clench all your muscles while you hilt yourself in her. The sigh you let out hardly synchronises with Chaewon’s gasp. Yet, you find that your thoughts are perfectly in sync as your hands grip onto her small waist, and she props herself up on her elbows and knees. Her hair falls off her back, cascading down her shoulders as she turns her head, catches your gaze to tell you—Own this pussy.

No more words need be said. Eagerly, you begin to pump yourself in and out of Chaewon’s slick, tight pussy, her body tightening around your cock with every thrust in and out, lathering your length with juices that glisten in the low light of your room. The sound of her sighs and gasps quickly rise in volume, a beautiful backdrop to the sounds of your wet shaft penetrating her slick pussy again and again. 

You’ve already lost yourself in her from the moment you stuck your member into her, but you find your grasp on reality somehow slipping further and further with each thrust you make into that amazingly tight body. It’s the nostalgia—that feeling of being able to hold her again, the feeling of being able to fuck her like you did on those nights after you graduated high school, those nights where her parents weren’t home and she wanted you in ever way possible—that’s making you sink deeper and deeper into this new reality that is Kim Chaewon’s body. 

Then her moans start once more; you give in to the carnal emotions that you’ve been doing a really bad job at suppressing, and almost at once, Chaewon becomes the only thing that matters. Her flesh suddenly feels softer than before, her moans and sighs and cries sounding closer and closer to a melody than a haphazard arrangement of notes, and when she rasps for you to fuck her harder, you’re quick to oblige. 

Screw patience, you’re going to take what’s yours right here and now.

Your hands drift up from her waist, grip her shoulders and pull her till her body is almost upright. Your left hand slides down, wraps around her flat tummy; your right follows suit—you’re practically hugging her. Chaewon’s arms reach behind her, lock themselves around your neck and pull her face closer to yours. She doesn’t turn to kiss you—that’d take too much energy, energy that she would rather put into moaning—so you settle on capturing her earlobe between your lips, sucking on it softly while she starts to moan your name. Then, her confessions start. 

I’ve missed this, I’ve missed you… Oh god, I fucking missed the way your cock stretched me out. So good… So fucking good… This pussy was made for your cock.

Those were just some of the many things you managed to make out. The words were hastily assembled, phonics loosely strung together, and then expelled from those beautiful pink lips in a precipitate manner. There were other things like: I love you, I fucking love you and Oh God I love you as well, but your tried not to make to much of it. Even though you’re lost in paradise, lost in her body, your subconscious is still actively fighting to keep her influence out of your head. Things are already messy—both figuratively and literally—as they are, and the last thing you need is to fall in love with memories of Chaewon while you’re fucking her in such a callous, unrelenting manner. Sex and alexithymia towards an ex is never a good combination—yet here you are, rearranging the insides of Kim Chaewon after agreeing to whatever it was you agreed to before you started (it’s not because you chose to forget, but because you truly can’t remember anything past the point where you stepped through the doorway to your bedroom). 

You push away the thoughts (for now), letting them exit your body together with the growl that you release into her ear—Chaewon, why are you so fucking wet?—as your shaft continues to plunge itself between her slick, wet folds. The cheeks of her ass ripple deliciously with each strike of your crotch against hers, eliciting a raunchy exclamation from her body each time she hilts you to the base of your cock. You’re not going particularly fast—Chaewon suddenly has the capacity to reply, I’m always wet for you, baby—but you’re so utterly deep inside her that it’s driving the both of you to perverted elation. The position compromises your speed, but you know for a fact that Chaewon is more than happy to make the trade off, savouring the feel of every inch of you filling her insides at a considerate yet fervent pace. 

“Baby.” Her pet name for you is really doing dangerous things to your feelings, “Harder. Let me feel all of you, just like last time.”

She turns her head to meet your gaze, and it’s only then that you see the tears streaming down her cheeks. Your best guess: just like how nostalgia has its effect on you, it's impacting her too. Her emotions are being dallied with, just as yours are. She’s feeling things that she can’t describe, and she doesn’t know if it’s the rock-hard meat drilling in and out of her that’s making her feel this way, or if it's the fact that she may very well be falling for you again. You may never fully comprehend the intricate workings of human emotions, but as you lean in and gently draw her lips to yours, you hope to help her make sense of her feelings.

Why does she always make things messier than they have to be, your asking yourself, all while her hand finds your left cheek, gripping it tightly as your lips part and she whispers, “Fucking own me. Make this pussy yours, just like you used to.”

Just like last time, just like you used to—two statements that unwittingly conveyed that she’s dabbling in the past in a foolhardy manner. Damn it Chae… Why are you doing this? You’re thinking, even as you’re riotously making her bouncing breasts you handlebars, pinching her stiff peaks with between the gap of your middle and forefinger as you double down on her. You’re wondering, Why do you have to make this so damn complicated, as she leans back into you, and you mark the skin of her neck with your lips. Why couldn’t you just wait for me? Things wouldn’t have to be this way if you just had some damn patience, you’re pondering, all while she starts to throw herself back onto your cock. It’s hard to tell if she truly understands the emotional state she’s put herself in, you tell yourself. The irony of this statement is not lost on you, and you’re inwardly chortling at yourself as you pull yourself out of your own head.

You return to reality, and you find that Chaewon’s cumming once more. Did she announce its arrival? You don’t know. All you know is that her pussy is tightening rapidly around you, her body is shivering and shuddering against you, and her knees start giving out on her. You steady her against your chest, slowing yourself to a halt as you realise how dangerously close to the edge you are. 

When she taps you on the knee, you take it as a sign to gently lay her back down on the bed. With her belly flat against the mattress, Kim Chaewon reaches behind her and spreads her asscheeks with her fingers. She gives you the slightest of nods; you pull out of her freshly fucked pussy, point the head of your cock at the opening of her ass, and begin to press forward.

Chaewon gasps as your head presses against her tight opening, her body refusing to let you in at first—but you press forward with your hips, slowly parting her entrance. Chaewon squirms and quivers as her opening slowly parts, and soon you are finally inside her. Her hands tighten into fists, scrunching up your bed sheets; a grimace of pain overtakes her partially turned head as you penetrate her ass for the first time. She lets a long hiss escape her lips, and you lean down to kiss the back of her head in an attempt to comfort her, bringing your left hand to match hers on the bed, covering her small hand with your own.

Soon you are halfway inside her ass, and you go no further, letting her get used to the new penetration. When you stop moving, Chaewon lets out a long breath that she didn’t know she was holding.

“You okay?” You’re checking on her out of genuine concern. It’s basic human decency, you’re trying to tell yourself, but you have a sinking feeling that she’s unknowingly broken past your defences. 

“Fuck,” she spits, “fuck you’re so big inside me.”

“Do you want to—”

“Fuck no,” she snaps, “fuck, please don’t stop. I want this. I want you. I want you in my ass.”

The soft sigh you let out makes the hair atop her head flail a little as she wipes the tears from her cheeks. She isn’t crying anymore, but she certainly seems a little embarrassed that she let her emotions get the better of her. 

“Keep going.” She can’t seem to raise her head as she speaks, “Fill me, please…”

Basic human decency drives you to compliance, and so you press forward—all the while, your eyes are affixed to the back of her head, your left hand still grasping hers while she shifts around slightly, adjusting herself to take you in better. The small yelps she occasionally lets slip tells you that she’s in discomfort, but not enough to make you stop entering her asshole. It’s too late to turn back now anyway.

It felt like years, but soon you're fully inside her, buried to the hilt inside Chaewon’s ass.

You slowly draw your shaft outside of Chaewon’s tightly gripping ass for the first time, and once it is halfway out, you slowly push back inside her. She's a quivering and squirming mess, and soon you are slowly pumping in and out of her body, your pace relaxed as you enjoy the tight, hot flesh of Chaewon’s body wrapped around your cock. You’re glad that the sheer sublimity of the sensation is removing your ability to think, allowing you to steep yourself in the moment with a turmoil free mind.

Chaewon’s tightness is overwhelming to say the least. Her pussy was tight, but her ass on another level altogether. Not as wet, of course, but almost overwhelmingly tight and hot, grasping you tightly with each entrance and exit like a glove. This would be the first time you’re entering her like this, and you aren’t sure if you’re doing it right, but soon she’s taking you in and out of her ass smoothly, the pain and discomfort of your initial penetration quickly lessening and giving way to the novel, new sensation of pleasure from having her ass filled.

Chaewon lets a short, sharp gasp escape her lips when you fill her to the hilt—one that takes her by surprise given the slight look of shock that you make out on her features. You reach down with your right hand, gingerly grip her chin and tilt her face up so you can get a better look at her face. Her eyes are glazed over now with pleasure, locking to yours as you start pumping in and out of her asshole. After a while her gasps lessen and then end completely as she becomes used to the hard length pumping in and out of her butt. She reaches up with her right hand to hold yours, and she pulls it down her chin until it’s at her throat. You didn’t know she was into choking, and she had never made you do it before. Then again, you’ve never had her ass before either—there’s a first for everything.

You feel her warm neck pulsing beneath your palm. She squeezes the outside of your hand slightly, causing you to clamp a little bit around her slim neck. The slightly reduced airflow at her throat causes her ass to clench even tighter around you: succulent pleasure to your mind that makes you think you are going insane. The novelty of fucking Chaewon’s ass, your hand around her throat, the carnality, the surprising tenderness of the moment–it’s all so damn overwhelming.

“C-Chae,” you call out to her. Her gaze flickers from the wall to your eyes, and you whisper, “Do you… Do you really want me to—”

“Just fucking do it!” Chaewon gasps, barely attempting to filter the want out of her voice, “Choke me! Cum in me!”

With her permission, you were more than willing to let yourself fall over the edge at this point.

Chaewon’s hand—the one that stops your hand at her throat—tightens, as though willing you to increase your grip on her windpipe. You are still afraid of hurting her—you already feel guilty for causing her pain and discomfort (physically and emotionally). But her hand on top of yours, clasped around her throat, dismissed any worry you may have had about taking things too far. Your orgasm beckons, and the hand around Chaewon’s pale throat tightens involuntarily with each thrust in her hot, tight hole.

Do it… own me—her voice is straining—Make yours again. Choke me while you fuck my ass… Use me! Fill me… Fill my ass with your cum!

With a few final, short, hard thrusts into Chaewon’s ass, you bury yourself as deep inside her as you can before finally letting go. Thick, hot cum spurts from your shaft into Chaewon’s willing depths, her hot, tight ass squeezing and pulsing around your cock as if milking every last drop from you. As you cum, your hand around her throat involuntarily tightens, and the moan that escapes Chaewon’s throat turns into a gasp—the dark part of you takes obscene pleasure in that fact.

Both of your bodies quiver and shake as the intense pleasure of your orgasm overwhelms your senses. It seems to last forever—longer than any other orgasm you’ve had. Nothing else exists for those long seconds, aside from Chaewon’s shaking body beneath you and the hot mess you’ve made inside her.

Your cock pulses a few final times as your orgasm slowly subsides and releases the last spurts of cum into Chaewon’s body and you regretfully come down from your high. After a few more seconds of treasuring the feel of the hot, creamy mess you’ve left inside her, you slowly draw your half-soft cock out of her body. Within seconds, white, pearly semen begins to leak out of her and onto the reddened, sore cheeks of her ass. Your eyes remain glued to Chaewon’s still-quivering form as she tries and mostly fails to collect herself. Slowly, she turns on her side, her whole body heaving like she’s completed a marathon. Her inner thighs glisten, your juices and hers flow down her naked skin. It's now that you remember what you agreed to before you started: Just for tonight…

“Hey…” Her voice has a lilt as she beckons you to her side. “Cuddle with me… Just for tonight.”

There she goes again.

Yeah, right... you sigh inwardly. The way she's looking at you tells you that the feelings brought forth tonight will persist as long as she permits. Maybe, just maybe, you should have turned her down, made her come as she was, and kept her at a distance; but she’s already snuggled up in your arms by the time you finish this train of thought. She kisses you on your jaw, then on your neck, then utters a soft good night baby before nuzzling herself into the crook of your neck.

Physically and emotionally, you've made a mess of her. And, in turn, she's made a mess of you too—physically and emotionally.

But you choose to forget that, just for tonight.

***

She slips out of your apartment at God knows what time, leaving like a thief in the night and leaving a note in her wake: I took one of your shirts. Will return it if I feel like it. 

Then below the message: P.S. Forget that last night happened. Go continue being a player. 

“I… Can’t believe this bitch.” You’re leaning against the door—the place where she’d stuck on the note—as you finish reading it. You decide to crumple it and toss it away—it’s the easiest thing to forget about her anyway. 

To be clear: You had no clue what your opinion on Chaewon was anymore, nor did you know what your status with her was (though the note suggests that she’s going to return to her usual bratty behaviour). Sometimes, you wish that there could be a bright digital sign perpetually hanging above her head, providing interpretations to her erratic behaviour. 

Yea… That would be great.

Just as you throw out her bowl of fried rice, there comes a knock on your door. You’re surprised to find Hwang Yeji standing there by herself. 

“O-Oh… Yeji,” you mutter. 

“That has to be the most asinine statement I’ve ever heard,” she derides. You purse your lips and scratch the back of your head, then you ask, “Do you uh… Need to borrow something?”

Yeji sighs and shakes her head. She’s quick to get to the point, “Are you free this afternoon?”

You nod, then she tells you, “I need you to follow me somewhere today. Meet me in the lobby at 3pm.”

She’s about to leave you with that vague request, but you’re quick to ask what this is about. It’s unwonted of her to suddenly request to meet you, and you’re painfully aware (or at least you thought you were) that she knows that this is unprecedented of her. Laconic and biting as ever, she turns back to you and tells you: I need you to help me talk to someone.

“W-Who?” You’re quick to ask. She turns her back to you as she answers.

“My junior. She wants to be our saxophonist.”

_________________________

What is popping gang. I did not get a chance to look through this thoroughly, nor was I able to get anyone to beta read for me :p. Hope you didn't have your bars raised to high for this.

~Nichuuu

[theorist-fox]

Do you have any tips for writing Simon's accent? I love your writing btw

MMMM this is an interesting ask!

In my guide (which is not professional at all, but eh, it's something) I linked a few resources I use for English/British English (step 8, specifically).

When it comes to British idioms, I definitely ask for help—for example, "How would you say X in British English?" or "How do you think Simon would say it—Manchester accent/dialect and all that?"

I read a lot of fan fiction when I have time, and I've found certain authors who write Simon's accent in a way that makes me hear his voice in my head.

For example, @/shotmrmiller truncates Simon’s dialogue in a way that just hits right, or @/xoxunhinged (who’s British!) delivers his lines in a way I love. @/void-my-warranty taught me to chop off as much of his dialogue as possible—which fits his character perfectly since he’s blunt and not very chatty (unless he’s happy).  They also made a guide on writing Simon’s character that’s super helpful! @/mayyourbaconburn has one of the most in-character Ghosts I’ve ever read, and their dialogue is spot-on every time. Highly recommend their stories! @/bitterrfruit writes a harsher Simon, way more blunt and spiteful—dialogues always tickle me just right in her stories too!

If while reading you can hear Simon's VA saying those things, then you hit jackpot.

When I don’t want to bother people with my questions, I listen to British dialogues (movies, YouTube videos, podcasts) or rewatch the game's cutscenes (which are easy to find on YouTube). Then, I focus on how certain words are pronounced.

I tend to drop:

"H"s at the beginning of words (e.g., "Come 'ere" or, if murmured, "C'mere" since the aspiration on the h is barely audible).

"T"s in the middle of words (e.g., "Swee'heart"—once again, I can't hear the T being pronounced).

"T"s at the end of words (e.g., "Alrigh'?" or "Tha'"—see above ^).

I truncate words such as:

"For" -> "F'" ("For me?" -> "F'me?"),

"It's" -> "'s" ("It's alright" -> "S'alrigh'"),

"To" -> "T'" ("Don't have to do it" -> "Don't have t'do it")

"You" -> "Ya", or "Y'", occasionally "Ye" ("Did you hear me?" -> "Did ya hear me?", or, "Y'hear?")

Basically, I learn from other writers and listen to British people talking—bonus points if they're from Northern England (Manchester area; sort of north-....west?).

That said, even though Simon is canonically from Manchester, multiple sources have told me his accent doesn’t really match the area… so yeah, do with that what you will 😆

I would also like to add that you can write an accent or a dialect without dropping letters or modifying the word—most of the time it's how the line is delivered that makes the dialogue believable!

So, my advice would be... read fan fiction, read books (@/legityoots recently recommended a romcom with a love interest from Manchester, called When Grumpy Met Sunshine), talk to native speakers if you can, and consume media in your free time!

And remember, Ghost literally has about five voice lines across three games, so you can write him however you like. Canon personality is as flat as the coffee table in your living room.

Good luck, and have fun writing! 🧡

[charseraph]

About to make no sense as I think out loud so bear with me. So we know Ragatha has penultimate circus seniority from Kinger, who’s been there the longest. And Zooble is the second-newest from Pomni, the newest. That leaves Jax and Gangle with an unknown order of arrival somewhere between them.

Kinger will be sieved. Zooble will still be intact but clearly unwell, not exactly ready to jump off the table, theoretically needing a couple months of acclimation to reality before they could have some autonomy. Someone should be ready to undergo sieving, someone in experimental stasis, and someone truncated for biomaterial.

I think Ragatha should be truncated, ready to be sieved. Jax is truncated in an asymmetrical and/or low-bulk-utility way. Gangle is… hm. Maybe already sieved? Oh, maybe Ragatha’s already sieved, but freshly, so there are some “scaffolds” in her container that show her system is adjusting. This would contrast with Kinger’s older set-and-left container, which collects dust sometimes but runs as smooth as its first day. Possibly.

Okay great. Jax will be truncated as mentioned. Gangle will be… that’s a hard one. A part of me wants a mesh. Alright, she’ll be a mesh with — Wait I got it! She’ll be currently undergoing sieving, in place of Ragatha being “held pattern” for minimization surgery. Gangle can be a set of weak shoulder sinew and vitals with some intact dermis remaining. You can almost see her person there.

Kinger: mesh

Ragatha: new mesh

Gangle: stably en-route to minimization, truncated

Jax: truncated

Zooble: intact, deteriorating

Pomni: intact, new

I think of all of these, Zooble or Ragatha might be the saddest to see. Zooble because their appearance won’t be something unfound in reality. And also, they are at the end of their window where, if escape really were possible, they’d still be able to come out approximately how they went in.

Ragatha, because her noosciocircus actions and words would imply she holds out some sort of hope of endurance, but her reality reveals that she has been freshly consigned to her last home already. She now plays a waiting game against her container’s preservation effectiveness, and she will probably lose.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

California zoo accessibility data dump

I just recently got back from a short (and fully covid-cautious) zoo road trip in Oregon and California, and wanted to share my notes re: accessibility at the facilities I visited. I'll get this all integrated into the spreadsheet, too.

Wildlife Safari - Winston, Oregon

This is a large drive-thru safari park with a free walk-about area attached that contains some small exhibits. Guests stay inside their cars the entire drive-thru, although there's at least one place to stop and sit in a gazebo to rest and use the bathroom (porta-potty only). You can pull over to watch animals for longer, and go through multiple times if you missed anything. It's a long drive-thru and there isn't really a good way to truncate the experience if you've got some kind of emergency. The roads are not flat, but they're well maintained and not bumpy.

The walkabout area is very small and contains bathrooms, food options, and other guest services. The paths are mostly concrete and well tended, although you do have to cross the steam train tracks to get to lion/some of the lemur viewing. I believe the Australia walkabout area was also unpaved. There's lots of parking in a big, flat, paved lot.

Sacramento Zoo - Sacramento, CA

This is a very cute, small inner-city facility - a good option if you don't want to try to walk a huge zoo in one day. There's lots of shade from all the plants and a good amount of benches throughout, including picnic tables with shade canopies. The paths are almost entirely flat and paved, with the exception of a boardwalk ramp up to the giraffe feeding and okapi viewing platforms. The cafe has gluten-free and vegetarian listings (maybe vegan?) on their menu. No straws are provided for animal safety, but if you need one, they can give you a reusable curly-straw from the slushies (kinda long and awkward for a normal cup) as an accommodation. They've got both water fountains and water bottle filling stations. Being build in a larger city park and recreation complex, there isn't a dedicated parking lot just for the zoo: the closest is across the street, shared with another attraction, and is kinda small. I've never had issues finding parking when I've gone, but sometimes it does involve a bunch of walking to get to the zoo entrance - if you have mobility or stamina limitations, probably best to get dropped off at the entrance and wait (there are benches).

San Francisco Zoo - San Francisco, CA

The SF Zoo is huge. There's lots of green / garden / swamp space that doesn't have habitats in it, but it means exhibits can be pretty far away, so plan your route accordingly. (Going out to the grizzly bears is the longest loop). Depending on the time of day, there's not always a ton of shade for guests either. There's a decent amount of benches, and quite a few are in decent proximity to animal viewing. After a somewhat long but not steep hill right at the entrance, the paths are all paved and fairly flat. There's a hill going down into/up from the Australia area / kids playground, but it's the only one I really noticed. There's a long elevated boardwalk through the lemur habitats that connects to the top of the new Madagascar construction - if you can't do stairs, as of Spring 2024, that's the only way to get up there to look down on the mandrills or see the top of the fossa habitat. (It's still under construction, so there might be an elevator in the building in the future). Back by the grizzlies, there's an old indoor rainforest building - while there's buttons to automatically open the door going in, I didn't find any on the first inside door going out. It makes sense they don't want both doors to open at once since it's a bird airlock, but not having independent ones on each door meant the day I used an ECV I got stuck in there until a nice staff member noticed.

All three times I've ever been to SF most of the little food kiosks haven't been open, and the vending machines for drinks have been hit and miss - so bring your own, or stock up at the cafe if you need to have supplies with you - but there are water fountains and water bottle filling stations around the zoo. There are interpretive audio boxes through the zoo in English and Spanish, used with a key you get at the entrance(?), but I heard a lot of complaints in passing about some of them not working. There's lots of parking at the zoo in a flat paved lot, and there's a specific dropoff area on one side for rideshares/mobility needs.

Oakland Zoo - Oakland, CA

To be clear up front - Oakland was the hardest facility to visit on this whole trip, with regards to mobility. We went twice, and I used an ECV (electric scooter) one and walked the other. Neither option was easy and both were exhausting. Oakland is a super hilly facility - you basically have to drive up a major hill to get to the zoo. The bottom half of the lower zoo can only be reached by going down pretty steep paths. The hills are also not graded to be "flat", so if you're in a wheelchair or ECV, you're going to have to lean to compensate for the tilt and balance the chair... while controlling it going down a steep hill. It's exhausting and kinda scary. (I don't even let other people carry my camera because $$, but I had to ask for help so I could focus on driving the ECV on those hills). There's also a lot of areas of the pathways that are not in the best repair, or patterned with pressed-in images, and multiple places actually have brass bugs embedded in the pavement so that they stick out above the surface. Lots of tripping hazards and/or things to rattle your teeth out rolling over. A couple places in the upper zoo (the California wilds area) the paths switch from paved to sand and back again, for drainage, maybe? On the upside, there's a lot of benches everywhere, including directly across from prime viewing areas.

Getting up to the upper zoo requires using a gondola - there's no walking option. You can actually take wheelchairs and ECVs on these, but you have to be ready to advocate for yourself. Normally, they don't stop the carriages completely, and expect people to walk on while they're still moving slowly. You can ask them to slow them down for you (I did, because knee issues plus torque is bad), or stop it completely if you need the time/help. When I took an ECV on, they had me disembark and get in one carriage, and they loaded it into the subsequent ones. This is fine because I can walk and stand on concrete for a while without it, but I'm not sure how that practice would work for people who need their mobility aids the whole time. They were very nice about managing the stopping and the loading and didn't make it feel like an imposition, too. If they stop the carriages completely at any point, there will be a loud buzzer/alarm when the ride starts back up. If you're close, it's pretty loud and startling. As they leave the track at the bottom the gondolas tip and dip a little, which can be scary if you're not expecting it - I think it's just the transition of the car from the loading bay onto the track itself. The rest of the ride is very smooth. The track is pretty high up and gives a great view of the bay and the surrounding cities, but face uphill if you don't do well with heights. Once at the upper zoo, the path from bald eagles through jaguar is mostly a boardwalk, but it's not too bumpy.

Oakland's parking is hard if you're not there early in the day, IMO. The overflow parking gets pretty far from the entrance, and starts to go up the hill towards the upper zoo. If the lot looks busy, drop anyone with mobility/stamina issues off at the entrance before parking. Unlike many other zoos I've visited, Oakland's ECVS have added sunshades, which is really nice (and which I should have used).

Monterey Zoo - Salinas, CA

This is a fairly small facility with most habitats on one level, but some big cats and bears are up a pretty big hill. The walkways are paved and flat, and there's an ADA-graded boardwalk ramp that takes you to the top of the hill. The pipes used for the handrails on both the stairs and the ramp get very hot in the sun, however. There's a boardwalk up to the rhino overlook. They indicate that their bathrooms are accessible, but the ones in the main building didn't have bars for transferring - I didn't check the ones up on the hill. At one point in the day speakers along the path started playing really loud pop music (drowned out the birds) and it was very overwhelming. There's lots of handicapped parking spots across from the front entrance, but if you don't have a tag, the rest of the spots are up a bit of a hill and a small walk from the entrance. They do have a note, though, that they can help if you need accessible parking and don't see any, so you could probably call/have someone to go in and ask for an accommodation.

Sequoia Park Zoo - Eureka, CA

This is another nice small facility, very doable for a half-day trip. The paths are paved and flat, and there's benches available. There's a lot of shade, although it can depend on the time of day, and places to fill a water-bottle. The sky-walk through the redwoods is accessible, but might be a little difficult depending on mobility limitations - its' a very sturdy boardwalk through the canopy of the tall trees. (I had more thoughts on this from my last visit, I'll dig out those notes). If you can do even part of it, it's worth it, and there's places to turn around. Because it's in a residential area of the town there's not a huge dedicated parking lot, but lots of street parking and a decent lot directly across the street. I've never had difficulty finding parking, and you can drop people off at the entrance easily.

[rbrooksdesign]

"DMT-EDMT Series for December Geometry #31"

TOP: acrylic, 17"x14", 2023. This is TRUE Mp127-PN8128

MIDDLE: acrylic, 17"x14", 2023. This is TRUE Mp8191-PN33550336

BOTTOM: digital, 2024. truncated Divisor Matrix Table (tDMT) with the first 6 TRUE Mp-PN's highlighted in BOLD.

The same two doublings seen vertically in the TOP and MIDDLE images can be seen as ROWS in the tDMT view. Start with the BOLD PN and work bakc (LEFT) for Doubling 2 and up to the TOP and back (LEFT) for Doubling 1.

[peanuts-fan]

How “Peanuts” Created a Space for Thinking

Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip invited readers to contemplate the big picture on a small scale.

By Nicole Rudick      August 6, 2019

Illustration Courtesy Peanuts Worldwide

In “The Storyteller,” an essay from 1936, the German-Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin describes what he sees as the beginning of the end of the oral tradition in the West. The collective trauma of the First World War and its aftereffects were making the communication of shared experiences through the telling of tales a thing of the past. He writes, “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” At the heart of this historical process is a grim efflorescence of experience: the sense that one is adrift in an unfamiliar landscape, a feeling that would endure as a defining condition of the twentieth century, when the world was expanding and becoming delimited at the same time. A few decades after Benjamin published his essay, the writer Luc Sante and his parents immigrated to the United States from Belgium. Sante’s mother and father spoke very little English, and, “tinged with a certain bitter realism,” they observed the foreign culture that surrounded them from an intimidating distance, as Sante explains in his introduction to “Peanuts Every Sunday: 1961-1965.” “It wasn’t surprising, then,” Sante continues, “that my father, an intelligent, capable man who had been dealt a series of bad hands by life—poverty, war, a truncated education—should see himself reflected in Charlie Brown.” Though he would come to be domesticated and beloved by Americans of all stripes, Charles Schulz’s comic-strip boy spoke to the émigré’s sense of dislocation, tough luck, and calamity.

There may be no more tiny, fragile body than Charlie Brown’s—the abbreviated torso, economized limbs, and naked, vulnerable head. That head: with a modicum of lines, Schulz produced an untouched, capacious orb on which a world of expression could play. In the Sunday strip for October 15, 1961, the title panel shows Charlie Brown’s head as a table globe, imprinted with a grid of latitude and longitude. The strip spins out the joke: to illustrate to Linus the distance between two locations (the absurd pairing of Texas and Singapore), Lucy plots the points over the top of Charlie Brown’s bare, impassive pate.

Surrounding this vulnerable human form is a wider world: hostile, exhausting, potent in its occasions for failure. Untethered from the historical moment, Benjamin’s agents of change, those “torrents and explosions” (like Hamlet’s enduring “whips and scorns of time,” which extend even to include the intimate “pangs of despised love”) are here as perennial humiliations played out in a fathomably unfathomable universe. “Peanuts,” Schulz once said, “deals in defeat.” At its core, the comic parses existential angst, strip by strip—not Cold War anxiety, a cloud under which “Peanuts” developed and flourished, but the garden-variety anxieties found in everyday life. Charlie Brown is the comic’s everyman (“Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you’re the Charlie Browniest,” Linus complains in a 1965 “Peanuts” TV film), adept at losing one day and still rising the next to see things through. And yet, as grounded in real life as it seems to be, “Peanuts” shows very little of the actual world. The comic is striking for its spare visual details, its generic, repetitious settings, and its constrained action. Although the early strips were busy with detail, Schulz soon developed a style that was formally minimal. There is little in the way of depth perspective—and the action in each panel moves right and left, as if on a stage.

Illustration Courtesy Peanuts Worldwide

I remember noticing, as a child, this circumscribed world in which Charlie Brown and the gang air their problems. It was so markedly different from that of another deeply felt, philosophical comic of my youth, “Calvin and Hobbes,” which visually and imaginatively bursts at the seams. In the “Peanuts” strip from Sunday, June 9, 1963, Charlie Brown and Sally admire the night sky as he explains the future movement of the stars that make up the Big Dipper. All eight panels depict the same scene: Charlie Brown and Sally atop a patch of earth, the dark sky engulfing their bodies. Nothingness surrounds them—both formally, on the page, and literally, in the black yawn of space. Nothing much happens here, yet, in its openness and conversation, the strip is alive with wonder, possibility, and humanity. Schulz does a lot with nothingness. In another Sunday strip, from November 19, 1961, the title panel sets Charlie Brown’s round head alongside the great round face of a clock (his anxious expression and bird’s nest of hair make his features a counterpoint to the clock’s uniformity). We are invited to consider the solitude of the school lunch hour, when Charlie Brown must sit with his thoughts, literally: each of the panels below the top row features the lone figure and a speech bubble giving voice to his interior monologue. The spareness of each frame rivals that of the stage set for Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”: only a bench and a paper-bag lunch. It’s no accident that the evenly distributed, postage-stamp-size panels number twelve, like the hours on a clock. Each movement of Charlie Brown’s head—he looks out and down, then up and right—is activated by the reader’s eye moving in rhythm from panel to panel to panel, like the ticking of a second hand.

That rhythmic deliberateness—specifically its leisurely meter—is essential to the way that “Peanuts” functions as a space for thought. A “Peanuts” strip, even one seemingly packed with goings-on, unfolds patiently. The strip from Sunday, April 18, 1965, depicts a disagreement (sparked by Lucy, of course) on the pitcher’s mound. Lucy wants Charlie Brown, who’s pitching, to “brush this guy back,” but Charlie Brown refuses, and an argument about morality ensues. Charlie Brown’s qualms about throwing a beanball make him a world-historical hypocrite, according to the others. “What about the way the early settlers treated the Indians? Was that moral? How about the Children’s Crusade? Was that moral?” Each new panel brings a fresh participant and perspective to the mound, and accusations become colloquy. By the penultimate panel, ten players stand on or around Charlie Brown’s perch (a pulpit overrun by parishioners), and five speech balloons, thick with philosophical reasoning (“Define morality!”), fill the sky over their heads. But Schulz makes order out of this chaos, arraying his characters in a single line (the panel is unambiguously “Last Supper”–ish, with characters, except for Charlie Brown, grouped in threes). One reads the scene from left to right, both together with and independent of the dialogue—a tidy progression that can be taken in with a serene sweep of the eye. (The thoughtful pacing in “Peanuts” is reminiscent of that of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The two also share a rejection of the violence and manic energy that characterize other children’s media of the time.) The rhythm of the larger Sunday strips is particularly effective, as they have more space in which to work. But the same effect plays out on a smaller scale in the dailies. In a four-panel baseball strip from August 5, 1972, Lucy harangues Charlie Brown from left field. The entire top half of the second panel is tightly packed with her rant, rendered in a thicket of bold type and punctuated at the end with an eye-catching, electrifying “BOOOOOOO!!” Her energy is palpable, but it cannot last. In the next panel, she sits on the ground, alone and silent, like a calm ocean, and the reader’s eye rests on her form and the open white space surrounding it for a surprisingly long time before moving on to the last, bitterly self-reflective panel.

Few comic strips feel more like a series of vignettes than “Peanuts,” especially when the already minimal scenery disappears in favor of empty white or monochrome backdrops, as though a thick curtain has descended to pull a character further out of time and into some more concentrated realm of feeling. The generous allotment of white space in the daily strips originated not from design but from necessity. As David Michaelis details in “Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography,” the comic strip was first sold as a potential space filler to be used in any section of a newspaper, even the classifieds. To draw the reader’s eye, Schulz opted for the less-is-more approach, aiming to “fight back” with white space to echo what he once called the strip’s “very slight incidents.” The usefulness of that simplicity became clear as Schulz’s writing deepened. “The more they developed complex powers and appetites while staying faithful to their cut-out, shadow-play simplicity,” Michaelis writes of the strip’s characters, “the easier it would be for Schulz to declare the hard things he was set on saying.” Had Schulz filled his panels with visual distractions, the business of examining interior problems might have proved less successful.

The formal qualities of “Peanuts” made it an outlier. As a boy, Schulz read comics that incorporated tight cross-hatching, deep vanishing points, and threadlike lines, and also the masterly modernism of Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley.” But such visual enrichment didn’t appeal to him as a practicing cartoonist—he was, by his own admission, “a great believer in the mild in cartooning.” What of his comic’s contemporaries? Mort Walker’s “Beetle Bailey” and Hank Ketcham’s “Dennis the Menace” began around the same time as “Peanuts.” “Beetle Bailey” is an uncomplicated gag-dependent strip drawn with what Michaelis calls “elastic visual exaggerations,” and “Dennis the Menace” relies on a wealth of visual details to deliver its absurdist situational humor. Both grew faster than “Peanuts” in readership and recognition, but neither has attained its broad cultural impact.

One can easily forget how unlikely this cultural ascendency might have seemed when “Peanuts” débuted. Schulz created an oddly shaped boy, an anthropomorphized dog, and a host of children who don’t behave or speak as children do, and he placed them in an efficient, nondescript setting—only on the surface of reality, you might say. The reader should be skeptical of this setup. And yet Charlie Brown’s emotional struggle is familiar, and the reader is roused by it. Bertolt Brecht would have approved of “Peanuts.” He sought the same “partial” illusion for the theatre, he said, “in order that it may always be recognized as an illusion.” Too complete an impression of naturalness and one forgets that this isn’t reality but art. Brecht would have us read not literally but critically and interpretively. Though “Peanuts” does not have all the same aims as a piece of didactic political theatre like Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” it, too, is meant to be engaged with, not skimmed over. The strip “deals in intelligent things,” Schulz once said, “things that people have been afraid of.” He did not consider “Peanuts” a children’s comic; even in Snoopy, his most kid-friendly character, Schulz created a self-willed, occasionally anxious fantasist.

I wonder if Brecht would have loved Lucy best, as I do. Born into “Peanuts” as a “fussbudget,” she soon became a prime mover behind the strip’s conflict and Charlie Brown’s feelings of disillusionment. Lucy is assertive, nervy, confident, stubborn, and manipulative; she can moon over a beau and still excoriate him for his inattentiveness. And, despite her near-constant bluster, she is a person who feels profound pain. In the Sunday strip for June 30, 1963, she feels low and rages, “I’ve never had anything, and I never will have anything!” Linus patiently replies, “Well, for one thing, you have a little brother who loves you.” And Lucy, her reserves spent, cries in his arms. Her modernity is on display best in her psychiatrist’s booth, which offers a kind of glimpse behind the scenes—that break with illusion that Brecht insisted on. A parody of the semiseriousness of a kid’s lemonade stand, Lucy’s booth calls itself a psychiatrist’s practice but offers none of the customary trappings other than its desk—but this pared-down presentation (along with, perhaps, Lucy’s confident authority) allows Charlie Brown to recognize the setup’s purpose. The reader recognizes it, too, but sees what Charlie Brown does not (or chooses not to): the booth is a façade, in construction and intent. Unlike the naïve young analysand, we won’t be beguiled by Lucy’s blunt advice. Still, we turn it over in our minds as we read, struck by some bigger truth in counsel that we know to be ill-advised.

Yet another defining visual feature of “Peanuts” is a low wall at which the characters sometimes pause for conversation. Some daily strips take place entirely behind this wall, like the one from Tuesday, May 6, 1958, which has Charlie Brown and Lucy leaning on its even stonework, facing out at the reader, in all four panels. The wall strikes me as a decidedly theatrical element, as makeshift as any that could be wheeled out onto a stage. The panels’ lines make a neat proscenium arch. (It is so obvious a device that when I see it I think of Snout in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” who, playing the part of a wall in the play within a play, insists, “This loam, this roughcast, and this stone doth show / That I am that same wall. The truth is so.”) If Lucy’s booth divides characters, with one on each side of the desk, and gives her an air of dialogic authority, then the wall is more Socratic, a site that encourages coöperative deliberation and reflection. In the strip for Monday, March 17, 1969, Linus and Lucy are at the wall. “I have a lot of questions about life, and I’m not getting any answers!” she complains, adding, in the next two panels, “I want some real honest-to-goodness answers. . . . I don’t want a lot of opinions. . . . I want answers!” In the last panel, Linus offers an answer that isn’t an answer, one that is itself a question and can only elicit further questions: “Would true or false be all right?”

Illustration Courtesy Peanuts Worldwide

Through “Peanuts,” Schulz wanted to tell hard truths about, as he said, “intelligent things.” But the main truth he tells is that there are no answers to the big questions. In the long run, no one wins and no one loses; this isn’t drama—it’s life. The strip’s solace is that the reader isn’t alone in facing these fraught issues, and its gift is a space in which she is invited to think, to contemplate the big picture on a small scale, like soaking in the emotional ambience of a Rothko painting. It’s tempting, and desirable, perhaps, to think of “Peanuts” as a mirror in which the reader sees and is absorbed by her own reflection, but that view undermines the elegant simplicity of Schulz’s creation: powerfully complex characters who, together, represent the constituent parts of humanity and who operate in a shadow play, to borrow Michaelis’s term. Schulz created in Charlie Brown “a man who reflects about his part,” as Benjamin writes of the actor in Brecht’s concept of epic theatre. (And here, again, we are not so far from Hamlet.) The irony of the visual flatness and economy of “Peanuts” is that they engender a capacious space—room enough both for Charlie Brown’s reflection on Schulz’s hard truths and for the reader’s own consideration of these big ideas. The strip’s achievement, and a significant reason for its longevity, is its creation of a space of inquiry that is never closed off.

Very early in the comic’s history, Schulz didn’t fully know his characters, in the way that a novelist or playwright can invent a set of characters but then must follow those characters’ lead to understand where they are meant to go and what they are meant to do. One strip of “Peanuts” can be satisfying in the way a single, shining sentence of a novel can be satisfying; we pin it on the wall as a reminder of an idea or a feeling, and it can stand on its own in that way, but it is also always only a fragment of a more expansive tale. It isn’t enough to see Lucy pull the football out from under Charlie Brown once; the point is that she does it again and again and again. The repetition of the act, from strip to strip, autumn to autumn, produces the same question anew each time: Why does she do it, and how does he respond? And, each time, the answer is different. (Charlie Brown “loses in so many miserable ways,” Schulz observed in an interview with Al Roker on “Today,” in 1999.)

The thoughtfulness with which Schulz examines humanity does not expire and does not cease to provoke astonishment (much like Lucy’s ongoing charade with the football). In the Sunday strip from November 26, 1961, Snoopy spends a dozen wordless panels bounding through curtains of rain that slash vertically and violently through each scene. Schulz punctuates the beagle’s short bursts of speed, rendered on monochromatic backgrounds, with tenuous moments of peace, as he pauses in doorways and under umbrellas—small moments of reprieve amid a visual cacophony. The final panel finds him recumbent atop his doghouse: the rain still falls in brutal torrents, but he is able to cope with it, a tender body at rest in a familiar landscape at last.

This essay was drawn from the anthology “The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life,” edited by Andrew Blauner, which will be published this fall, by the Library of America.

[potato-frenzy]

Please imagine:

Chilchuck comes back from everything, not really changed but there's more grey in his hair and he's eased up on the drink just a little. He sees his girls, let's them fuss over him because this job was a rough one. He's not a talker and they grew up knowing that about him, says what he needs or thinks is important.

But he tells them about Laios and Marcille and Falin and Senshi and all the rest. It's truncated and short on detail but he tells it. All the way to the end.

And then he makes dinner for them, he's no stranger to the kitchen. Cooked for them plenty when their mother needed him to. But he's learned such depth of technique that his daughters practically cry at how good it is. And he suddenly realized why Senshi was so firm with him about eating and why he was so finicky about cooking.

Or rather, he remembered why it's so important to feed your younguns good food.

Later on, his wife comes back from a trip she had been on. She's surprised to see Chilchuck home, she'd half expected him to have finally bitten it this time. But she takes one look at him at the table and simply says:

"Someone's been feeding you."

"Yeah, his name is Senshi. A real character, you'll love him. Taught me a few things too. Come eat, hon, I gotta tell you about the handsomest dwarf anyone ever saw-"

[perseidlion]

This is why streaming is dying.

I'm Canadian, and I used to watch Star Trek on Crave. Crave saved us for awhile from the fracturing of the streaming landscape because it stayed as an umbrella service for quite some time. I used to get Star Trek, HBO, WB shows, Starz, Sony stuff...basically Hulu + HBO + Paramount. That was actually worth it because for the same monthy fee I could get House of the Dragon, Star Trek and more.

But that wasn't going to last forever. When Paramount+ launched in Canada, Star Trek got taken off Crave. I'm a huge Star Trek fan but even I couldn't justify a FIFTH streaming service just for Trek.

So I waited until Discovery was finished. And then I binged it and season 4 of Lower Decks. And then I cancelled. I won't get it again until S3 of Strange New Worlds and Season 4 of Lower Decks are finished, then I'll binge and cancel again.

There is literally nothing else on P+ I want to watch. I looked, because if there was something I'd cancel Netflix for a bit. But it's all movies I've seen and don't want to rewatch, shows I already have access to on other streamers, or things I have no interest in.

When the networks were working together to put lots of tasty treats under one streamer, it was absolutely worth it. I'd pay $20 a month for Crave if HBO kept making good shows (instead of cancelling them, RIP Our Flag Means Death) and if P+ had lots of Trek (and...didn't keep cancelling those shows like they did Lower Decks and Discovery.) Between that and Trek that would mean I always had a show releasing on the platform that I wanted to watch.

As long as there isn't a steady diet of things that appeal to me, I WILL keep subscribing, binging, and cancelling. Churn is the reason these networks aren't profitable. But there is literally no incentive for me to NOT do that when the things I want to watch are scattered across 5-6 different streamers, each charging $15+ a month.

In trying to get their slice of the pie, the networks have guaranteed there isn't enough food on their buffet to keep people coming back for more.

It creates a vicious cycle. This fracturing means there's not enough budget to support the flagship shows/franchises. Then, they get cancelled and/or budget reduced. So they take away or vastly reduce the thing I want to watch the most.

PLUS none of the networks are nurturing the cult hits/franchises of the future. Shows that have the potential to be the reason I subscribe are being cut off at the knees after virtually no promotion.

I watch every new show like Dead Boy Detectives knowing there is a very high likelihood that this will be the only season I'll get to watch. So much potential is left on the table. If there were four or more shows like Dead Boy Detectives and Kaos getting ongoing commitments from Netflix I wouldn't even consider cancelling my subscription. Instead, I know that any show that isn't an immediate cultural moment is probably getting the axe, or getting two seasons, max. Especially if it's SF&F. Especially if it's queer.

We live in the world where even the critically-acclaimed and franchise-based House of the Dragon is getting truncated episode runs and reduced support.

Regardless of how you feel about how Game of Thrones ended, that franchise is a cultural juggernaut. House of the Dragon is legitimately good and packed with talent. The rough patches of Season 2 can be easily traced back to reduced budgets/cut episode run at the last minute that forced the production team to scramble and adapt.

Honestly. Is there anyone actually committing to their series other than FX, AMC, and Amazon with Rings of Power? Although RoP can also be considered a sunk cost fallacy since Amazon invested a SHIT TON into the IP and the series, so they need it to work. They also have a wobbly track record supporting other shows. (I will never forgive them for cancelling A Leage of Their Own.)

FX and AMC are the only networks that feel like they're actually supporting their content. And what do you get for that? Shogun, one of the best shows in recent memory. The show absolutely swept awards season (and rightfully so) and is now setting itself up to be a tentpole show in the mold of such classics of the historical fiction genre like Deadwood, The Tudors, and Rome.

Interview With the Vampire, is an AMC show which has a very active and passionate fandom eager for more of it and Anne Rice's Immortal Universe. This is a rare example of a new franchise (albeit based on an existing, well-know IP) is really finding its feet and its audience. The audience for it is not of the size of something like House of the Dragon, but AMC is feeding the audience it does have unapologetically, with queer camp horror full of messy, toxic relationships.

Then there's What We Do in the Shadows, which seems to be ending on its own terms this year. FX is a Disney subsidary which somehow manages to commit to the series it creates, which proves it can still be done.

I do hope that FX and AMC continues to support their weird and wonderful shows, and I hope they keep getting rewarded for it with high ratings and awards so that the rest of the networks will smarten up.

If we hadn't just come out of a golden age of streaming where every network was producing excellent TV, all of this heavy cancellation and fragmentation wouldn't be quite so devastating.

Entertainment seems like it's constantly in a feast or famine churn. Right now, we're careening toward famine, which is full of one-season shows, overextended franchises, flagship shows being cut/restrained and a whole lot of cheap dreck.

It's the reality TV heyday all over again and I hate it.

[alexanderwales]

Adapting Worth the Candle into a Pixar Movie

Worth the Candle is 1.6 million words and covers a lot of characters, themes, and events. The average Pixar movie is around 90 minutes.

How would you stuff one into the other?

The first answer is that you wouldn't, obviously. But that's boring, so I'm going to try to game out how I would attempt it, if I had to, mostly as a writing exercise that involves stretching the planning/plotting muscles. This post will spoil most of the story, in the same way an adaptation would, while also missing like 99% of what actually happens in the story.

We start with a scene of Juniper playing some tabletop game with his friends. His friend Arthur is introduced. This is a short scene, maybe of their first game together, and then we immediately go into montage, showing the character sheets stacking up, the book collection growing, the endless campaign notes, all that visual story-telling passage-of-time goodness. Some of the other players rotate, but Juniper is always there at the head of the table, behind an increasingly tattered screen, and Arthur is always by his side.

Then we have another scene where someone wants to start without Arthur, and Juniper says "no, no, he'll be here, he's never late", and he gets a phone call, and we see his eyes widen, and then we go to another montage of time passing, this one showing the world darkened, the same game table, the seats slowly emptying as more and more people drop out, until it's just Juniper alone. We see behind his screen, images that evoke his pain and anger, plans for a game that no one wants to play, and Arthur's empty chair beside him.

I think for pacing reasons you probably have to draw out the next bits, but Juniper walks home alone in the rain, feeling worse and worse, maybe with some portents of what's to come around him, until eventually he finds himself in the fantasy world.

We're now five to ten minutes in, depending on just how fast we've been going. (This is close to being the beginning of Up, I am aware of that and absolutely fine with cribbing from one of the greatest movie openings of all time for this exercise.)

Juniper quickly meets Amaryllis, she's in trouble, we probably use a different exclusion zone from in the book, there are monsters to fight, they fight those monsters in an action scene, hardly pausing for breath. Juniper recognizes the monsters, they're from one of his campaigns, and if we don't trust the audience, we can have him say that or directly flashback, but presumably this was something from the montage. Eventually the fighting ends, Amaryllis introduces herself, and Juniper is just obsessed with her name, because that's the name of one of Arthur's longest-running characters.

After that, our first act is them getting out of the exclusion zone, past the monsters. Juniper proves himself at least once by knowing things that he shouldn't, domain expertise, how to defeat the evil things. We get the story of how Uther, the lost king, went away and never came back, and Juniper becomes determined to find him. Amaryllis does too, mostly because her country is in dire straits. They meet up with Fenn, a half-elf who provides comic relief. The end of the first act comes when they're in relative safety, in Anglecynn, with Amaryllis in disguise, hiding from her relatives.

Most of the second act is a single adventure, like we're highly truncating a million words of bumbling around the world into maybe thirty minutes of runtime. My copy of Save the Cat suggests that on the beat sheet this is where "Fun and Games" portion comes in, so we have Juniper use his foreknowledge to understand the layout of the castle, the nature of the magic, etc. to prove his worth. We're going for a "false high point" here, in Save the Cat terms. They've got the gang together! They're doing adventure stuff! It goes off without a hitch! Any seeming setbacks were all part of the plan! Fenn gets a cool magic hat!

And then whatever MacGuffin they've stolen points them in one single spot: Fel Seed. Of all the dark and scary things that were on Juniper's DM screen in that opening montage, this is the darkest and scariest of them all. Juniper has to explain that he ... well, he made some things. Not monsters that were set up to be knocked down, not a castle that was meant for a heist, not a cool hat, something that was evil, something that was not meant to be beaten. Rocks fall, everyone dies.

But they go ahead anyway, pressing forward after, maybe, a speech by Amaryllis about doing the necessary thing, not just stopping because it all feels lost and hopeless.

So they go, and they fight, and they lose, and all hope seems lost, until Juniper throws down his sword and gives his own speech, about how this isn't what it's supposed to be, how his friendship at the table was about creating a story together, about setting up a villain to be knocked down, and then Fel Seed looks at the sword that's been cast aside, and says that it's not enough, that if you want to win you have to fight. So Juniper fights and wins.

And then Juniper finds Arthur, who is middle-aged and a fearsome warrior, and we do a highly abbreviated Long Stairs thing, Arthur trying to escape this world and its cycles, pushing on forward in spite of Juniper's objections. I would really want to have another montage similar to the opening ones, where Arthur describes what life was like, how the adventures ground him down, how it felt like he was being urged forward all the time, pushed when he felt like standing still. Like there was some Juniper up above who wanted to keep playing, who wouldn't let go.

I do think this comes off more deathist than in the original. Uther's not trying to escape life, he's trying to escape narrative, or more than that, to escape his life as an object of worship. This is definitely an execution problem, especially because we have like ... maybe 20 minutes to spend on this. I think it's doable though, especially with flashback, a long sequence showing Uther's life.

And then Uther is gone, and all the hopes of restoring the kingdom to its former glory with him, and Amaryllis slumps down, because this was her shot at fixing the fractious fighting. But Juniper offers her his hand, because he's at peace now, and he's going to do what he feels like he's always done best: build things, side by side, with her.

(And then we imply that this goes better than we naively think it should, maybe because of Juniper's detailed knowledge of the world, or his superior ability to adventure.)

Alright, I think that's it.

There are some obvious issues. Runtime is probably fine, but I did not actually fill out my Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, so there would be a lot of work to turn this into an actual script ... which I might do just because I told myself that this would be the year that I write a movie script.

Also, I cut your favorite part and hacked away at some of the themes you liked. Sorry about that. There's no Bethel, no Raven, no Maddie, no Grak ... though I actually do like the idea of a Grak that is more beard than anything else, a quirky side character that's mostly silent, since it does seem like we'd want to fill out the team in the second act. This is disrespectful to the vision of Grak as a character, which I find funny. But the list of things that are getting removed is very very long, I acknowledge this, and there are entire themes, mechanics, etc. that are being slashed.

And of the things that aren't getting slashed, some of them are getting sanded down. You cannot depict Fel Seed as he is in the books in a big budget animated movie, because if you did, the movie would not make its money back. You can't have a scene where your protagonist ejaculates into an elf's mouth. Sorry, just not possible with standards and practices, in a world where this was even remotely possible to get made. The very inclusion of a "handjob police" joke in the book would probably preclude this movie from ever getting made, even if that was nowhere in the script, to say nothing of the other elements.

Still, I think this is sort of what you would need to do for this extreme of an adaptation. I think that as a movie this could work. I also think it would be highly dependent on execution, as most things are, finding an art style that works, hitting all the beats correctly, making sure the writing is very very polished and that we have continuity going forward and backward, callbacks and call forwards and brick jokes.

At least as a quick half-hour exercise, I think I am happy with the plan as outlined here. This was not created for purpose, just because I thought it would be interesting. If you're trying to rescue a core story that can be told in 90 minutes, pulled from a sprawling web serial, I think this is how you do it.

[avoicebehindthestars]

For whatever reason 6 episodes of s3 seem to be off the table. Maybe NG never wrote them (the last update we got was 3 scripts + the final 15 minutes). Maybe the contract prevents swapping him for a different showrunner (movies don't need showrunners), or there isn't enough time to find one. Since the movie is coded as "high budget", money doesn't seem to be the issue here. Maybe because of all the time spent on negotiations there simply isn't enough time left to do all the rewrites and pre-production to prepare for an entire season (remember that the main actors have other obligations starting May, I believe).

Whatever the reason, my question is:

Why can't we have 2-3 movies?

They could be produced one by one, whenever the cast is available. They could be released in installments - once a year, or even once every two years - giving Prime more profit from subscriptions. It would keep the audience interested for longer, having it trend on social media, rewatched and meta-analysed, just like s2 - again, more profit for Amazon!

I don't see many people complaining about the film being made rather than GO being cancelled entirely. If anything, people are upset about it being truncated. So... what gives?

[neobastard]

tnt addressed a lot of my concerns last night about the future of the plot in the AMA last night, here are some of the highlights (via jellyneo):

more time will be needed to implement changes, so the holiday break was the perfect time to work on them. it's not an ideal decision, but one made to make the experience better for both the players and the team and avoid overwhelming everyone.

the shorter release schedule mentioned above isn't truncating the plot, but instead accelerating the pace at which chapters come out. that was one of my biggest concerns and i'm so glad that it's not being rushed for the sake of a time table. i'm also interested in the resources shift to revamp the pace of the plot on a weekly basis.

this is one i actually made a post about, but codestone inflation is being combated by increasing the drop rates in the regular battledome and increasing the amount received from the quest log (used to be 1-2 beige codestones per day).

episode 2 will have a heavy focus on puzzles, and new items will be available from all channels (comics, battledome, and prize shop). this is honestly what i'm excited for the most, the new items from the comics are my favorite part of the plot currently. the break will only be a few months and will return in Q1 of 2025 (anywhere between january-march, so 3-5 months depending). the FAQ mentions that we'll get an official date as we get closer to it, so my bets are on late februrary/early march.

all in all a very informative AMA, a lot of my worries about the future of the void within have been eased and i'm glad that the team has time to breathe so they can make this experience better. i'm excited for what's to come!

[sunnysaystuff]

written for @saintcursemicrofics april prompts

prompt : 2. letters

words : 745

rating : G

title : silver eyes

this ac inspired me so much the full thing is ermm...1.5k...sooo...I truncated it,...,,,,. fic incoming. is canon compliant !! features Mary post obliviation

1982

.

Mary sits at her boyfriend's marble kitchen table and takes out a pen. It's a lazy afternoon on a drizzling Sunday, and Mary's mind is cloudy. There's something on the tip of her tongue—a name. She's been having strange dreams lately: a pale face; silver eyes. Wild hair. They have met before, Mary and this girl. But she cannot remember when.

Mary thumbs through her book, doodles on her napkin as she sips her coffee. Smoke curls and hisses softly from the open drink, and she inhales. Mary looks down at her napkin and sees—a figure with long, curly hair. It's Mary. And she holds a stick in her hand—what is it?  The doodle's aimed it at—Mary's eyes widen. Pale face. Wild hair. Mary hadn't even noticed herself drawing the girl.

Strange.

Mary finishes her coffee and stands to go toss the container in the garbage. She grabs the napkin, too, and considers—she turns around, and slides it into her back pocket.

1983

.

Now the birds chirp melodiously and the trees' leaves have greened. Mary is near the same as she was in that past drizzling fall, although she's recently sans boyfriend. Except…the dreams have gotten worse. More intense. Each night, she's plagued—a burning house; green lights. A shout: "Marlene!" She has never known anyone named Marlene, but it is undoubtedly her screaming that name.

And she still sees silver eyes; a pale face. This girl has no name, but she haunts Mary's sleep.

Mary laughs with a red-headed girl, runs with a freckled one—Marlene. The girl with the silver eyes dances in her dreams, even laughs. But Mary doesn't know her. She doesn't think she ever did.

1984

.

Winter sinks its teeth into autumn and Mary knows the pieces are going to fall into place. Mary likens her memories to a million-part jigsaw puzzle, of which she has maybe seven components. That's no deterrent, Mary resolves, as she collects more. She's taken to putting sticky notes on the wall opposite her bed in her flat when she wakes up from her dreams—she doesn't have much up; she forgets almost everything by the time she reaches her notes and pen:

Silver eyes again. Can't reach.

I'm going to kill her.

Red hair. Her eyes are green.

Beard and spectacles.

They don't make much sense to her either. 

On a crisp morning, Mary wakes up with a name on the tip of her tongue and a pen in hand. She scrawls on a neon sticky note in jagged marks and rushes to eat her breakfast. She's late for work.

Before Mary leaves, she sticks the note onto her dresser drawer. She's already forgotten what she wrote—but she's going to remember. She's going to remember.

Innocently, it waits for her. Just five words.

They're dead. They're all dead.

1985

.

July 31st, Mary sits up in the middle of the night, cold and panting. The moonlight streams through her window and casts a shadow on her face as she reaches for her notepad. It's become almost routine to scribble these nonsensical fragments of thought down. Today, her fragment is He's five today. She would have been so happy. Mary's no idea who he is, but she thinks she can vaguely remember—a tuft of dark hair. A soft coo. He's an infant, and he's also five. Five months?

Mary shakes off the speculation and sticks this note above her bed. Where there was once four or five notes opposite her, there's a wall of thought that stares her down, intimidating in the moonlit gloom. She's almost glad for its presence—the more she thinks of this strange other world, the more she dreams of it. The more she dreams, the closer she gets to unravelling these visions at their center.

1986

.

It has become clear to Mary that she does not just see images of a world of her own creation. She has eyes that rip two spyholes into the fabric of another life. Sloping fields and laughing skies and imposing towers and grand staircases that all somehow feel like home. Mary pines for it, this life. This warmth. She wants to take out her skeletal, neglected hands and claw it away from this other Mary, this lucky Mary who got flickering fireplaces and ancient towers and bright silver eyes that met hers. She feels the ache of want beating in her chest, and it hurts.

So Mary sighs, takes out her pen, and writes a note.

[that-left-turn]

Talking about promo. We could see a decline in last year's promo. First heavily Caryl centric until it was only friend, friends and French people. With the last public appearances, that could only be described as mediocre, what can we expect this year. ALL the men involved belittled Melissa on stage and during interviews. Answered for her, had an attitude (yes, Norman acted like an asshole) and made uncomfortable "jokes" (Zabel about Melissa being difficult). At the last weekend of promo all felt obviously uncomfortable.

Do you think AMC would intervene or talk with them to create the illusion everything's fine? Or do they hope to get more attention because of the tension? Is it possible that consequences followed for unprofessional behavior even when it's the golden boy? And if there were no consequences, could it be worse now?

The way the hierarchy works is that if the studio isn't happy, they talk to the showrunner. Usually, it's a phone call, but if it's big/bad, the showrunner has to show up in person, but regardless of what the issue is, it's the showrunner's responsibility to fix it and to straighten everybody else out. No studio wants BTS tension to leak out in public because it makes them look unprofessional. While the Dolan family is the majority owner, it's still a publicly traded company and they're doing poorly even without the squabbles over at the kids' arts and craft table.

I wouldn't assume that all the execs love "the golden boy," or that they even think of a middle-aged man in those terms. None of them know Norman (they're all in offices in NY and LA) and for all we know as the audience, they might be waiting for him to flame out. I can't imagine any scenario in which trying to do your job, while an entitled star whittles away at the show's quality and credibility, is regarded as a pleasant way to spend your workday.

The truncated production timeline is causing problems for AMC to correct any issues. The scripts for S3 were written long before they knew how viewers responded to S2. On-set rewrites happen, but not ones where you change the entire plot and regardless, Zabel can't write better than the quality we've already seen. The shoot seemed to have some of the more strangely determined blocks I've seen, but I don't know if that's due to rewrites or just that none of the stooges know how to manage a set efficiently and how to be mindful of the budget.

As for the promo, I don't think these guys want to understand that their behavior is sexist and ageist, so HR talking to them probably doesn't yield anything and it's the showrunner who should initiate their involvement. Zabel takes his cues from Norman (which is the wrong way around, regardless of how famous the star is) because he knows that he'll definitely be fired if Norman doesn't protect him and Nicotero also hides behind that protection. The show needs to be rid of both moochers to have a chance and Norman needs to stop acting against his own best interest.

Remember how Nicotero got upset with a terminally ill 8-year old during a panel for S2? That's the maturity level we're looking at from these grown men. If they feel squeezed by AMC, their behavior will likely be worse during the promo circuit because they'll attempt to justify all the decisions they've made for S3.

[oneshotnewbie]

What if Maya had been secretly working on learning Italian. When Carina gives birth to there first kid, Maya’s first words to them are in Italian and Carina can’t believe it.

ᕚ---ᕘ

It was a quiet afternoon as Maya sat on the sofa in the cozy living room, staring intently at her laptop. The room is lit only by a soft lamplight, illuminating the desk, which was completely cluttered. On the coffee table lay stacks of new books and smeared notes covered with various scraggly characters. Soft and gentle sounds of a language learning program played in the background.

Maya repeated words out loud, trying to imitate the sound of the language as she stared at the screen with a determined expression on her face. The blonde mumbled syllables and phrases under her breath as she used her laptop's keyboard to write down the new vocabulary. Sentences in Italian appeared on the screen and she diligently tried to translate them carefully into English while taking her notes and underlining important words. She marked difficult passages in the textbook precisly while studying the new grammar rules closely.

Maya reached for a dictionary near her thigh and searched for unfamiliar terms to further encourage herself. With a pen between her nose and upper lips, she flips through the pages, reading definitions and trying to understand the meanings. With little dog-ears on the pages, she closes the book back together to return to these words later.

After about two hours of practice, she tiredly looked at the clock and sighed contentedly. It is obvious that she has already put a lot of time and effort into her own language teaching, as she was now able to successfully pronounce several complete sentences. Maya smiled slightly, proud of her weekly progress, before focusing back on her lessons after a quick stretch and another cup of coffee.

More keyboard clicking into a new lesson, the rustling of pages and the muffled voice of the man from the language program fills the truncated silence of learning. Maya was determined to deepen her knowledge as she continued her secret study session, anticipating the surprise of using her wife's learned language for the first time.

The blonde continued to leaf through her solution book, comparing her own notes with the printed information. More hours passed and the clock on the shelf already showed midnight; in six hours she had to go back to work and with a satisfied smile she closed the laptop, stowed the books safely and hidden in a corner where she knew Carina would not accidentally look in. Maya was determined to master this language by her daughter's due date. She was proud of herself that she had learned a lot and was well on her way to mastering her newly acquired language skills.

ᕚ---ᕘ

The sterile atmosphere of the delivery room filled with excitement and a soft glow as Carina lay exhausted but overjoyed on the hospital bed, holding her first newborn peacefully in her embrace, the little girl's tiny fingers wrapped tightly around her index finger. The Italian woman's face was still marked by the exertions of childbirth while she smiled lovingly down on the little face and felt a familiar warmth in her heart.

Maya stood next to the bed at her wife's side, overwhelmed by the birth, the beauty of the moment and the love that pulsed between the three ladies. It was her first child and her first birth that she had experienced live and the emotions overwhelmed her. The blonde never expected that she would ever experience a moment like this in her life.

She lowered her head and gently kissed her baby's forehead several times, whispering quietly but clearly a the first words in Italian to the little creature. "Sei bella quanto tua madre,“ (You are as beautiful as your mother). Carina, still exhausted and overwhelmed by the rigors of childbirth, widened her eyes in surprise when she heard the words. It was as if time stood still for a moment. Placing her index and middle fingers under the blonde's chin, the brunette tried to catch her gaze. The words her wife uttered were so familiar but at the same time so unexpected that the strain of childbirth made it difficult for her to comprehend what had just happened. „Sei il regalo più bello che la vita ci abbia mai fatto." (You are the best gift life has ever given us)

She did not know that Maya had been keeping it a secret from her that she had been secretly learning her language over the past few months. She had tirelessly poured over books and studied Carina's native language to ensure that she had a good command of the language to begin with. She had done all of this to make this special event even more meaningful.

"That was Italian, bambina," Carina whispered, looking wearily at Maya, her eyes bright with excitement. Tears of emotion gathered in the brunette's eyes as she looked at her wife, could not believe how much love and devotion went into this small gesture. „You know my native language?" she asked in a shaky voice and the blonde simply nodded with a loving smile on her face.

"Yes, I learned it to create a better connection with you and our child,“ Maya sat carefully on the edge of the bed and gently stroked the baby's tiny cheek before lovingly taking her away from Carina and into her own arms. "I wanted our child to know your culture from an early age and I also wanted you to know how much I love you."

Carina smiled through the tears that were streaming down her red cheeks and placed her hand on the firefighter's arm, gently stroking it up and down. She didn't know what to say. She was at a loss for words as she heard clear devotion in the younger woman's voice. "I love you so much. You are incredible, you know that?"

The blonde smiled back and gently squeezed her beloved wife's hand. "We are a family now and I will do everything in my power to strengthen our love and happiness. Come what may."